Quote:
Originally Posted by nekokami
It's an interesting analogy, but there is one key difference from the situation with contemporary content creators. In the terms of your analogy, many gardeners created their gardens with the understanding that people would pay to see them, according to an established social contract. Subsequently declaring that viewing of gardens should be free from now on, and gardeners may not erect walls and charge admission, nor forbid photographs, is a violation of the social contract the gardener entered into when she invested all that time in her garden.
That being said, if walls around gardens are allowed and even expected, and someone peeks over the garden wall early in the morning, and even takes pictures for their own personal use (not for sale), can that really be called "theft"? Do we view this differently if the peekers are children, or indigents, who would never be able to afford the admission fee?
But another way to look at your original analogy might be: suppose the bill to consider the garden a "public work" was not slipped into some council vote, but was publicly discussed and put to a popular vote, and passed by an overwhelming majority. Can a dissenting citizen choose not to pay, because he doesn't like gardens? Or is that considered part of the social contract of the community, because other citizens pay a share of things the dissenter does like (e.g. public statuary), even if they don't use them?
|
Let's stretch the analogy further. For building the garden, the gardener get to keep the ticket proceeds for a set number of years and is then required to donate it to the public thereafter. These rules were agreed to before the gardener built the garden.
But now the gardener doesn't want to give up the garden (and the stream of revenue attached thereto). So the gardener quietly convinces the government to
not take over the garden at the proper time, but sometime in the far future.
Did not the public, who agreed to the deal in the first place, not get robbed of their garden? They still have to pay fees on something that should have become free, according to the original deal....