“By making what should be an infinite good scare you can create a market for it”

But that defeats the whole purpose of having an economy to begin with. The whole purpose of having an economy is so that we can have more goods, not so that we can have more scarcity.

Creating a monopoly on anything creates industries around that monopoly. But it decreases aggregate output, the very purpose of having industries to begin with.

“My opinion is the main justification in the modern world for copyright is that without it lots of people would lose a lot of money.”

but money isn’t an end of itself, it’s the things that money produces. No monopoly = more aggregate output = more things produced.

The good is only ‘infinite’ without copy’right’. Copy’right’ seeks to artificially make it finite by placing a price on it (people only have so much money and so they can only buy a finite amount). Allowing it to be ‘infinite’ creates more aggregate output. More aggregate output is good because more people have more things of value, that is, copies of the content. Aggregate output is the whole purpose of having an economy to begin with, to give more people more of what they value.

Why is your free air progress to life?

Why is it progress when people freely give to charity?

“why is your free entertainment progress for mankind?”

and no one is forcing anyone to produce entertainment. If you don’t want to, then don’t. But others will produce free entertainment and they do. Why is it not progress when entertainment doesn’t have to cost money?

the bands choose to release for free or to sign with a record lable. they are not foreced to sign.

people neednt build on it they can copy it directly, make a near exact copy from their band. if 400 bands make nearly exact copies of your song in the month following your release, it can very easily cause you to get lost among them. currently those bands have to pay you a small amount, so you at least get some compensation.

regarding the commercial comment, currently you need to get permission and pay to use a song in your commercial due to copyright laws. without anyone can use any song to advertise their product, i think it would be a shame for some artists serious work to be used to market some flippant item.

the bands choose to release for free or to sign with a record lable. they are not foreced to sign.

people neednt build on it they can copy it directly, make a near exact copy from their band. if 400 bands make nearly exact copies of your song in the month following your release, it can very easily cause you to get lost among them. currently those bands have to pay you a small amount, so you at least get some compensation.

regarding the commercial comment, currently you need to get permission and pay to use a song in your commercial due to copyright laws. without anyone can use any song to advertise their product, i think it would be a shame for some artists serious work to be used to market some flippant item.

So if he is in my car he should pay then?
If he is in my house I can’t play the music since he didn’t pay for it right?

Copyrights gets silly pretty fast.
Why not adopt what every other person in the world do and that is get paid for the work once and have no further claims on it. Price the f’ing work and ask a price for it and release it when you get that money not sooner, what is wrong with that?

“How much data is enough data to make a policy change”

How much data is enough data to justify maintaining the current policy? Oh, wait, you have no data to justify maintaining the current policy. Lets abolish it.

Agreed the fact that Glenn Beck its allowed to drive a car from any manufacture and use it for his own personal financial gain should be prohibit, also no electronic manufacturer should let him get away with what he say on television using their creations to make money from himself without having to pay anything to them it is a damn shame.

“i think once you have a structure in place that protects the intellectual property of say “huckleberry finn” (pretend it is undelined) it seems rather easy and logical to extend that protection to other forms of art. “

Despite the fact that this is a non-sequitur, the question that I’m asking is why should we have a system that prevents the free copying of “Huckleberry Finn” to begin with, even if that means more art will be created?

Do Ford get paid by anyone that uses their cars to make money?
Have cab drivers have to pay a percentage of their earnings to Ford?
Has Ford charged truckers for their earnings they are using Ford’s creation to make money it is obscene, imoral, those truckers are thieves OMG!

Why should anyone have to pay an artists for using their music in their business if they paid once?

Why do artists are paid over and over again and nobody else inside society have the same rights?

Why can’t artists put a price on what they sell and be done with any further rights down the pipe?

Those people don’t want to change that is why, but there is no problem here, law or no law, people will just turn against them and no money will be made by that group.

Doubt?

It has more than ten years now since I last bough any music from any “artist” from a label, movies the same thing and books, how will they get my money when I’m angry and pissed and there is no law saying I need to buy anything from those people.

No, the good is still infinite with copyright, regarless of the legality of doing so.

I disagree – the argument is sound. By having a monopoly on corn,f ro example, you deprive a LOT of other people the capacity to grow more corn to satisfy the needs of a scciety.

(That is we are worse off with copy’right’ than without).

I cannot continue discussing this with you.

