Terthna
Professional Lurker
I don't agree, for reasons I previously laid out. Also most copyrights are owned by corporations, not the people who actually created the thing copyrighted.
Copyright Discussion and Debate
- Thread starter S'task
- Start date
Shipmaster Sane
You have been weighed
Your reasons dont seem to make any sense, something about "the good of mankind means your book about elves is public property" which sounds like commie shit to me.
Well, obviously, that wouldn't be possible under the system I laid out.
Terthna
Professional Lurker
If it was meant to be "commie shit" I'd have argued that you have no rights to your own ideas at all. Thing is, every idea is built off of someone else's; usually multiple someones. Your book about elves will eventually become public property; we're only arguing over when that should be.
So essentially, what you're suggesting is that we make copyright non-transferable? Then your system would be an improvement over what we have currently, I'll give you that.
So you fall much more that writing should be much more like personal property. Would you apply the same to technology? If you invented the car, should that person have exlusive right to it till they die?
Or, if not, why would you value the idea of an invention less than the idea of a book?
Keeping in central mind were talking about ownership of mere ideas.
Edit:
And that we alow the ownership of ideas specifically in order to impoverish the general public in the short term (by making something artificially much more expensive) with the idea that it makes us richer in the long term.
Also, the slavery angle well, doesnt make any sense. If Tolkien only wrote the lord of the rings as a hobby project and then released it for free to the world, did we enlave tolkien?
Are we enslaving all those fan fiction righters who coppyright explicitly forbids from making a profit off their work? If your judge of slaverly is working without pay, then how many slaves does Rowling have in Harry Potter fanfic? How many slaves does shakespear still have in volenteer performers of his plays?
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Shipmaster Sane
You have been weighed
That something will eventually be someone else's property should not effect if it is yours now.
Yes, that is what I am saying.
I dont see a reason why it shouldn't work the same way for technology.
wonderful I thought that fancy himalian salt was good but this this is the shit man 10 out of 10 would troll again.
Arch Dornan
Oh, lovely. They've sent me a mo-ron.
Whoever loses salt is harvested before the cycle renews itself. This time it's SJW salt.
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Hm. So your actually more extreme on the "Ideas are personal property" train than most people. I don't know, I feel like a government granted right to profit off other people's labor is more "commi" than letting each person benefit off their own labor.
In my earlier example of the Beatles copying 90% of a song they read in a magazine once, how much of the value and labor is properly directed at the original worker?
Or in the case of an invention, why should the person who scribbled something onto a piece of paper have a greater claim to an invention than the man who organized thousands of people and brought together millions of dollars in capital?
No, creating a new property right is so far from being commie its hilarious. You could argue that it is corporate cronyism, sure, but commies hate property rights, so why would they go about making new ones?
Without those scribbles on the paper, all of that power would be sitting their idly, doing nothing. So it is necessary to reward that thought. The person who gathers the labor also makes money for what they did as well. I don't see why they should get all the money though. Instead, you just establish a property right, and let the two sides negotiate what is fair.
Shipmaster Sane
You have been weighed
They were already paid for their labor.
I dont understand this sillyness about "how much", either they copied enough to infringe copyright, or they didn't. Its a yes or a no.
Because apparently the man who organized thousands of people and brought together millions of dollars in capital didn't think to leverage that position into ownership of the copyright, or contractual rights to profits off of the copyright, in your silly example.
But you already said in your ideal the copyright cant be sold?
And how much is very, very important. If changing 1 paragraph in lord of the rings moves you out of copyright, then copyright is worthless and having such laws is a pointless inconvience.
When you say ideas are property, its crucial to define what counts. Because an idea has no real clear limit.
And your the one someone has a moral right to the labor of others over a piece of paper. You dont get to claim the right is legitimate because theres tools to get arround the right: its the inventors right to profit off of others thats in question.
And how much is very, very important. If changing 1 paragraph in lord of the rings moves you out of copyright, then copyright is worthless and having such laws is a pointless inconvience.
When you say ideas are property, its crucial to define what counts. Because an idea has no real clear limit.
And your the one someone has a moral right to the labor of others over a piece of paper. You dont get to claim the right is legitimate because theres tools to get arround the right: its the inventors right to profit off of others thats in question.
You know, I'd be in favor of having separate copyright lengths for corporate and privately owned IPs, with corporate IP having a shorter term than a privately owned one.
For example, something like this:
Corporate copyright lasting only 20 or so years, but with 2 automatic extensions if a derivative work is made by the end of the term seems reasonable.
Private copyrights last 50 years, with 1 automatic renewal if a derivative work is made by the end of the original term.
For example, something like this:
Corporate copyright lasting only 20 or so years, but with 2 automatic extensions if a derivative work is made by the end of the term seems reasonable.
Private copyrights last 50 years, with 1 automatic renewal if a derivative work is made by the end of the original term.
The Name of Love
Far Right Nutjob
Okay, I know I've been away from this forum for a long time, and I apologize. I've been caught up with real life business, what with the Coronavirus. I've been away from this topic for a while.
