Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

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I agree with you and don't understand the downvotes. If I create something, it doesn't belong to society and I should have the right to own what I create and use it or not use it as I see fit. Let's take the anti-copyright argument to the extreme -- I challenge everyone opposed to copyrights to make your private github repos public. It is the exact same thing. Weak IP protection leads to decreased incentive for innovation. We could take it to another extreme and eliminate private real property rights as well. I like your house, it has been in my street for years, it's a part of my street's culture, therefore I have the right to move in whenever I want. How is the written word any different than a creation made of bricks? Why would I spend years writing a novel and only get the right to benefit from it for some arbitrary amount of time? If I wrote it and I built it, then I should be the beneficiary of it. Why is that concept so objectionable? Just because someone wants to do something with Robocop, doesn't give them the right to steal the work of someone else. There IS a means to create derivative works; it's called licensing. When your startups open source all of their application code, then perhaps I might be more convinced, but until that happens, complaints about copyright are nothing more than hypocrisy. There's nothing stopping any of us from creating our own art.

In that case, why is there a societal obligation to protect the work?

Copyright is a trade between the author and society. The author releases the work to society at large, and in exchange, society provides a means to be rewarded for releasing it.

You can own a story entirely, so long as you do not release it. Then, nobody can take it from you, and you will never see those characters do anything beyond what you say they do. But if you want to share it with others, you must accept that they will eventually write things based on it.

> We could take it to another extreme and eliminate private real property rights as well. I like your house, it has been in my street for years, it's a part of my street's culture, therefore I have the right to move in whenever I want. How is the written word any different than a creation made of bricks?

This is a terrible analogy. If I take your house, I have deprived you of its use. If I make a copy of something you wrote, of what are you being deprived? Do you not still have access to your writing?

You expect to profit by selling copies of your work and you task the State with preventing me from doing so, thereby limiting my freedom to do whatever I want with my own physical property (my pen and my paper).

That's the nature of the copyright bargain, and everyone more or less agrees that it's a net gain for society. But do not lose track of what's going on here.

Not necessarily. what about taking an empty house, ie squatting? That's legal in some jurisdictions. On the flip side, when you infringe on someone's copyright you're depriving them of the right to the residual income from its resale (this applies more to infringement in the form of republication/mass duplication and offer of the copy for sale than making an individual copy, but there's a non-zero possibility that someone who helps themselves to a pirate copy of something for nothing because they can might otherwise have paid something to purchase it.

You expect to profit by selling copies of your work and you task the State with preventing me from doing so, thereby limiting my freedom to do whatever I want with my own physical property (my pen and my paper).

Not true at all. You can do whatever you like with your pen and paper, and it will even be copyright-protected. You don't sell with your pen and paper, you compose and/or copy with them. It's the commercial transfer of intellectual property that copyright laws regulate, not the act of creation as such.

The original analogy is flawed, but so is your counter-argument. The intangibility of authorship doesn't obviate its legal existence - otherwise whole classes of contractual relations would be impossible.

The equivalent to copying information would be building another house with equivalent materials that has the same floorplan as your house, not taking your house itself.

"right to the residual income from its resale" sounds like a very weird right to me, and doesn't really come from any sound ethical foundation. In fact, it's exactly the opposite for physical goods. If I buy a deck of cards, and then sell (or give) it to somebody else, I've technically deprived the creator of the deck of cards of residual income from resale, but they don't have a right to it from the first sale doctrine.

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