[Krystian Galaj]

Originally Posted by PKFFW

So your final argument seems to be saying that it is not wrong if the author chooses to do things any way that you personally do not like. Is that it? In essesnce things are done your way or you feel you have the moral right to take the work in question without fair recompense?

Cheers,
PKFFW

(Please excuse my clumsy use of words; English is not my first language. I hope you'll enjoy the quotations though.)

Thomas Jefferson has put it in words well:

It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.

Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Isaac McPherson, Monticello, August 13, 1813

What I believe is:

1. As stated above, the author loses any claim on "fugitive fermentation of his brain" at the moment he makes it public.

2. The copyright, ie. state laws guaranteeing the author certain rights to his creation for a limited time, has been used as a tool to promote creativity, has been used in 18th-20th century, and it was mistaken by many for some natural right one could have to an idea - "intellectual property" term was coined for that in 20th century. Because a whole lot of other people don't consider an ownership of an idea a sensible notion, they come, slowly but continuously, to perceive the copyright law as nonsense, and decade after decade they put less trust in it.

As stated beautifully in Thomas Babbington Macaulay speeches in UK parliament in 1841:

I am so sensible, Sir, of the kindness with which the House has listened to me, that I will not detain you longer. I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one-tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim's Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living.

Sources:
http://baens-universe.com/articles/McCauley_copyright
http://www.baen.com/library/palaver4.htm

Please notice how it was envisioned by Macaulay 170 years ago that the law will render itself a public enemy by supporting the issue of copyright, and how his words reflect today's affairs.

3. The monetary recompensation for the author and the publisher for the effort of making the creation available to the public was neccessary in 19th and 20th century. When Internet came about, and making a thing public became as easy as typing the words on the blog, this effort becomes much less costly, and thus the recompensation can be withdrawn without the loss to the general public.

4. The civilization is a result of free sharing of ideas. The knowledge how to kill animals, how to light a fire, how to survive could itself survive the death of an individual due to sharing of it between people. It takes many years now for each of us to absorb the important knowledge our civilization has developed - and all of it was someday conceived by minds long gone. Without that knowledge we'd be just savages lost in the concrete jungle.

The notion of intellectual property is to me an intellectual perversion of the purely utilitarian concept of copyright, and I believe it should currently be dropped altogether, as in current world it causes loss, not gain, to the society as a whole. Only because it's not currently easy for the copyright holders to go after people disregarding copyright, and thus impede sharing of ideas, this loss is not yet visible to the public.

So, to answer the original question:
1) It's your moral right, and also obligation to your peers to take in the works of other minds and continue to develop them and add your ideas to them, and share them with other people.
2) It's a moral wrong to impede sharing the knowledge/ideas between people.
3) That one can see clear distinction between common thieves, fraudsters and murderers, and people who don't believe in sensibility of copyright shows that comparing "just taking" the idea to "just taking" a thing or life is nonsense.
4) (to clarify a bit) It's clear that some business models, like author who can earn millions for his books, will be made impossible by the abandonment of copyright. I believe that this will not impoverish the society as a whole as much as the copyright law does. There are enough examples of work done by people for people just for enjoyment of creation, and a feeling of being useful to convince me of it. Linux, Free Software Foundation and Calibre come to mind. The legal jump over copyright issues Google made, scanning millions of books and sharing them with people, is a right thing to do in my eyes, and I'm sad that currently popular ideas and law arrangements cause it to be in opposition to the law.

(Edit: many of opinions stated here has been put in words simpler that they are, to drive the point home. I'm aware of various degrees of gray, non-black-white, in the presented points, and bad choice of words sometimes, but I'm also convinced that none of the small corrections that would need to be put in change the general outcome of the argument. I try to present strong opinions, weakly held ( see http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_webl..._opinions.html and http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001124.html )