But here's my case against copyright law in full. The first part of my argument is historical and second is rooted in the sort of labor theory of property rights that has been standard in the West for the past several centuries.
First, the historical part. The idea that an author is the source and originator of ideas came from a very particular kind of thought that emerged in the seventeenth century. As late as the Renaissance period, people believed that authors 1) were craftsmen who followed a tradition and adhered to a standard and 2) were mere vehicles for ideas that came either from this tradition or from some divinity. The seventeenth century individualist view of authorship espoused by Thomas Hobbes claimed that authors were the originators of their ideas and was only able to do so by simply disregarding all of what was previously thought. These ideas merged with the idea of the "genius" that emerged in the nineteenth century, forming the view we have today: that authors are the creators of "original" ideas that come from their own genius, and, following the labor theory of property, come to "own" these ideas. This is a view of ideas that, to my knowledge, has no basis in reality. Culture is inherently intertextual; that is to say, different pieces of culture are connected to each other in such a way that it becomes impossible to tell what is "original" and what isn't.
In actual reality, however, separating what are "original" ideas and what aren't is a lot harder than one thinks. And that's why enforcement of copyright will inevitably be arbitrary in nature. Copyright law, as a concept, originally emerged as a way to control the flow of information caused by the advent of the printing press. Royalists used copyright as a way of privileging their favored publishers. Not much is different today. The only difference is that the mass corporation and mass media are the determiners of copyright law. Modern-day corporations oftentimes take folk music or fairy tales, commoditize them, and sell them to the public as if they are their creations. Rarely do the "original owners" get fair compensation because they come from a culture that didn't believe in intellectual property. Again, no society believed in intellectual property until the 17th century West.
This leads to the second part of my argument, the rights portion. The labor theory of property dictates that an unowned thing becomes property when I mix my labor with that thing. But in order to mix my labor with a thing, I must first have control over that thing. Pouring tomato juice into the ocean doesn't count as mixing one's labor with the ocean because you can't control the ocean. You'd just be wasting your tomato juice.
So given this, how can one truly have control over ideas?
This is a more difficult problem than you might think. Ideas are universals, and universals do not exist in themselves, only in either the particular things that instantiate them or in the minds of individuals as abstractions. If I were to read your story, the form of your story, the idea behind it, would be in my head as an abstract thought. You cannot control my thoughts, so you cannot own their contents, including the ideas. And if I were to write your story or a variation of your story down, that wouldn't be your story at all. Rather, that piece of cultural expression would've been the result of my laboring to express the ideas in my head onto my property. In no way does anything of yours come into the equation.
Now, let us return to the justification for intellectual property. Intellectual property is considered property because one is mixing a previously unowned idea with their intellectual labor to create some form. Leaving aside the lack of empirical evidence for this (as pointed out above), a careful analysis of how ideas work shows that this is not what's happening. Nobody can own ideas because nobody can control ideas. Therefore, ideas cannot and should not be treated as property. Furthermore, when you sue me for "violating" your "intellectual property rights," you are actually stealing the fruits of my labor.
Now, one could accept this view and still try and justify intellectual property regardless. They'd shift to a utilitarian argument, claiming that copyright allows for the flourishing of artists and cultural creators. Without intellectual property, there'd be no financial justification for cultural creation, or so they claim. On the face of it, this is a pretty difficult claim to prove. Most of the great innovators in history operated without benefit of copyright laws. Indeed, sufficiently stringent copyright laws would've made the works of the great composers like Bach, Mahler, and Beethoven and great playwrights like Euripides and Shakespeare impossible. All of these people operated in a time where intellectual property was nowhere near as strict as it is now, if it even existed. All of them borrowed from other sources without guilt. As the great twentieth-century composer Igor Stravinsky once said: "good composers borrow, great composers steal."
To overcome this hurdle, more than a few people have pointed out that there are more cultural works in production today than there ever were, as if this is somehow evidence against my position. It really isn't, and I'll give you a few reasons why.
First, we live in an age of mass media. Modern technology allows companies to create and distribute a huge number of products, including cultural products, all over the world, people are wealthier now than they ever have been, and, thanks to the consumerist effects of Keynes-Fisher Macroeconomics, those people are more inclined to spend money on frivolous entertainment than to save money. None of this has anything to do with copyright law necessarily.
Second, suppose we were to conclude that copyright law was responsible for the creation of huge numbers of products. We can then ask the question: are these products good? Or even original? There is no reason I can see that leads me to conclude this. In previous posts, I've pointed to Adorno and Horkheimer's theory of the cultural industry. According to this theory, the commodification of culture has leads to a situation in which mass corporations produce cultural products in an assembly line-like fashion. The end result is a kind of cultural sameness and the destruction of high art.
