[pdabbadabba]

> This is a debatable proposition.

True enough. Though for the present purposes, it it probably sufficient to note that this reformulation is not fairly debatable: "Creators and makers have the right to determine how and where the work they own is distributed."

Edit: Actually, krapht's response led me to see that this is completely wrong. "Creators and makers" have robust (though not totally unlimited) legal rights to determine the conditions under which their works are copied, but do not have an all encompassing and well established legal right to determine how their works are distributed after the first sale.

Of course, the easy confusion (that I fell prey to) is that distribution often, but not always, entails copying. When it does, creators have strong legal rights. But when it does not, their rights are considerably more limited.

The example of libraries brings this distinction out nicely.

[probdist]

Not entirely. For example many forms of music are subject to either compulsory or statutory licensing. Also, the United States government has long held that it does not need to comply with patent law for its own internal use (e.g DoD can ignore your patents).

If you write/compose a song, and/or record a song for the public in the United States you do not have complete control over it anymore.

[pdabbadabba]

This is true, of course. I did not mean to claim that creators' rights to control subsequent copying are comprehensive and unlimited. They are not. But they are very robust.

[RodericDay]

> Though for the present purposes, it it probably sufficient to note that this reformulation is not fairly debatable: "Creators and makers have the right to determine how and where the work they own is distributed."

This is very very debatable. Do you enjoy jumping into arguments where the salient points of debate have been decided before the discussion has even begun?

[pdabbadabba]

In what sense (taking my edit into account) is it debatable that today's copyright law gives creators a robust set of rights to control the copying of their works? (Perhaps our disagreement is over our use of the word 'right'? I had meant it only in the concrete legal sense, and in that sense I don't think there is much to debate. Though if one uses the word in the broader moral sense, I agree that the proposition is very debatable.)

[RodericDay]

Yeah, that's what I was getting at. No disagreement then.

[JulianMorrison]

Yes it is, because it smuggles in a definition of "own" that a whole lot of people don't agree with.

[pdabbadabba]

Again, it is true that a lot of people disagree with it from a normative perspective. But not a lot of people disagree that this form of ownership does actually exist under our current system of laws, descriptively. At most, one might disagree with the use of the word "own," but this disagreement is fairly meaningless when discussing what rights do and do not exist, since the bundle of rights referred to by the word "own" is well defined regardless of the label used.

[JulianMorrison]

If you want "own" to be synonymous with a bundle of statutory rights having nothing necessarily to do with the normal English language definition or emotional impact of "owning" something, why didn't you call it "gleeb" or "fnarg" instead? I do in fact disagree with using "own" because I consider it to be smuggling in connotations under cover of a claim to precision which is unlikely to be adhered to - the user will then pivot to words like "steal" or "pirate" and smuggle in a shedload more connotations, and soon will be talking about copying a pattern as if were equivalent to hotwiring your car.

[pdabbadabba]

As a matter of fact, I do think that holding a copyright (are you OK with 'holding'?) is a form of ownership in the usual sense of the word. A copyright holder can sell her copyright to someone else and can exclude others from using the copyrighted material. These are the two primary criteria that are commonly understood (among lawyers, at least) to pick out ownership relations. What other criteria are there for a relationship to qualify as an ownership relationship?

It can't just be that a copyright is intangible, because there are a lot of intangible things one can one: money, shares of stock, debt...

[JulianMorrison]

Holding is fine.

The difference between copyrights and property is that the scarcity is entirely artificial. If I have your sandwich, you can't eat it. If I steal your money, you can't spend it. (There exists the possibility of copying your money, that's counterfeiting and it's a distinct issue. Not all monetary systems are vulnerable to it. But whichever way, copying your money is never seen as a crime against you. You can still spend yours.)

Copyrights and patents are properly understood as granted monopolies. In the same category as having "a monopoly on the sale of salt". Basically, a way of governments playing favourites by making someone a needless but coercively enforced toll-booth owner.

[pdabbadabba]

The scarcity points are interesting, but I'm not sure I agree that this has anything to do with the concept of ownership. Is it really necessary for a thing to be scarce in order for it to be "owned"? Why? I would have thought that scarcity would provide the motivation to buy and sell an item of property, but is not necessary for the thing to have been owned in the first place. Can we come up with a single thing out there that we think of as not property because it is not sufficiently scarce?

And what about things that are made scarce by the prevailing legal framework? Surely this is the case for copyrighted works and patented methods (etc.)--I take it that this is the root of your criticism--but it is also true of pretty much any other intangible thing that we think of as being property and, therefore, subject to ownership, such as stock, money, and debt. Is there any principled reason for requiring that things be naturally scarce in order to be subject to ownership?

Finally, I don't think one can simply ignore the policy reasons for the existence of the intellectual property laws that make intellectual property scarce. Maybe you don't think they are good reasons anymore, but simply ignoring the very copious literature on this subject doesn't seem like a good way to persuade anyone.

On the patent front, for example, the usual arguments are that patents 1) encourage people to make more patentable methods than they otherwise would, 2) encourage people to make greater use of the patented methods then they otherwise would (the so-called "extractive" theory), and 3) encourage people to make discoveries public (in exchange for legally enforced exclusivity) instead of protecting them by keeping them secret.

Maybe these arguments don't persuade you (some of them persuade me more than others), but I don't think they are so weak that they can simply be ignored in favor of purely metaphysical arguments about the definition of "property" and "ownership."

[ploxiln]

The main problem with that standard, focusing on copies, is that when a work isn't fixed in a physical medium (like an optical disk), everything is a copy. The internet just copies, into your system memory, onto your storage device.

(When you play a DVD, you copy it into memory. But at that moment you give it to someone else, it's the physical thing.)

This all means that the spirit and the mechanical effect of the laws are different, now that we use the internet for everything.

[krapht]

Public libraries being the notable exception.