Terthna
Professional Lurker
Good to know; but still, most people aren't aware of that. Even if they are; often they just cannot afford the time investment to defend themselves.
Copyright Discussion and Debate
- Thread starter S'task
- Start date
You're not wrong. Those of us defending copyright, as a concept, are not really defending the current implementation of it. The duration for copyright is to long right now. The way the courts are set up tends to favor the people with more money and that could use fixes too (but that's a whole different and larger issue that is in many way a separate one from copyright). And the present Fair Use provisions could use refinement, though the biggest change that could be made would be to make it so that a company that loses a fair use case has to not only pay legal fees to the person they've accused of stealing their copyright, but further allow courts to issue substantial fines against companies that are clearly claiming things that fall into fair use.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
This sounds more or less like my position on the whole mess.
One of the biggest problems our system has is the inflation of legal costs and how often 'exhaust the other person's financial reserves' has become a way to 'win' in court. Part of the problem is that it's such a hard problem to solve, because you can't just force people not to pay lawyers lots of money, and if you make it too easy for people to be liable for the other side's legal fees, that comes with even larger problems...
Terthna
Professional Lurker
As I understand it, one thing that could be done to improve the situation is increase funding for assigned counsel; I've heard horror stories about how some public defenders are so swamped with cases, they have only a few minutes they can dedicate towards each.
The Name of Love
Far Right Nutjob
I'd like to point out that the book I'm pulling these ideas from Owning Culture, was written in the early 2000s, so in the case of the Happy Birthday To You example, that's out of date, sure. But that's only a single example. I can give you many, many more examples, such as the fanmade magazine Hey There, Barbie Girl!, an example of a corporation shutting down a critique of their product. You also ignored the ASCAP story too. One victory for public domain doesn't mean the system itself isn't bad.
Your argument that copyright law comes from Patent of Monopolies really doesn't explain the full story. How does a system of censorship transform into a system of "protecting authors' ideas from theft"? That's where Thomas Hobbes, who was a 17th century Enlightenment thinker, comes in. His individualist idea of authorship transformed the way we think of stories and storytellers. Funny how you ignored my mentioning of him, considering he predates pretty much all of the copyright laws and arguments for copyright law coming from the 18th century onward. It's almost as if you wanted to pull a "gotcha" and didn't really think this through. My interpretation of what happened isn't exactly idiosyncratic either, but based on much scholarship. I can cite a few authors, if you like.
Considering S'task didn't refute my argument, I think you spoke too soon, rent-seeker.
OK, so we've reached an impasse here. You appear to define "Enlightenment" differently than most sources I can immediately find, as Hobbes does not appear to be considered a member of the Enlightenment school of thought and in fact is explicitly considered to be a member of 17th century philosophy which is explicitly considered to predate the Enlightenment. So of course I don't consider someone who did his work pre-Enlightenment to be an "Enlightenment thinker", that's nonsensical.
So let's step back a moment, at what point and philosophical schools do you consider to be part of the Enlightenment? And why does that even matter? You seem to assume that all Enlightenment thought is axiomatically wrong and act as if just by establish something is related to the Enlightenment that it than proves that it's wrong, but that is a premise only you seem to adopt.
Anyway...
Yes, because just throwing out a line is an example. Protip: no it's not. A single line hardly makes an example that is worthy of being treated seriously or discussed, you need to actually showcase that it is. That said, since apparently you expect us to do your own research for you, I looked into this, and the situation is decidedly more complex than "mean songwriter's association threatens poor innocent campers". The ASCAP specifically warned the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts of America that they might be liable for royalties for singing certain songs in their collection at . In fact, the article I found lists very few actual true "folk" songs, rather the opening starts with what was at the time a dance pop hit, the Macarana first published in 1993, and then continually mentions "Puff the Magic Dragon" a song composed in 1962 and made famous by the pop folk band "Peter, Paul, and Mary" and while I do love that song, both of it's author are still alive and thus the song is very much still under copyright and as such an organization representing their interests, which is what ASCAP explicitly is, it's a songwriter's guild much like the old medieval trade guilds. These are hardly what most folks would consider traditional camfire folk songs. I would further note the ASCAP backed down from seeking licensing fees from the various small campsites and the Scouts. So hey, look at that, once again the system worked and didn't punish the little folks!