Now, when I look at modern culture, I and many other conservative commentators see that commodification has occurred in our individualistic, consumerist society. People talk of their "brand" and "selling themselves"; they call prostitution and pornography "sex work"; they consider homes as something to "flip" for a profit rather than to possess and pass on; and there's even talk of "starter marriages" no less than "starter homes." Nothing is inherently worthwhile, and everything is disposable and replaceable. Furthermore, many conservative commentators have commented on the sameness of mass media. In his new book The Decadent Society: How We Became Victims of Our Own Success, Ross Douthat talks about how one can quantitatively measure the share of major motion pictures based on "presold IP", the declining sales of literary fiction, the increasing dependence of the publishing industry on recursive franchises and young-adult blockbusters, and the turn towards repetition and sameness within pop music and see the decreasing originality over this period.
What really opened my eyes was Kembrew McLeod's book Owning Culture: Authorship, Ownership, and Intellectual Property, the basis for a lot of my investigations. She gives example after example of how intellectual property essentially upends any tradition based on folk culture and replaces it with a conformity to a corporate standard. One person on this forum argued that an end to intellectual property would mean a return to authors' reliance on patrons, which would harm their intellectual freedom. But if you are reliant for your livelihood on a corporation, then doesn't that make the corporation itself your patron? And if the corporations are producing a society in which everything is turning into a mass of sameness, doesn't this disprove the "incentivizing creativity" defense of copyright law?
Finally, my proposal as a replacement for intellectual property would be as follows: ideally, everyone would become an independent publisher. There are already plenty of fanfiction writers, such as Sufficient Velocity writer RexHeller, who have Patreon accounts, so there is already a precedent for writers of derivative works to make money. Imagine if RexHeller could advertise their work more effectively. That said, if a writer takes some work that somebody else wrote and claims it to be their work, then they may be liable for fraud, but that's a wrong committed against the consumers, not the original author. That's the direction I see cultural content taking, and such a thing can only grow.
But here's my case against copyright law in full. The first part of my argument is historical and second is rooted in the sort of labor theory of property rights that has been standard in the West for the past several centuries.
First, the historical part. The idea that an author is the source and originator of ideas came from a very particular kind of thought that emerged in the seventeenth century. As late as the Renaissance period, people believed that authors 1) were craftsmen who followed a tradition and adhered to a standard and 2) were mere vehicles for ideas that came either from this tradition or from some divinity. The seventeenth century individualist view of authorship espoused by Thomas Hobbes claimed that authors were the originators of their ideas and was only able to do so by simply disregarding all of what was previously thought. These ideas merged with the idea of the "genius" that emerged in the nineteenth century, forming the view we have today: that authors are the creators of "original" ideas that come from their own genius, and, following the labor theory of property, come to "own" these ideas. This is a view of ideas that, to my knowledge, has no basis in reality. Culture is inherently intertextual; that is to say, different pieces of culture are connected to each other in such a way that it becomes impossible to tell what is "original" and what isn't.
In actual reality, however, separating what are "original" ideas and what aren't is a lot harder than one thinks. And that's why enforcement of copyright will inevitably be arbitrary in nature. Copyright law, as a concept, originally emerged as a way to control the flow of information caused by the advent of the printing press. Royalists used copyright as a way of privileging their favored publishers. Not much is different today. The only difference is that the mass corporation and mass media are the determiners of copyright law. Modern-day corporations oftentimes take folk music or fairy tales, commoditize them, and sell them to the public as if they are their creations. Rarely do the "original owners" get fair compensation because they come from a culture that didn't believe in intellectual property. Again, no society believed in intellectual property until the 17th century West.
This leads to the second part of my argument, the rights portion. The labor theory of property dictates that an unowned thing becomes property when I mix my labor with that thing. But in order to mix my labor with a thing, I must first have control over that thing. Pouring tomato juice into the ocean doesn't count as mixing one's labor with the ocean because you can't control the ocean. You'd just be wasting your tomato juice.
So given this, how can one truly have control over ideas?
This is a more difficult problem than you might think. Ideas are universals, and universals do not exist in themselves, only in either the particular things that instantiate them or in the minds of individuals as abstractions. If I were to read your story, the form of your story, the idea behind it, would be in my head as an abstract thought. You cannot control my thoughts, so you cannot own their contents, including the ideas. And if I were to write your story or a variation of your story down, that wouldn't be your story at all. Rather, that piece of cultural expression would've been the result of my laboring to express the ideas in my head onto my property. In no way does anything of yours come into the equation.
Now, let us return to the justification for intellectual property. Intellectual property is considered property because one is mixing a previously unowned idea with their intellectual labor to create some form. Leaving aside the lack of empirical evidence for this (as pointed out above), a careful analysis of how ideas work shows that this is not what's happening. Nobody can own ideas because nobody can control ideas. Therefore, ideas cannot and should not be treated as property. Furthermore, when you sue me for "violating" your "intellectual property rights," you are actually stealing the fruits of my labor.
