I don't think the authors of the books would agree. Of course intellectual property is not real, but it's no less real than "property" of any kind, so if you don't object to the idea of property rights, it's not clear to me why people who create digital products are less worthy of economic protection than those who create physical ones.
Because lighting your candle from mine doesn't diminish my candle's brightness.
We grant limited monopolies on created works to incentivize the creation of the works, but that's it. There's no deeper moral grounding. Words you put out into the world don't belong to you anymore; they created impressions in the minds of other people and those impressions belong to those other people, by natural right.
You're right that it's just as sound a property right as every other, but it's one that cuts remarkably against the grain of the underlying natural rights (for a specific perceived societal benefit), and it should always be evaluated as such.
Every generation should be asking "Does the current copyright regime create more good than harm?" And every generation should correct if the answer is 'no.'
So you are saying people don’t deserve the right to build on public ideas without, ultimately, having armed men use violence to take money from them or forbidding them altogether?
Because remember when you say an author “deserves” to be paid you are saying the state should use its monopoly on violence to make that happen.
Perhaps it’s best not to use straw men and loaded terms designed to emotionally appeal to five year olds when discussing enclosure of the intellectual commons?
> Because remember when you say an author “deserves” to be paid you are saying the state should use its monopoly on violence to make that happen
Yes, that's how property rights - and in fact all rights afforded through civilized society - are enforced. If you have a problem with that take it up with literally the entirety of recorded human history.
That is an hilariously authoritarian view and wrong to boot.
You are confusing rights that are created by the threat of violence, such as copyright, and rights that are protected by the threat of violence, such as the right to not be killed for no reason.
Needless to say there is no inherent right for an author to profit from copyright. It is a wholly constructed right. They do not "deserve" it. Perhaps a society chooses to organize itself that way and perhaps it doesn't. On the other hand, innocent people really do deserve to not get murdered.
Am I understanding correctly that your position is that the enforcement of property rights is authoritarian? Or is your position that copyright is not a form of property rights, and thus authoritarian?
For the vast majority of recorded human history there was no copyright. We have records of Roman senators semi-complaining about how rude an acquaintance who wouldn't let them copy their book (not a book they had written, a book they had come into possession of a copy of) was.
Armed men have never enforced that everyone gets what they deserve. Not even close. They enforce those laws that we have decided they should. It's a huge leap from saying that someone deserves something to saying that society's armed men should take that something from other people and give it to them.
Value and labor are divorced from each other in this world.
I don't much care to get into who deserves what when we're talking about a property right constructed to create general societal benefit. I will instead observe that you haven't gone after anybody at Hacker News for the money they're not paying you to write comments.
Do you think you deserve compensation for these writings? Why not?
I believe most authors do not earn out their advance of $5k - $10k. I'm not sure how long it takes to write a book, but I'd be willing to be that ends up being less than minimum wage. If you enjoy reading, but don't think they deserve even that amount, well...
That's a pretty good argument against copyright. Is it really worth losing the cultural intellectual commons so that the average author (nearly all authors, in fact) can make well below minimum wage? I'm unconvinced about that being a societally beneficial trade-off.
And that's the thing. One could make the case that in a world of UBI, copyright diminishes in relevance. If the intent of copyright is to allow people to use capitalism to create wealth via their words so that they can live a "life of the mind" and pursue grand ideas... If UBI gets us the same goal then that does something to the good/harm balance of the temporary monopoly on ideas.
The key point is remembering that copyright isn't some divine right stemming from the muses blessing the author with their own exclusively-owned words; it's a right societies fabricate because we believe it will incentivize people to build new knowledge that eventually benefits everyone. It's that incentivization that's the goal.
I think we probably agree with each other. Even with UBI, I do think it makes sense to have some degree of copyright. Just to allow creatives room to breath and tell stories they want to tell without their narratives by more popular forks. That argument is a different issue altogether, though, I think, and we are nowhere near being in a context where we need to figure it out.
I do think UBI should be a minimum, and people should still receive compensation for work they produce that people enjoy. Just not exclusive rights and perpetual royalties and all this nonsense.