I can find no mention of this online; however, if the name of the magazine had "Barbie" in it, then it likely ran afoul of Trademark law, not Copyright. Those are two ENTIRELY different things and have VERY LITTLE to do with each other despite looking superficially similar. Copyright is based in property rights and ideas of ownership, as we all agree. Trademark is much more about reputational rights and has much more in common with slander and libel than it has anything to do with copyrights. But if you have further details or articles on the matter, feel free to share.
The Name of Love
Far Right Nutjob
Let's assume Hobbes wasn't an Enlightenment philosopher. So? His view of authorship as well as those of his contemporaries led to the invention of the idea of the "author" and helped to justify copyright law as it existed in the 18th century. Furthermore, as Kembrew McLeod put it, both Locke and Hobbes had an idea of "possessive individualism" that shaped our modern understanding of copyright. So this point about Hobbes not being of the Enlightenment, while interesting (considering this is the first I've heard of it), is hardly relevant to this conversation. Although it would help explain why Hobbes was so different to a lot of other Enlightenment philosophers, even if his ideas did prefigure theirs.
I generally consider the Enlightenment to be a movement that started with Hobbes and ended with the Founding Fathers. It's kind of a catch-all term that I don't really consider useful outside of a few contexts. I don't really see how you could gather that "all Enlightenment thought is axiomatically wrong." My general opinion of the Enlightenment is that it was mostly wrong because its main thinkers didn't do a good job justifying their seminal ideas and made their assumptions based on problematic metaphysics. You can look at the critique of those metaphysics in my philosophy essays. Link is in my signature.
Once again, you are being misleading. The songs I mentioned, such as "Ring Around the Rosie," "This Land Is Your Land," "God Bless America," "Edelweiss," and "Happy Birthday to You" were all claimed as copyright too. And let's look at what you're talking about. If someone from ASCAP walks into a camp where a bunch of kids are singing those songs, it's a "copyright violation"? What? And they defended their demands by saying "they buy paper, twine and glue for their crafts - the can pay for the music, too." The entire fiasco caused several camps to stop singing the songs out of fear of being sued.
ASCAP only backed down due to "PR hell" because of the public outcry, not because the actual system of copyright was fair to begin with. On its own terms, ASCAP had every "right" to make the Girl Scouts pay royalties and only backed off and claimed they didn't want royalties later.
We can also look at the example of the Macarana, which Kembrew McLeod has some interesting things to say.
This brings me to my own critique of copyright I'd like you to answer: besides the faulty claim that authors can "own ideas," McLeod points out that most cultural production relies on taking aspects of other people's work (intertextuality) and using it in yours. From this, an argument can be made that copyright inhibits this process of borrowing and concentrates the cultural production into copyright holders, mainly media monopolies like Disney. This can have the effect of decreasing the creativity of works, as rather than make something new based on what's come before, Disney can sit back on its copyright and rake in the continuous dough, confident that nobody can "steal" their ideas. Creativity comes from the public domain.
The company Matel cited both copyright and trademark law, according to what I read from McLeod. The books she cites in turn are The Cultural Life of Intellectual Property by Rosemary J. Coombe, Contested Culture by Jane M. Gaines, and Forever Barbie by M. G. Lord. I could screenshot my copy of McLeod's book, if you would like to look at the text.
The articles I found mentioned it, but did not mention if they refused to use it because of copyright or another reason. I can literally find nothing backing up the claim that someone tried to claim copyright over the poem or song, and it in fact appears listed on as being in the public domain.
Not a true folk song, another popular song in the "folk" genre. Originally written in 1944 by Woodie Gunthie who passed away in 1967. So while I agree that it should be out of copyright as I've stated that copyright term is to long, it's not really an example of copyright run amok.
OK, so this one is actually really interesting in some respects. Again, this is not actually a "folk" song, just a popular patriotic one originally written in 1918 by Irving Berlin. Now, you'd think this should mean it was out of reasonable copyright length, right? Except, Berlin didn't pass away until 1989 at the age of 101! But we're not done yet because Berlin didn't want profits from his song, so instead he set up a trust so that all royalties from the song would benefit others, specifically the Boy Scouts of America. It's due to enter Public Domain in the 2030s.
So again, this is not really a folk song, just a popular song, and one that's only not in the public domain due to the quirk of the original author being exceptionally long lived. Had he lived a more average lifespan, it would have long ago entered public domain.
. . . This is perhaps the LEAST folk song on this list of supposed folk songs that copyright has infringed upon. It's an original composition by Rodgers and Hammerstein specifically composed for The Sound of Music in 1959. It is literally a show tune only made popular by the popularity of the play and movie. Of the two creators, the last to pass away was Rogers in 1979 so it may well should be in Public Domain at this point, it is again, not a folk song...