Now, one could accept this view and still try and justify intellectual property regardless. They'd shift to a utilitarian argument, claiming that copyright allows for the flourishing of artists and cultural creators. Without intellectual property, there'd be no financial justification for cultural creation, or so they claim. On the face of it, this is a pretty difficult claim to prove. Most of the great innovators in history operated without benefit of copyright laws. Indeed, sufficiently stringent copyright laws would've made the works of the great composers like Bach, Mahler, and Beethoven and great playwrights like Euripides and Shakespeare impossible. All of these people operated in a time where intellectual property was nowhere near as strict as it is now, if it even existed. All of them borrowed from other sources without guilt. As the great twentieth-century composer Igor Stravinsky once said: "good composers borrow, great composers steal."
To overcome this hurdle, more than a few people have pointed out that there are more cultural works in production today than there ever were, as if this is somehow evidence against my position. It really isn't, and I'll give you a few reasons why.
First, we live in an age of mass media. Modern technology allows companies to create and distribute a huge number of products, including cultural products, all over the world, people are wealthier now than they ever have been, and, thanks to the consumerist effects of Keynes-Fisher Macroeconomics, those people are more inclined to spend money on frivolous entertainment than to save money. None of this has anything to do with copyright law necessarily.
Second, suppose we were to conclude that copyright law was responsible for the creation of huge numbers of products. We can then ask the question: are these products good? Or even original? There is no reason I can see that leads me to conclude this. In previous posts, I've pointed to Adorno and Horkheimer's theory of the cultural industry. According to this theory, the commodification of culture has leads to a situation in which mass corporations produce cultural products in an assembly line-like fashion. The end result is a kind of cultural sameness and the destruction of high art.
Now, when I look at modern culture, I and many other conservative commentators see that commodification has occurred in our individualistic, consumerist society. People talk of their "brand" and "selling themselves"; they call prostitution and pornography "sex work"; they consider homes as something to "flip" for a profit rather than to possess and pass on; and there's even talk of "starter marriages" no less than "starter homes." Nothing is inherently worthwhile, and everything is disposable and replaceable. Furthermore, many conservative commentators have commented on the sameness of mass media. In his new book The Decadent Society: How We Became Victims of Our Own Success, Ross Douthat talks about how one can quantitatively measure the share of major motion pictures based on "presold IP", the declining sales of literary fiction, the increasing dependence of the publishing industry on recursive franchises and young-adult blockbusters, and the turn towards repetition and sameness within pop music and see the decreasing originality over this period.
What really opened my eyes was Kembrew McLeod's book Owning Culture: Authorship, Ownership, and Intellectual Property, the basis for a lot of my investigations. She gives example after example of how intellectual property essentially upends any tradition based on folk culture and replaces it with a conformity to a corporate standard. One person on this forum argued that an end to intellectual property would mean a return to authors' reliance on patrons, which would harm their intellectual freedom. But if you are reliant for your livelihood on a corporation, then doesn't that make the corporation itself your patron? And if the corporations are producing a society in which everything is turning into a mass of sameness, doesn't this disprove the "incentivizing creativity" defense of copyright law?
Finally, my proposal as a replacement for intellectual property would be as follows: ideally, everyone would become an independent publisher. There are already plenty of fanfiction writers, such as Sufficient Velocity writer RexHeller, who have Patreon accounts, so there is already a precedent for writers of derivative works to make money. Imagine if RexHeller could advertise their work more effectively. That said, if a writer takes some work that somebody else wrote and claims it to be their work, then they may be liable for fraud, but that's a wrong committed against the consumers, not the original author. That's the direction I see cultural content taking, and such a thing can only grow.
I'm just happy your back! 
No, it really isn't? I'm genuinely not sure how you can even claim this to be true with a straight face.
Yes, many ideas are reused and broad concepts often shared; however, it's quite easy to tell that when a set of ideas are put into a single specific form, almost mathematically so. I mean, firstly, since we use written words, it's quite easy to see when individuals words are put together into a unique combination. It's even easy to see when a set of ideas is put into a unique combination. There are so many ideas, and so many potential combinations, with new ideas appearing over time due to changes of society and advancement of technology and science, that it is very difficult to accidentally have two individuals come up with the same idea of a story at the same time. To claim otherwise is a very big ask, and a huge chunk of your argument is premised on this, but you are merely asserting it as true, you've done nothing to prove it is true.
Umm... OK, look, going to be honest, this argument seems ass backwards to me. Allow me to explain why, your premise this on, basically, saying that "If I read a book, and then a write down and resell the book as my own, even though I didn't originate the ideas, the book is mine and I am it's owner because I put the labor into copying the book and you refusing me it makes you a thief."
Allow me to explain how this argument sounds to your opponents, and why this actually undercuts your attack on the idea of personal property requiring individual's labor to be personal property: a thief can make the same argument for the stealing of anything. After all, thieving is work, it's laborious, it takes effort. You making this argument, to those of us who do not agree with your a prioris, is the equivalent of saying that society taking something stolen from a thief and giving it back to the original owner is actually stealing from the thief because it's denying the thief the fruit of their labor. It's nonsensical and comes off as attempting to invert morality.
You never adequately addressed my rebuttal of this entire premise. As such, this a priori is again rejected because you've not demonstrated that your theory is more provable or accurate, you merely assert that it is and move on.
