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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. |
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.