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"Creators and makers should have the right to determine how and where the work they own is distributed." This is a debatable proposition.
by talleyrand 11y ago
"Creators and makers should have the right to determine how and where the work they own is distributed."
This is a debatable proposition.
- cm2187 11y agoWhy wouldn't they? Even open source software comes with a license that restricts exactly that.
- dagw 11y agoThere's a greater good argument to be made that people shouldn't be denied access to education and culture simply based on the country they live in or how much money they have.
- cm2187 11y agoBut in all western countries that does not invalidate copyrights. And in this particular case, I am not sure Games of Thrones qualifies as "education and culture".
- krapht 11y agoIt definitely counts as culture. Today's literature was yesterday's mass market serial.
- thanksgiving 11y agoWhile I agree that you are correct under current laws the position as I see it is about it should be fully legal to copy any publicly published piece of information. I am not too worried that literature and art will go away. Literature and art existed before we had avenues for mass audience to buy or rent personal copies and they will continue to exist after we dismantle copyright. I'd like to note that I support trademarks. I do not condone people selling modified versions of Microsoft Windows including keyloggers that call home to the seller and claiminf it is official, unmodified Windows. One shouldn't sell malware with someone else's trademark on it. The problem as fsf explains well is that we have grouped disparate things together under vague intellectual property when the entire exercise is anything but intellectual.
- ionised 11y agoIt fits the very definition of culture.
- s73v3r 11y agoIf that's true, then the government should be paying these people to produce the content. Otherwise you're saying that poor people are entitled to content for free, without the creator getting anything.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- digi_owl 11y agoExcept that they use it in a kind of legal judo move, making sure anyone getting it from you get the same rights as you got it under. Never mind that there are a bunch of companies, in particular in the embedded market, that violate it left and right.
- icebraining 11y agoFor me, open source restrictions are merely a consolation prize. I'd gladly give them up tomorrow along with the rest of copyright.
- jordigh 11y agoWithout the restrictions of the GPL we might not have OpenWrt, many Linux modules, or near universal hardware support for gcc. If we can find a way to ensure we can get those without copyleft, alright, but so far copyright is the only legal tool we have.
- desdiv 11y agoSo the penalty is just having to switch to *BSD and LLVM?
- bonesmoses 11y agoIndeed it is. Legit avenues like Netflix and iTunes are showing people are willing to pay for content, so long as it's available. There's dwindling tolerance for manufactured scarcity. Make it available, and we'll buy it. Don't, and it'll be pirated. That's just how things work.
- Numberwang 11y agoAnd if I need Netflix for some tv, HBO for some, Hulu for some, iPlayer for some, Canal+ for some and torrent sites to access Korean thrillers.... I'm going to go 100% torrent sites.
- ethbro 11y agoThere is that point too. I think it can be summarized into the "consumers are only willing to jump through so many hoops" tenet.
- Splines 11y agoUnfortunately we'll never see this solved - there are too many parties with conflicting interests to make everybody happy.
- Spivak 11y agoThe fact that "We need to get in on the streaming thing" is probably said in the boardroom of every media company is exactly what's going to kill it. I am willing to pay for exactly one streaming service. The idea that streaming services will become the "pay only for the channels you watch" is second to the fact that all but a few streaming sites will wind up being complete shit. So far only YouTube and Netflix have passable interfaces, cross platform support, and a half-decent discovery algorithm.
- s73v3r 11y agoWhy? Because you're an entitled little brat?
- pdabbadabba 11y ago> This is a debatable proposition. True enough. Though for the present purposes, it it probably sufficient to note that this reformulation is not fairly debatable: "Creators and makers have the right to determine how and where the work they own is distributed." Edit: Actually, krapht's response led me to see that this is completely wrong. "Creators and makers" have robust (though not totally unlimited) legal rights to determine the conditions under which their works are copied, but do not have an all encompassing and well established legal right to determine how their works are distributed after the first sale. Of course, the easy confusion (that I fell prey to) is that distribution often, but not always, entails copying. When it does, creators have strong legal rights. But when it does not, their rights are considerably more limited. The example of libraries brings this distinction out nicely.
- krapht 11y agoPublic libraries being the notable exception.
- JulianMorrison 11y agoYes it is, because it smuggles in a definition of "own" that a whole lot of people don't agree with.
- pdabbadabba 11y agoAgain, it is true that a lot of people disagree with it from a normative perspective. But not a lot of people disagree that this form of ownership does actually exist under our current system of laws, descriptively. At most, one might disagree with the use of the word "own," but this disagreement is fairly meaningless when discussing what rights do and do not exist, since the bundle of rights referred to by the word "own" is well defined regardless of the label used.
