Nobody has the right to obtain copyrighted entertainment products. Unlike, say, having access to food or water, or even education, there's no coherent moral framework that says that you are obligated to the latest TV shows or movies under your own terms.
> that are contributing a substantial part of how the society collectively feels and thinks
First of all, I straight-up don't believe this. I had very little exposure to TV/movies/books/the internet growing up, and yet I feel virtually no disconnect with my friends and co-workers - even when I don't understand a particular cultural reference they make, they either explain it and we engage in a fun tangent about it, or we just laugh and move on.
Second, even if that were true - then the problem is that culture is being built off of copyrighted works in the first place. Solve that. Doing otherwise shows that this is just a convenient excuse to secure access to personal entertainment.
> there's no coherent moral framework that says that you are obligated to the latest TV shows or movies under your own terms.
Copyright anarchy and copyright abolition are absolutely coherent moral frameworks.
I have a magnet link. It brings me information. You don't want me to have that information? Up yours.
Oh you made it did you? Should've thought about my BATNA before deciding how to put it on the market.
For the record, I'm quite a bit more moderate than this would imply. But copyright is a weird wrinkle to "encourage the useful arts and sciences", it's has no basis in natural rights, the opposite in fact: the State intervenes in my natural right to do things with my own computer and the Internet connection I pay for, in order to encourage the making of more cinema and so on.
Total opposition to copyright is coherent, but I'm not sure that's being adhered to in the discussion here - particularly from the OP.
Being totally opposed to copyright and also choosing to consume content that was only made in the expectation of copyright-enabled paid business models is where it breaks down, in my mind. There's a vast world of freely available content out there, as there would be in a no-copyright world, but if that's not enough for you, or you find benefits from consuming the content produced by the commercial industry enabled by copyright law, how consistent is your belief that copyright should be abolished? Seems like you just want to freely enjoy the benefits without upholding your side of the bargain in that case. I have not seen a case that the budgets to produce those things would be there in a "everything is free for everyone" world.
Other people's expectations are none of my business.
CostCo gives me free samples with the expectation that I'll buy something. That's on them, whether I buy something is on me.
A guy writes a poem. It's in the expectation that his lover will choose him and not his rival.
That's not his paramour's responsibility. She can do what she wants.
A guy writes a TV show, in the expectation that I'll subscribe for ten bucks a month to get it, and with the legal arm of the law to threaten me if I watch it any other way.
First off: Fuck that guy, and second, still not my responsibility what the person who created something expected.
There’s no evidence that copyright leads to decreased creative output. We do however have a thriving fashion industry built on no protection of ideas. From what I can see, copyright is just rent seeking and imposing artificial limitations on ideas.
> Second, even if that were true - then the problem is that culture is being built off of copyrighted works in the first place. Solve that.
I mean - the natural state of these works has ALREADY solved that, they are easily copied and distributed. The only prevention is arbitrary law/policy that says we (the royal one) shouldn't.
So you're essentially arguing that no one has the right to a product, but they do - in a natural state, copying and sharing those items IS THE DEFAULT.
In fact - copyright law is insanely new, as far as laws go - dating back only about 300 years (1710 - Statute of Anne).
Personally - I think the whole thing was a mistake, and we've seen complete erosion of public access to works of all sort (not to mention education) under these new laws. That said - they're wildly successful if the goal is to subvert culture for private gains.
> Nobody has the right to obtain copyrighted entertainment products. Unlike, say, having access to food or water, or even education, there's no coherent moral framework that says that you are obligated to the latest TV shows or movies under your own terms.
Yet educational books are copyrighted all the same, and scientific journals fight tooth and claw from preventing open access even if morally they should (eg. when publishing results of research paid for by public months).
You just drew an imaginary line (entertainment products) to defend an artificial law (copyright). Prior to 1710 there was no copyright, yet culture, art and civilization flourished. People were entertained, and entertainment products were certainly produced.
Copyright creates an artificial scarcity (literally, in the 21st century, where copying is costless). Compare that with natural laws, such as against killing, stealing, etc, known for thousands of years, with obvious reasons for existence.
We can argue to what extent copyright promotes creation, and we can agree to respect it because of its positive effects (if any).
But we should never mistake the "nobody has the right to obtain copyrighted works" dogma for a law of nature.
> culture is being built off of copyrighted works in the first place. Solve that. Doing otherwise shows that this is just a convenient excuse to secure access to personal entertainment.
What is culture if not total sum of all art, science, and other human accomplishments? And as we now stand, all modern art (and much of science) is being locked up behind copyright for decades.
> Prior to 1710 there was no copyright, yet culture, art and civilization flourished. People were entertained, and entertainment products were certainly produced.
People, if they were entertained at all, were mostly self-entertained back then - they played instruments and such. There was hardly if any passive content consumption back then. Before 1710 there were no novels (novels as literary form weren't invented yet), obviously no movies, video games or music recordings. There was practically nothing to protect, apart from musical scores or theatre plays.
I find it amusing that you reduced the works of Greek and Roman philosophers and poets, the entire Renaissance, the whole Library of Alexandria and indeed, the Bible, to "practically nothing."
I fail to see how, say, the Nth installment of Marvel movies is somewhat more worthy than all of that.
Movies which, I might add, are already hugely profitable, even though they're massively pirated.
They didn't exist as mass market products. Printing was expensive, so they were only accessible to the rich and literate. With one exception being the clergy.