All these examples are of songs that, in the 1990s when the ASCAP incident occurred, were clearly NOT actual folk songs and tunes, but rather pop songs with specific writers and authors. And I find it hard to fault ASCAP for pursuing the financial interests of their guild members, that's what guilds are FOR after all. That people do not know that many of these songs are both much newer than people think they are and not actual folk songs is on them and their ignorance, not on the copyright holders.
One can make the argument that copyright inhibits that, yes. But conversely, without copyright, creative types would be financially disincentivised from creation of works as well, as they would have only limited profit potential from their creations and thus may well simply NOT pursue creative work. These two areas exist in a contrabalance to each other, and this is something that present copyright law actually considers and seeks to balance with the concept of "transformative use" under Fair Use.
Now, I'm not entirely happy with the limits on transformative use, I feel that it should likely be expanded as should other areas of Fair Use; however, it is a nuanced thing. I firmly believe that an creator should have sole financial benefit from their creative works just like any property, but due to the fact works inspire and influence each other, we have to be careful to not expand that ownership beyond the actual work produced.
You seem to think that any form of copyright is, as you say, "rent seeking", but I have an alternative view. The view idea that anyone can simply take the fruits of your labor (and make no mistake, creative works do involve labor) and profit off them and that people, culture, and society are simply owed the creative output of those individuals to be tantamount to slavery. The attitude that once a creative work is created that anyone should be able to profit off it and that the creator has no right to it strikes me as nothing more than selfish entitlement and seeking to enslave creative types into a patronage system, as that then becomes the primary way they can make a living off their own creative efforts, rather than be independent to pursue their own creative ideas. Copyright, just like any form of property rights, is critical in enabling human creativity and freedom, and while our present system certainly is flawed and in need of reform (expanding, clarifying, and strengthening fair use, shortening of copyright post creator death, weakening corporate copyrights while strengthening individual copyright), I do not think it's so flawed as needing to be thrown out.
Terthna
Professional Lurker
Here's a question though; if copyright length was drastically shortened (say, twenty years), what exactly is stopping the person who created a copyrighted work, from continuing to profit off of it, once it enters the public domain? Let's say they wrote a book; just sign the blasted thing, give it a fancy cover, and sell it as the "official, author sanctioned" collector's edition. Or heck; write a sequel, and sell that.
Ideally in a world with moral and ethical corporations? Nothing.
However that's not the world, in a world without copyright, or drastically shortened ones, while the author COULD do that, there's nothing stopping another person from taking their story, printing it as cheaply as possible, and undercutting the nice "author sanctioned" volume among the population. Most authors will never get the notability where a "author sanctioned collector's edition" (which is basically what you're pitching) would be something marketable, rather, their primary income potential will be from the mass market paperback style book that people grab cheaply, and if that is successful, sure they might write sequels to it, but for books especially, notability and popularity are slow to develop unless they somehow get lucky and get a big splash (and in the present media environment, that means they need to be an intersectional darling and somehow writing anti-traditional stories). Myself or @LordsFire? If we can get something published our best hope is a slow and steady buildup of popularity mainly via word of mouth over years, if not decades.
The Name of Love
Far Right Nutjob
You keep bringing up "the financial interests of the guild members." When did I deny that this wasn't the case? Rather, the question is whether the financial interests should trump the campfire songs. And don't you think it's somewhat perverse that a person could be forced to pay for something that they never knew was actually owned?
That said, I'm going off of McLeod's own book. Perhaps we could go over it sometime and look at its inaccuracies, if there are any.
First, are still a lot of forms of "copying" that are not "transformative" that are prohibited. I could give several more examples from McLeod, but you've said before that you don't really like me throwing out examples willy-nilly.
Second, people made money off of there works before copyright law. I'd like you to recall the concept of patronage, a system that fostered some of the best talents in European history. People like Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart all had their talents fostered by it. It only fell by the wayside later on, when it became more profitable to just make money from selling to the masses. With the advent of online crowdfunding (the modern form of patronage), you can make a great deal of money off of your works. Creators would still be incentivized without having to rely on a system that's inherently monopolistic and exploitative.
