Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
The concept of "ownership" of a company is not "property" either; it is, in fact, very similar to the idea of copyright. In both cases, you are given the right to "control" something and make money from it. I don't think anyone would say that people shouldn't be able to pass on shares in a company in their will, so why single out copyright in this way? It is discrimination against people who create "ideas" rather than a physical object. Why should that discrimination exist? Creating a story is just as make a creative endeavor as creating a physical entity.
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Why will no one pay fair wage for my mashed-potato-and-human-hair sculptures? They are creative endeavors each involving months of dedicated effort as a shape each starchy curve with infinite care. It
must be discrimination!
In a pure market economy the value of a product is a function of supply and demand and nothing else. The creativity and effort involved are irrelevant. The “supply” of a purely informational product like the content of a book is infinite. This makes the pure-market value of book-content approximately the same as that of my undemanded sculptures: nothing.
Copyright works by granting creators a legislated monopoly on the content of their creative work, allowing them to artificially scale supply against demand and turn a profit. But informational content is not a physical product – treating it as such is an entirely artificial construct for the purpose of compensating creators in a market economy.
Copyright was effective for so long because the means to distribute creative content was so expensive and time consuming, thus not widely prevalent, and thus easily controlled. The core contention of the “pro-freedom” side of this “debate” is simply that this is no longer the case. The technology for costless duplication and distribution makes the copyright system’s legal imperative to treat information like a physical product as sensible as a legal requirement to sell liquids by their color. Our laws and institutions can do better, and until they do there will be a lot of moral edge cases.
So with the case of inheritance (wow, I got carried away), I’m not sure how I feel... (Questioning the very concept of property inheritance I do think goes a bit far.) An artist might inherit their parent’s brushes and paints, but that doesn’t give them a right sell new paintings if they don’t have the talent for it. I at least like the
idea of a system of voluntary contributions intended to subsidize future (freely distributed) work, like the system primarily used by comic artists on the Web. Definitely no inheritance in that model.