Comment by Retra
7 years ago
You can't dismiss it all as entitlement. Imagine that you have a gym membership and someone is offering a service to life your weights for you for a fee. Do you have a right not not lift weights without paying this fee? Of course you do.
Some of these things that people want to charge fees for are things that you can participate in for free naturally, so long as nobody is gate-keeping you. So it's very hard to justify spending money on them... particularly if you consider them bad for you, (like, say, binging on Netflix.)
It is the freedom of the creator to pick a license and method they wish to use to distribute their work. I'm talking about DRM for things which are mostly entertainment - things like movies, games, music, etc. We all have equal freedoms to not support such platforms. I don't follow what point you're trying to make with your gym example. If the gym has some policies which you dislike, you can simply chose to not go there. (I know people love to take things to extremes, so I'm obviously obviously not talking about racist policies or other illegal exclusionary practices)
They gym doesn't have any policy. If you have a membership, you're free to use the facility or not. Real life doesn't have any policy either, if you have the capability, you're free to copy & distribute what you have access to or not. It is a third party that is trying to interfere with these native abilities. The ability to create something is not intrinsically tied to the ability to control it.
Which isn't to say there's anything wrong with copyright laws, per se. What I'm saying is that it is not 'entitlement' on the part of the copier, but entitlement on the part of the copyright holder to expect to hold dominion over other people's capabilities. That is the negotiated result of social processes.
>if you have the capability, you're free to copy & distribute what you have access to or not.
Well, you can do anything you like with the freedoms you have as enshrined in the legal framework that applies to your domicile. Do you also respect the freedom of a creator to choose a license and a distribution method of their liking for their works? It seems like you don't.
> What I'm saying is that it is not 'entitlement' on the part of the copier, but entitlement on the part of the copyright holder to expect to hold dominion over other people's capabilities.
But the fact is that one of those people is on firm legal ground, and the other one isn't.
>Which isn't to say there's anything wrong with copyright laws, per se.
Well, your comments seem to indicate that you find many things wrong with the copyright law.
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Gyms are substitutable, "movies, games, music, etc." are not. Your argument works for e.g. Steam vs. GOG when both carry a particular game, but it doesn't work in general, because a DRMed work is usually DRMed everywhere.
Well, okay, maybe you won't be able to buy a non-DRM version of a game you really like. That is a problem for the creator. If people simply walked out of a situation where they don't agree with the terms, maybe more creators would notice.
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