Morally bankrupt? Copyright is not a moral issue, it is just a several centuries old regulation created by people who could never have envisioned something like the Internet. The effort to turn copyright into a moral issue is nothing more than a tactic employed by copyright-based industries in their desperate bid to stay relevant without changing their business models.
The potential moral issue is that the creator of the work (author, photographer, artist, musician) receives no compensation for widespread use of their work. On the other hand, the publishing company or record label or other middleman almost always makes most of the money anyway. An illegal but morally somewhat right thing I’ve seen people do is to pirate the work and pay the artist directly, cutting out most of the expense while still benefiting the creator.
There is no moral obligation for people to be paid for their work, even if other people enjoy that work, even if it is widespread. Are you going to track down every person who told you a funny joke at a bar that you go around repeating to your friends, or perhaps feel guilty about repeating that joke?
The idea that there is moral obligation to pay authors for their writing was itself a tactic used by the publishing industry to establish copyright law when it was first being debated. As you point out, publishers almost always receive the bulk of the money while creators receive little if any compensation. Copyright has always been about business interests and not about morality.
I mean, we've all laughed at the "you wouldn't steal a car" commercials, and the truth is, if you could download and 3D print a car, risk free, you probably would steal it.
The underlying social part of that statement is both true and interesting though. Because the reason you wouldn't steal a car is because of the social contract you have with other members of society. We don't steal from each other, and if we do, society punishes us.
That's basically what the EU is doing with this legislation, and sure, its annoying, but I have a hard time seeing how it's wrong.
There is a very hard difference between stealing something from someone, which deprives them from having access to it, and copying it, which doesn't. The first one is considered morally wrong by everyone here, the second one is argued not to be.
> There is a very hard difference between stealing something from someone, which deprives them from having access to it, and copying it, which doesn't.
That's why I'm 100% in favor of counterfeiting money, since that has the same properties: no one is deprived of the money they already have.
I think it's worth being careful with your language, but then you are talking about whether or not it's okay to infringe on the rights of another and I don't think it's any easier to say it is.
Copyrights are not "rights" the way most other "rights" are understood. The term "right" in this context is an abstraction and it is becoming increasingly strained in the modern world. Copyright is a "right" the way that minerals rights are "rights" -- in reality it is a regulation on an industry.
Copyright is tied to speech and expression the way speed limits are tied to driving: copyright is a restriction on what a person can say and how they can say it.
As for mineral rights, "theft" is not so clear at least based on the history of oil exploration. If I drill a well on my property to tap reserves that span the ground beneath both of our properties, is it really "theft" if I do not pay you a share? Historically the problem was that people were generally incentivized to drill their own land, which led to over-exploitation of petroleum reserves and giant messes in places like Los Angeles. Mineral rights were created to solve that problem by regulating the petroleum industry in a way that minimally disrupts property rights as they are generally understood.
In both cases there is nothing fundamental underlying the regulations. There would be nothing particularly wrong with a system that ignores the ownership of land above a petroleum reserve -- that is how air traffic is regulated in the US (nobody can demand compensation for the airplanes that fly over their property above a certain height). Copyright law has been changed many times since the Statute of Anne, and the original motivation for copyrights was to restore the publishing monopoly that had existed under a previous regulation system (the Licensing of the Press act, which was actually intended to enforce censorship). The rules are mostly arbitrary, and I would argue that in the case of copyright the goal of the regulation is also arbitrary (i.e. copyright was not established to solve an actual problem facing society).
Maybe if you're comparing piracy to stealing of personal goods, but if you steel a few gallons of milk from your local supermarket then you're not depriving them of selling that particular brand of milk either.
Digital products are easy to replicate, so they're obviously different, but that doesn't mean you can do whatever you want with them. Well you can, because it's extremely hard to regulate, but that frankly doesn't make it any better from a moral point of view.
> but if you steel a few gallons of milk from your local supermarket then you're not depriving them of selling that particular brand of milk either.
You've deprived them from selling those specific gallons of milk to someone else and caused them a direct monetary loss. Conflating that with brand is intellectually dishonest.
> but that doesn't mean you can do whatever you want with them. Well you can, because it's extremely hard to regulate, but that frankly doesn't make it any better from a moral point of view.
Yes it does, it's hard to regulate because it's stupid precisely because you haven't actually deprived them of anything which makes it morally not wrong.
> I mean, we've all laughed at the "you wouldn't steal a car" commercials, and the truth is, if you could download and 3D print a car, risk free, you probably would steal it.
