Quote:
Originally Posted by llreader
Not to be rude (I mean that), but your moral absolutism is a bit narrow minded. Doing "what is right" is not an absolute. Stealing may be undesirable, but stealing to eat or to feed one's children is certainly certainly morally defensible. And copyright infringement is not stealing, but we don't need to go into that again.
In the face of gross injustice, people resist, either passively or actively. This is normal human behavior and quite healthy. The continued extensions of copyright are without question theft (not copyright infringement) from the public domain, stolen from all of humanity. This is certainly as great an injustice as making a copy of "Citizen Caine" without the permission of the copyright holder, which denies nothing but some money to the copyright holder. It doesn't even undo the injustice of having the intellectual property of the original material withheld from the public domain, where it would be if copyright extensions had not extended (I am not sure which extension would apply to this particular movie, released in 1941, but I hope you get my point), because the material cannot be legally used for derivative works, impoverishing our store of shared intellectual capital.
 No offense! |
No offense taken. You at least are on topic and not spewing personal attacks. I don't think I'm narrow minded at all. You say taking someone's intellectual property (to which you have no permission to do) is not theft, I say otherwise based on right and wrong (ethics and morals) regardless of current law.
Some say stealing food to feed you kids is morally right, is it right under all circumstances. I don't know. The thing I do know is that you or the world is not going to die or suffer because you are not willing to pay a fair price for my intellectual property. Nor is or does the public domain have any rights to any IP, you can't characterize it as needy or deprived. Why is it you can claim not sharing the IP is theft where's you say otherwise when someone makes a copy of my IP? Sound like a double standard at the very least even if it were true. Copyright and the other IP laws are in place SPECIFICALLY to allow creators to share the IP in managed ways with the public. I not saying copyrights should be able to be extended as those rights and laws have clearly been abused, in fact I'm not saying anything about copyright or IP LAWS at all and have done my best to avoid it. I've said many times in this thread exactly that -- I don't care what the current law is or says, what I do care about is the ethics, morals and behavior of those who would intentionally violate my rights and deprive me of my ability to make a living (to feed my children if you will) from my abilities to create IP.