Err... this has been normal in civilizations for hundreds, if not thousands of years? Heck, "flipping" houses is a very odd thing to attack as somehow evidence of cultural decay, as all that is is buying a property, making improvements, and reselling it at a profit... something developers have been doing since time immemorial. People within certain economic classes have been doing that kind of thing with homes for a long time. Further, do you understand what the concept of "starter" homes are and how important such things are for improving people's economic lot especially now that there is no "frontier" for people to move into and build their own homes.
I'm honestly not sure what your ideal would be here or how this is even a sign of cultural decay to you.
Yes... and? People ALWAYS have, they just use different terms for it in different times that reflect their cultures. A person's brand is just a silly way of saying a person's reputation. "Selling themselves" merely is how one goes about spreading and sustaining one's reputation. In the past this might have been called "honor", "reputation", or "face", depending on the culture and time in question. It's silly, and yes, reflective of how highly commercialized our society has become, and you can decry that commercialization certainly, but it's really not that strange of a thing, it's something that people have always had to do to...
Look, I rarely do this, but I have an actual degree in English, specifically Creative Writing. You want to know why the sales of "literary fiction" has declined, don't look at culture degradation, look to the keepers and writers of the genre. And yes, "literary fiction" is a genre, just like fantasy or science fiction or romance. At one point in time, said genre was actually focused on being a popular genre for people to read. If you look to the late 19th and early 20th century giants of "literary fiction" they were not writing to be considered "literary", they were writing popular fiction. As time went on, literary fiction became more and more elitist in focus and scope, it was no longer marketed to, written for, or engaged with the average person, but rather, was focused towards academics and the elite.
Further, these academics and elites would frequently go back and claim that classic works that were never meant to be "literary fiction", but rather were just well written popular fiction, was actually literary fiction. They still do this to this day, where they will appropriate works of other genres and claim they're really literary fiction and not part of some "lesser" genre.
Do you really think that people being less interested in "literary fiction" when it was no longer written to appeal to them is strange or a sign of "cultural decay". It's not, it's a sign of elitist capture of a former popular genre and driving it into the ground.
Also, let's talk about the late 19th and early 20th century publishing world, and how it flies in the face of your theory of "cultural product decline" while rather serving as an excellent example in support of my theory of the "chronological crap filter".
Have you ever heard of a Penny dreadful or dime novel? Or know where the term Pulp fiction originated from? These were mass market media of their day, full of cheap, quickly written stories that were, frankly, rubbish, to the point where all those terms were, at one point, pejoratives. There's a reason that the Pulp stories that are remembered today are the ones that are, they were stories that either managed to stick in the popular consciousness and were often simple better written than others and thus, because of that quality, managed to stick around. By the way, the stories in those media were often many of the same things you're decrying about modern media: formulaic, derivative, and series that were clearly pushed our quickly. Yet if you ask most folks today what pulp stories they remember, they don't list a bunch of crap stories, no, rather they would likely list Conan, maybe The Shadow, and a handful of other works that have stuck around due to their quality and capture of popular imagination.
Oh, and let's touch on movies and other media too. I mean the Serial movie was HUGE in the first half of the 20th century, and the vast majority of them were cheap, put out quickly, formulaic, and meant to have mass appeal to make a quick buck for the studio. You also saw the same in radio dramas of the period.
This entire idea that cultural works have decreased in quality is, to be frank, utterly wrong. You simply have not been exposed to the sheer amount of bad media from the past because it's mostly been forgotten and lost, while the actual good stuff has stuck around.
The Name of Love
Far Right Nutjob
A general theme running through your post, @S'task, is that you only seem to be able to refute my arguments by... not even engaging with them at all.
And yes, you are undoubtedly begging the question. In order to make this "thief" argument, you have to basically ignore my argument, the "a prioris" you seem weirdly averse to. And since we're arguing over whether these "a prioris" are correct, you assuming they must be wrong is question-begging.
Here is this rights-based argument against intellectual property, spelled out as succinctly as possible:
1. Only by controlling something can one come to own it.
2. You cannot control ideas because ideas are universals, and humans can only control particulars.
3. You cannot own ideas.
4. Therefore, intellectual property rights don't exist.
In order for your "argument" to be anything more than question-begging, the thief scenario you used would actually have to be a logical extension of one or more of the premises. Let's see...
Premise one - You can only own what you can control. I take this to be presupposed by the labor theory of property, which I was assuming you accepted. Now, if you do believe in the labor theory of property but reject premise one, you'd be committed to the idea that pouring tomato juice into the Pacific Ocean would allow me to own the Pacific Ocean. I don't think you'd argue for that position. The thief scenario doesn't follow from this in any way.
Premise two - You cannot control ideas because humans could only control particulars and ideas are universals. Now, a universal can only exist in two ways: an abstract thought or an instantiation in a particular object's form. You can't control my abstract thoughts, obviously. They're mine. The form of the story you came up with is in your mind and in the minds of all readers who read your story, and you can't stop that process without restricting access to the particular paper you wrote the story down on. That paper is a thing you can control.
