[liquidise]

> The mission of preserving human culture is far more important than respecting rent-seeking copyright holders

That genuinely may be so, but "this law i broke shouldn't exist" is not an advisable legal defense.

Also, what you call "rent seeking" others would call "return on investment". I do think there is a grey area here, "fair use" being one example, but i think summarily discounting distributors and publishers wholesale doesn't help your stance.

[dbingham]

"This law I broke shouldn't exist" is the basis of civil disobedience and is how many of the freedoms we enjoy were won and the oppressive laws of recent history were struck down.

It may or may not succeed in courts, because our "justice" system is anything but. Even if it doesn't succeed in court, it's still a worthwhile stance and it may succeed in other ways. Especially if enough people who recognize where justice actually lies stand up to support those taking the risk to point it out.

The line between "rent seeking" and "return on investment" lies at the spot past which those who produced a work have been fairly compensated for their time and effort, past that, it's rent seeking. If you want a good metric, break the return down to an hourly wage for each participant in producing the work. Does it seem obscene? That's because it is.

[xhkkffbf]

Rent is the basis for all forms of savings through investment. It allows people to work hard for a time and then take some time off. Yes, some will be rent seeking while drinking rum at the beach bar, but so will the sick people and the retired people. Rent makes it possible for society to offer disability insurance and retirement savings.

[randomhodler84]

And Usury was well known to the ancients as one way to destroy a society.

Rent is not the basis of savings through investment, yield is; of which rent is one kind. Renting a movie at blockbuster made sense in the 90s as plastic shells of magstripe were a scarce good. Today, literally millions of devices could stream their entire lib for free via ad supported streaming apps.

We live in different times. Holding on to artificial constraints for old-times business model nostalgia will look so quaint in a few decades.

[SpelingBeeChamp]

Those “ad supported streaming apps” are still reliant on copyright.

Without it, why would anyone choose to view the movie with ads when they can just download it and watch it with no ads?

(Legally, since in this hypothetical, copyright doesn’t exist.)

Or are you just arguing for ad-supported viewing of content? Which is what currently exists for an enormous body of material. See, for example, YouTube.

[randomhodler84]

Why indeed, I know how I consume media.

I support a wide range of monetization strategies and access to content by the most amount of people.

[vegetablepotpie]

There are two ways to change the laws in America, through legislatures and with the courts.

The courts are the most efficient way to repeal something you don’t like. There are hundreds of legislators, you need teams of lobbyists to influence them, and there’s no guarantee that they will take up your issue in their agenda. Furthermore, if you want to change one thing, everything gets thrown on the table as being liable to change. You may win in one area but lose in a lot of others, and sometimes you will lose in non-obvious ways.

The judges don’t want to rock the boat as much as politicians do. If they make a decision that makes precedent, it will be very focused and very specific. But, if you want to take an issue up in the courts, you need to sue, or be sued. Courts are not hypothetical in the way that legislatures are.

I think fair use is a perfectly valid legal defense. Grey area is one way to put it, another way to put it is a legal area lacking precedent. If it were not for fair use, copyright law would violate your right to free speech. Fair use let’s you use copyrighted material for criticism, parody, and education. Covid created a situation where people’s access to works was restricted, with the only reason being legal limitations (copyright law). IA sought to educate people irrespective of the limitation. I don’t know how IAs legal team is planning to defend their client, but fair use would provide a defense. This case could end up with a precedent that says that under exceptional circumstances, the scope of what activities are covered under fair is expanded.

[citizenkeen]

> That genuinely may be so, but "this law i broke shouldn't exist" is not an advisable legal defense.

It actually happens more often than you might think.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification

[plonk]

Is there a jury here? It's copyright, not a murder.

[happyopossum]

That's not really relevant - someone accused of copyright violation has the right to a jury trial.

[1] https://www.rcfp.org/court-finds-right-jury-trial-copyright-...

[citizenkeen]

Yes, there is a jury.

