Obviously the the difference that increased punishment and enforcement is to help the economy by building more platforms for public functions such as public torture. Although building Stocks would not only employ carpenters, but food people would buy would help farmers as well…

“Those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it!”

Copyright is good. It enables an artist to labour long and hard to create an artistic work, it could be week, a month, or a year. Lets say an author spends a year writing a book, or a musician an album. If they can only offer the original work for sale, then they will charge, say for the sake of argument, ?25,000. That will enable the artist to buy food, clothes and shelter for a year, if not live extravagantly.

Of course no one is going to buy a book at that price. This would take us back to medieval times when cultural works were the sole preserve of the aristocracy, restricting the spread of cultural works amongst the public.

Nor will the artist find 5,000 people prepared to pay ?5 each to have a share in a single book. Copyright allows artists to make a living, to share the fruits of their creativity (via their exclusive right to copy) with others at an affordable price, and everyone should be happy with that arrangement.

Copyright infringement, piracy, and rights grabbing are the result of dishonourable behaviour by those who want something for nothing.

Copying others works is not a natural right, it is a moral wrong. I would refer you all to the Human Rights Act article 27 –

(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

For further enlightenment and a much longer dissertation on the human right aspects of copyright I would refer you to this link – http://bit.ly/oYN7Y4

Those who indulge in piracy and other similar abuses are in effect disregarding a human right. Copyright is a human right and moral right, there to protect creative people, to enable them to earn a living. It is of course not a right to earn a living, that depends on the creators talent, business ability, and the market.

I find it incomprehensible that so many people here are unable to understand a human right and a moral point of view. In my own life I would never dream of taking anothers’ work without paying for it. If I couldn’t afford it then I would save up for it if possible or do without. I would feel guilty for taking something out of a shop without paying for it, likewise downloading creative works from pirate sites.

I can only assume that those who advocate taking something for nothing have a sense of morality which is way beyond my understanding.

Hi Crosbie, you’re still here. Good, maybe you can describe a viable economic model that lets me earn a living from selling my works of art. I’ve been pressing Richard on this point but I’ve not had an answer yet.

It needs to be a practical solution that works right now and it mustn’t depend on some hypothetical new world order, I’m needing food, clothes and a roof. Your help will be appreciated.

By the way, I’m really not interested in all this God stuff, I’m an atheist, I referred to religions in a previous post simply as a way of illustrating that there is a set of moral behaviours that are generally accepted. So we can move off the God stuff, happy to talk morals though.

I’ll get back to this debate tomorrow, I’m busy right now creating art for a customer. Just a few brief points for you to consider…

Richard and dwg, since you asked what I do, I’m a photographer making fine art prints, some are in a limited edition of 10, I sell works via galleries and my website. I also make a range of around 200 different hand made greetings cards the assembly of which gives a local lady employment. People can look at my work before they buy it, they have a choice and know exactly what they will get.

dwg, you make unique works of art, that’s fine, your view of copyright will be different from mine, of course it means nothing to you. However some creations are not made as one offs, they are part of mass culture, sold in volume and as such tend to be very much less expensive than a single unique work of art. There is room in the market place for both tyoes of art. The creation of a movie for example can involve the labour of hundreds if not thousands of people, to sell that as a one-off unique piece of art would be impracticable except perhaps to the mega wealthy.

So within the market place there is a range of art available at a range of prices. For those who can afford them unique works of art are a very attractive purchase, perhaps because they appreciate the art involved, or perhaps they see it as an investment.

dwg, I would imagine that if after making your unique work of art someone came and removed it from your studio without your permission, to keep for themselves, you would be upset and feel wronged.

If someone else took a copy of my images to make the exact same greetings cards as me for example I would also feel wronged. The creation of a photographic image is in itself a unique experience. Much depends on time of day, lighting conditions which are infinitely variable and never repeat, careful framing of the composition, a great deal of technical skill, and patience over a period of weeks or months to get that one elusive image you are seeking. I often visualise images I want to capture and make plans to assist me in the capturing of them.

