Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
Jesus.....the lengths. Everybody benefits from what came before. But nobody comes to the farmer to confiscate his fields, to the tradesman to confiscate his bank account, to the teacher to confiscate her house. How come an author's works are deemed “owned by society”?
You don’t deserve Mickey Mouse any more than you deserve your neighbor's car.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
[...]Once again, you use faulty definitions. Copyright isn't property, it's a government granted monopoly of limited duration. It doesn't become property just because you think that it ought to be property. [...]
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Are we starting over again? How many loops does this make?
It is fairly simple: you are both wrong.
In the context we are discussing, copyright is property. It is because we say it is. (That government granted monopoly gives you rights under law, those rights are called copyright and the rights are a thing you own - hence property. Notice the distinction: it is not the words you own, it is the rights, the copyright, that is the property.) Have a problem with that, go change the law and/or the rules of economics (oh, and the dictionary). In the meantime just accept that, for all relevant intents and purposes, copyright is property.
In the context we are discussing, property is only able to be owned with the cooperation of the society. That cooperation is given under different terms for different types of property. Tangible or intangible, property ownership is
not the absolute people keep trying to assign to it.
You own land (real estate property) only within the constraints permitted by society; eminent domain still exists, land can be confiscated, and until then taxes and other constraints will be levied against you for the privilege of those limited ownership rights. Fail to keep up and someone really will take your land. Notice again that even with real estate property what you actually own are a limited set of rights to the land. Don't like it, then change the law or accept it. The rules for copyright are different, but still just laws about rights, so if you don't like it, change the law or accept it.
I know that abstract concepts like property and ownership can be confusing, so we struggle with analogies to try and come to grips with the concepts, but what you have to do first is understand that these things only work the way they do because we as a society have agreed (in various and round-about ways) that they should ... for the moment. Laws have changed over time, and will continue to do so as people try to convince one another that some variation will be better than another. So fine, arguments like this will continue for many more loops yet, but please try to accept that there is no ideal or inherent order to this. It's all quite arbitrary, something "we the people" have chosen. So far. Mostly. Until something better shows up.
And so far neither of you offer anything better. You can't realistically claim copyright isn't property in the face of a world full of people treating it as such. It is at least slightly more realistic to say copyright could be perpetual, because society in theory could agree to that - for a price! But I need much better arguments than "because no one takes away land"; that statement is untrue, it can happen, and anyway, we pay for our land ownership privileges in other ways. And it seems to me those other ways don't suit copyright nearly as well as the current arrangements.