h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I think there's a much better argument in favour of music-sharing, and it looks at the heart of the matter - copyright laws. Whilst the music and movie industry have apparently successfully brainwashed people into believing that copyright is there to 'protect the rights of authors' this simply isn't the case. The point of copyright is to benefit the public domain. That might seem crazy - if there are no copyright laws then every work of art that is created is in the public domain, so surely copyright laws can only limit the amount of stuff in the public domain. Actually, this isn't the case. Copyright gives authors a limited time monopoly on their work, allowing them sole rights to licence it, and thereby allowing them the potential to make a living producing works of art or science. If people have a way of eating whilst writing, without the need for a wealth benefactor, then more people are able to do it, and more works will be produced.

What this means, however, is that copyright has, and can only have, legitimacy as an agreement amongst society to prevent themselves temporarily from having the benefits of a work being in the public domain in the belief that they will gain overall in the end. But, and this is a very big but, such laws can and should only exist for as long as the public support this agreement. I would argue that this is no longer the case. The public no longer believes that copyright protection is necessary for artists to feed themselves, or, alternately, no longer believes that the benefit they gain from it outweighs the sacrifice they make.

Basically, if a majority of people believe in freely sharing music, there can be no *moral* argument why they should not. The only argument can derive from the idea that society has made a pact and that individuals are breaching that pact, thereby free-riding at the expense of those that pay for music. Such a pact can only exist amongst a majority, however, and without such a majority, nobody can claim that those that break it are doing so unfairly.

An interesting argument, and also one that never cropped up in this article's PeerReview thread at F113191?thread=244435 .

It's true that copyright was set up originally to support artists/inventors and their work, but it is now a legal matter, not just an ethical one. The copyright laws cannot just be abolished straight off, just like that, because too many people benefit from them (not specifically in the music industry, but everywhere).

Also, some artists (such as Metallica and Eminem) are very fond of the concept of "copyright" and I think there are plenty of battles to be fought with the law, human rights, ethics etc. etc. before anything will be done about it. In fact, something which was raised in the PeerReview thread about this article is that some people are pressing to increase the restrictions on how many years after the inventor/artist's death the copyright expires.

We've a long way to come yet

~ Owl

Of course it's true that copyright is now law, but the question I was trying to answer was 'How can copyright infringement be justified?'. In many cases the argument that something is illegal is enough; in most cases it doesn't matter what majority of opinion is - murder is still wrong even if everyone wants to do it. But copyright is different. It's just an agreement between people. It derives its moral power only from consensus. Just like how if you say 'Bagsy the first go on the slide' that has a certain moral power because children subscribe to the idea of bagsying, copyright is only valid, and thus infringement unjustifiable, if such a subscription persists.

Interesting analogy there, Benjamin...

Um, but surely copyright comes from the ethics (or unethics) of plagiarism originally. It's to do with claiming ownership for the sake of proving your intellect (hence the name Intellectual Property).

If you'd written a novel, or a software system, say, and one day someone republished that exact same item with their name on the product instead, then that would be plagiarism, which is clearly wrong.

If you were JRR Tolkein, would you like people to believe that Jeffery Archer had written Lord of the Rings?

I think copyright has its place

~

No. No no no no no. No. Nope. Nup. Nope. No.

There *are* arguments that copyright is a good thing because of artists' rights, etc., but that *certainly* isn't the basis on which we got to the copyright we currently have. And I think that they're not good arguments anyway. It seems clear to me that as wide a public domain as possible is in the interests of society as a whole. Nobody thinks that it's wrong that, say, fairy tales are retold, adapted, etc. etc.. People think it's okay that Disney should have made film versions of stories, including ones which with the longer copyright they themselves have pressed for they'd never have been able to create.

There clearly *is* a problem with 'passing off' in your suggestion about Jeffery Archer, but this isn't a question of copyright. Clearly you can rule that people are allowed to copy a book but not to claim that they wrote it themselves. Likewise, if they improve it, they should be entitled to call it 'Jeffery Archer's edition of Tolkein's 'The Lord of the Rings'.

The same argument that the Free Software Foundation use for software. It's very utopian, and I'd love to see it in place, but the world has a lot of fighting to do before we get there...

~

Exactly!

(Posted with Mozilla 1.3b on Redhat 7.2)

I agree!

(Posted with Phoenix 0.5 on Debian sid)

Ugh. Phoenix. Ugh.

Clearly off topic:

Phoenix is good. Once you have it configured. I have it doing _everything_ I had galeon doing previously, but with added speed and lower crash-rate (although only nasty things like Flash crash gecko anyway).

~

I generally agree with your point of view, however, an artist friend put this to me the other day. If an artist, say a painter or a sculptor, was to finish a piece, but someone took some images of this piece. They then put these images on the internet before the artist has exposed this particular piece to the public in a gallery.
Would this not impinge on the rights of the artist, to deal with thier own product as they see fit? They painted it, they sculpted it, they wrote and performed it! Why does someone else have the right to use anothers product without consent. After all whether it be a painting, a sculpture or a piece of music, "free" in this case means that the original artist may now have a "corrupted" market to sell to? Still maybe this is all nonsense & I need a good lay down!