- JulianMorrison 11y agoIf you want "own" to be synonymous with a bundle of statutory rights having nothing necessarily to do with the normal English language definition or emotional impact of "owning" something, why didn't you call it "gleeb" or "fnarg" instead? I do in fact disagree with using "own" because I consider it to be smuggling in connotations under cover of a claim to precision which is unlikely to be adhered to - the user will then pivot to words like "steal" or "pirate" and smuggle in a shedload more connotations, and soon will be talking about copying a pattern as if were equivalent to hotwiring your car.
- gozo 11y agoSomewhat weird statement considering the MPAA is representing the studios and not the creators and, eh, makers.
- digi_owl 11y agoIts called PR.
- IBM 11y agoIt's only really debatable on reddit, HN, Slashdot, etc.
- ctolsen 11y agoIt really isn't. Copyright is riddled with exceptions of many kinds, and the granting of it is completely in the hands of whatever a government wants to provide.
- jfindley 11y agoI'm not sure that's true. While I'm not a fan of the entitlement-culture that's a massive feature of large parts of the popular internet, there's more to this than simple entitlement. Demanding content for free is entitlement. Being happy to pay for content, but being denied access based on your geographical location isn't entitlement - at least to me, and I think to a lot of people both on and off the internet. What content owners have seemed to fail to grasp, repeatedly, is that governments operate at least partly by consent[0]. No matter how successful you are at convincing the government of a country to pass the law you want, if it's a law that's very difficult to enforce and is generally perceived as being unfair/unreasonable, it will often get ignored entirely. The problem in this particular case is that in much of the world, the content owners have taken an incredibly aggressive stance, making it extremely difficult or impossible to access lots of content legally. This is often regarded as unfair by the general population of that country - "Why can't I listen to this song/watch this film? It's been available in <other country> for months/years". From a legal standpoint, the content owner is within their rights to say: "Actually, I don't really care about country Y. I'll not bother releasing my content there."[1] However, in practice, it's unlikely their wishes will be respected. No matter how you or they might feel about it, in the real world, content owners have two options: 1) Make it legally available under reasonable terms. 2) Accept that it will be available illegally. There is no third option. 0: Yes, there's debate as to what degree this applies, but for the purposes of my point that shouldn't matter, as long as you accept that there's at least some degree of consent required. 1: In theoretical discussions of this topic, it's often presumed that market forces will counteract this, and incentivise the owner to make their content widely available in most markets - this is demonstrably not the case in practice however.
- Jun8 11y agoAbsolutely! First, let's agree that "creators and makers" in this particular sense mostly refers to big studios, i.e. large corporates, not just to up and coming indie bands or filmmakers. So let's rephrase the statement as "corporations should have the right to determine how and where the [patented] work they own is distributed". It's then easy to see that the above does not hold true in all cases, many examples of public greater good can be provided but the case of generic drugs is perhaps the most well-known: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3694898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3694898.
- s73v3r 11y agoNot really. Unless you feel entitled to the work of others.
- Fargren 11y agoCopies of the work of other are not the same as the work of others. That is one of the reasons why the argument is debatable.
- digi_owl 11y agoYep. If one consider modern machine tools, I could in theory buy a chair, you could take proper measurements of it, and then feed those into a CNC or 3D printer to get an exact duplicate. The only one at a potential loss here would be something like IKEA, because you didn't buy the chair from them. And that is the kind of insane territory the likes of TPP and TTIP are heading into with their clauses whereby companies can sue nations for loss of potential profits (due to new legislations or whatsnot).
- s73v3r 11y agoYou're still benefiting from their work and effort. There's far more to a work than simply the cost to reproduce. That's why it's not debatable.
- Fargren 11y agoI'll ignore that we are debating this(and both getting upvotes), and thus it's debatable. For most of human history if you, say, heard a poem someone else wrote you were absolutely free to copy it, reproduce it, even sell it! Even if you didn't do the work of actually writing it. And this was the norm, and no one thought the author should have the right to stop you. So saying that it's not debatable whether this is still the case from a moral standpoint (hence the "should" in the debated statement) seems to me shortsighted. What's more, even today there are countless ways in which content is distributed without permission from it's makers that we don't deem wrongs. Libraries were named in this thread, and we have all kinds of lendings, readings, quotes and all use that is allowed by fair use. Where the rights of the makers should end (and those of the consumer start) is very much debatable.
- paulhauggis 11y agoIts not really debatable in the tech community. See: the gnu license.
- digi_owl 11y agoAs best i can tell (not a copyright scholar) that is a generalized version of the French "rights of the author". While the English copyright only dealt with, well, copying, the French system dealt with things like how and when a play or musical piece could be performed. This because they cared not just about the monetary angle, but about the reputation of the creator (like say if a politician the creator didn't support wanted to use a song or similar). The reason we see this pop up is that copyright was standardized across Europe with the Bern Convention. Later this was extended across the world (USA didn't sign on until the 1980s, btw). The french is also to thank for the whole "life+X" copyright duration...