The idea that copyright is a form of property rights is explicitly based on a misreading of John Locke's idea of property. Locke stated that mixing your labor with things in the state of nature, in the material world. True, people after Locke defended intellectual property on the grounds that what authors do is mix their ideas with labor, but this idea of the author being the owner of their ideas just isn't born out by reality. As I stated before, intertextuality dominates the creation of art. Most of the composers of classical music borrowed from their previous works and from each other. As Igor Stravinsky once said, "A good composer does not imitate, he steals." To give you an idea of how ridiculous this is, imagine ideas were tangible, physical things. If Stravinsky were to use entire sections of another author's works in a "transformative" way, it'd be like mixing one's labor with your neighbor's property and making it your own! But this is the logic of treating the creation of "original" art as though it were "mixing one's labor" with things in the state of nature. I suggest taking a look at this essay sometime. It goes into a great deal more detail on this argument than I ever could.
Also, "enslaving" people to a patronage system? This comes across as mere rhetoric on your part. I see three things wrong with it. First, it seemed that, given the quality of the works produced at this time, perhaps being beholden or limited by nobility increased the quality of the art. Total free expression might not lead to high quality works; at best, I see no correlation between the sources of a creator's money and the quality of their work. Second, one could argue that modern capitalism "enslaves" the artist no less than the old patronage system, as now, the artist has to either double as an entrepreneur for the masses or be beholden to groups that will help him sell his art, like publishing companies. Third, with the rise of patronage and online crowd-funding, I think the idea that the artist will be beholden to a single person or group will be a thing of the past going forward. Maybe in an earlier time, when only the nobility and the Church had spare money would a writer be "enslaved." But now? I don't really think so.
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Lanmandragon
Well-known member
I don't know what civil cases but in the criminal world. Public defenders are often called "public pretenders" because of what you said.
Is that not fairly normal though? If you are walking across the countryside and come across an orchard bearing fruit and you take some, most people would consider that stealing even if there's no signs demarking the property line. You've taken the fruits of someone's labor even if you are ignorant of who owned and worked the land. I do not see a difference between such things and a song or story. Words and sounds do not arrange themselves into coherent music and ideas, SOMEONE has to do it, just because a person doesn't know who that person is doesn't make using them without compensation any less stealing that taking the fruits from an unmarked (but still owned) orchard. It certainly should be a mitigating factor in punishment for the crime, and the owner really should make an effort to make it known that is their property... which is EXACTLY what the ASCAP was DOING.
Yes, different types of property behave differently. Land, which is immovable, has different connotations in property law than say, goods produced on land, which are mobile. It's very difficult to steal land, you cannot hide it and abscond with it and the ways you do so tend to be via fraud. Whereas goods can be quite easy to steal, and the laws handle those different things slightly differently. Ideas, likewise, are their own form of property so of course the laws governing them are different than that governing goods or land. So no... I really don't find it strange that we handle these different things differently?
I would also note that while you seem quite attached to pre-copyright ideas of creativity, the sheer quantity of cultural output since copyright came to dominate the legal framework dwarfs all time before it. Now, granted, that is in part because mass media and the fact that the consumer base for cultural products has expanded from just being something for the elites to everyone in society.
Yes, just as you calling people who utilize copyright "rent-seekers".
This isn't testable in the least. One of the things we KNOW about cultural products is that as time passes, the low quality dross fades away and only the best quality works endure. This creates an artificial time filter where when we look back at the past we tend to only see the stories and song that managed to truly and seriously endure. We don't see the many thousands of songs or stories that were just so-so and so didn't keep getting repeated or written down. Further, when we look to the past, we also tend to get an "elitist" perspective on cultural products, since those were the works most likely to be written down and preserved, the many thousands of lower class songs and stories that were not quite up to be included in the Grimm Fairy Tales or managed to get preserved some other way have simply been lost to time.
Again, the time filter makes standards artificially high in this regard. Further the point of more free expression isn't just to increase the quality of works, but the quantity and breadth of works produced. Within a patronage system profitable works are utterly beholden to the tastes of the patron and if they don't like a certain genre or, well, if they don't like certain ideas even if that genre or idea has popularity beyond them, those works won't get produced and those ideas with be in effect censored.
I'm not sure how owning and profiting from the fruits of your own labor is being enslaved. A core part of patronage is that the patron had considerable creative control over things. And while publishers often will try and do similar things, at the end of the day, they simply do not have the same level of control as a patron did and they have considerably more competition. And creative types have ALWAYS had to act as entrepreneurs, I mean, the simple act of FINDING a patron in the first place is not so different than finding a publisher, and creative types who specialized in mass appeal (troubadours, traveling showmen and storytellers) also have always had to sell themselves to an audience.
