Posts by Keir Leslie
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``Copyright infringement is theft'' is not the same as ``copyright infringement is similar to theft''.
I have scrupulously avoided the first statement, because it is false. The second, however, is mainly true, and therefore I have said it.
Also, I'm quite happy to agree that the RIAA are thugs & lawyers, &c. &c.
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Treasury bonds are not the same thing. You pay money for them and they accrue interest. They are a form of property. Copyright is not.
Jesus, you really have this mantra that you aren't going to let go of, don't you? Treasury bonds aren't property in that sense either, being purely societal promises to pay, and solely potential money, just like copyright is a societal promise to pay on use of an idea.
There is no evidence that an infringer would have paid, had they not been able to infringe.
So? There's no evidence that most shoplifters would have paid the money had they not been able to shoplift.
You appear to be arguing against dodgy claims by the RIAA that the music industry is losing Very Large amounts of money in sales, which are pretty dodgy. What's not dodgy about those claims is the fact that there's a Very Large number of people exploiting the labour of musicians without paying them for it. Seems a lot like theft to me, even if it isn't exactly the same.
And, in fact, if you steal a CD from a store what you are denying them is the potential income represented by that CD; the CD itself is largely worthless to the store except as something to be sold (and i suspect the real value of the CD lays in the licensing, not the physical media anyway, but others could be more precise on that.)
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Actually, it's not.
Um, it is pretty similar. Consider the case where you steal $7.50 from me; that's theft. Now consider the case where you infringe my copyrights to the tune of $7.50. In both cases, you are depriving me of $7.50 I have a right to in law.
Now, OK, they are different because we make distinctions between money and potential money, and between criminality and merely illegality, and because of the impersonality, and so-forth, and they're all valid points, but ultimately, illegal downloading is taking without paying.
Now, the RIAA are a bunch of thugs & lawyers, but the fundamental point about illegal downloading is quite legit -- what you are doing is exploitative.
Under current copyright law, Rowling's heirs don't have to lift a finger and their benefactor's work keeps generating income.
Look, J K Rowling earned the money when she wrote the books, and all her heirs are doing is getting paid for it, as all heirs have the right to. Exactly like Treasury bonds -- you earn the interest & return of the principal when you buy the bond, not when the money is paid back.
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Contrast this with copyrights, which are of value to society as a whole only when the subject matter passes into the public domain
They are of benefit to society even while still under copyright. You can tell this because people choose to pay money for works. In general people are rational enough not to throw money away; ergo, selling copyright works is of benefit to society, the same way that selling milk or rice is.
A business doesn't exist in and of itself, and it doesn't rely on the state saying "Pay up, or else" in order to exist.
Er, you do know that businesses are arbitrary creations of the state, just like copyright, and in fact rely heavily upon the coercive power of the state all the time?
Also, I never mentioned a word about inheritance of going concerns &c, and was in fact considering the case of someone receiving a large number of Treasury bonds and living off the interest.
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"Because Tolkien was popular, his descendants are entitled to a whopping income for decades to come."
Yup. That's about the measure of it. Hugely successful businessmen make their descendants hugely rich; hugely successful whatevers tend to be able to make their children rich.
Why shouldn't creators?
You're making a powerful argument against inheritance full stop, not inheritance of copyrights.
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Your garbage men's families don't continue to get his wage from the council after he kicks the bucket.
First of all, one of the most important writers of the 20th century =/= a garbage man.
Look, the wage-earner does a job and then gets the money straight away; the creator does a job and then gets paid over a period of decades -- essentially, to make the accounting easier & more accurate. However, they both get paid for doing work. If the creator's family randomly got assigned more copyrights after death, this'd be meaningful, but as it stands it doesn't make sense.
We can evaluate the worth what a garbage man does basically at the point he does it; it isn't sui generis, whereas as most works of art are. Therefore, to find out the worth of an idea, one must let time pass to find the judgement of society. However, the work was done at the point of creation; all that's happening now is evaluation and payment for, essentially, services rendered.
The garbage man's family do get any wages that the council owes for work done before his death.
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Dickens clearly didn't suffer much from those conditions
Yep, one of the most fantastically successful authors to have ever lived was wildly successful, as were two other authors who were ridiculously successful. Although Twain wanted longer copyright terms to protect his children, it should be noted.
We have a system that works well at the moment, in general. Why change it as drastically as you're proposing? We don't know the consequences, but in terms of the creation of IP, we've never had it so good.
The Hobbit was published 1937; under 20 year terms, it would have been substantially out of copyright by the time the first book of the Lord of the Rings was published; I doubt Tolkien would've starved, but that's just not fair. His Estate wouldn't have got any money from the vastly popular films, even though he provided the important creative basis.
Discussing if it is possible for a creator to be adequately remunerated in 20 years is a bit of a red herring, because you haven't defined adequacy, and because the value of copyrights differ depending on the popularity of the underlying text.
And, yes, the RIAA are idiots. However, the fallacy of the excluded middle applies.
But if I copy your CD, you have a copy and I have a copy, and we can both listen to it
Doesn't matter; you haven't paid me for it, and you're depriving me of the money you should give me under the law. I don't care if I can listen to, listening to my own CD doesn't feed or clothe me. I don't really like calling it theft, because it isn't, but it is similar.
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<i>You can tell this because they would like to lock away 13 year olds for listening to MP3s.</i>
Oh, for heaven's sake, most creators (and I'm going to use creators because that's the common thread) don't actually want to lock up 13 y.o.s, and nor do most copyright holders. You might have noticed the lack of authors running around suing people off the face of the planet for fan-fiction?
As for the `craftsmen' comment, (a) craftspeople, and (b) some are fine arts, and some aren't. Painting and some types of writing are arts, not crafts, whereas others are crafts, and some are barely even that. The one thing in common is the expression of ideas; idea reifiers sounds too unwieldy, so you've kind of got to make do.
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Eh, I'm pro life plus 10 to 20, or fixed terms around 60-70 years. I really don't think that fixed terms of less than 50 years are at all equitable to the creator.
I think that large parts of copyright are natural rights, though -- the right to the fruits of labour, basically, as well as the moral rights. If you propose changing copyright law radically -- essentially, anything beyond returning to 40 odd year terms -- the onus is on you to explain how this will still provide a fair return to creators consistent with their right to receive payment for work.
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I should note that I'm using artist in the broad sense of any creative type, mainly.
(I'm ignoring folk art as being special, basically.)