Why so many bleeding-hearts?

[GhostWriter16]

TF doesn't believe in private property at all...

I don't have a problem with copyrights in general but I think they should end when the author dies (Possibly with a certain minimum period of time, say, 10-25 years, if the author should happen to die extremely quickly). There's no good reason Shakespeare should theoretically still be able to be copyrighted.

 

[Traitorfish]

The point being completely missed here is that the original purchaser of the music supposedly no longer has access to it once he has sold it. It is as if the new owner was the original purchaser, and he now has the right to sell it without maintaining his own copy afterwards.

I addressed that explicitly in my last post.

That a previous consumer no longer gets to listen to the record is of no interest to him, any more than if the previous consumer had simply lost, broken or gotten bored of the record.

I dunno, maybe you think this is an insufficient recognition of the point, but if that's the case you have to at least identify that it is recognised and explain why it's insufficient, not just ignore it altogether.

If you are opposed to the copyright laws, you are essentially advocating theft of others' legitimate property. It is really no different than breaking into someone's house or car and stealing his CD.

Okay.

I don't have a problem with copyrights in general

You should read this blog post; it might change your mind on the matter.

 

[innonimatu]

If you are opposed to the copyright laws, you are essentially advocating theft of others' legitimate property. It is really no different than breaking into someone's house or car and stealing his CD.

Bullcrap. Taking your analogy, it's the equivalent on copying someone's CD in a way that causes the owner of said CD no harm or notice whatsoever.

Copyright is outdated. It's no more than a legal privilege comparable to... feudal privileges. Because you or your ancestors did something, you get a special privilege for a number of years or generations, to be enforced at the expense of everyone else.

I guess that someone really wants to prove that history is not progressive. With "intellectual property" it is very noticeably regressive!

 

[Zelig]

If you are opposed to the copyright laws, you are essentially advocating theft of others' legitimate property. It is really no different than breaking into someone's house or car and stealing his CD.

It's really not like that at all. It's like breaking into the CD pressing factory, stealing a CD, and leaving behind cash equal to the marginal cost of producing that single CD.

 

[Formaldehyde]

I just love these threads where the topic of copyright comes up. They really show how so many are willing to rationalize even theft merely because they aren't objects instead of intellectual property.

 

[Traitorfish]

I'd steal objects if I could get away with it.

 

[GhostWriter16]

@TF- Your article, I didn't really know what it was getting at with some of that stuff. There is no law that restricts our memories.

What copyright laws are for are to prevent you from using someone else's characters, worlds, stories, or music, to make a profit without their permission. If you could just buy a CD and make tons of copies of it and sell them for cash, music wouldn't be designed. That's unfair. I think they have a right to a certain period of time when you can't reuse their stuff in that way.

I do disagree with laws that enforce things like "You can only show this in your home" or whatnot. As far as I'm concerned, no, you shouldn't be able to copy it (As I said, eventually this should just expire, probably after the original author is dead) but you should be able to do with YOUR copy whatever you like.

 

[Traitorfish]

The key is in this paragraph.

“Intellectual Property” doesn’t just attempt to sever the content and reach of 21st century communication, it decrees that merely having certain memories will be punished by brutal force. The particular medium of course does not matter. Hardly anyone uses our precious grey matter to store facts, experiences or detailed arguments anymore. From paper journals and sketchpads we’ve moved to cybernetic augments. Laptops and phones have become as critical and fundamental to our near-singularity minds as any other bodily organ. But eidetic memory is now forbidden. The moment we leave a movie theater the experience must be ripped from our minds by gunpoint leaving only the hollowest of impressions and afterimages, lest an .avi file in our silicon lobes deter them from potential profits. This is considered “fair” because it only reduces us to the level of prehistoric primates. When we leave a company they have the capacity to slice away our plans and ideas. Our neural structures are not our own. Those in power have begun a campaign whereby armed soldiers bust in our doors and murder us if we resist.

The argument is that there is no absolute distinction between internal and external forms of human memory. Even something as basic as writing (or even more basic, such as a physical mnemonic device like the wampum belts of the indigenous Eastern Woodlanders or the quipus of the indigenous Andeans) is a way of externalising human memory, of taking thoughts that we would have previously stored in our heads and transforming them (in whole or in part) into some physical form. That it entails a mechanically distinct form of recall does not fundamentally alter the nature of the cognitive process, just the organisation of its components.

