There are various problems with the article, but the most glaring is the implicit assumption that copyright rights are somehow less fundamental than other kinds of property rights. They are not. Both exist because of the law, and neither exist without the law.
> Both exist because of the law, and neither exist without the law.
I could not disagree more. Rights exist even in the absence of respect for them. I affirm my right to life, and I would do so even if every person in the world wanted to kill me.
Leaving aside religion, rights exist only because society recognizes them and is willing to use its collective force to enforce them. In the absence of society, humans have no more of a "right to life" or a "right to property" than the chicken that ended up on my plate for dinner has these things.
We would all act to defend ourselves physically; we would not all act to "defend" copyright. People infringe copyright all the time, and others simply reject what they cannot copy easily.
There was enough disagreement to dislodge the right to own people from the right to own property. Is there enough agreement to keep copyright?
I think that copyright rights are less fundamental than physical property rights. The right to own/control a physical, tangible item is very intuitive to me. The right to control how other people use or share a piece of information is fuzzier, a step further removed. That's just me, but I find it reasonable to suppose that many others have a similar view.
I was arguing from a legal viewpoint: neither copyrights nor other property rights are more fundamental in the law.
Re: intuition, it's strange that you'd characterize movies, music, and software as "information." While most people would find laws regulating the information they can share with other people to be unintuitive, people also don't perceive movies, music, and software to be "information." The reduction of these things to "information" in the sense of "strings of ones and zeroes" (no different than say a phone number or someone's birth date) is a distinctly techie abstraction. People perceive these things not as information, but as products, analogizing them to any other product they may buy. Indeed, I think that's where the intuitive appeal of the first sale doctrine comes from. People find the first sale doctrine intuitive not because they think there shouldn't be restrictions on the "information" they can share with other people, but because they see movies, songs, etc, as akin to physical property, which they can resell.
Comments
There are various problems with the article, but the most glaring is the implicit assumption that copyright rights are somehow less fundamental than other kinds of property rights. They are not. Both exist because of the law, and neither exist without the law.
> Both exist because of the law, and neither exist without the law.
I could not disagree more. Rights exist even in the absence of respect for them. I affirm my right to life, and I would do so even if every person in the world wanted to kill me.
Rights are inalienable.
Leaving aside religion, rights exist only because society recognizes them and is willing to use its collective force to enforce them. In the absence of society, humans have no more of a "right to life" or a "right to property" than the chicken that ended up on my plate for dinner has these things.
We would all act to defend ourselves physically; we would not all act to "defend" copyright. People infringe copyright all the time, and others simply reject what they cannot copy easily.
There was enough disagreement to dislodge the right to own people from the right to own property. Is there enough agreement to keep copyright?
I think that copyright rights are less fundamental than physical property rights. The right to own/control a physical, tangible item is very intuitive to me. The right to control how other people use or share a piece of information is fuzzier, a step further removed. That's just me, but I find it reasonable to suppose that many others have a similar view.
I was arguing from a legal viewpoint: neither copyrights nor other property rights are more fundamental in the law.
Re: intuition, it's strange that you'd characterize movies, music, and software as "information." While most people would find laws regulating the information they can share with other people to be unintuitive, people also don't perceive movies, music, and software to be "information." The reduction of these things to "information" in the sense of "strings of ones and zeroes" (no different than say a phone number or someone's birth date) is a distinctly techie abstraction. People perceive these things not as information, but as products, analogizing them to any other product they may buy. Indeed, I think that's where the intuitive appeal of the first sale doctrine comes from. People find the first sale doctrine intuitive not because they think there shouldn't be restrictions on the "information" they can share with other people, but because they see movies, songs, etc, as akin to physical property, which they can resell.