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Originally Posted by llasram
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!
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Maybe... because they don't like them? Just because a product is out there doesn't mean anyone wants it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by llasram
In a pure market economy the value of a product is a function of supply and demand and nothing else...
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.
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On one hand, you argue that e-books can be free because they are cheap to produce... a "supply-side" physical goods argument. Then you point out that e-books are actually intellectual property, which is not constrained by the cost of production. So you're actually contradicting yourself there.
Quote:
Originally Posted by llasram
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.
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This is a misconception about the point of copyright: It protects the
idea, not the physical container of the idea. It guarantees the creator a period of time to profit off their idea (and if they die prematurely, to their heirs)... it does not subsidize its production or dissemination.
In practice, people tend to reduce the concept of copyright to simple terms: "X number of books equals Y dollars to author Z." This is generally what e-book readers and producers, and "pirates," actually argue over. But in fact, copyright goes much deeper than that... it bypasses the physical media and cuts straight to the
idea. Most people cannot intuitively quantify ideas, so they must resort to simpler concepts.
It is for the benefit of these people that copyright laws are written. In the absence of intuitive understanding, the individual is expected to accept their society's rule of law because, hopefully, they trust the leaders of society to rule on something they do not understand. (And if you don't trust your leaders... you've got much worse problems.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by llasram
So with the case of inheritance (wow, I got carried away), I’m not sure how I feel...
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I suspect that if your author/father died unexpectedly, and you stood to inherit large sums of money that he would have gotten, and spent some part on you, had he lived... you would have an appreciation for inheritance. The details may vary depending on your age (I'd consider you even more deserving of it if you were underage, and had no way of making an income of your own, for instance), but I see nothing wrong with passing the money guaranteed by law to a creator, down to their heirs, for (at least) the original duration of the copyright.