The reason those commercials were funny is that they were a transparent attempt to pretend that copyright infringement was theft. It is not, either in law, or in effect. Copyright is a time-limited grant by a government over a category of items. It is not ownership of an item.
If someone could download and 3D print a car, the most important reason that they wouldn't steal it is that usage of the car would not be theft.
I can produce a copy of the contract I have with my employer that specifies my wages and other terms of my employment. If you believe I have a contract with some "content creator" then produce the contract, and show me where my signature was applied.
I am not claiming that the EU legislation is "wrong," I just want people to stop pretending that it is motivated by some high-minded ideal or that it addresses a fundamentally important issue for society. It is nothing more than a regulation imposed on one industry for the benefit of another industry. Copyright has always been about business interests, and the notion that a poor author somewhere is the real beneficiary of copyright is just a nice story publishers have told people since they started lobbying for the Statute of Anne.
> I mean, we've all laughed at the "you wouldn't steal a car" commercials, and the truth is, if you could download and 3D print a car, risk free, you probably would steal it.
Wouldn't it be awesome if we could just 3D print ourselves all kinds of nice things we'd like to have?
If we could actually pull off such utopia, why should society as a whole consider it acceptable to artificially restrict this capability?
When the legal situation around monopoly rights is holding us back, maybe the time is ripe to come up with a new social contract that is actually beneficial to society?
> if you could download and 3D print a car, risk free, you probably would steal it.
That wouldn't be theft, that would be making your own care. Theft necessarily involves depriving the person you stole something from of having it. It'd be theft if you downloaded the blueprint and then deleted it from their servers so you had the only remaining copy; that's theft. Copying is not theft.
So is it immoral to eat a holiday dinner at Grandma's house without paying Grandma for cooking? Not likely. In fact, it would probably be immoral to offer payment. But it IS immoral to skip out on your bill at a restaurant, even if your grandma was the cook. Why?
The morality around payment for work is an attribute of the work having been done "for hire". It has nothing to do with the type of work, the effort involved, the skill of the worker, or the value of the benefit received. Everything is contingent on whether the work was done as a this-for-that exchange.
Copyright has nothing at all to do with work, or payment for work. Copyright turns the expression of your thoughts into property, and allows you to make rules about how that expression of ideas can be used, including selling that expression as if it were a good, or even selling the right to make the rules. It's a weird system when you think about it.
Whether or not you think this system is reasonable depends on whether or not you think that the expression of thoughts is itself property, independent of the tangible objects you create in the process.
What is NOT part of the discussion is whether or not people can or should get paid for being creative. Work-for-hire does not depend on intellectual property rights; people have been getting paid to write and draw and paint and sculpt for thousands of years before copyright ever was even a concept.
On the flip side, the newspapers I subscribe to have high paywalls and publish content I can't find elsewhere for free. If I could reliably find FT content for free on Reddit, I'm not sure I'd be a subscriber.
What is your point? That FT's business model might fail if they could not rely on copyrights? I think they need a business model that is better suited to the modern world if that is the case (or we need to own the fact that when it comes to newspapers etc. we are not interested in a market-based approach).
> they need a business model that is better suited to the modern world
The model that works under such constraints is a hard, high paywall guarding differentiated content. A consequence of such regulation is one having to pay for content with dollars, not eyeballs.
I want to help articulate the point even though I don’t know how I feel about it: Reddit makes money when users post popular things with no regard to how those things were acquired. Often this happens via the inner circle of power posters and meme-trend setters and not actually original content authors. And reddit is perfectly okay with this because it makes them money. If you believe it’s immoral to treat content creators this way it’s a moral issue. I tend to agree more with the GP because I’m pretty copyleft, but I also don’t like the fact that the “reddit machine” is basically an internet link record label where the payout is zero...
Lets break it down. You intrepid reporter have discovered that Chairman John Smith has been embezzling from the company coffers and lying to shareholders and even now is preparing to abscond with his ill gotten gains to an island paradise. Your release a blistering expose on this titled Mr Smith goes to Jamaica... with all your money. Robbery and shame at foo corp.
You might think that your title communicates the most import part of your hard work but 99.9% of the value consists of the fact that you have no right no NOT your clever presentation of such.
When copyright was invented, the bulk of communication was personal and free. Now it is captured into electronic silos on the internet. Creators can't have priority over the interest of the population. They have to cede that public interest in discussing news is more important than their 'right' to monetise even the headlines themselves. When balancing rights, we have to take a larger perspective that includes more than the creators interests.
