Quote:
Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald
What is copyright infringement?
As a general matter, copyright infringement occurs when a copyrighted work is reproduced, distributed, performed, publicly displayed, or made into a derivative work without the permission of the copyright owner.
Question: Why are copyright holders concerned about piracy?
Answer: Free speech is protected by the U.S. Constitution but so are property rights. Copyright law provides incentives for creating. One of the incentives for creating software, music, literature and other works is being able to reap the financial benefits as the creator. Illegitimate distribution of copies may prevent the copyright holder from benefiting from the sale of legitimate copies of the product. The theory is that significantly fewer people would buy copies from the copyright holder if other copies were available cheaper or for free.
The dictionary definition of steal is to take something that isn't yours. Copyright infringement is taking the product of someone without permission. If you don't have permission to take it, it isn't yours. If you take something that isn't yours, you are stealing. Maybe the concept is too simple for you to grasp? Or are you just trying to rationalize your own thefts?
|
This reasoning is symptomatic of disease that's plaguing people's thinking for the last century or so.
The author of creative work doesn't create it out of nothing. The author first learns language, tools, previous ideas, takes the whole culture of society he lives in. Only then he remixes those elements in some way, makes a collage of them, and that's his creation. How much of it is author's doing... well, it would be everything only if he could produce the same thing as a lone caveman raised by animals. It's usually just a tiny bit of the whole. So it's natural that such creations become part of the culture, so next authors can build on them. This is how works of Homer were created - over a period of hundreds of years, by bards taking parts of other bards' songs, throwing away unneeded bits, adapting good ones, re-forming the work. Just as culture belongs to everyone, it's obvious that any new additions to it also belong to everyone.
Enter late middle-ages. Books can be mass-produced, and their creators for the first time in history can receive money from many sources as a result of creating the work. They start to consider the work their "property", in the dark corners of their minds. It's not a problem then, because every work needs to have a physical media to be stored in, and the process of copying the work is hard. No one's protesting, or even laughing at this "property" idea. Copyright law is invented, as temporary monopoly of the creator to copy the work, granted by the state, and so temporary compromise is reached.
Then late XIXth and XXth century. Businesses that base their model on copyright manage more and more money. They think of the licences to copying granted to them by authors as their assets. It's one small step to think of them as "property". New laws are passed, terms like "intellectual property" and "creative control" invented, in spite of the fact that it's not property, and the only control is over the copying. Some people are indoctrinated as well, into thinking ideas can belong to a person. To other people the concept remains a joke it's always been, only more and more bitter as the newspeak flows freely in the news of the world.
Now Internet makes copying as easy as possible. This will at some point lead to confrontation of those who think ideas and thoughts can be property with those who think culture belons to the whole society. The former can only win this by raising and controlling planet-wide totalitarian state in which every move of every human is controlled and monitored all the time. Otherwise the latter win.
You can't steal something that is not and cannot be property. You can infringe on someone's state-granted privilege, but that's it.
Copyright law is currently one of the biggest obstacles to creating - it locks away all newer parts of culture for centuries, preventing them from being transformed further, kept alive, evolving. It's probably hard to imagine what Internet would become if most people weren't scared away from creating by lawsuits waiting at every line of text. Practically all new material that's being produced now is produced only because hundreds of small violations of someone's copyright are not acted upon. I sincerely hope copyright will be reformed or abolished entirely soon, because otherwise creativity will become impossible.