Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by belorn 2290 days ago
A genuine inquiry should get a genuine answer. Let me try to provide one.

Copyright law with its duration of 95 years after the authors death is practically universally seen as the result of money being transfer from large companies into the control of politicians that voted in favor of the law. Normally when laws get written as the result of money changing hand we call it corruption, but as the supreme court have show, that is not always so.

Some people have tried to fix the problem from within, but the US political system makes third-party initiatives like that rather hard. Internationally, the result of the corrupt process spread through international trade agreements where nations has to either implement the same laws or risk getting trade sanctions from the US, and thus internationally nations has accepted the same corrupt law in exchange for getting through trade deals.

There is no moral ground for following current copyright law except blind following. Instead what we get is individual moral decisions where for example a person might feel it being acceptable to view 95 minus 1 year after the authors death old video on youtube, but find it wrong to view a recently released cinematic movie. Each person uniquely define when, where and how they feel copyrights exclusive monopoly is morally defensible and when it is not. The result is that you get about as many different moral view on the issue as there is people.