The current debate is framed by the presumption that "intellectual property" is a fundamental right that must be protected, and the disagreement is only over the means by which this is done and the collateral damage that results. Questioning the premise of "intellectual property" (and, by extension, "online piracy") makes the position of SOPA's supporters less tenable.
I was hoping for an explanation of how the current arguments draw power from the distinction between 'fundamental' vs. 'government granted' rights. Simply restating that "the debate is framed that way" provides no such explanation.
The position of SOPA's supporters is "hey government, there are people stealing our work on a massive scale; fucking do something about it." The actual enforcement mechanisms in the bill have taken center stage in the debate because that position statement is credible (and obviously so).
I did not hear the author's post as questioning authorship as a concept, or the fact that U.S. law recognizes authorship as an activity which confers upon the author legal rights (or are we calling all of those 'privileges' now?) that are not granted to everyone else.
Here's an analogy: imagine a time before the civil war when slave owners go to Congress to demand draconian measures be enacted to find and repatriate runaway slaves, i.e. "Hey government, people are stealing our property, fucking do something about it" as you say. One can argue against such measures on all sorts of pragmatic and legal grounds, but all of those arguments are strengthened if one questions the underlying premise that humans can legitimately be considered property.
Likewise, all of the pragmatic and legal arguments against SOPA are strengthened if one does not tacitly accept the premise that intellectual property has the same legal standing as other kinds of property.
Thanks, I think I now understand (better, at least) where your original post was coming from.
So now that we're not "tacitly" accepting that IP has "the same" legal foundations qua other properties like cars and laptops, do you also intend to non-tacitly reject the claim that "online piracy" is a thing that subjects content producers to harm?
Because it seems to me that if you agree there is harm at all, we jump to a debate where we're arguing (I think) whether the Extent of the harm is such that the Proposed Enforcement Mechanisms and Penalties are a legitimate fit.
My impression of the SOPA hearing was that's pretty much where we are today. e.g. Google's recommendation to "follow the money" was an attempt to fit an enforcement mechanism to illegitimate financial gain by parties other than the content owner.
> do you also intend to non-tacitly reject the claim that "online piracy" is a thing that subjects content producers to harm?
I would say that I would examine this claim under the new, more correct perspective rather than reject it. "Harm" is a relative notion. The baseline state against which the situation is be measured is that all information by default should be in the public domain. The gains that authors get from copyrights are a grant, not an entitlement, to encourage them to produce. So the "harm" is that the grant is (perhaps) smaller than it would by under a more aggressive enforcement regime.
The real test ought to be: is the grant large enough to serve the purpose, i.e. to encourage people to produce creative works? The answer at the moment seems to be manifestly that it is. I would challenge you to find even a single example of a creative work that might have been produced but wasn't because of fear of piracy.
I strongly agree that harm is relative, and that the relative harm of infringement must be balanced against the potential harms of any enforcement mechanism (with significant room for error on the side of under-enforcement).
I strongly object to the idea that IP rights are only real to the extent that they are a) granted by the state and b) encourage additional creative effort. Utilitarianism is a great model for a democratic society to use when encoding things into legislation, but isn't a great "be all" for ethical theory or ontology.
Your test and request are problematic. If there is a creative work that might have been produced but wasn't, for the reason you'd like me to somehow cite evidence for, by what search method (other than knowledge of my own personal creative endeavors) should I seek out such an example? And if I pluck from my own experience, what would constitute evidence that the actual reasons for non-production are what I claim them to be?
I would bet there are thousands of bedroom-class electronic music producers who never devote a ton of effort to their talents because of the rate at which music is pirated. The number of hours it takes to become passable at production is quite large, even with great tools. And even if they become accomplished, they have no great hope of turning that accomplishment into gigs or recordings that pay a living wage, precisely because piracy became so rampant that people now expect new artists to give away their first EP-worth for free or under a "pay what you want" scheme.
The world has decided that the fruit of those first 1000-4000 hours shouldn't cost anything. You're telling me that doesn't have a chilling effect on people deciding whether or not to spend that kind of time?
"But see," I imagine you saying, "Now we only get artists who were willing to do Whatever It Takes to become great!" Yeah well, a lot of those folks suck compared to some other guy who had a family and a mortgage to think about; you'll just never hear that guy.
> I strongly object to the idea that IP rights are only real to the extent that they are a) granted by the state and b) encourage additional creative effort.
Then you'll have to amend the Constitution. Or you could try to make the argument that the 1st amendment supersedes the Article 2 authority to establish copyright. Some people are doing that, but I'm pretty sure they're going to lose.
> If there is a creative work that might have been produced but wasn't, for the reason you'd like me to somehow cite evidence for, by what search method (other than knowledge of my own personal creative endeavors) should I seek out such an example?
By the same methodology that you use to do any market research: ask people in the industry. There is ample precedent for this sort of thing. For example, the production of small general aviation aircraft more or less ceased during the 80's and 90's. It was pretty straightforward to show that the reason this happened was because of liability laws. These laws were changed in 1994, and now the production of light aircraft resumed.
I don't see an analogous shortage of movies. Quite the opposite: there seems to be an overwhelming glut on the market. The Sundance Film Festival got 8000 submissions for 100 openings. There's so much new music coming out that it's a full time job to keep up with it all. That seems to me like pretty compelling evidence that piracy is not much of an impediment to production.
