[puppycodes]

and that is equally atrocious and should be eliminated from a society that wants to share ideas freely.

Idk if your in the US but you also massively oversimplify in your example, copyright law is waaaaaaaay more complex than that and it would take a set of special circumstances way beyond doing what you say it siphon money from an infringment claim

[philistine]

Copyright law is enshrined in a knotted web of trade deals across the world, meaning it will never change for as long as anyone on this board is alive. It's so tiring on here with the constant copyright law shouldn't exist. We know! How do we get rid of it? What's your argument for everyone to break all the world's trade deals to give you this one thing that would unmake our whole artistic sector?

[puppycodes]

I have a more positive outlook on the future as we have seen the rise of open source and collaborative community projects. But yes we might have to enter a post money star trek universe first but hey a girl can dream.

[MattPalmer1086]

A world without any legal protection for novel ideas or creative works is a world that does not share them freely.

That is why copyright law was originally created. Without it, there is little incentive to invest in the creation or disemmination of the works in the first place.

Edit: I am not defending the current form of those laws. The time period is too long for one thing. But removing it entirely would be a bad idea, IMHO.

[puppycodes]

I disagree. But I think we are operating on a different premise. My critique is wider and includes capitalism as a system, too much to cover in a reply on HN but idealogically it boils down to entitled thinking where people feel they are the protagonist and somehow "unique" among all other human beings and then expect to become a landlord for ideas. There are lots of ways to create capital and profit without being a patent troll.

[MattPalmer1086]

Granted, if we were operating in an entirely different economic system, my points may be moot.

I don't much see the need for our current copyright or patent law in a post-scarcity Star-Trek society, for example. Although even then, I still don't discount the need for some legal protection on creative works (e.g. the right to be known as the author).

[puppycodes]

There is always some middle ground that makes sense with things like this and i'm sure there are exceptions like there are to any rule but i'm just trying to dream a little bigger...

at the same time point out that people love to apply the idea of physical objects to a digital world and I wish they would just stop trying to put the square peg in the round hole.

[card_zero]

Yes, of course. I struggle to have an opinion here since I don't like either side in this fight, but I eventually squeezed one out, and there it is.

[bernb]

Copyright doesn't apply to ideas. It applies to concrete works.