[GHFigs]

You're confusing your own choice to give away your own work with the choice of many to take work of others not freely given. It's unreasonable to assume that everybody would make the same choice as you, which is why a creator's right to make that choice is important.

Would you, for example, feel the same way about publishing a book if you had no right to keep other people from putting their name on it and claiming it as their own? Or would you rather not have that choice at all?

[vidarh]

> Would you, for example, feel the same way about publishing a book if you had no right to keep other people from putting their name on it and claiming it as their own? Or would you rather not have that choice at all?

I'd like to point out here that in most countries, copyrights and moral rights are legally entirely separate.

Moral rights (the right to be recognized as the creator of a work, and in certain circumstances the right to dis-avow your involvement with a work, if it has been modified in certain ways for example) are generally non-transferable, for example.

Trying to conflate the two to argue against someone's belief that reproduction / copying a work is ok is thus rather meaningless - we can easily enough have one without the other.

[GHFigs]

I'm not conflating the two at all. The point is that having rights over your own work implies other people have rights over theirs, too.

[icebraining]

But defending attribution rights doesn't mean you have to defend copyright.

[derleth]

> Would you, for example, feel the same way about publishing a book if you had no right to keep other people from putting their name on it and claiming it as their own?

Except everyone is against this. Everyone is against plagiarism.

That's where the law falls down: We have laws against 'copyright infringement', a wonky idea that essentially nobody understands or cares about, but not against plagiarism, which is what most people actually are against and will work to combat.

Some people actually think copyright infringement and plagiarism are the same thing, to the extent they believe that proper attribution keeps them on the right side of the law. It does, of course: The right side of the moral law, which is all most people ever really follow.

Then you have the few zealots, who try to equate copyright infringement with theft. They might just as well try to claim that it's a violation just like rape is a violation so The Pirate Bay is guilty of rape. They'd still fail, but at least their failure would be more amusing to the rest of us.