IssueRaiser

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

Sorry I'm like a week late here, I don't check HN very frequently. It's not just "people" that distinguish between copyright infringement and stealing; the law does as well. I find it extremely odd that you're asking why people feel "entitled" to make a perfectly lawful distinction. It's my personal opinion that traditional ownership of property and the intellectual property afforded by copyright are such different concepts that all debate tends to collapse into incoherence once the concepts are taken to be the same. For things that I personally own, there is no idea of a "public domain," and my belongings are not temporarily granted exclusively to me for the good of the public. My macbook is my macbook, full-stop. Copyright, on the other hand, is a temporary monopoly on the distribution of a creation because, at some point in time, the state deemed it beneficial to the public to incentivize artists/creators/inventors with this kind of financial benefit. Why do we have any concept of a public domain if copyright and traditional ownership are perfectly interchangeable as ideas? Why is there no concept of "fair use" for my macbook or my car, but there is such a thing as "fair use" for any novel I might write? My personal take: there isn't really any analogous concept of "ownership" for most things that could be considered artworks or intellectual creations. I can be credited as the original creator, and I can attempt to control the distribution of physical manifestations of my artifact, but in what sense do I actually "own," say, the dirty limerick that I wrote? The only way I can truly own it is to simply never show it to a soul. But that's not very satisfying, is it? And yet it's perfectly satisfying to keep my macbook solely to myself ...

Posted by ryanpardieck on Sep 30, 2014, 10:15 PM

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

ryanpardieckSep 30, 2014, 10:15 PM

Sorry I'm like a week late here, I don't check HN very frequently. It's not just "people" that distinguish between copyright infringement and stealing; the law does as well. I find it extremely odd that you're asking why people feel "entitled" to make a perfectly lawful distinction. It's my personal opinion that traditional ownership of property and the intellectual property afforded by copyright are such different concepts that all debate tends to collapse into incoherence once the concepts are taken to be the same. For things that I personally own, there is no idea of a "public domain," and my belongings are not temporarily granted exclusively to me for the good of the public. My macbook is my macbook, full-stop. Copyright, on the other hand, is a temporary monopoly on the distribution of a creation because, at some point in time, the state deemed it beneficial to the public to incentivize artists/creators/inventors with this kind of financial benefit. Why do we have any concept of a public domain if copyright and traditional ownership are perfectly interchangeable as ideas? Why is there no concept of "fair use" for my macbook or my car, but there is such a thing as "fair use" for any novel I might write? My personal take: there isn't really any analogous concept of "ownership" for most things that could be considered artworks or intellectual creations. I can be credited as the original creator, and I can attempt to control the distribution of physical manifestations of my artifact, but in what sense do I actually "own," say, the dirty limerick that I wrote? The only way I can truly own it is to simply never show it to a soul. But that's not very satisfying, is it? And yet it's perfectly satisfying to keep my macbook solely to myself ...

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