If this is the case, then intellectual property laws, in licensing the state to regulate the external memories license the state to regulate our cognitive processes themselves. It is quite literally a form of thought-policing. We are simply naive enough to believe that, as the author says, it reduces us "only" to the level of absolute primitivism, this arrangement can be understood as somehow just, or even reasonable, and that those of our thoughts that we happen to store in physical media may in fact belong to somebody other than ourselves. To an anarchist this is of course utterly unconscionable, and it should for the same reasons be of at least a mild concern to yourself.

 

[innonimatu]

What copyright laws are for are to prevent you from using someone else's characters, worlds, stories, or music, to make a profit without their permission. If you could just buy a CD and make tons of copies of it and sell them for cash, music wouldn't be designed.

Question: Did people create music prior to the late 19th century?
Ok, it's a rhetoric question, of course they did. Copyright is entirely unnecessary for creation.

Picasso reportedly exclaimed, after seeing the 17000 year-old paintings at Lascaux "we have learned nothing!". Artists - dumans! - always created due to what is the human drive to create, not because someone throws money at them. Throwing money at them just changes which creations are done. And most of what is done is anyway indeed done again and again throughout history with slight variations. Who "owns" that "intellectual property"? For example, Disney taking all those free fairy tales and making copyrighted versions of them.

"Intellectual property" is theft. Theft from all of humanity, for the benefit of a few legal monopolists, with the protection of their legal privilege paid by the state.

I just love these threads where the topic of copyright comes up. They really show how so many are willing to rationalize even theft merely because they aren't objects instead of intellectual property.

I just hate how people like you are so in love with the very recent concept of "intellectual property" that you keep claiming against all reason that it is just like the property concept which involves tangible and finite things.

 

[GhostWriter16]

So we should all be able rewrite a novel precisely as it originally exists and sell it on the market even though we did no work to create it?

Sorry, I accept some forms of intellectual property.

I do think that it should eventually expire, of course.

I don't understand that argument. How do you go from "You can't copy this" to "You can't think about this."

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

So we should all be able rewrite a novel precisely as it originally exists and sell it on the market even though we did no work to create it?

Have you never repeated a story before?


Link to video.

I guess Gerard Butler and Christian Bales' characters owe George Lucas Disney lots of money!

 

[Mr. Dictator]

So we should all be able rewrite a novel precisely as it originally exists and sell it on the market even though we did no work to create it?

So, how much did the authors of the bible make?

 

[Zelig]

I don't understand that argument.

That seems to be the case most of the time.

 

[GhostWriter16]

So, how much did the authors of the bible make?

Hencde why I said such copyrights should eventually expire.

 

[Traitorfish]

So we should all be able rewrite a novel precisely as it originally exists and sell it on the market even though we did no work to create it?

Why not? I could download a map from this site, edit it, and re-upload it for distribution, and nobody would think anything of it. All that's asked is that proper attribution be given, and where possible some indication of the division of effort, but that's a matter of good practice, not necessarily one of ownership.

I don't understand that argument. How do you go from "You can't copy this" to "You can't think about this."

Again, it's about the function of hard-data as an externalised form of human memory. There are in terms of the cognitive processes at work no fundamental differences between an idea I keep in my head and an idea I keep on a piece of paper; it's only a question of how the physical components of the cognitive structures are organised. External data is in a very real sense a part of my mind, so any attempt to regulate that data or my access to that data can only be understood as an attempt to regulate my mind: to regulate what I may think, and how I may think it.

 

[GhostWriter16]

OK, I don't think I agree with that argument.

And yeah, if I create a novel or something and sell it for profit, you don't have an immediate right to just start making additional copies and selling them without my permission.

Yes, that should eventually end. My right shouldn't last forever. But it absolutely should exist.

 

[Traitorfish]

Why does your right to make money trump my right to be free?

 

[GhostWriter16]

Why does your right to make money trump my right to be free?

I would argue this isn't about you being free, but about you stealing the intellectual work I have created.

 

[Traitorfish]

You're claiming that you have a right to use state violence to dictate to me which thoughts I may or may not have; how is that not about me being free?

 

[GhostWriter16]

No, I'm not. I'm arguing that you can't produce copies of certain things for profit for a certain amount of time.