

There Is Never a Need to Justify Sharing Culture and Knowledge - mtgx
http://falkvinge.net/2012/12/19/there-is-never-a-need-to-justify-sharing-culture-and-knowledge/

======
rayiner
I don't think you have a right to "share" episodes of Veronica Mars. The
justification for sharing "culture" is dramatically diminished, in my opinion,
when that "culture" is purely commercial. There are a huge number of artists
willing to share their culture for free, yet sites like Pirate Bay seem
nonetheless to be filled with commercial "culture" not created for the sake of
culture itself, but for the sake of profit, and not intended to be shared.

~~~
muuh-gnu
> I don't think you have a right to "share"

But you should.

> when that "culture" is purely commercial.

You dont need a justification at all. You want to share with your fellow
people, thats it. People love other people and love to share things they have
with them. Sharing is caring. Suppressing that inherently human feeling and
urge simply to make somebody make more money is insane.

The problem with the whole copyright debate is that the so called "democracy",
aka will of the people, is completely and utterly disregarded. The process of
law making is completely and utterly driven by special interests and enforced
against all public resistence from top down. The issue of copyright is closed
up in a dictatorship bubble and fiercely guarded against democracy.

The people, and _only_ the people (like in a direct referendum) should decide
what they value more: their natural, human right to share useful information
with their fellow humans, or to collectively enforce a kind of for-profit
censorship in order to incentivize commercial production. No single authority
should be able to make such a far-reaching and intrusive decision for them.

Such a referendum has never been held, and therefore such laws are
undemocratic, and for that single reason alone I and a lot of other people do
not feel obliged to obey copyright laws. It is as simple as that. Requirig
people to obey and respect copyright restrictions simply because some special
interest calls it a law makes as sense as requiring them to obey and respect
ius primae noctis only because some special interest calls it a law. To be
respected, a law has to be widely agreed upon, and copyright is as widely
agreed upon as ius primae noctis.

~~~
rayiner
If we're talking about natural human tendencies, I'd argue that any supposed
"urge to share" is weaker than the evident urge to control the products of
one's own labor. People who know nothing about intellectual property still get
extremely upset when they perceive that someone else "stole their idea" or
"ripped them off."

Also, claiming the copyright regime is not the product of democracy is utterly
ludicrous. If people cared so much about this "natural right to share" they
would vote out the people who pass restrictive copyright legislation. But they
don't. Claiming that the results of the democratic process are in fact not
democratic for various hand-wavey reasons is the last-ditch argument of people
who don't like the outcome of the democratic process because it didn't come
out their way.

~~~
betterunix
"People who know nothing about intellectual property still get extremely upset
when they perceive that someone else "stole their idea" or "ripped them off.""

That is because they want credit for the idea. Give them credit and share it
freely, and most people will not complain, even if they never intended for
their ideas to be shared by millions of people (many will be happy with the
fame, even if they don't see millions of dollars for it -- again, as long as
they are getting credit, or at least as long as nobody else gets the credit).

Only people who want to exploit ideas for profit use terms like "intellectual
property," because they are desperate to convince everyone else that ideas are
a form of capital. The rest of us use words like "idea," "song," "movie,"
"book," "equation," "name," "DNA sequence," etc. to describe things that might
be copyrighted, patented, trademarked, or whatever else. That is because the
rest of us have not been brainwashed to the point of thinking that copying
things is a destructive activity.

"Also, claiming the copyright regime is not the product of democracy is
utterly ludicrous"

Yes, because as we all know, hundreds of millions of Americans care deeply
about Sonny Bono's vision of lifelong copyrights and the end of the public
domain; all that money donated by Hollywood and the recording industry, all
their lobbying, all the revolving door politics, none of it had anything to do
with the Mickey Mouse act, the DMCA, or TPP. No, this is all highly democratic
-- we just heard Obama and Romney talking about the importance of ensuring
that websites like Megaupload be removed from the Internet, and that programs
like deCSS remain outside of America.

"If people cared so much about this"

People don't care; people ignore copyrights when they want to share things
with each other, which is in no way a new situation. People were singing Happy
Birthday at public events without giving a damn about the copyright status of
that song. Copyrights are a regulation on industry, and it is absurd to try to
apply copyrights to the day-to-day lives of ordinary people. The only reason
copyrights became a major issue in the past 30 years is that the industries
that depend on copyright to turn a profit discovered that they are no longer
necessary, and so they tried to expand copyright to turn back the
technological clock. We have seen this sort of laughably misguided behavior
before, and thankfully we stopped the nonsense before ruining good things:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws>

"Claiming that the results of the democratic process are in fact not
democratic"

This is not democratic:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bribery>

It is, however, the way copyright expansions happen, at least according to one
prominent insider:

[http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/01/19/exclusive-
hollywo...](http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/01/19/exclusive-hollywood-
lobbyist-threatens-to-cut-off-obama-2012-money-over-anti/)