Now, you might be tempted to think "even if I can't control your ideas, I could control all expressions of your idea." And certainly, you could do that if you could control my actions and my property. But since I am neither an extension of your will nor your servant/slave, you don't control my actions. And since my property is my property, you can't control it without borrowing or stealing it, since it is previously owned.
According to intellectual property law, ideas nobody controls, when mixed with property I control by means I control, creates a cultural expression that you own? And if I don't believe this, then I must accept that a thief stealing an apple I control with his labor makes the apple his? This doesn't make sense.
Premise three follows from one and two, and the thief thing doesn't work because control is not sufficient for ownership. Again, to come to own something, must either take control of some previously unowned thing or receive it justly. Stealing something previously owned counts as neither of these.
Since the argument is valid, it appears that the conclusion - intellectual property rights don't exist - is true. Intellectual property rights rest on owning ideas. If you can't own ideas, you can't own property. So you are just begging the question. Please stop begging the question.
Furthermore, this isn't a "premise" but an argument in itself. Again, I'll give a syllogism as follows:
1. Commodification affects cultural products through intellectual property law,
2. Commodifying something involves turning them into standardized consumer items to use and discard at leisure.
3. This causes cultural homogenization and the degrading of art.
You rebut neither premise nor do you argue that my argument is invalid.
1. There were was a lot of crappy art in the past.
2. Therefore, things haven't gotten worse.
There's a hidden premise here, but for the life of me, I can't see it.
Insofar as you assume that I think there weren't crappy works in the past, you attack a strawman. Let's see what I actually said.
Now, am I right? Well, I notice that you don't rebut my observation of "there's no high art anymore." This is probably because this is a very popular talking point across the right wing, as seen here, here, and here. They all have differing views on why this is the case, of course, but they all are observing the same phenomenon. Of course, I'd like to hear you actually rebut the view by pointing out the overwhelming amount of high art coming out nowadays. Is there any good art? Where is the twenty-first equivalent of Shakespeare? Of Beethoven?
Cultural sameness, you do try to debunk - and good for you! But here's my question: it's one thing for cheap and formulaic novels and movies to exist in the late 19th and early 20th century - the culture industry theory predicts that too, since my formulation of it depends on copyright law, and copyright law existed back then. But the question is this: has the stagnation, the uniformity, gotten worse as IPs consolidated? The answer is "yes, yes it has." Even if you are correct about how literary fiction is declining because of elite capture, your theory wouldn't explain why we keep seeing the same IPs being sold to us over and over and over again. Why popular music has basically been reduced to a formula. None of these things are really addressed by your theory of "chronological crap filter." The culture industry theory is far more parsimonious, by contrast.
I'd implore you to actually refute the substance of what I say. When I look at what you write, you seem to be egregiously averse to actually tackling the meat of the arguments. The only time you actually made an attempt to rebut me was at the last point, which was actually tertiary to the overall argument. The culture industry arguments are a rebuttal to the claim that intellectual property leads to more creativity and higher-quality works of art, a claim that you haven't proven at all. In contrast, the historical and rights-based arguments are key, and you bungled your responses to these arguments so badly that I could have just dismissed them as fallacious and called it a day.
I think your refusal to engage possibly has something to do with this harping on about a priori reasoning. I use that kind of reasoning a lot, primarily because empirical evidence can be consistent with multiple theories at the same time. Therefore, it's important to have a more solid theory whose premises are backed by even more basic empirical observations. If you have a problem with this, then our differences go much deeper than an ethics dispute.
When I said:
Because all of our ideas are based on previous ideas that have come from other people, where "my" idea begins and "your" idea ends isn't very clear cut at all. That's my argument, and you don't even refute it. You just assert that I'm making an assertion, and that's it. In fact, if there's any candidate for something being an assertion, it'd be whoever wrote this:
That's one hell of an assertion, don't you agree? Especially since hardly anybody before seventeenth century philosophers like Thomas Hobbes believed this. So why should I? Where's the proof for this?
"If I beg the question hard enough and with enough vigor, I could possibly get away with not addressing the point of the argument."
And yes, you are undoubtedly begging the question. In order to make this "thief" argument, you have to basically ignore my argument, the "a prioris" you seem weirdly averse to. And since we're arguing over whether these "a prioris" are correct, you assuming they must be wrong is question-begging.
Here is this rights-based argument against intellectual property, spelled out as succinctly as possible:
1. Only by controlling something can one come to own it.
2. You cannot control ideas because ideas are universals, and humans can only control particulars.
3. You cannot own ideas.
4. Therefore, intellectual property rights don't exist.
In order for your "argument" to be anything more than question-begging, the thief scenario you used would actually have to be a logical extension of one or more of the premises. Let's see...
Premise one - You can only own what you can control. I take this to be presupposed by the labor theory of property, which I was assuming you accepted. Now, if you do believe in the labor theory of property but reject premise one, you'd be committed to the idea that pouring tomato juice into the Pacific Ocean would allow me to own the Pacific Ocean. I don't think you'd argue for that position. The thief scenario doesn't follow from this in any way.