Yes, crowd-sourced patronage may well change things and even change things for the better, but we'll see. There's a lot of danger right now in this due to the primary forum for that, Patreon, being more than a little politicized. But it's still a VERY new area, and I'm not willing to throw out the entire old system which has served creative folks fairly well for the last few hundred years just on the potential of that new system.
I've downloaded it and am looking it over, but it's over seventy pages and I do, technically have work to do.
The Boot here, the only time personal attacks are explicitly against the rules are if somebody enters the thread solely to fling them. If somebody who has contributed to the thread starts flinging personal attacks against others... well, while it is not against the rules per se it does mean that they want a street fight rather than an intellectual debate. So long as you contribute to the thread yourself, feel free to return the favor. Do note that people who routinely fling about personal attacks instead of debating issues might well draw greater scrutiny for any subsequent rule breaking. But otherwise, have at it. The Boot won't stomp, Captain America won't throw his mighty shield... that sounded better in the Boot's head.
The Name of Love
Far Right Nutjob
No, it's not particularly normal. I can see for myself whether I'm on someone's land. They may put up a sign or a fence signifying that the land is off limits. Land is physical, unlike ideas. You can't get around the fact that there's no way to exclude others from using an idea except through the arm of the state. This is what copyright law does: it uses the state to redistribute the earned wealth of others back to you because you did some work once upon a time. How is this not rent-seeking?
Again, my contention is that words and sounds aren't arranged by individuals, but by collectives. The importance of intertextuality to the creation of new cultural products shows this. There is no such thing as "author ownership." That's a fiction born from Hobbes' ideas of authorship, a misreading of Locke's theory of property, and the Romantic idea of the "genius artist." All of these things don't reflect actual reality.
That sort of proves my point. As a Christian and a Georgist, I hold that the land is the common property of the community, and it is illegitimate to profit from it, and I use the differences between land and products of labor to make this distinction. So do you want a system where there's copyright, but the owners of copyright have the earnings they get specifically from copyright taxed and redistributed to the community? I'd be up for that.
On the idea that "huge amounts of cultural output came about because of intellectual property", I have two things to say. First, the sheer quantity of cultural output can be better attributed to the rise of the middle class, who had the spare time and money to indulge in such "nerdy" things. Pre-modern peasants didn't have the time or money to spend on such things. This seems to me to be a far more cogent explanation. Second, why should I consider the quantity of cultural output to be something I'm concerned about? In fact, when have I ever implied that I cared about such a thing?
When I call someone a rent-seeker, I'm saying that they are "increasing one's share of existing wealth without creating new wealth." Given my view of authorship, I don't actually believe copyright holders create new wealth just by having an idea. Rather, they create wealth by actually making physical things based on the ideas in their head.
You calling artists who are reliant on patrons "slaves" is just rhetoric, unless you literally believe that artists are the property of their patrons.
That said, I will stop calling individuals on this forum rent-seekers. So @LordsFire, you have my sincerest apology. I insulted you out of misguided anger, and I shouldn't have gotten angry just because someone on the Internet disagreed with me. I am heartily sorry for that.
You may be correct, but consider an alternative analysis: the individualism and consumerism of capitalist societies tend to lead to treating everything as a commodity, and thus as a means rather than an end in itself. The very idea of intrinsic value tends to dissolve into the cash nexus. Mass production reinforces this tendency, since it facilitates our thinking of things as essentially indistinguishable, disposable, and replaceable. The theory of the culture industry from the works of the Frankfurt School reinforces this idea. According to it, mass-production under capitalism endangers the more intellectually stimulating forms of high art. The mass produced culture robs people of their imaginations and turns them into passive consumers. Everything is homogenized with factory-like ease. None of this would have existed in pre-capitalist societies because those societies 1) hadn't adopted the capitalist view that all property was commodity and 2) didn't have the capacity for mass-production.
We may produce a lot more stuff, but we produce a lot less quality stuff.
As opposed to modern times, where things are never beholden to any individual's or group's tastes... right?
I suppose that you can make the case that, with the rise of the Internet, self-publishing, and crowdfunding, you really aren't limited. But before then? You had to go through publishers, media companies, etc. Just look at all of the ways television executives and moral guardians are able to limit self-expression.
Again, if you are defining "slavery" as "some guy tells you how to do your art," you find plenty of examples of that in the modern world. I don't see a real difference between being beholden to publishers and being beholden to patrons besides there being more competition in modern times. But you already made my point that there isn't really any difference between the two, so thank you for that!