Because you can not prove him wrong.

Which is why you are a gigantic vagina that won’t admit when he has been outsmarted, despite the entire Web witnessing it.

No. As already explained (multiple times) music is not scarce because it is non-rivalrous and non-excludable.

Never been explained (of course), and you’re far too much of coward to dare try and put it into a few sentences.

Nah, I knew you would wuss out and not respond with a real answer, so I just posted *crickets* to save some time in advance.

And I was right!

Ask a person gasping for air how much they’d pay for it.

*tumbleweed*

(and why)

For the billion or so years that earth has been around there was no copyright. We did well with out it. Copyright only came about in 1709 with the Statute of Anne. Ever since the beginning of copyright it has been used to control the population or make the people doing the publishing rich at the expense of the authors and artists. The modern day artist that dreams of making it big by getting a record contract is delusional. Its like buying a lottery ticket, many will enter few will win. 5 million bands and artists on MySpace and FaceBook. How many of those actually get recording contracts? And out of those how many recoup? Yes there are the rare few musicians and singers that recoup, but the majority never do.

Most modern day pop stars are nothing but no talent, puppets, created to fit a certain mold. They are advertising and promotional constructs designed to sell product. A brand and focal point for a population of children that wouldn’t know talent it if bit them on the ass.

Copyright is not needed. Its is a drain on society, that does exactly the opposite of what it was designed to do, promote the progress of the arts and sciences.

It matters not if the merchandise is apples from my orchard or the words of my book or the unique arrangement of notes of my song or images from my camera.

Wrong! It matters a great deal. A physical good is fundamentally different from an idea or expression.

If I take and sell your apples, you no longer have the apples to sell or eat yourself.

If I copy your idea or song and use it, you still have that idea. You still have created that song and can use it yourself. I have stolen nothing from you.

but so much of the debate simply seemed to assume that by arguing against using moral arguments, it was the equivalent of arguing against the entire system.

We live in a (supposedly) free country. The in the good old USA, you’re supposed to need a reason for restricting freedom (making a law that says doing something is illegal).

There needs to be a damned good moral or ethical reason for restricting the right for me to repeat someone else’s idea or expression in whatever form I wish.

There isn’t one.

Therefore, copyright law in its entirety needs to go. It does not promote the progress, neither in its current form or any modern form that I can conceive*. The burden of proof is for copyright system defenders to show that the law is moral, ethical, and promotes the progress. If they can’t, then the founding principles of this country say it cannot be law.

*(I’m perfectly willing to admit there might be a form that could be both ethical and which promotes the progress, but until I see one and the supporting evidence, my opinion stands.)

You are arguing against something I did not say. Of course there is more art today. There is a Hell of a lot more people, and a lot more are artist, and there are a lot more forms of art. What I say was the argument that no one would create anything without copyright is absurd. There was a lot of art being created when there was no copyright. Saying because there is is copyright today and more art today means that the former caused the latter is a prime example of assuming a correlation without actually showing proof. There are a lot more factors involved.

A rational moral view of copyright would reach the same conclusion as the economic one — that it can only be moral pragmatically, i.e. only if it were actually shown to be a practically beneficial arrangement.

This is because a rational moral view must ultimately be based on the hard facts of reality, just as economics is (or at least ought to be). And the key feature is non-rivalrousness: that copyability is unlimited. (And if we value intellectual products (as in the context of copyright arguments we do), we also value their instances or copies. And if we value both of these, we want both.)

*Why restrict a beneficial abundance, when there is no essential need?* That is the crucial question that any moral view in favour of copyright, that is not the pragmatic one, must answer. And it is difficult to see how any really satisfactory answer can be given.

Does copyright not pay for production? Is that not an answer? No, because there is nothing essential there. There is no logical/physical dependence of production on copies. And, indeed, it is entirely possible to pay for production without restricting copies.

Does the author not deserve to be paid for work? For work, yes, but for copies of work, no. Again, it is perfectly possible for the author to be paid for work without restricting copies. A general moral rule or right of payment-for-work would not cover a *particular* way to be paid.

Should the author not benefit from their work? Not as a *moral* rule exactly, no. A moral rule is one that makes sense for all. It is justified not simply by its gain for an individual, but as something that works for everyone.