Premise two - You cannot control ideas because humans could only control particulars and ideas are universals. Now, a universal can only exist in two ways: an abstract thought or an instantiation in a particular object's form. You can't control my abstract thoughts, obviously. They're mine. The form of the story you came up with is in your mind and in the minds of all readers who read your story, and you can't stop that process without restricting access to the particular paper you wrote the story down on. That paper is a thing you can control.
Now, you might be tempted to think "even if I can't control your ideas, I could control all expressions of your idea." And certainly, you could do that if you could control my actions and my property. But since I am neither an extension of your will nor your servant/slave, you don't control my actions. And since my property is my property, you can't control it without borrowing or stealing it, since it is previously owned.
According to intellectual property law, ideas nobody controls, when mixed with property I control by means I control, creates a cultural expression that you own? And if I don't believe this, then I must accept that a thief stealing an apple I control with his labor makes the apple his? This doesn't make sense.
Premise three follows from one and two, and the thief thing doesn't work because control is not sufficient for ownership. Again, to come to own something, must either take control of some previously unowned thing or receive it justly. Stealing something previously owned counts as neither of these.
Since the argument is valid, it appears that the conclusion - intellectual property rights don't exist - is true. Intellectual property rights rest on owning ideas. If you can't own ideas, you can't own property. So you are just begging the question. Please stop begging the question.
I never rebutted your rebuttal because you never made one. You have alternatively dismissed my argument as "Marxist" and therefore wrong or simply asserted "my a priori theory is right and yours is wrong!"
Furthermore, this isn't a "premise" but an argument in itself. Again, I'll give a syllogism as follows:
1. Commodification affects cultural products through intellectual property law,
2. Commodifying something involves turning them into standardized consumer items to use and discard at leisure.
3. This causes cultural homogenization and the degrading of art.
You rebut neither premise nor do you argue that my argument is invalid.
First of all, your argument, in syllogistic form, appears to be:
1. There were was a lot of crappy art in the past.
2. Therefore, things haven't gotten worse.
There's a hidden premise here, but for the life of me, I can't see it.
Insofar as you assume that I think there weren't crappy works in the past, you attack a strawman. Let's see what I actually said.
Now, for the final time, nothing in this theory implies that there weren't works of poor quality in the past. In fact, let there be as many low-quality works as possible! The amount of bad works that happened in the past is strictly irrelevant to culture industry as an idea. The question is whether there is less or more cultural sameness now, and whether there is less or more high art now. I hold that there is more of the former and less of the latter, as the theory predicts.
Now, am I right? Well, I notice that you don't rebut my observation of "there's no high art anymore." This is probably because this is a very popular talking point across the right wing, as seen here, here, and here. They all have differing views on why this is the case, of course, but they all are observing the same phenomenon. Of course, I'd like to hear you actually rebut the view by pointing out the overwhelming amount of high art coming out nowadays. Is there any good art? Where is the twenty-first equivalent of Shakespeare? Of Beethoven?
Cultural sameness, you do try to debunk - and good for you! But here's my question: it's one thing for cheap and formulaic novels and movies to exist in the late 19th and early 20th century - the culture industry theory predicts that too, since my formulation of it depends on copyright law, and copyright law existed back then. But the question is this: has the stagnation, the uniformity, gotten worse as IPs consolidated? The answer is "yes, yes it has." Even if you are correct about how literary fiction is declining because of elite capture, your theory wouldn't explain why we keep seeing the same IPs being sold to us over and over and over again. Why popular music has basically been reduced to a formula. None of these things are really addressed by your theory of "chronological crap filter." The culture industry theory is far more parsimonious, by contrast.
I'd implore you to actually refute the substance of what I say. When I look at what you write, you seem to be egregiously averse to actually tackling the meat of the arguments. The only time you actually made an attempt to rebut me was at the last point, which was actually tertiary to the overall argument. The culture industry arguments are a rebuttal to the claim that intellectual property leads to more creativity and higher-quality works of art, a claim that you haven't proven at all. In contrast, the historical and rights-based arguments are key, and you bungled your responses to these arguments so badly that I could have just dismissed them as fallacious and called it a day.
I think your refusal to engage possibly has something to do with this harping on about a priori reasoning. I use that kind of reasoning a lot, primarily because empirical evidence can be consistent with multiple theories at the same time. Therefore, it's important to have a more solid theory whose premises are backed by even more basic empirical observations. If you have a problem with this, then our differences go much deeper than an ethics dispute.
I'm not sure how to prove a self evidence fact of the world. You're arguing that I need to show that the sky is blue. It is self evident and directly observable to me that individual works of creativity are unique works. You're arguing for a metaphysical "origin" of creativity that somehow negates individual contributions, which to me is nonsensical on its face. Yes, people rework culturally transmitted ideas, but in that reworking they create a new unique configuration of ideas that is unique to them because each individual is unique in and of themselves.