It's worth noting that in the US there is already the DMCA that content creators can use to take down their work.
Most content owners even big companies like Disney choose to allow (or maybe just ignore) the memes and likenesses because it's free advertising. So in a way they are getting value.
You can also say that it is immoral to receive compensation for not working, i.e. rent-seeking. The creator should be compensated for his or her work, but that's not what copyright is about, it's about being compensated at the time of information exchange. Further confounding the moral issue is the fact that copyright can be assigned, so now a third party is charging rent for the information exchange of a product that they didn't create.
In practical terms, this leads to the creation of entities - media companies, that do not care for morality and are entirely built to maximise profits from the rents they control. Which in turn creates other problems, since those same entities can amass enough wealth and power in order to bend our information exchange technologies in amoral ways, all in the pursuit of perfect rent exploitation. So while the concept of "artist gets paid a fair sum for creating art" is commendable, the current implementation has very detrimental side effects. And you can't fight the side-effects with policy, because free information exchange generates less revenue than the rent on information exchange the media companies seek to extract, so you have less money to lobby for laws against the people trying to restrict your freedom of speech.
> The potential moral issue is that the creator of the work (author, photographer, artist, musician) receives no compensation for widespread use of their work.
Just because something has widespread use doesn't mean it's actually worth anything.
When I call them morally bankrupt, its because of the social manipulation, meddling with democracy and selling of user data, not so much the fact that they allow people to share images of Yoda. But I guess I could have made that a little bit clearer.
I don't personally think the laws are wrong though. I'm a content creator myself, and while much of the code I write is open source, and I'm happy to see people use it to build cool things, I also don't want anyone to steal it and pretend it's their own, and I certainly wouldn't want a social media company to make money from it being shared.
So I like the law, and I think it should apply equally to you as it should to a social media company. Reddit shouldn't be above the law, and it makes me proud to be a European citizen when our politicians stand up and tell these companies that they aren't.
> I certainly wouldn't want a social media company to make money from it being shared
If you can't handle things like this, you basically can't handle platforms that allow others to share things openly. You'll never have an open environment for anyone to create platforms if you also want to pick and choose communication outlets because it effectively devolves to prior restraint like it has here.
Freedom comes at a price, be it sharing your stuff or whatever, and every effort to curb its ills, no matter how noble, reduces the freedom. Sadly, the rest of the world has to suffer these freedom tradeoffs so some can feel proud they are standing up to some companies they don't like.
Github is a platform that allows anyone to share my things openly. It also lets them contribute or perhaps even take ownership of the work if we agree it's better off in their hands.
Do you believe Github should preemptively filter content you are trying to git push? You're ok with me uploading all of your copyrighted photos to my GitHub page with the laws that exist today? Do you believe GitHub profits off of their popularity (driving more private repo and enterprise sales) built on a platform that allows users to upload copyrighted content? Is your answer going to be the same as the ones making judgements on GitHub while clutching this new legislation?
I do not think your politicians are "standing up" for you or any other content creators. They are standing up for the big copyright industries who have basically captured European politicians (to a much greater extent than they captured America's).
The general approach that Europe seems to take is to protect old industries from any challenge, even at the expense of new industries. I see that as a big reason for the sad state of the European tech industry. Europe is falling further and further behind America and China in terms of tech industry leadership and relevance, and with each new effort to "stand up" to tech companies Europe makes it harder for small tech startups. Where is the European answer to Reddit, or to Google, or Facebook or Tencent or Weibo? At this point it looks like European politicians have given up and are just trying to get as much money out of foreign tech companies as they can.
> I certainly wouldn't want a social media company to make money from it being shared
Reddit/etc make money because of their platform not content. All of the content on reddit is available via api for free. So its definitely not the content.
> When I call them morally bankrupt, it is because of meddling with democracy
To say that, you have to affirm that the people in your democracy are unable to decode various forms of information. It happened in East Germany because East Germany didn’t have the freedom of information, so people were gullible (or so said historians). Your remedy is to... what, shut down Reddit, so only information controlled by the state is published.
Despite being a bad idea from the get go, let’s analyse what people usually criticize as fake news. Statistics about criminality. Statistics that don’t comfort the idea that women are oppressed. Remember that you can write a 10-page document citing sources and having it backed by 5 scientists across the world and be fired by Google for fake newsing.
So in the end you’re just advocating to shut down information that doesn’t comfort your ideas. And you’re using the argument of « morally corrupt » for it.