Mad Hamish

This is exactly why copyright infringement simply isn't theft. If I photograph your painting it doesn't in any way affect the artists right to deal with the product as they see fit. They can still sell it, burn it, change it, do another. Just as they could with a chair. The reason you can commit theft with a chair is that by taking the chair you deprive the maker of something. Namely, in your having the chair, you prevent them from making use of it. The same with the *original* painting. If I steal a painting, the artist can't do anything with it. However this is totally not the case with copyright 'theft'. If I copy a painting, the artist can still do everything they could before. They haven't lost *anything*.

Now before you tell me that they can't still do the same things, for example, they can't sell it to someone who's already bought a copy, I'm just going to reject straight out this bizarre use of language. Of course they *can* still sell it. People may not want it, but they have no less ability to do anything they wanted to do before with it. Anything else is just talking about the copier's right to do stuff with it, and restricting that. And then we just get back to the initial question of copyright and societal agreement.

Well that really _does_ depend how you define "theft"... the expression "stealing the limelight" springs to mind when I think about this.

Although some artists, like Radiohead, are happy to have their music leaked and spread around the world before they planned for it to be, I think most artists (not just musicians) would be most disappointed if people were able to see/hear their work before they had the chance themselves to do a "grand opening". I know some musicians (such as Suede) decide at the last minute that the whole album is poo and start again from the beginning. If the album has already made it out onto the internet, people will spend a year listening to the rubbish that the band never wanted anyone to hear (John Lennon's "Free as a Bird", anyone?). This is what Hamish was on about, I think, and the idea of revealing something before the artist themself does can really be considered as stealing (hence theft) the limelight from them.

~

Erm, again, I really can't see how on *any* definition that's theft. To go back to the test case, that certainly *isn't* preventing the artist doing what they like with their work.

Let's put this as simply as possible. It's easy to see why stealing a chair causes problems: the person that had the chair no longer gets to use it. There is obvious harm done to them.

Now, it may well be that copying music causes harm, but it's certainly a very different type of harm that stealing in the normal sense of the word. To see this we just need to imagine that the person didn't just copy the music, but also destroyed the original. The harm in that case is much closer to what might reasonably be called 'theft'.

Are you picking a fight with the expression "stealing the limelight", then? That expression contains the word "stealing" and hence implies theft of some sort (at least in my owl-eyes).

~

Oh no, not really. I didn't really notice that - it's just an impression. Surely nobody could suggest that limelight was actually a real thing that could be stolen....

My point is simply that, whatever copyright infringement is, it isn't stealing.

The same with 'stealing limelight'. You might think it was something bad, and that there should be legislation to prevent (I happen to think not!), but regardless I think you'd be just plain wrong to think it theft.

I must apologize for my last comment, I was dealing with a few things at once, and it wasn't my finest hour in text. The point I was trying to make,rather badly, was: If you give people the option of obtaining a product, sound wave, theory or whatever from another source other than the creater, you are "taking without permission" the capacity for the creater to decide the fate of that product wheter it be a copy or the original. By definition alone :Theft is taking without the permission of the owner!" The people who believe otherwise are simply lying to themselves, in an attepmt to sit at home on their computers, stealing "unauthorized" music and feel blameless in a strange socialist fashion. If the creaters, such as Radiohead are happy to share, bloody fantastic, however no-one has the right to "take without permission" for the purpose of distribution. If you can pay for it, pay for it! If you can't and you take it THEFT.

Nuff said...Mad Hamish

The State of California takes the idea of copywright and abstracts it one level deeper. If you buy a painting, sculpture etc. from an artist, you have possession of the physical object, but you may not destroy it, restore it, or change the way it looks or appears in any way without permission of the artist. How may times the art object is sold, the artist is just granting licence.

Perhaps because so many of the people of California are involved in creating images, it is much easier for us to percieve something intangible as stealable, and not find this idea any more peculiar than the legal fiction of a corporation as a person who never dies.

That sounds like a very reasonable law! Combine that with the Free Software mentality (mentioned earlier) and you get the GNU General Public Licence (or similar), where one can freely download and even inspect another's work released under this licence, but is not permitted to remove their name from it, or alter it in any significant way without the owner's permission (of course bugfixes and so on are allowed, else the whole Open-Source thing goes down the drain anyway).

~

With all due respect, that is *absolutely* not what the GPL says. You are allowed to do *whatever* you like to a GPLed program. You can change the name, remove the name, alter it in any way, and none of that needs the owner's permission.

The *only* instance when the GPL has any effect is when you *redistribute* the work. In that case you do not need any further permission - the GPL already grants you the right to do everything you describe, so long as the work you redistribute is likewise redistributed under the GPL.

As to the question of theft, I still don't agree. Theft isn't about taking something without permission, it's about depriving someone of something without their permission. Of course until the possibility of easily producing a facsimile of an object was around these two definition would be co-extensional (I.e. anything that was taking without permission was depriving someone of something without permission), but it should be obvious if we look at the reason for outlawing theft that we'd make it a criminal offense principally because of the deprivation aspect. It's nonsense to say that the aspect of doing something without permission has more of a detrimental impact than the deprivation aspect.