Comment by Suppafly
1 day ago
>And what a shame that is.
I was with you until this. Copyright is a legal fiction, if it's no longer working the world will adapt. No need for shame to be involved.
1 day ago
>And what a shame that is.
I was with you until this. Copyright is a legal fiction, if it's no longer working the world will adapt. No need for shame to be involved.
All abstract property rights are legal fiction. The notion that you can own, say, a piece of land that you have never even came close to, simply by virtue of a record in some registry somewhere; and, based on that ownership, then restrict the ability of others who actually do live next to it to enter it or otherwise use it, is rather absurd from a "natural right" perspective.
I should note that this isn't even some kind of hot new take. Here's what Thomas Jefferson had to say on the subject:
"It is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all... It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society."
"A right of property in moveable things is admitted before the establishment of government. A separate property in lands, not till after that establishment. The right to moveables is acknowledged by all the hordes of Indians surrounding us. Yet by no one of them has a separate property in lands been yielded to individuals. He who plants a field keeps possession till he has gathered the produce, after which one has as good a right as another to occupy it. Government must be established and laws provided, before lands can be separately appropriated, and their owner protected in his possession. Till then, the property is in the body of the nation, and they, or their chief as trustee, must grant them to individuals, and determine the conditions of the grant."
All law is a fiction, by that argument.
Just because it’s a fiction doesn’t meant it’s not effective in triggering human responses and proactive actions. In a broad sense, fiction is all we get as human minds, whether it’s representative representation of our actual embedding universe or not.
That would in fact be part of my argument.
Some fictions are readily dispensible. Most are not.
What they are not however is laws of nature, divine right or revelation, or immutable.
Limit on the law-of-nature bit: law is often a highly probable outcome of various power dynamics, political, economic, social, cultural, etc.
>All law is a fiction, by that argument.
sure but some can claim more of a moral basis than others.
Beware claims to moral rights / superiority. They're often a thought-stopping wedge to badness.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43782745>
Copyright in the sense of corporate greed is indeed an issue.
Whenever talk about that being a shame, I am thinking about the individual author who lost control over their work and still can not feed themselves.
Piracy is not the reason individual authors cannot feed themselves.