Fair enough. I'm not proposing a sudden radical change. I just have very radical opinions.
Just keep in mind that the author doesn't exactly share my views on copyright, but she does go over how limited the Lockean defense of intellectual property actually is. She shows how, even if you model copyright as a form of naturally-owned property, you cannot justify most of what modern copyright holders do in the present. I'd honestly be a lot happier under her proposed system than the current state of affairs.I've downloaded it and am looking it over, but it's over seventy pages and I do, technically have work to do.
Then you've never really been out in the countryside and wandered, or hell, even in a suburban area where most property lacks fences. Vast parts of personal property especially in wooded areas is not demarcated by ANYTHING when you're out in the land. In some of the places it would be entirely trivial to end up on another person's property without knowing it or who's it was, and given how some property lines are drawn, you cannot even assume it's the nearest house to you.
Umm... sure there is? I find out someone has republished my work, I take a gun, and I go shoot them. Sure, it may be harder to find out that someone is doing that than it is for me to patrol the edge of physical property. The purpose of the State to protect property rights is specifically to prevent this sort of violent property protection that is necessary in an anarchic state.
If we accept your premise that there's no such thing as intellectual property, I guess there isn't. However, I fundamentally disagree with that premise as such, of course I don't see it as rent seeking, merely normal commercial exchange enabled by the government. Because I see ideas as "intellectual property" I see no difference between the state enforcing copyright than the state enforcing laws against stealing something from a store.
I'm not sure what I can say to this. Are you a collective consciousness or something? It's nonsensical. Individuals do creative work all the time and create unique stories and songs. Influence or inspiration from prior cultural works is not the same thing as it being created by multiple people. Do you do any creative work yourself, or do you only wax philosophical about it, as I feel like there is a fundamental disconnect from what I know of my own creative process and how you seem to think the creative process works...
Well, that's hilariously unchristian, considering that Christ clearly considered the profits of privately held land to naturally be the property of the land owner and not the laborer (see, Matthew 25:14–30) and there was clearly individual land ownership laws outlined by God for the Jews. Regardless though, this is probably an entirely seperate discussion.
. . . Are you serious? This... this is so ahistorical and false to what we know of pre-modern peasant life that I'm not even sure where to begin. Wandering entertainers were in fact, a thing, and one doesn't need much money to sing or tell stories yourself. Yes, they had much less money than the later middle class did, but they did have plenty of time on the numerous holidays and festivals that happened.
Umm... look, citing the Frankfurt School for just about ANYTHING raises about a million red flags considering their ties to Marxism. Given how inaccurate to reality pretty much all of Marxist theory actually is, I'm inclined to believe that reality is entirely the opposite of anything the Frankfurt school posits. Again, I think this entire idea is nothing more than a time filter onto the past where the best works of the past were preserved while filtering out the dross. My evidence for this would be to point back at music from the 1950s - 1970s to see the process happening in real time in our own culture. The songs and stories preserved from those decades are generally considered the best they had to offer, but due to the extensive archiving we've done, you can actually go and dig up huge amounts of random stuff that almost nobody even remembers today. I mean, here's the list of the Top 40 songs for the entire year of 1960, a nice even sixty years ago. These were the top songs of that entire year, and you'll likely only recognize a HANDFUL of them that have been preserved because of how good they were.
Considering I can provide pretty empirical evidence of the "Time Filter" premise, while your counterpoint is founded on literal Marxist philosophy... I, uhh, know which one I'm going to believe in.
The Name of Love
Far Right Nutjob
So you would compare all cases of accidentally violating people's intellectual property as my accidentally crossing into a neighbor's property without knowing it or who's it was?
You'd only be able to do so if you "find out" about it. Doesn't that strike you as odd?
I understand our views differ on this. But my use of the word "rent-seeking" is literally describing reality as I see. Your use of the word "slavery" to describe an artist working for a patron is hyperbolic, akin to the socialist description of capitalist employment as "wage slavery." Do you dispute this, yes or no?
I don't believe in individual authorship, and I don't believe in real originality. Those are concepts that presuppose ideas of authorship that I just don't buy into. If you want to defeat my arguments, then you have to address the root: that I don't believe you can actually believe in it.
I don't think it's an entirely separate discussion. I think it's useful to understand the differences in our conception of property too.
