[aidenn0]

> ...as people convince themselves digital theft is somehow not to be equated to physical theft.

Do you honestly thing the two are in any way equivalent? If I steal a physical item from you, you no longer have that item. If I download a copyrighted item that I never would have purchased, and you are entitled to royalties from then you lose nothing. If I download 100 items and I otherwise would have bought 5% of them, then you lose 5% of it.

Note also that libraries work similarly. I have checked out many hundreds of books out from the public library and read them. That also cost authors money, but we do not equate that to stealing. I have bought 100s of used CDs. I saved a lot of money and the record companies and artists collected no money for that either.

I also object to the concept that a creator has any moral right to monopolize their creations. There is no such moral right. The US provides for granting such a monopoly for a limited time in order to encourage people to create things. This has somehow morphed into the belief that someone creating something intangible has an indefinite monopoly on its use.

Such policy is actively harmful to the arts to the point of being detrimental to creators! Disney's Sleeping Beauty was a delightful film, if not a box office hit, but it would never had happened if the copyright laws (that Disney lobbied for!) we have today existed then, because Tchaikovsky's ballet would still have been under copyright.

[IndySun]

Like many arguments defending wholesale sharing, they start at the end products and look forward, instead of being even a tiny bit cognisant of the process by which those items came to be.

The thinking is along the lines of, look at this car and look at this mp3, they're so different. But obviously they share important similarities, those being that both needed ingenious human thought plus plenty of physical objects for them to come into existence. True, how they are sold is another question. How they are received. How are they shared. How they function. What is their purpose?

Let's swap funkwhale to carwhale - yes, I can, because one day in the future, we will be able to push a button and have an exact copy of any car just by pointing a scanner at it. Suppose you worked on that car, all your life, in the hope others could enjoy it, and love it the way you have. And if you got it right, might be compensated for your time and efforts.

But no, this is not in the future because everything should be free. Everything? Or just the mp3s? Just digital? Who's going to make that music? Or that car? Or perform your heart op?

Most people, sadly here, are not respectful of creativity and its worth, I feel its more important than that car. And throughout history culture has been the most important aspect of any society; its strength and survival depend on it.

[aidenn0]

I certainly don't intend to devalue creativity. Like many (most?) on HN I have a career where I get paid for my creative work.

However, creative outputs are qualitatively (and legally) distinct from physical outputs and to pretend otherwise is only going to be a hindrance in properly creating a system to nurture cultural output.

Let's start with the car example. I can buy a car, modify it and resell it. I can buy a cassette, modify it and resell it. Legally I can't buy a digital download, remix it and resell it. There's already a difference here.

If I come up with an improvement to someone else's car design, am I allowed to print up one for myself on carwhale? Am I allowed to sell the new design? Am I allowed to describe my changes to someone else? Where do we draw the line? 100 years after the first car is printed from car-whale, does the estate of the person who designed the base model that the cars we are now printing hardly resembles still get royalties because the design before the design before ... the design before happened to use their car as a quickstart convenience?

With physical objects it's clear. The person who built the car gets paid once and we don't have to debate 100 years later over ship-of-theseus questions. With creative outputs its far less clear.

Just because we agree that it is a Good Thing for creators to be rewarded for their work doesn't mean that copying their work is equivalent with theft. It's its own unique thing and coming up with a framework to handle it correctly is quite challenging and to just say "digital theft is still theft" is a way to ignore those challenges rather than trying to meet those challenges.

[IndySun]

Ok, ignore the part about physical things being needed for creativity to happen.

I don't feel we're pulling in opposite directions. You make points I agree with. I definitely want to understand more.

Time limits, profits limits, distribution caps, all important and debatable facets.

All I ask is you really try to put yourself, and only you can do it, in the shoes of a someone who's very existence depends on what you are casually, or strongly, or passionately, advocating. Are you the person to decide what 'product' is more valuable, either in recompense or admiration?

[aidenn0]

We probably aren't pulling in very different directions at all.

As far as this:

> All I ask is you really try to put yourself, and only you can do it, in the shoes of a someone who's very existence depends on what you are casually, or strongly, or passionately, advocating. Are you the person to decide what 'product' is more valuable, either in recompense or admiration?

I think that all individuals have a responsibility to decide what is and isn't more valuable and align their actions accordingly. The fact that an action causes harm to someone else does not make it necessarily immoral though. I can afford to buy every book I want to read. Nevertheless, I still frequent my local public library. This causes quantifiable harm to authors, yet few would call it immoral.

I could probably come up with a dozen reasons why it's a good thing to frequent the library (libraries are awesome, and making them a ghetto of people too poor to afford to buy books would be to their detriment), but the simple fact is I don't want to spend $8 on a book I'm probably going to only read once when I can get it for free.

This is a selfish action with quantifiable harm that most people do not consider immoral. I can come up with many post-facto justifications for why libraries are good and piracy is bad, but IMO the real reason why society falls this way is one is an old and revered institution, while the other is something teenagers do to get access to media because they are time-rich and money-poor.

And at the end of all of this, I'm still not going to advocate for general piracy, but I will say that it's mostly two sides each inflating or deflating the actual harm done in order to justify a position they hold that was never grounded in any sort of utilitarianism in the first place.