[bo1024]

That's an interesting perspective, maybe this response will help.

It's tempting to think of copyright in terms of ownership. I wrote the song, so I own it, and anyone else who uses it is violating my ownership in some way. But that's incorrect. Copyright is about control. The holder of copyright is granted a certain amount of legal control over everyone else's actions. I can prevent Jack from selling a copy of my song. I can prevent Jill from performing my song live. They no longer have rights they used to have.

Of course there is no "natural" basis for this concept, unlike ownership of physical goods. It was invented merely as an economic tool to incentivize production. Legally, it's purely a fiction of government. If Jill moved to another country and performed my song, I might have no way to stop her. I'd probably never even find out. So how could I have some fundamental right to stop her from singing what she wants to sing?

Ethically, I would turn your question around: Why do I get to control other people's actions that don't affect me? Why should I be able to sell that control or hand it down to my heirs? It's not clear what that argument could be.

[rayiner]

> Ethically, I would turn your question around: Why do I get to control other people's actions that don't affect me? Why should I be able to sell that control or hand it down to my heirs? It's not clear what that argument could be.

All ownership is a right to "control other peoples' actions." What "fundamental right" does a farmer have to keep people from picking ears of corn off his field? Surely the farmer can't stop someone from exercising their natural right to grab whatever is laying around in nature for their own sustenance?

And infringement does "affect" the copyright owner, just as much as taking an ear of corn from a farmer's field. It reduces the market value of an economically valuable resource that the person created through their own labor. The response of "taking the ear of corn from the farmer leaves him with one less ear of corn" while copying a song does not seems like an ethically irrelevant distinction to me. The farmer doesn't care about possessing the corn. The only thing he cares about is how much he can sell his corn crop for, and the fact that someone taking an ear of corn reduces his income. Likewise, infringement reduces the money a content creator can get for having created a song or movie or book.

In both cases, what's lost is opportunities to make a sale. In the case of the corn, it's one lost opportunity per ear of corn (the stolen ear is one you can't sell to anyone), while in the case of the song, it's a fractional lost opportunity per copy (some of the people who get a copy would have bought it). That a difference of degree, not one of fundamental morality.

[bo1024]

You make an interesting point and I want to acknowledge that, but I disagree and will try to explain why. If you take an ear of corn that belongs to me, I no longer have the corn. This is not true if you perform my song. On the other hand, I'm not sure I have some fundamental right to profit from the corn, just because I own the corn. That seems like a stretch. Similarly it seems to me very entitled to say I have some right to money because somebody else sang my song.

Your analogy gets to a distinction I've seen made between personal property -- something I own and use for myself -- and private property, something I (or a company) own and use in order to make money. As I understand it some on the socialism spectrum deny the fundamental right to own private property in this sense (though not the right to own personal property), so they would use your analogy against you.

You also get at what ownership of physical items means. Corn is easier to justify ownership over because of the effort that went into growing and tending it. A less clear case is picking fruit off a wild tree that happens to grow on someone else's property. Here again I think you would find people arguing the fruit tree belongs to some extent to everybody (e.g. some countries have laws protecting your right to hike through "my" land). So again your analogy can work against your argument, maybe ownership of this corn or fruit tree is not such a natural right either.

In summary, you say "what's lost is opportunities to make a sale" and I would not recognize that as a fundamental right. I would recognize a fundamental right to own a physical item for personal use and not have it taken from you, and I would recognize the right to say or sing whatever you want.

[infinite8s]

So you have decided what rights you believe as fundamental, but through no arguable basis. Unfortunately for you, the rest of society (as evinced by copyright laws) have decided that the of opportunities to make a sale are fundamental. There is no such thing as a fundamental right - they only exist because a certain group of people decides to abide by them and will fight to the death to mail Tain them

[tptacek]

If you believe that, do you also believe I have a right to take any code you ever write, regardless of how you've (heh) "licensed" it, and bake it into any closed source product I happen to want to use it in? If not, why not?

[int_19h]

I don't have a natural right to prevent you from doing so.

But there's social contracts on top of that. Copyright is one such. It's not a right at all - it's a privilege (specifically, monopoly grant on distribution of certain information), that we as a society have decided to grant some people, because it incentivizes them to do things that we as a society want them to do.

Coincidentally, this also applies to regular property in a broad sense. The shirt that you wear on your back is yours in a physical sense; but, say, an apartment that you own and rent out in New York while living in California is only yours because the society declares it to be, and enforces that on your behalf - you don't have a natural right to such property, it's a social contract.

And no, I'm not a communist. Not anymore so than this guy:

"It is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all... It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society."

- Thomas Jefferson, 1813

[bo1024]

I have mixed feelings about this, not sure exactly where I stand.[1] I think I might be ethically okay with a world without copyright control on code, especially because you could sign contracts governing how people use your code in exchange for revealing it to them. But it would take a lot of getting used to.

[1] Personally, I've put a few small open-source projects online and do take the stance that people can use them however they want, I assert no control over their use (I request attribution). But I don't make money from writing code so I'm not saying I think everyone else should do this.

[tptacek]

No, you couldn't. A contract that binds on someone after they obtain your source code is a license. In the coherent version of your world, once you've revealed your source code to someone, you can't stop them from publishing it to everybody else for free.

[hundt]

I mean, the license could have a nondisclosure/confidentiality agreement, right?

That wouldn't be a full substitute for copyright though. For example, if they broke the contract and distributed the code I don't think you could prevent other people from distributing it further.

[tptacek]

If you believe in contracts that selectively release source code for a fee subject to nondisclosure and other limitations on redistribution, you effectively believe in copyright. At most, you're saying that the default should be an unlimited right to redistribution. But that's not especially meaningful, because opting away from that default would be trivial, and practically every professional musician would do so immediately.

[bo1024]

So copyright is redundant with legal structures already in place...? (Meant to be tongue-in-cheek)