>How about content producer insanity and entitlement?
They created it and they own it. They have the right to issue insane terms for its consumption and they are, by definition, entitled.
And you are entitled to choose not to consume it. Now, perhaps if enough people made that choice then "producer insanity" would come to an end. But, until then...
They created it and they own it. They have the right to issue insane terms for its consumption and they are, by definition, entitled.
No, they "own" limited rights to control its distribution for a limited time. This is not a natural right; it's granted to them by copyright law. Copyright is not an entitlement, but rather an explicit bargain with society.
Copyright law is brand new, as laws go. It can and has changed, usually to the consumer's detriment, and it clearly needs to change again, but in the other direction. When the law does not respect the people, the people will not respect the law.
If the producer wants to "own" the content itself, the only way to do that is to lock it away in a vault, never attempting to license or sell it at all. They are of course "entitled" to do that, if they want.
>Copyright is not an entitlement, but rather an explicit bargain with society.
Of course it is. The notion that we would buy anything at all vs. outright taking what we want from others is representative of an explicit bargain with society. If you want to throw out property rights and start from scratch then, sure, we can dispense with this entire discussion posthaste.
>When the law does not respect the people, the people will not respect the law.
That sounds noble, but there's clearly a difference between advocating change and making up your own laws. But, beyond this, we're talking about an attitude of consumer entitlement, as if creators literally shouldn't have rights to their own creations. Read other comments on this thread.
>If the producer wants to "own" the content itself, the only way to do that is to lock it away in a vault, never attempting to license or sell it at all.
I earnestly can't tell what this comment is supposed to mean. Are we advocating that no one ever create anything or simply that their punishment for attempting to derive economic value from their creations is to have that value outright taken from them?
They own it for sure. But I'm not sure they should be entitled to freely set the terms under which the public may interact with copies of the work once released. And they definitely shouldn't be entitled to abuse the justice system and call the big men with guns to trample through the door and ruin the life of someone who didn't play along with these insane terms.
By definition they may indeed be entitled, but I'm not sure their entitlement to people's wallet and liberty (which the producers don't own) is morally any more sound than the "consumer entitlement" to movies (which the consumers don't own).
So you're arguing for price controls. Who's going to set them, the government? You don't want producers to price their own offerings, and presumably you recognize that if the price is set at the consumer's preference of $0 then it won't be economical to make any films.
Copyright is not a natural right. It was made up from whole cloth a relatively short time ago. The only rights the producer has are explicitly granted to them by the government. Therefore, yes, price controls are a valid point to raise. I'm not in favor of them, but I can't argue against them on indignant moral grounds.
I think this can of worms was opened when the DMCA extended copyright in directions no one had ever contemplated before. The content producers pulled all kinds of new "rights" out of their asses, such as the right to have the government act as their own private police force to back up their own private encryption and protection mechanisms, and the legislators cheerfully signed them into law. It should have been obvious to the legislators that this was equivalent to a perpetual copyright grant, but if it was, nobody cared. When the DMCA was passed, copyright became a one-sided affair. Any notion of a bargain with society involving limited rights granted for limited times flew out the window.
Is it surprising that this leaves consumers feeling "entitled," as people keep saying in this thread?
> Copyright is not a natural right. It was made up from whole cloth a relatively short time ago.
All legal rights are made up from whole cloth and consist only of what is granted by the government, the only difference between is how old the original conception and most recent revision are. Many are based on some conception of natural rights (including at least some conceptions of copyright, which are grounded in the concept of the ownership of one's own labor.)
"Natural rights" are a quasi-religious set of value statements, not facts (or even fact claims.) A statement that something is or is not a natural right is not a claim about the situation that exists in the external universe, it is a statement about one's personal values.
Agreed, but that's not how the (religiously-influenced) US government has historically worked. They've always made a distinction between rights endowed by the FSM versus rights that are enumerated by law.
They created it and they own it. They have the right to issue insane terms for its consumption and they are, by definition, entitled.
And you are entitled to choose not to consume it. Now, perhaps if enough people made that choice then "producer insanity" would come to an end. But, until then...