~~~
rayiner
> That is because they want credit for the idea. Give them credit and share it
> freely, and most people will not complain, even if they never intended for
> their ideas to be shared by millions of people (many will be happy with the
> fame, even if they don't see millions of dollars for it -- again, as long as
> they are getting credit, or at least as long as nobody else gets the
> credit).

It goes far beyond credit. Find a popular restaurant with an original shtick,
set up a copy, and see if proper attribution changes the degree to which
you've pissed off the owner of the original.

Do a thought experiment. Do you remember the episode of "Big Bang Theory"
where Penny comes up with the idea to sell Penny Blossoms (little hair
accessories)? See: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KF-0qn_-TAo>

Imagine this hypothetical: someone else sees Penny Blossoms, copies the idea
and the name, and makes a ton of money selling their copy mass-produced by
Chinese labor. What is Penny's reaction in this hypothetical? Is she excited
to see her ideas be disseminated, or pissed off that someone else is making
money off her idea? Does attribution change that reaction?

> Only people who want to exploit ideas for profit use terms like
> "intellectual property"

"Intellectual property" exists because people believe, very strongly, in the
right to profit from their own ideas to the exclusion of others. People
perceive it as "unfair" when someone else makes money off their idea. The
Apple versus Samsung case is a really great example. The case didn't happen
because certain patents existed. The case happened because Samsung released
products that looked a lot like iPhones, and Apple (Jobs) felt ripped off. If
patents didn't form the basis of the suit, Apple would have found something
else--the feeling of being ripped off came first, the law came after.

> That is because the rest of us have not been brainwashed to the point of
> thinking that copying things is a destructive activity.

You're wildly confused about whether the chicken or the egg came first.
Perceptions about the protection of ideas predate "all that money donated by
Hollywood and the recording industry, all their lobbying, all the revolving
door politics..." Obviously copyright and patent date back to before the
Constitution, but even in contexts where neither copyright nor patent apply,
there has been a strong theme of people wanting to protect intangible
property. Usually these come up in the context of "misappropriation" or
"unfair competition." In many respects, the protection of ideas under the
current law is much narrower than what people thought should be the case
historically. It was popular (though never the law), for a long time, to
appeal to a "labor theory of copyright" where people thought facts or news
should be protectable if they took effort to collect or gather. There is a
strong conceptual appeal to the idea that if one spends effort creating
something, whether tangible or intangible, one owns and should be able to
control it. It's a manifestation of our monkey selves.

