[unclebucknasty]

Well, I find myself in a funny position, as I'm not much of a corporate/big industry apologist, so I don't really have a motive to be disingenuous. These questions are earnest head-scratchers for me.

To answer your first question, consumers care about manufacturing costs every time they agree to pay the producer of a good the producer's asking price. But, this is not so much about caring about manufacturing costs as it is about respecting ownership rights.

In any case, it's really splitting hairs to say that it's copyright infringement vs. stealing. In fact, I believe that making that distinction is what is disingenuous. To the extent that a copyright has value, it's because people respect that it represents ownership of a thing and, thus, the right to capture any value that the thing produces. When we don't respect that, then we have effectively taken any value from the creator for his/her creation. Meanwhile, we enjoy value from the creation, whether we use it for ourselves, re-sell it, or otherwise. How is that not stealing?

I do get that people have always made a distinction between copyright infringement and stealing, but my question is why is that so? Actually, my original question extends further than that to ask, why is it that people additionally feel entitled to do so?

[ryanpardieck]

Sorry I'm like a week late here, I don't check HN very frequently.

It's not just "people" that distinguish between copyright infringement and stealing; the law does as well. I find it extremely odd that you're asking why people feel "entitled" to make a perfectly lawful distinction.

It's my personal opinion that traditional ownership of property and the intellectual property afforded by copyright are such different concepts that all debate tends to collapse into incoherence once the concepts are taken to be the same.

For things that I personally own, there is no idea of a "public domain," and my belongings are not temporarily granted exclusively to me for the good of the public. My macbook is my macbook, full-stop. Copyright, on the other hand, is a temporary monopoly on the distribution of a creation because, at some point in time, the state deemed it beneficial to the public to incentivize artists/creators/inventors with this kind of financial benefit.

Why do we have any concept of a public domain if copyright and traditional ownership are perfectly interchangeable as ideas? Why is there no concept of "fair use" for my macbook or my car, but there is such a thing as "fair use" for any novel I might write?

My personal take: there isn't really any analogous concept of "ownership" for most things that could be considered artworks or intellectual creations. I can be credited as the original creator, and I can attempt to control the distribution of physical manifestations of my artifact, but in what sense do I actually "own," say, the dirty limerick that I wrote? The only way I can truly own it is to simply never show it to a soul. But that's not very satisfying, is it? And yet it's perfectly satisfying to keep my macbook solely to myself ...

[unclebucknasty]

>It's not just "people" that distinguish between copyright infringement and stealing; the law does as well. I find it extremely odd that you're asking why people feel "entitled" to make a perfectly lawful distinction...

I don't mean technically or literally. I mean in spirit. The legal distinctions you're making are obvious statements of fact. There's no need to debate them. It's your conclusion that the distinction should rightly lead to people making a moral distinction when violating one law vs. the other that's odd here.

For instance, you make a distinction between owning your macbook and copyright ownership, as if the latter is only conferred by the state, whereas the former is some sort of natural right. Maybe your failure to acknowledge the sameness of the two is the problem here. That is, the protections you enjoy around ownership of anything is a societal contract that is upheld by the state. Of course, this explains why, in some cultures, there is no notion of private property ownership at all.

I just find these discussions to be intellectually dishonest and loaded with rationalizations that skirt the moral issue. All of this talk of ownership really hangs on economic questions. And, if you want to be able to own your macbook without someone making some abstract argument that, say, the origins of the source material are free products of the planet and thus your macbook belongs to everyone, then it seems you also have to acknowledge the economic value of copyrights.

[ryanpardieck]

I think you've latched onto the wrong thing here. Clearly both things are conferred by the state. I was not arguing that one was more worthy because it somehow wasn't granted by the state, but rather that they are granted for clearly different reasons, because the two types of "ownership" are so vastly different that they required different laws.

The fact that both of these concepts are enforced by the state doesn't change the fact that there is still no real possibility of my macbook entering the public domain after an arbitrary numbers of years. That one form of property does do this, and another doesn't, would suggest that we're talking about two extremely different things, no?

If there were a fundamental "sameness of the two", then making an exact replica of my macbook would be the same thing as stealing it from me. Clearly that's not the case though. Copyright deals with who has the permission to make legal copies of a thing. Generally it's a much stickier question than the question of who owns a physical item. Sometimes I can legally copy a thing without being the copyright holder, though rarely, I'd say, can I legally steal something.

I don't think I'm arguing that people should make a moral distinction. I've argued that largely they already do. People have never cared about copyright infringement like they do theft.

Here's something I wonder about: have people ever gone significantly out of their way to respect copyright? or have they only do so when respecting copyright was also the most convenient way?

I'm not sure the answer means too much either way ...

---

FWIW, I either get my media legally or I don't bother getting it at all(1). I'm watching Game of Thrones currently through physical video store rentals. I'm not sure this is necessary but sometimes I feel like it's worth putting out there.

1 - The only exception was some long out-of-print books I wanted to read, which I downloaded illegal pdfs of since they were not available new, or in the libraries I searched, or in the used book markets I searched. So, that's the one notable time I violated copyright.

[capsule_toy]

I think the key is that you're stating that fundamentally, copyright should have value. This is not a given. I can certainly imagine a society where copyright infringement is allowed and no value is given to copyright at all. I'm not saying I would want to live in that world, but it's definitely not the same as a world that allows stealing.