Is not the ‘intellectual product’ deeply connected to the personal ‘actualisation’ of the author (or some such stuff)? Not in a way that makes sense — because there is no physical connection between a copy and the author. A physically separate copy, in itself, can obviously have no effect on the author. But to deny that copy would deny someone actual physical use of it.

In summary: there seems to be no route to a rational argument for an intrinsic morality of copyright. There is no virtue in denying ourselves the benefit of copies. Quite the contrary, communication is good, as people unconciously know and feel. Copyright is something we would *not* *want* to have. We would only have it because we had to.

The vested interests of media ‘owners’ see the idea of ‘morals’ as a way to avoid rational examination and simply tell people what to do. But that is not what morality is about.

Supreme Court or not, that moral argument does not really work. Copyright is about *copies* not labour. It is not simply a general rule, but a special rule about copies, so it cannot be justified merely on general grounds, it must be examined on its specialness. So let us have a quick look:

Copyright is not really about you selling your labour exactly, it is about allowing you to sell your labour, by means of copies, *multiple times*. Does that seem reasonable? Why should you have that special privilege?

Is the possibility that the labour’s result can exist in multiple copies due to the author? Where in authorship is it that makes the work copyable? Is it a special skill that is learned, or an extra effort expended? No. It is simply the way reality is. Information is copyable. So it is hardly ‘just desert’ that the author be paid specially for copyable labour. Every payment for a copy looks like a payment unearned.

An author does some work to produce a product. Their just desert is to be paid for that labour, and no more, and to be granted normal rights, and no more — just as anyone else.

Just cruising through the worlds favorite music store I notice there are over a thousand versions of the theme song from Titanic My heart Will Go On.
All by different artists. All for sale.
I don’t think that has taken anything away from the original. Or has it?

Where in British law was the progress clause directly copied from?

I’d question whether the Guild was un/happy about the Statute of Anne.

That simply instituted the guilds de facto monopolies on a per work basis. That as a consequence the author became the initial holder of the monopoly arising in their work is just a logical inevitability. It doesn’t actually give them any power – being able to choose which Guild member gets to print your work doesn’t constitute having the same power as a Guild member to exploit the monopoly. Just as today: being able to choose which mobile network provider to use doesn’t make you as powerful as a mobile network provider, nor does it diminish the latter. Copyright is as impotent in an author’s hands as Sauron’s ring is in Frodo’s.

One shouldn’t be surprised that the Statute of Anne was presented as a transfer of power from Guild to author, but that doesn’t mean it was anything of the sort.

But you’re right about the brief period in which England enjoyed a free press – and so how easily the crown was persuaded by the Guild as to how dangerous a threat such liberty posed. Obviously, the Statute would pretend, as the copyright cartel does today, that it was all a matter of preventing the poor starving authors being bankrupted by piracy (not the publishers/printers of course), oh, and so encouraging authors to write useful works, the better to educate the masses. Daniel Defoe was one of those awkward authors who had no problem even with commercial piracy – just so long as it printed fair copies. But, instead of law to recognise authors’ moral rights, we have a privilege to enrich the guild and regulate the press at her majesty’s pleasure.

I’d have to agree that your ‘music’ is scarce. Mostly because it’s not music, it’s just sucky noise scratched onto a disc.

See? I can make baseless accusations with no substantiation, as well! It’s easy!

The second sentence is one of these new fangled hyperlinky thingies. If you click on the “18th Century Overture” part of it you’ll be able to read a much more knowledgeable opinion – of more than two sentences.

Well, firstly the progress clause only provided power to secure the author’s exclusive right to their writings and being a natural right this should certainly be secured.

Copyright was enacted with the insinuation that it would help secure the author’s exclusive right – even as it at the same time derogated the right to copy from everyone’s liberty.

Securing the exclusive right to one’s intellectual works is essential to the commercial exchange of that work, e.g. for money. So, this carries on anyway.

Your question is probably more about how authors exchange their work directly with their readers, for their money, i.e. given the monopoly of copyright granted for the benefit of the printing industry is no longer effective (and so should be abolished). All you need is a marketplace where author and readers can meet, make their offers, and do an exchange. Selling the work in one go instead of copies.

I’m interested to know what the people in favour of abolishing copyright suggest as an alternative.

This statement hides the assumption that an alternative is necessary. I suspect that is an unfounded assumption.

ie. How can we “promote the progress” of music, software, literature etc if we remove the copyrights of the creators of those works?