According to Catholicism, property rights are not absolute, but relative to the needs of others. As St. Thomas points out, "it is not theft, properly speaking, to take secretly and use another's property in a case of extreme need: because that which he takes for the support of his life becomes his own property by reason of that need." You find in the writings of the Popes that there are other principles besides private property, such as "the universal destination of the earth's goods," that need to be respected.
The Georgist view of land is foreshadowed by the Scriptures. In chapter 25 of the book of Leviticus, God laid out a safeguard against the alienation of each family's land. He justified this by saying "The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine " (Leviticus 25:23). In the book of Isaiah, it says "woe to those who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is no more room" (Isaiah 5:8).
The early Christians also foreshadowed this idea. St. Ambrose, in the fourth century AD, says to the rich man: “For what has been given as common for the use of all, you appropriate to yourself alone. The earth belongs to all, not to the rich; but fewer are they who do not use what belongs to all than those who do" (De Nabuthe, PL 14:747). In the same century, St. Basil the Great speaks similarly when he addresses the rich man: “You are like one occupying a place in a theater who should prohibit others from entering, treating that as one’s own which was designed for the common use of all. Such are the rich. Because they were first to occupy common goods, they take these goods as their own" (Homilia in illud Lucae, PG 31, 276).
Finally, in the modern day, the Catholic Church holds that “God gave the earth to the whole human race for the sustenance of all its members, without excluding or favoring anyone.”
You are correct that there wasn't land socialism in the Old Testament, sure. But Georgism isn't land socialism, but a form of liberal capitalism derived from the Lockean Proviso. I am not a Lockean, though the Catholic view of property is similar in some ways to Locke's.
The Georgist critique of land ownership is also implicit in the Church's views on usury. Usury is "when, from its use, a thing which produces nothing is applied to the acquiring of gain and profit without any work, any expense or any risk” (Fifth Lateran Council). The appropriation of site rent by landowners is akin to usury in that it consists of taking what one has not earned and belongs elsewhere.
Claiming that my views on land ownership are somehow alien to the Catholic faith are somehow unchristian is an astounding feat of ignorance, in other words.
The wandering entertainers and festivals are quite a bit different from the ravenous nerd fandoms that exist nowadays. The latter didn't appear until after the rise of industrial capitalism.
So you are just going to dismiss my ideas just because they have come from a Marxist while extrapolating a twentieth century phenomenon so that it stretches back all throughout history? There are so many things wrong with this, I don't know where to begin.
First, your crude dismissal of my counterpoint ("It was proposed by the Frankfurt School, therefore it's wrong.") is an example of the genetic fallacy and marks you as an ideologue. As an eclectic thinker, I have no problem incorporating viewpoints that radically differ from my into my overall view of the world. A true idea is a true idea, no matter who comes up with it. Just earlier, you were (falsely) accusing me of assuming "that all Enlightenment thought is axiomatically wrong" and acting "as if just by establish something is related to the Enlightenment that it than proves that it's wrong."
Second, my counterpart, while borrowed from the Frankfurt School, is not based on any of the premises that Marx got wrong, such as dialectical materialism, economic reductionism, or class conflict. Rather, it's based on Marx's analysis of commodity fetishism, something that Sir Roger Scruton admitted had some weight in his book The Meaning of Conservatism. Commodity fetishism is something that we do see in modern culture. As Edward Feser (who is no Marxist) pointed out in his blog:
So there is some empirical basis to the idea that I propose too.
Third, your reassertion of your previous argument does not even attack the Culture Industry idea. I mean, you can disagree with the idea that popular culture is destroying high art, homogenizing our cultural experience, and turning us into passive consumers, but you can't dismiss the idea by saying "we've forgotten the bad stuff from the past!" Because the Culture Industry critique is about the decreasing quality. There's not just more garbage, there's less quality stuff. The video below provides an example of this.
ShadowsOfParadox
Well-known member
...how do you answer ANY breach of physical property if you don't "find out" about it?
...so, if I'm a beggar on the street in winter time and steal another beggar's blanket in order to have a blanket I haven't actually stolen anything at all! How nice.
...I find this claim utterly fascinating... and also entirely unproveable. Or for that matter, unfalsifiable, which is basically the same thing.
...You mean medieval peasents DEFINITIVELY did NOT have arguments over which bards telling of King Arthur or Beowulf or which ever story it happened to be was better/more accurate? They DEFINITIVELY did NOT have shipping wars? Really? Wow. Can I see your time machine?