I'm sure someone great at math could come up with a function. Although I'd think it's more to do with the popularity and amount of times a work is consumed, while accounting for people consuming it for free.
And in the context of natural rights, they'd be wrong.
Natural rights are fairly easily thumbnail-sketched by "What are your rights if you're on a desert island?" Out of the context of any preexisting society, what rights would you have?
On a desert island, if I find some words scrawled ten feet high on a cliffside, I may do with the ideas in those words what I will: copy them, change them 'round, claim they came from me, claim they came from god. Similarly if I hear some mountain hermit shouting them from their cave. The natural rights as apply to ideas are very, very liberal. We in modern societies (and only recently) have taken up the experiment of constraining those rights with temporarily and contextual monopolies to incentivize creation of more ideas via property law. This works, but in a clunky, hackish way; it is a strange kind of "theft" that leaves us with more of something than when we started.
And like all good wild hacks, it deserves to be considered for refactoring frequently.
The digital nature of a work doesn't matter. It says right there on the tin, intellectual property; a la any work ("property") that is a product of human intellect.
Actually I agree with you, but I refer to the digital aspect because people don't seem to have any difficulties understanding why its problematic to steal physical books.
Which contains its own irony, as the trees providing the primary material the physical books are made from would probably have a thing or two to say about the notion of being stolen from.
I don't see any irony in it since trees don't have brains or opinions as far as we know, but when they decide to say something about it I'll definitely be sure to listen. Short of that though, I'm generally not opposed to the production of paper.
You mean sentience? Of course that's where moral value begins. Almost everyone holds that position.
And people who say they don't almost always are roleplaying that they don't for the sake of argument and can be immediately exposed as holding a contradiction in their values with the most basic pressure/consistency tests.
Your belongings aren't sentient and I'm sure that if they were to be wiped out almost everyone would hold the position that they couldn't be bothered to care.
That's not a comparable argument because your belongings have a material effect on at least one sentient entity.
Instead what if you were given the power to expunge everything in the universe outside of our solar system. Would that be acceptable?
That's not a comparable argument because you haven't been properly compensated as authors of the printed word are. If you received a dime for every snuffed-out star, would it then be acceptable?
Of course if you were to argue that downsizing the universe represents an intangible loss to humanity as a whole, we are have returned to ground zero in which it is ironic that exterminating trees provides a net benefit to humanity.
It's scientifically known that plants respond to stimuli such as being injured, namely to communicate that fact to others of its species in the vicinity.
For an example I'm sure most people can relate to, you probably know that "cut grass smell" when you mow your lawn? That's the grass throwing out chemical signals telling other grass "Hey! Something cut me down! Be warned!".
While whether this can count as intelligence or sentience is worthy of further debate, to say that trees don't feel anything is a gross mistake.
All living things respond to stimuli, even some non-living things respond to stimuli (like viruses or crystals) so I don't see "response to stimuli" as sufficient evidence that plants suffer pain.
Actually, I'm not categorically opposed to the notion, but I think you need to bring a lot to the table to explain why things without nervous systems feel pain. If the default assumption is that all complex systems feel pain then I wonder if you think things like jetstreams, economies and the internet feels pain.
> that "cut grass smell" when you mow your lawn? That's the grass throwing out chemical signals telling other grass "Hey! Something cut me down! Be warned!".
>Actually, I'm not categorically opposed to the notion, but I think you need to bring a lot to the table to explain why things without nervous systems feel pain.
Note that I didn't say they feel pain, just that they can feel what is done to them by the environment around them and respond appropriately.
The fact trees don't speak human plays a big role in us not understanding them, but they do clearly feel and express things whatever they may be.
>So is it immoral to cut grass?
Considering most of it is done for purely aesthetic purposes to satisfy human egos, arguably yes.
Note that whether it's moral or not is tangent to whether it can be done or not. We humans do plenty of immoral things without a care in the world.
Well, I never said "they feel nothing", but if you're saying plants have a right to life because they feel "something" I'm wondering where you draw the line. If you're something of a panpsychist I'm actually ok with these conclusions in terms of metaphysical consistency.