[yellowapple]

> Also, what you call "rent seeking" others would call "return on investment".

Which they've largely already enjoyed many times over. I have precisely zero sympathy for the poor widdle publishing corporations.

[orev]

Using your same logic, I will single-handedly decide that all software companies (and the developers working there) have received enough compensation for their efforts, and demand all their services and code be made available for free. As long as you got one paycheck from those months of work, now I want it for free.

/s

[somenameforme]

It's interesting to consider that there are books, still in copyright, that were published before any digital computers, let alone software companies, existed.

It puts the extreme absurdity of modern copyright law in context. 20 years is extreme. The modern "standard" is the entire life of the author + 70 years on top. This is indefensible.

[orev]

I agree and not going to argue that here. But that’s the way the rules are right now, and publishers have the full weight of the law to enforce their rights as that’s what the current state of things allows.

[yellowapple]

My code is already free. The service I provide is creating new code, not selling existing code.

Contrast with publishers, where it's the other way around.

[orev]

Not knowing anything about you, I’m going to assume you mean code that you created and chose to release as OSS. That’s your choice, and publishers have the same right to release their works under different terms (through agreements with the authors they have signed, etc). You don’t have any say over what other creators choose to do with their works, and if they choose terms you don’t like, you can’t just ignore them.

Without strong copyright laws, the choice you make is just as enforceable as the choice they make.

[yellowapple]

> I’m going to assume you mean code that you created and chose to release as OSS.

It doesn't matter how the output is licensed; I'm paid for the process of creating that output, not for the perpetual profiting over that finite output. That's the point you're missing.

[Veen]

And how do the people who pay you to code make the money to pay you?

[SpelingBeeChamp]

Only because you agreed to that. No?

[plebianRube]

This is infact what companies currently do.

Your argument would make sense if developers got paid per run of their code, instead of only for new code they write.

[orev]

Every company is different, but the vast majority are moving to a subscription model where users are charged monthly to use the same code over and over. For licensed (non-subscription) software, code can live through many major revisions where the customer pays over and over for the same code to renew their license.

If you think it would be nice to get paid per run, then you should have gone into mainframe programming, because that is (more or less) how it works (licensing fee based on how many units the code could process, which would go up if you upgraded the CPU). Moving away from that was one of the innovations of UNIX and PC style licensing.

[xhkkffbf]

Just remember that there are thousands of authors who are only paid because the publishing company is able to charge for books. The same goes for software firms that also depend upon copyright. So if you're a programmer, ask your boss if he or she would be willing to put all of your work into the public domain.

[metadat]

I'd be completely sympathetic if the commercial entities were willing to work with (or had tried) and strike a reasonable compromise with TIA. Instead, they've chosen to go for blood and sue a valuable, well-intentioned organization who tried to help folks have access to information during the pandemic.

There is no end to the greed. Fuck 'em.

[Nemo_bis]

Why do you (and one other person in this thread) write "TIA" instead of "IA"?

[elefantastisch]

Maybe not "this law I broke shouldn't exist" on its own, but "this law I broke shouldn't exist according to the constitution of our country" or "this law I broke shouldn't exist because it conflicts with this other guaranteed legal protection" is a perfectly ordinary defense. It's one of the core functions of a functioning judicial system.

[lucideer]

> "this law i broke shouldn't exist" is not an advisable legal defense.

That depends entirely on the level of support for the defense, and is precisely the only way unjust laws ever change.

> i think summarily discounting distributors and publishers wholesale doesn't help your stance

I don't think anyone's discounting anyone here: there's a big difference between discounting and challenging.

[eikenberry]

Maybe if the industry hadn't bribed the government over and over to extend copyright again and again we might not call it rent seeking. 12 years of copyright is almost reasonable. But current copyright durations are pure rent seeking.

[knighthack]

"this law i broke shouldn't exist"

Wrong. Ultra-vires laws can be challenged after the fact that they were broken. If the law in itself was invalid, that is a valid legal defence.