Do you have some reason to think it is necessary to promote those things? In other words, is there reason to believe output and public availability of them would drop substantially in the absence of copyright?

Rights are not ‘kept’. We are born with them. We create governments to secure them.

Governments however, if we let them get away with it, can assume power beyond that provided by the people (via Constitution) and grant privileges (such as were often granted by Kings & Queens), and James Madison assumed the power to grant the privilege of copyright (which requires the legislative derogation of the people’s right to copy from their liberty – that they created the government to protect in the first place – the Statue of Liberty is a big reminder).

We have a right to exclude others from our material and intellectual possessions because we have a natural power & need to (we build houses and lock the doors). Conversely we have no natural power or need to prevent others singing the songs we sing to them or retelling the stories we tell to them, or improving them. That doesn’t mean such power is not attractive – to those who’d rather a monopoly to exploit than their liberty left intact.

We do not and cannot abolish rights. We can however, and should, abolish the archaic, unethical and now anachronistic privileges that derogate from them – especially copyright and patent.

Cultural and technological progress is promoted by preserving people’s liberty, to share and build upon each others’ ideas. State granted monopolies may well be potentially lucrative to those who receive them, but they represent a net loss to society (loss of opportunity and cost of administrative/policing overheads and inhibition of intercourse). All an author or inventor needs to enable commercial exchange of their writings and inventions is the recognition and securing of the exclusive right to them. It is the act of releasing their work from this (rightful) exclusive possession into the possession of the purchaser that enables commerce. Note that ‘the purchaser’ can just as well comprise a consortium of 10,000 sufferers of a particular disorder as a single person.

You could always try reading 18th Century Overture or The Promise of a Post Copyright World.

Copyright is a privilege. That means it annuls the right to copy in the majority to leave the right by exclusion in the hands of a few. So, copyright is not a right so much as a law that enables the holder of the privilege to prohibit the enjoyment of the right in others (others who were born with that liberty and power, the natural right to copy the songs and stories they heard, to improve and retell them).

Copyright is law that was first enacted in 1709 (The Statute of Anne). It was re-enacted in 1790 in the US.

This anachronistic law, that youngsters are today ignoring in ever greater numbers, this instrument of injustice (ask Joel Tenenbaum or Jammie Thomas), should be abolished, repealed. And thus people’s cultural liberty, their right to copy is restored.

So yes, abolish the publishing corporations’ privilege of copyright, and thus restore the people’s right to copy.

Bear in mind that copyright has already ended in effect. If you sell one copy of a novel as an ebook (and it’s popular) it’s going to be pirated anyway – irrespective of your privilege of copyright, that if you were very wealthy you might try prosecuting against a few random victims.

You have to sell your novel – not copies of it. That means you build up an audience from which you invite commissions/sponsorship for each further novellette/novella/novel. If you get 100% of revenue from 1% of your readers that’s equivalent to a 1% royalty from sales to 100% of them.

My own love for music (and literature and probably even some software!) makes me believe they are worth “promoting the progress” of.

Of course, but that isn’t the question. The question is whether it’s necessary to promote the progress. Would there not be sufficient writings (etc) without copyright? And if not, what kind of copyright laws would most effectively promote progress while causing the least possible harm? The copyright lobby is not examining these questions, and in fact would prefer that they not even be asked.

Purely anecdotal, but I know of a wonderful music producer who also does a second job to pay the bills. I would much prefer it if this guy spent every day making music.

That’s fine, but it is no reason to blindly enact, strengthen, or even continue with copyright law in the hopes that it will somehow let him quit his day job, when the copyright laws we already have don’t do so.

Also, I’m interested to hear thoughts on how a software company, for example, could afford to develop new software, if they do not keep an exclusive right to sell that software.

By selling services. None of the companies I’ve worked for as a software developer sell copies of their software as the business model. They sell the service of the software. Hosting, maintenance, support, upgrades, new features, customization. Those are ongoing scarcities that customers are willing to pay for because they cannot be copied.

If your next question is how to make sure companies can still sell copies of software, my answer would be another question: why would we want to do that? There is no lack of software being produced; we obviously don’t need more incentive for anybody to make more. If market or technological conditions make selling copies an obsolete business model, then let companies find new ones. That’s how capitalism is supposed to work.

Alex, you will have to shift paradigms at some point.