Someone else who copies one of my images and starts selling it doing me a wrong, they have not used any skill or creativity yet they are trying to gain an economic advantage by using mine. Even if you don’t believe in copyright as a solution to the problems I would hope you would see that taking advantage of someone else’s work is morally wrong.

I personally wouldn’t dream of doing that – maybe I’m old fashioned, I believe in respect for other people and property – I am trying to be respectful to you guys at techdirt, I’m strugging to understand your thinking, and I feel I’m getting very little in the way of enlightenment back about your view of the morality of piracy or copyright infringement.

Anyway I have to get on with my life at the moment and will return here tomorrow to see where the debate has gone.

Feel free to chat amongst yourselves in the meantime…

Crosbie, At last, we seem to have got somewhere, I was sure you would have claimed that my selling copies of my artworks as prints or cards would have been beyond the pale.

Re your point about wedding photographers, I have some sympathy with your point of view in that what we are talking about in that case is a personal service.

I don’t do wedding photography but did I do so I would be inclined to offer a package price for the service, agreed what it was they wanted, a book, film, dvd etc, price accordingly, then what they did with the results of my labours/digital images subsequently would be up to them. Of course if they specifically wanted me to make prints at some later stage I would need to charge the time/cost of doing that, but they could go elsewhere if they wanted to. So I’m not going to argue with you on that point.

I have no issue either with people making personal copies of works they have already bought, copying from one device to another. Probably everybody does that anyway.

Where things go wrong and become unethical in my opinion is in making copies of works in order that everybody else need not pay for it. Forget about copyright law and let not differences of opinion over that muddy the waters. Just consider an act of copying from the point of view of fairness and respect for others efforts.

Unlike digital products it’s not quite as straightforward to make good copies of my artworks because they are sold as physical products. It can be done however, so lets assume that someone went to the bother of photographing one of my large prints, used a degree of skill and replicated it pretty well – including my logo which is part of the image.

Now if they went to the trouble of doing that for their own personal pleasure, hung it up in another room in their house, then fine, this hurts my ability to make a living not at all and frankly I don’t care.

However, if instead they use the exact copy of my photograph and start selling it this is where the moral issue arises for me. They invested no originality, creativity, or expended the time, effort, and sometimes unrepeatable good fortune, it took to capture that unique image. Yet through their actions they will now start to undermine my livelihood, perhaps even passing it off as their own work which in addition undermines my moral rights to be identified as the creator. All of that seems to me to be immoral behaviour and I cannot understand how such behaviour can be justified. Note I am still not talking about copyright, at this stage I am trying to keep the discussion on the point of what is morally right or not. I will be interested in your view of this, am I tramping on other peoples cultural liberty by prohibiting copies for any use other than personal? Am I incorrect on the morality of this issue, and if so, how?

I don’t know about the Jammie Thomas case and so can’t comment on it. However, I would be concerned about people iPhoning movies in the cinema, I wouldn’t know what they intend to do with it, if they were only going to watch a poor copy of it on their own iPhone afterwards then maybe that’s no big deal. The problem is we don’t know their intent is.

They could decide to upload that digital copy and make it available to world so that nobody else need pay to watch the original or to buy the dvd. To me that would be immoral, it is undermining the efforts of all those people involved in making the movie to make a living.

Personally, if I have seen a movie I really like I buy the DVD from a shop, that seems right to me. I know I already paid to watch it in the cinema as part of a group experience but I’m very happy to buy my own personal copy to watch in my own home as often as I like. I could make copies on my computer and give them away to friends, or sell them, but I wouldn’t do that, it would be wrong to do so.

So their are moral issues at the heart of this debate quite separate from the legal issues. I don’t know what the copyright abolitionists stance is on these moral questions and it seems pointless to debate the law of copyright. until we understand each others views of the moral issues being discussed.