No, I would equate it to entering into a neighbor's property unknowingly and taking an apple from the apple tree they planted somehow thinking it was completely "natural" for an apple tree to be growing in the woods. In other words, stealing.
And this is different from any other form of theft how? I mean, the entire point of being a good thief is to take another's property without them noticing.
Yes, as I believe that a person taking and using something produced by another without compensation for their time and labor is, at best, stealing. When a person adds on an entitled attitude and attempts to reframe the matter as people expecting payment for services rendered or goods produced as them somehow being immoral, then they move into being nothing more than a slaver, as they are basically demanding that another person labor for them without compensation.
I'm honestly not sure how to prove this to you. If you've never come up with stories or ideas on your own in your imagination, it's honestly not something I can explain. Also, you cannot define that of which I believe, which you are doing here. You're basically saying that I cannot believe what I'm outright saying to you, in other words, you are saying I am a liar for saying that I believe there is such a thing as individual creativity. A nice trick, I might add, since it basically makes your position falsifiable. I cannot prove there is original creativity because I'm lying when I say I believe there is such a thing.
So, what evidence is sufficient to prove that someone can create original works? Do they have to invent an entirely new language from the ground up in order to write a story in? Since if they don't you could then argue that, after all, words are ideas and weren't created by them and thus a story told in an already existing language is inherently a communal creation simply because it is told using language. At what point does something qualify as "original" to you?
See, here's the fundamental problem with you adopting this concept: it's again axiomatic. As others pointed out, it's non-falsifiable based on evidence. You proposed an non-testable academic theory to support your assertion that older works were of higher quality than modern works. I countered that point with a testable theory. Your academic theory quite nicely fits with your axiomatic belief, but outside of that axiom, it in no ways provides actual evidence. You call me out for making a genetic fallacy, but you're actually wrong, you made the first logical fallacy by engaging in an Appeal to Authority. My attacking the Frankfurt school as founded in Marxism and the numerous areas Marxist theory has gotten wrong therefore is not a genetic fallacy, but rather a dismissal of your appeal to authority by me rejecting the authority of the people you are using to support your assertion.
Further, you never even ENGAGED with my proposition of the "Time Filter" as a legitimate explanation for the idea that creative products of the past were of higher quality than modern. Did you even look at the list of 1960's top 40 songs? Have you yet to encounter the time filter in your own life via the nostalgia for certain higher quality media from your youth while forgetting massive amounts of other media you consumed?
Because the idea that the quality of cultural output has gone over time is entirely unfalsifiable! Yes, you can point to certain genres of music going downhill in quality like "pop", but that does not mean that ALL music has gone downhill, that's a single, albeit very dominate, genre. How much of "classical" music from the heyday of it's prime has been lost and forgotten? We have no idea, because we lack records of all the music composed and performed in that era. Likewise we have no idea what the popular music of the Middle Ages even WAS nor how many songs or stories were lost simply because they were not preserved because they were simply not good enough to be. That is, unless you have a time machine you've been holding out on us...
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
'The Name of Love,' I have to point something out now:
The more you argue, the less appealing you make your position. You have had specific points of evidence you raise repeatedly proven to support the opposite of your position, you're blatantly basing argument on 'this is how I personally define things to be' positions, and trying to insist everybody else argue based on those assertions.
And repeatedly ignoring both evidence that runs directly contrary to your assertions, and treating your assertions as unfalsifiable.
In short, you come across as someone who made up their mind, and now comes in with an attitude of 'damn the facts, I've already made up my mind.' I don't think I've once seen you admit that any evidence impinges on your arguments; you just discard the disproven argument, and pick up another like the prior one only mattered so long as it supported your position, rather than worked against it.
Combining that with your authoritarian streak paints a bleak picture of what would happen if you ever got your hands on any significant amount of power over others
The more you argue, the less appealing you make your position. You have had specific points of evidence you raise repeatedly proven to support the opposite of your position, you're blatantly basing argument on 'this is how I personally define things to be' positions, and trying to insist everybody else argue based on those assertions.
And repeatedly ignoring both evidence that runs directly contrary to your assertions, and treating your assertions as unfalsifiable.
In short, you come across as someone who made up their mind, and now comes in with an attitude of 'damn the facts, I've already made up my mind.' I don't think I've once seen you admit that any evidence impinges on your arguments; you just discard the disproven argument, and pick up another like the prior one only mattered so long as it supported your position, rather than worked against it.
Combining that with your authoritarian streak paints a bleak picture of what would happen if you ever got your hands on any significant amount of power over others