- angersock 11y agoIt's a cute and anachronistic practice. Unfortunately, it seems to have in mind some ministrel or author scraping-by in poverty instead of the more likely modern publishing/licensing corporation.
- digi_owl 11y agoAnd that was the case when it was put in place. When copyright first came to be, it was a negotiating leverage between the singular author and the owners of printing presses (very mechanical and labor intensive to operate, and therefore it was rarely done without sales in mind) for a share of the profits. Without it, it was not uncommon for a printer to buy a text for pennies and then resell copies for pounds. Then again, it also introduced the title page holding the name of author and printer. Thus the government had names to lean on if the content was not acceptable...
- Vespasian 11y agoQuite some civil law countries in europe have this system. For example "droit d'auteur" in france, "derechos de autor" in spain and "Urheberrecht" in germany both named not after the work or the act (to copy it) but after the author.
- digi_owl 11y ago
- egypturnash 11y agoOkay. What do you make? What do you make to pay the bills; what do you make for passion? How would you feel about people pirating what you make to pay the bills? Even if you are 100% open source everything for free forever, do you acknowledge that other people may be looking to their creative work as a source of income, and may want a more restrictive license on their work? Do you feel they are morally wrong to ever want to be paid for all the time and labor that goes into performing their craft, and probably into paying off their absurd student loans as well?
- icebraining 11y agoWe all want legal privileges, nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't mean society should grant them. "I want" is not an argument. If people can't live off of doing some activity, they have to choose whether they can afford to keep doing it or not. Student loans, and obligations in general that people have contracted with certain expectations, only justify that we take a "softer" approach, it doesn't change the argument.
- gress 11y agoThis is a great argument which implicitly favors maximizing privilege for the already rich.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- mdpopescu 11y agoThank you; I got downvoted when I said "I (don't) want" is not an argument. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9941486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9941486
- tptacek 11y agoIf it's debatable when it comes to movies, it's debatable when it comes to software, and we should all be making a lot less money.
- schoen 11y agoI think opposition to proprietary software is as mainstream here as opposition to film copyrights. (Maybe we should have a poll to find out.) (There are plenty of nuances of people's opposition, for example people who think arbitrary copyright licenses should still be enforceable but that it's mean to use a proprietary one.)
- icebraining 11y agoIt's a deal!
- tptacek 11y agoI can't imagine how anyone on HN could possibly spend enough on movies or music to make this trade rational.
- icebraining 11y agoI know you all think it is, but it's not a matter of money. All the software I make is already freely distributable by its users, and that was an important reason why I chose this job.
- tptacek 11y agoI think I'll take the many tens of thousands of dollars in premium that intellectual property law allows my work to command in preference to the warm fuzzies I might get at the prospect of Zac Efron's "We Are Your Friends" being free and immediately available on my Macbook, which also would not exist without intellectual property law.
- 11y ago
- 6stringmerc 11y agoNot really. Is there room to debate the notion of artificial scarcity and copyright limits? Sure. Does a creator of a work sacrifice all rights to distribution simply by the act of creation? Nope. Or, in a more real-world example, if I found out a religious organization was using one of my original works as a soundtrack to a commercial - without my consent or receiving compensation - I'm going to fight to keep my rights to tell them to shut it down. The implication of your statement is much more problematic.
- superuser2 11y agoIf you oppose copyright, you are required to oppose Free Software. "Creators and makers should have the right to determine how and where the work they own is distributed" is the only reason copyleft licenses have any power. You do not get to be a copyright abolitionist and a supporter of mandatory source code distribution at the same time. There seems to be a lot of overlap between these communities, and the cognitive dissonance is just stunning.
- saint_fiasco 11y agoI think you missed the point of Free Software entirely. The GPL, like the Discordian Kopyleft, is a legal exploit, or a hack if you prefer, that uses a silly IP law to nullify itself. If some people are using IP law to restrict the freedom of users and makers of software, why can't they use the law to defend themselves? It's like complaining that anarchists are hypocrites for calling the police when they are victims of crime.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoI was with you until the horrible example. Of course Anarchists are hypocrites. (They would be the first to go in a general breakdown of society.)
- saint_fiasco 11y agoAn anarchist explained to me that if they are forced to pay taxes and follow laws and all that, they should at least enjoy the advantages, even if they would prefer to forego those advantages if they were then free from taxes and laws. Much like a significant minority of Free Software advocates (notably not Stallman) believe that the ideal is to have no IP at all, but that since we have them whether we want them or not, Free Software and Kopyleft are a valid defense mechanism.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago...and in that sense they act hypocritically. Its a fair cop. The Anarchist claim is nonsense. They want no government, because it would be better. Yet when they get a free chance to act out that scenario (taking care of things on their own) still they call on the man. In what way would it hurt them to NOT call the cops after they've been mugged? They've already paid the taxes, so no marginal cost. It would let them enjoy the experience of their utopian society with no further cost to them. I call that hypocrisy to the max.