I hope in a millennia copyright is looked back upon with the same disgust and insanity that human sacrifice, child wives, and genital mutilation are (mostly) today. In a society unbounded by information scarcity, to intentionally and systemically stymie it is to intentionally cripple yourself. The immediate magnitude may be less significant, but the long slow death of culture to perpetual copyright is having absolute consequences on our modern society today, with escalating damage as time goes on. The longer we as a people are culturally stunted walking a tightrope of legal bureaucracy established and maintained to protect monopoly and corporate profit the more of our history we lose, and the more of our bonds are lost or never formed amongst one another in common knowledge. But because the suffering is scattered across our collective conscious, and because it requires an understanding of how information and culture are made beyond the average wit, the movement is limited and rife with a never-ending uphill battle against one another rather than against the aggressors, because we were all raised in this system and to see outside it requires great effort and a sacrifice of established ethos many are not willing to engage in.
It is the same outside thought that kept slavery the norm, or subjugated women, or made great thinkers like Giordano Bruno heretics to be burned rather than celebrated. People are born into systems of oppression and will fight for them because it is what they know, even if it is to us now what is not right. And I firmly believe intellectual property protectionism falls into that history of oppression - much more muted, much less immediately harmful, but backwards and self-defeatist all the same.
I'm very much for copyright change, but equating copyright monopolies with human sacrifice and genital mutilation is specious bullshit that makes people less sympathetic to the cause of reform. The injustices of copyright are a minor annoyance by comparison to other kinds of abuse and trauma.
because it requires an understanding of how information and culture are made beyond the average wit
Bah, humblebrag. Almost everyone I've ever discussed copyright with is perfectly capable of appreciating the systemic perpetuation of privilege that inheres in copyright monopolies. You're waving a bloody shirt for the moral equivalent of a paper cut; it's not OK to borrow the vastly more intense sufferings of others to make more of an emotional impact.
I'm not equating it. I'm comparing it. They are simply explicit and blunt examples to make a point, more relatable examples would be traditional models of miasma causing disease or of the Earth being flat. But you also reinforce my point - it feels more explicit when the consequences of a misguided social order have physical ramifications in the immediate, rather than the sociological spanning the entirety over a long time. Probably the greatest relatable yet poignant example would be the cultural view of women as helpless or lesser than men for most of history since cultivation of crops began. It started as a tool of control, and was passed down in an ingrained psyche we have still not fully escaped. But we can fully understand both that people borne into it assumed it to be an absolute of the world, the same as how many think copyright and intellectual property must be, while also recognizing how wrong they can be.
> Almost everyone I've ever discussed copyright with is perfectly capable of appreciating the systemic perpetuation of privilege that inheres in copyright monopolies. You're waving a bloody shirt for the moral equivalent of a paper cut; it's not OK to borrow the vastly more intense sufferings of others to make more of an emotional impact.
This is also the point. It is not about the privilege of the owners, it is about the damage inflicted by it. It is not about money earned but history, knowledge, and potential lost. You can see the immediate consequences of slavery, but also recognize that such a sin of culture has consequences in the potential of everyone involved beyond the subjugated. If a debate on copyright devolves into pursuits of wealth or privilege, the macro impact is already lost. In addition, anyone you are having a debate with is probably already putting in the effort. I speak of the other 99% of peoples who give it no consideration and assume it as natural as gravity or light.
And I'm not claiming to be some enlightened saint. As others have said, these flaws in social organization of peoples require mental effort to grasp and overcome. You always want to presume what you know is what is right, and I am certain I have my own assumptions that are as moralistically wrong as copyright that I have not yet, or may never, challenge. And hopefully whatever we are in that thousand years looks back and sees them all as backwards and unreasonable as we see so many historical practices as wrong.
I personally make money selling software that I wrote expecting to be able to sell it in the future. Without copyright, I wouldn't have done it in the first place. How do you see this sort of activity in a world without copyright?
This is always the first comment, and its always the easiest. You do not treat your information as a scarce resource when it is not. You treat your scarce resources as scarce. Seek payment to develop, not for the fruits of development, at least not to be treated as a falsified scarce commodity. The time and mental energy to create is the limited resource, not the creation itself.
> I hope in a millennia copyright is looked back upon with the same disgust and insanity that human sacrifice, child wives, and genital mutilation are (mostly) today.
> in a millennia copyright is looked back upon with the same disgust and insanity that human sacrifice, child wives, and genital mutilation are
1000 years is enough time for our contemporary culture to change. Those things you listed may even become acceptable by then. Just to compare with what we already accept - capital punishment, abortion, children being controlled by their parents, and even forced to eat food, circumcision.
And all are valid examples of potentially backwards thinking, and the many more even us are not recognizing because we have not dedicated the mental energy required to break out of our respectively imprinted expectations of social organization.
I only speak of one example amongst many, but I stand by it being in our best interests to recognize and correct them before they cause too much injury to either individuals or the collective.
It is the same outside thought that kept slavery the norm, or subjugated women, or made great thinkers like Giordano Bruno heretics to be burned rather than celebrated. People are born into systems of oppression and will fight for them because it is what they know, even if it is to us now what is not right. And I firmly believe intellectual property protectionism falls into that history of oppression - much more muted, much less immediately harmful, but backwards and self-defeatist all the same.