Another good example is analyst stock recommendations/price targets. These are
clearly facts/opinions and not protected by any intellectual property regime
(an attempt to extend protection to them under a misappropriation theory was
struck down by the Second Circuit recently). But even though the law doesn't
protect these recommendations, people genuinely feel ripped off when
aggregator sites repost analyst recommendations. They feel it is unfair that
someone should be able to profit by simply reposting something that required
them to undertake extensive research and analysis. It's very much a "there
should be a law!" sort of feeling.

~~~
betterunix
"Find a popular restaurant with an original shtick, set up a copy, and see if
proper attribution changes the degree to which you've pissed off the owner of
the original."

The first thing they would do is remind everyone that they had the original
recipe, that they still make it the authentic way, and that the competition
cannot get it right because they are just copying things. Surely you could
have come up with a better example.

"The Apple versus Samsung case is a really great example. The case didn't
happen because certain patents existed"

Yes it did, see above. Steve Jobs wanted to ensure that it was Apple filing
patent lawsuits, rather than Apple being sued. Rounded rectangles are not an
original idea. Apple is a profiteering corporation, no different than any
other profiteering corporation:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/technology/patent-wars-
am...](https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/technology/patent-wars-among-tech-
giants-can-stifle-competition.html?pagewanted=all)

Here is what Steve Jobs really felt: "Privately, Mr. Jobs gathered his senior
managers. While Apple had long been adept at filing patents, when it came to
the new iPhone, “we’re going to patent it all,” he declared," "“Even if we
knew it wouldn’t get approved, we would file the application anyway,” the
former Apple lawyer said in an interview. “If nothing else, it prevents
another company from trying to patent the idea.”"

"Perceptions about the protection of ideas predate "all that money donated by
Hollywood and the recording industry, all their lobbying, all the revolving
door politics...""

Right, they can be traced all the way back to "that cozy relationship between
printing press operators and the British government, with all their lobbying,
and with the lack of protections on free speech." For what it's worth, the
idea that sharing is good for humanity and that knowledge should be copied
predates the notion of copyrights and patents by _millennia_ : ancient
libraries copied books frequently, without hesitation, and one point anyone
who came to Alexandria with books was required to allow the books to be
copied. Copyright was a product of industry from its very inception: first to
ensure that only certain, government-approved printing presses could publish
books, later to maintain the revenue stream of those presses (after intense
lobbying following a period of no copyrights.

"there has been a strong theme of people wanting to protect intangible
property"

Yes, but at one time it was considered to be the sort of thing that the
aristocracy did to prevent the lower class from ever rising to power.

"Usually these come up in the context of "misappropriation" or "unfair
competition.""

No, it usually came up as "censorship," "sedition," "libel," "witchcraft," and
"heresy." The early origin of copyrights in English law falls squarely in that
category:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_166...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_1662)

"Another good example is analyst stock recommendations/price targets"

Yes, this is a good example: these are created for the purpose of turning a
profit, by people who are so focused on exploiting others that they
disproportionately meet the clinical definition of a psychopath. Of course
they want that information to not be copied; the fewer people who know it, the
more of an edge those that do know it have over their competition.

------
jstanley
I agree with most of what the article says, with one exception:

"We don’t determine what civil liberties our children get based on who can
make money and who can’t; we base them on what our parents fought and bled
for."

Lots of people fought and bled over lots of issues, but the act of fighting
and bleeding has absolutely no bearing on whether they were right or wrong.
This just seems to be deliberately emotionally-loaded language, and the
article would be better off without it.

~~~
graue
I used Ctrl-F and didn't find the word "determine" or "bled" anywhere on the
page. Did you read a different article?

~~~
Falkvinge
This looks like a different article - namely, "The Analog Letter: It is
entirely reasonable to demand that our children inherit the rights of our
parents".

[http://falkvinge.net/2012/11/06/the-analog-letter-its-
entire...](http://falkvinge.net/2012/11/06/the-analog-letter-its-entirely-
reasonable-to-demand-that-our-children-inherit-the-rights-of-our-parents/)

~~~
jstanley
Oops! My apologies.

------
scotty79
I have a cool story to tell you. It's called "Spiderguy". But you have to pay
me first. Also once I tell you the story you can't tell it to anyone else. You
can just tell them about it. Also if you don't pay me and anyone else will
offer to tell you this story then no matter how curious you are you should
stick fingers into your ears and not listen to it. Or I'll sue ya.

What do you say?

~~~
VikingCoder
That sounds great - as long as the story you tell is compelling, and you do it
in a way that captivates and surprises me.

I support art.

If it turns out that your depiction of Spiderguy sucked, I'm less likely to
support you in the future.

If you want to share your toys, I think that makes you awesome. But if you
don't want to share your toys, I don't think you should have to.

~~~
scotty79
How do you feel about me suing you for not sticking fingers into you ears when
someone else is telling the story and you listen to it because of your
curiosity I instigated?

~~~
VikingCoder
Your scenario isn't remotely real.

~~~
scotty79
If I, due to curiosity induced by advertisers of Spiderman go to piratebay and
download it (which is as easy and natural as listening in when someone else is
telling some story) I can get sued.

~~~
VikingCoder
You are aware of the laws of the country you live in. You can ignore those
laws, but you may suffer the consequences. No matter what the laws are, no
matter if you think they are right or not. There's no mystery involved in
this.

We can debate whether the laws should change, and that's fine. But you can't
claim that you "innocently overheard" my telling of a story - in your
scenario, you are actively violating the law.

So go find another story teller - one who won't sue you. It's not like it's
hard to find them. Don't like the quality as much? So, _sponsor_ the community
that won't sue you. Do a Kickstarter. Use Flattr. Share on FB or G+
interesting artists.

------
tzs
Making a copy of something for a friend is sharing. Making millions of copies
for complete strangers is not.