So I'm not sure how you can argue this with a straight face, because, to be perfectly frank, the evidence of my assertion is, well, the entire collection of human works over the last four thousand or more years that we have preserved at least some cultural works from. Yes, there are shared ideas and tropes, but those that have been preserved all have core unique stories and ideas. The fact that you cannot see this to me is utterly alien, from multiple aspects.
Firstly, just from a linguistic standpoint, the likelihood of a work being identical is highly, HIGHLY improbable, the improbability of such growing exponentially as the length of a work increases. This also holds true for the collection of ideas that make up a story. Even if you argue there's a limit to the number of ideas in existence, mathematically, how those ideas are then arranged are much more likely to be unique than to be the same and again, the likelihood of uniqueness increases exponentially as length increases.
You're arguing a philosophical and metaphysical argument that seem to reject fundamental observable reality. The fact that people in the past accepted that argument over observable reality does not somehow make that idea correct, or even that their observations resulted in a correct understanding of reality.
Except... I did?
I may not have used the term "high art", but I did, directly, rebut this idea:
Except that... that is what copyright laws are premised on, controlling the expression of ideas by society. Do you reject that society, rather than direct individual control, is an acceptable avenue of asserting control? For someone raging against enlightenment idealism, you appear to be leaning into enlightenment individualism quite heavily here. We accept societal restrictions on personal actions for all manner of things because we believe that it leads to better societal results. Likewise, copyright is fundamentally founded in utilizing societal mechanism to allow the initial arranger of a unique set of ideas to have control over the expression of those ideas for a limited length of time.
I'm not even sure that this "labor theory of property" is generally universal. No matter how much labor I put into a piece of land, if I do not have the deed to that land, it will not be mine, and that's been a universal accepted constant for humanity for thousands of years.
You're making an assertion as if it was self evident. I'm not convinced it is. How about you provide some evidence. That evidence should also account for all forms of media, including the internet.
But if you want, I can give quite a good reason for why we're seeing these things happen: the internet. You can trace both the IP reuse and Pop Music decline almost directly to the rise of the internet starting with the 90s and accelerating since. Why? Prior to the internet, niche markets could still be profitable for corporations to pursue, and thus, you had many smaller corporations that were dedicated to pursuing those genres. However, with the rise of the internet you saw two things: 1. digital music sharing utterly undercutting the music industry while also 2. giving artists a platform to distribute music outside the music labels. This tended to destroy smaller music labels as their back catalog was no longer being sold (rather, it was being shared in violation of copyright laws) thus leaving only the largest corporations, who were now highly risk adverse and so sought to create things that had the widest mass market appeal rather than pursue more unique niche music. Meanwhile niche creative works are being made primarily for free distribution online, if you know where to look.
Not actually true. In the US, if you stay on land for long enough, and improve the land, and aren't kicked out, it becomes yours. It's called Adverse Possession.
That varies WILDLY by State in the US, as in the US property law is entirely controlled by the States. Further, Adverse Possession isn't automatic, it has to be litigated through the courts and it's entirely possible for someone who was "on the land long enough" to lose such a case.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
Well, I took the time to read through this whole post, even though there were some grossly flawed concepts right from the start. I don't know why you work so hard to include some lines of thought from your argumentation, and actively exclude others, but it's frustrating to deal with.
You are ignoring a number of very key things that completely overturn your position.
1. Creation of 'original property.' People aren't allowed to copyright 'female characters,' as a concept, or 'talking animals' as a concept. Walt Disney was able to Copyright Mickey Mouse, a specific character, drawn in a particular way, with a particular personality, and particular voice. Mickey Mouse did not exist before Disney created him, and thus by Disney's labor there was something new that had not been before.
The same can be said of Bilbo Baggins, Paul Atriedes, Belgarion, The United Federation of Planets, Corran Horn, Harry Potter, Hanse Davion, etc.
People can and do write derivative works, some of which are outright fanfiction, some which just borrow heavily from the original material Dungeons and Dragons drew and draws massively from The Lord of the Rings, particularly in earlier editions, and has its own copyrighted settings and characters. They're similar but distinct, and because none of the novels set in D&D settings were ever as good, they've never been as successful.
2. The existence of debased derivative works is not evidence of a lack of great art. Others have made the argument before that it is the great pieces of history that we remember most strongly, comparing them to any random crap from the modern day is not fair. Another part of why there's a lot of modern 'samey' music and art today, is because people have more money to spend on luxuries, so they'll buy the good stuff first, and then there's money left over for inferior works that they still appreciate.
But just because there's enough loose money to support the glut of crap, does not mean there isn't exceptional material that rises above with substance and meaning. As an example, this song was a pop hit. It speaks to something more profound and substantial about the human spirit, without the raw level of shallowness or vapidity so much pop music has, and the art and style for the video is engaging and creative as well. It's still a product of the pop industry, but it has some substance.
Then there's an old favorite of mine for writing battle scenes to.
How about visual art? Gunnerkrigg court is a very engaging story that, while I don't like all the story elements or themes, is unique and meaningful.
You're increasingly coming across as someone who is so absorbed in reading up on particular philosophers and philosophies, that you're actually blind to the world around you.