You should probably read the Cheese and the Worms, about how an average cheese seller in 1500s Germany read hundreds of books and talked about them passionately. Printing was expensive in the beginning of print but book historians have demonstrated convincingly that there was a huge circulation of books and copied media (i.s. teams of professional copyists) pre and antedating the printing press. Less than 30 years after the introduction of the press humanists talked about how the flood of books was so massive that no one could read them all in a lifetime. You are operating on an image of print that is historically wrong.
> Nobody has the right to obtain copyrighted entertainment products.
what about all the things that should have been out-of-copyright had large companies not purchased favourable laws? How many years after death are we up to now? Is this what people originally agreed to when copyright laws were created? Did they agree to the extensions or did the government do this for the "lobbying"?
What about public domain which was taken by for-profit companies and then copyrighted so you cant do the same?
I agree it's out of hand. Disney has pushed it to absurd heights. IMO it should be 40 years from publication, performance, distribution, or first sale/license; whichever is earliest.
Ideally with a formalized way of declaring an earlier expiration, or directly to public domain.
> Nobody has the right to obtain copyrighted entertainment products. Unlike, say, having access to food or water, or even education, there's no coherent moral framework that says that you are obligated to the latest TV shows or movies under your own terms.
The only coherent moral framework for the existence of copyright at all is that it is a societal level intervention to maintain financial incentives for the production of creative arts and livelihoods for creators. If the lion's share of the returns to the production of IP is being soaked up by gatekeepers like streaming services and publishers then the alignment of the principle to its aim starts to attenuate.
This is the one of the oddest things I've read all day. you should feel a certain disconnect during these conversations, and it's odd to think of media as something that people don't relate over and use to bond. People will obviously accommodate people who aren't in the in group (and know about insert thing) to not be complete assholes, but you will absolutely be treated differently in life for not being into insert thing for better or worse.
You forgot genes. Why on earth is society oblivious of laws that allow copyrighting of human genes?
"Unlike, say, having access to food or water, or even education"
This is YOUR take. MY take is NOTHING should be copyrightable. People will still go to concerts and movie theathers. If anything, copyright stiffles production and innovation.
EDIT: I forgot to remind you that copyright is different from trademark. I think trademark is constructive, but copyright is not.
> Nobody has the right to obtain copyrighted entertainment products.
Depends on the country, actually. In Poland, as in some other European countries, it's legal to download copyrighted content without paying for it. It's only illegal to distribute it without the copyright owner's permission.
I am not a lawyer, but that is also the case in the US as far as I know. For example,
Torrenting copyrighted material is illegal because you necessarily share files as you download (if a peer asks for a piece) but direct downloading or streaming via HTTP or Usenet etc. is legal. Hosting those files via HTTP/Usenet etc is not though.
It's easy to configure the torrent client to disable any upload, so that torrenting stuff is legal. However, if the copyright holder sues you (which is what sometimes happens in Poland, there are law firms which specialize in that), you'd have to argue all the technical details of P2P file sharing to the judge, so it's still easier to use VPN in practice.
> then the problem is that culture is being built off of copyrighted works in the first place. Solve that.
How about you solve your business model that relies on the generosity and goodwill of people not to take an infinitely distributable good.
Maybe it isn't morally coherent but I am all for resisting the US government's pro monopoly positions by pirating from said monopolies. True resistance will never be legal in a framework where the rules are dictated by authoritarian governments or in this case corporations.
I think that's borderline a similar argument to loss prevention in department stores. I don't know hard numbers, but assuming there's a 2-3% loss in goods due to theft, the department stores can still make profit. "No one is harmed yet" If everyone stole goods, the stores would go bankrupt.
I think the same argument can be made for pirating. It's harming no one as long as it remains a minority action. If the entire population felt the same as you, the movie/game/show industry would take a huge crash.
My personal believe is that morals shouldn't rest on other people not doing what you're doing for it to be ok morally. It needs to be applicable for 100% of the population for it to be moral. (barring obvious exceptions like handicapped people using handicap stalls, etc)
Nobody will miss neither Disney or Merck or Elsevier, or any other company whose bussiness is copyright and artificial scarcity. 100% of people can pirate their content and noone will miss them because we didn't need them in the first place.
> Nobody has the right to obtain copyrighted entertainment products
People do still have the right to use libraries, though that is being threatened by digital restrictions in ebooks and other media.
In the US we seem to forget that copyrights and patents exist to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" - not to ensure a perpetual revenue stream.
Putting paywalls on culture puts culture out of reach to the lower classes.
I think poor kids growing up with parents living paycheck to paycheck should have equal opportunity to become a great filmmaker as trust fund kids.
That should be where we start this conversation, not hand wringing over making sure billion dollar media companies don't have their business models disrupted.
> I think poor kids growing up with parents living paycheck to paycheck should have equal opportunity to become a great filmmaker as trust fund kids.
I think that the bigger issue is that poor kids cannot consume the same media that richer kids in their school consume and this can turn them into outsiders automatically. Imagine the feeling to be the one kid in class that cannot watch the show that everyone else is talking about, because your parents are too poor to afford subscriptions.
> that are contributing a substantial part of how the society collectively feels and thinks
First of all, I straight-up don't believe this. I had very little exposure to TV/movies/books/the internet growing up, and yet I feel virtually no disconnect with my friends and co-workers - even when I don't understand a particular cultural reference they make, they either explain it and we engage in a fun tangent about it, or we just laugh and move on.
Second, even if that were true - then the problem is that culture is being built off of copyrighted works in the first place. Solve that. Doing otherwise shows that this is just a convenient excuse to secure access to personal entertainment.