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by markvdb
2852 days ago
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This comparison is intellectually lazy or maybe even dishonest. One difference between a house and a recording is marginal cost of replication/reproduction: not zero in case of a house, effectively zero in case of a recording. Without a government granted monopoly on copies, the marginal financial value of a copy is close to zero in all but the most exotic cases. With a government granted monopoly comes a real cost: enforcement, and loss of social value. How does one justify that? Authors' descendants do not have a $DEITY granted eternal right to exploit the author's work, and rightly so. This is why "intellectual property" can be more accurately described as "intellectual rights". |
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The fact that in one case the creation is easily reproducible with almost zero marginal costs, speaks not of the inherent value of the original creation (that was presumably undisputed at the author's lifetime), but is mere opportunistic thinking from the perspective of the society.
How would you vote against that if you were on your deathbed? You can burn your house, but you cannot undo music or literature.
I come from a former Russian occupied country that has maybe left me a bit overprotective of private property. The notion of requisitioning property "for the good of The People" is deeply repulsive - a lot of families here, including mine, actually were liberated from their house, farm, land and personal freedoms by the "liberators". So maybe after some decades, I should leave more room for "The People".