[foobarbazqux]

The intellectual property laws are protections around concepts that existed previously. IP refers to trademarks, patents, trade secrets, and copyright.

Trademarks protect brands and go back a very long way; primitives would use them to distinguish themselves from each other, farmers would mark sheep, etc.

Patents are really protections on inventions. Inventions also go back a long way, although they were previously treated as trade secrets rather than open descriptions. Reverse engineering and a desire for openness instead of secrecy created the need for patents (I'm not saying the governments are doing a good job.) A chef's secret sauce is his intellectual property.

The idea of copyright stems from a desire to protect the older concept of authorship and goes back to antiquity as well; drawings in caves were certainly made by cavemen; the Greek philosophers certainly originated their words; narration in the bible is attributed to certain authors (although there is sometimes dispute here); Mozart (barely) survived on the patronage of his compositions.

That's all I mean by it's not a complete fiction: it's a set of protections around things that we already valued but that were started to get degraded by modern society.

[betterunix]

What you are saying basically ignores the history of copyright law. Copyright was created not because society placed a high value on creative expression, but because of a desire by the government of England to censor printed material. Modern copyright was created when that system was abolished, not because of the plight of artists but because of the lobbying effort of publishers, who sought to restore the monopoly on printing they had enjoyed under the censorship system.

[foobarbazqux]

Publishers represent artists and take a cut. Of course they want a monopoly, otherwise how can they pay royalties to artists? Walt Disney was an artist, and what we have now is Mickey Mouse copyright law.

I'm not saying that IP laws are amazing by any means. I'm saying they are attempts to protect things that we have always valued on a moral basis: invention, creation, branding, and secrecy / privacy.

It doesn't even matter what the intent of the people creating the laws is, what matters is in practice whether people feel the laws protect those things that they value. The majority of artists feel protected by copyright law.

[betterunix]

Read the history of copyright -- the Star Chamber, the Stationer's company, and how publishers lobbied for copyrights (using authors as a convenient excuse). Seriously, you should look at the actual history of copyright law. It was not created for the sake of artists. It was not created for moral reasons. It was invented for purely political and business-motivated reasons, nothing more.

"The majority of artists feel protected by copyright law"

So what? The point of copyrights is not to protect artists. The point of copyrights, at least in the United States, is to promote the progress of science and useful arts. The question is not about what artists feel, but about whether the majority of people feel that copyrights are working in the best interests of society. I suspect that most people would not care one way or the other about copyright if you were to ask, because most people ignore copyrights.

I also have my doubts about the majority of artists feeling protected by copyright law. Most musicians, authors, actors, painters, etc. are not even paid enough to live on and have to take second jobs. Either they have truly mastered doublethink or copyright is not really providing those creative workers with as much protection as we are expected to believe. This is under the current copyright system, which features the longest terms in the history of American copyrights and some of the most expansive copyright law ever seen.

[foobarbazqux]

Laws are programs. It doesn't matter what the programmer who wrote the program wanted the program to do. It matters how the program is used and what it does.

I agree that copyright law is terribly implemented (DMCA, DRM, expiration 70 years after death, 3 strikes rules, etc.), but nevertheless, I don't know a single artist (or knowledge worker) that doesn't feel that the Berne Convention provides them at least a minimal protection against outright plagiarism. Even the the most liberal Creative Commons licenses build on top of copyright, even BSD style licenses do.

I mean, would you be okay if I took your work, erased your name, and slapped mine in its place?

[betterunix]

Do not conflate copyright infringement with plagiarism, they are entirely orthogonal. You can plagiarize work without violating a copyright. You can violate a copyright while giving full credit.

"I mean, would you be okay if I took your work, erased your name, and slapped mine in its place?"

In fact that happens all the time with work-for-hire copyrights. Anyone who works as a programmer for Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc. can expect to receive no credit for their creative work, only a pay check for having done it. Think of all the independent contractors out there who write software for big corporations, get paid, and get neither recognition nor credit for their work.

Take a look at movie and music sharing on the Internet, and what you will see is that plagiarism is almost entirely absent. Nobody is claiming credit for some musician's work when they share that musician's recordings online. That is probably copyright infringement (whether a particular act even constitutes infringement is determined by a courtroom battle), but it is not at all plagiarism.

The history of copyright is important here, because it explains things that otherwise make no sense at all. If copyright is about plagiarism, why is there no requirement that credit be given the actual author / artist / creator of covered works? If copyright is about paying creative workers, why is it that the vast majority of artists need to work a second job? The answer is that copyright is about neither plagiarism nor paying artists; it is and has always been about business and government interests. The reason publishers, recording studios, movie studios, and so forth have become so disproportionately wealthy by comparison with the people whose works they sell is that copyright as a system was designed with industry in mind.

Your original claim was that copyright is the legal embodiment of a widely held moral belief or of some generally held value. I am asserting that this is as untrue in the 21st century as it was in the 17th century. Copyright continues to be a system that is design for and which favors certain industries; artists are a secondary concern, just as they were when the Stationer's company lobbied for the Statute of Anne.

Finally, plagiarism is readily solved with technology; copyright infringement is inherently unsolvable. The solution to plagiarism is watermarking, embedding a hard-to-remove message in images/audio/video/text that identifies the creator (technical details omitted). This was studied in the 80s and 90s and at one time it was believed that there might be a market for such technology, as a way to combat plagiarism on the Internet. In the end, though, it worked out that plagiarism is not so important as long as everyone is being paid; copyright became the important issue online, with plagiarism being a secondary and far less important concern.

[foobarbazqux]

Plagiarism of something under copyright is copyright infringement. So, at least plagiarism is protected against in that instance. You could plagiarize Shakespeare though, and it would simply be a moral offense.

When you write code for a company, the company usually owns the copyright, not you. You've assigned copyright to them. Do you release all of your personal code into the public domain? Why not? If you use a free software or open source license, you're relying on copyright protections.

To reiterate, I'm not claiming that IP laws are a perfect match for longstanding morals about invention, branding, authorship, and secrecy, I'm claiming that they are better than a 0% match.

I'm not even disagreeing that IP laws as they stand grossly favor big businesses instead of creators. I'm just disagreeing with the claim that IP laws are 100% made up by the government and have nothing to do with our morals about wanting to protect creative work. I think we need better IP laws that correspond more closely to our morals about creation and less closely to our morals about capitalism.