I’m just letting you know that without intermediary publishers exploiting a monopoly to provide an artist with a 1% royalty, it is possible for artists to exchange their work directly, for the money of those in their audience who want them to produce more work.

Note that a free market involves voluntary exchange.

A monopoly is state granted power, compulsion. A loss of power (copyright’s dissolution and abolition) is obviously not a replacement for power. If you’re looking to replace copyright you’re looking for a power that is as effective as copyright once was. About the only thing that would do it is a tax or mulct on the Internet to fund the publishing corporations directly – bypassing the tedious scam of selling digital copies that cost nothing to make. This could be achieved via ACTA by enabling the provision of premium, licensed Internet subscriptions vs unlicensed ones (subject to invasive infringement policing & penalties). My hunch is that this hasn’t got a hope in hell, but I could be wrong.

Maybe it’s time for a metaphor.

Copyright is bit like the Berlin wall, but with umpteen sections completely destroyed and only a few guard towers remaining. Thousands of people enjoy the restoration of their liberty to pass through the gaps every day – in both directions. Unfortunately, there’s one bitter & twisted soldier in a guard tower who each week receives a magazine of ammunition for his rifle. Now and then, when he sees a particularly naive wall-transgressor, he shoots them in the leg. He has been told that this will serve as an educational deterrent, and thus maintain the wall’s effectiveness.

When I say that copyright should be abolished, I’m saying that the wall’s guards should be disarmed and stood down, and the remains of the wall entirely dismantled.

All you’re saying is “What can we replace the wall with to control the movement of people?”, and “I don’t see how dismantling the wall is better than keeping it”, and “The wall never prevented people from crossing so as long a they obtained the necessary visas”.

Alex, the wall has become ineffective. We should abolish it to prevent any more file-sharing kids being shot (sued/fined/bankrupted/imprisoned). The wall’s military infrastructure (copyright cartel) will come to an end, but musicians will keep on making music, and their fans will keep on paying them.

Now I have a hunch you’re just going to tell me “Well, I think we should keep the wall – until we have a better way to control the movement of people across our (imaginary) political borders”.

My hunch may be wrong…

You should be more worried that your speech is abridged by copyright than stunned by mock surprise at an apposite metaphor.

“Godwin’s law itself can be abused, as a distraction, diversion or even censorship, that fallaciously miscasts an opponent’s argument as hyperbole, especially if the comparisons made by the argument are actually appropriate.”

It’s not a comparison, but a metaphor.

What do you think of the copyright holder who obtained a sentence of 6 months in prison for Emmanuel Nimley (who shared some iPhoned recordings he’d made of a few movies)?

The shooting of one in umpteen thousand wall breachers is a METAPHOR for the penalty used by copyright holders against infringers unlucky enough to be selected as educational examples – as a grievously futile and patently ineffective deterrent – against an action they should be naturally at liberty to enjoy in any case.

It’s a metaphor. It’s figurative: to refer to a familiar situation in order to explain an unfamiliar one that shares similar dynamics – even if their elements are dissimilar. A ‘hive of industry’ doesn’t necessarily mean that human workers have wings and produce honey, or that bees are intelligent and have two legs.

For bullets substitute copyright litigation. For totalitarian state substitute corporate state.

They aren’t shy of suing children – the shock story provides useful publicity.

If guards on the Berlin wall issued court summons to people attempting to cross it without permission, perhaps you would have found it a more apt metaphor?

I don’t understand how deleting one of these options is going to improve matters.

It depends on your definition of “improve matters”. If you mean “make things better for people who are used to relying on government granted monopolies” then no, it would not do that. If you mean “promoting the public’s access to and use of new works of literature, music, etc” (which is what the Constitution says copyright is supposed to do) then it may very well accomplish that aim by shifting power away from the monopolists and toward the public. Obviously the monopolists will object strenuously to this option until the bitter end.

It’s a system that (despite it’s problems) gets people paid for their works if they are in high demand.

Yes, but that is the means, not the end.

You could say that all museums should be free – even if it means some of them can’t afford to stay open – it’s better for the public.

You’re twisting the analogy. If museums could be free, and we could still have as many or more museums of equal or higher quality, of course that would be better. Similary, if there were no copyright, and we could still have as much content of equal or higher quality, that would be better too. Copyright should only exist if it pays for itself, so to speak, by actually increasing access to and use of content.