Copyright

[AnthArmo]

On an intuitive level, I know that Copyright is nonesense.

Yet on a rational or argumentative level, I have difficulties supporting or rationalising my moral intuitions.

Anybody able to give me rational arguments as to why Copyright is stupid?

[DWI]

Ideas are non-rivalrous. Other people knowing things does not diminish the originator's knowledge of them. Contrast to material things, which can only be put to a single use at any given time.

Think of it this way: if I steal your bike, the harm is that you no longer have your bike, not that I now have it. But with copyright, I can copy something you have of value, and still leave you with it.

[meow]

a recent thread:
start from the other end. why have copyright at all? for most of human history there was no copyright. it was created to restrict copying. so that money men could make the price for the few copys they allowed as high as possible. it benefits only a few rather then the mass of the people.

by restricting who is able to distribute a work or to modify a work culture itself is restricted. there are many books (etc) by authors long dead that are still in copyright. who does this benefit? certainly not the dead author!

and of course the corporations are happy to take work from the public domain. they are happy to take our culture. and then lock it up again. example various disney films based on fairy tails. imagine if the grimms brothers had children who held the copyright to the grimms brothers tales!

most people dont create for profit or thought of profit anyway. they create because they love to. so even if there was no money reward for createing it would still happen. and we can well imagine that in a future communist society even more work will be created as people ahve more free time!

(we can see now with the internet and access to tools that many more people are createing. youtube would not exist if it didnt allow anyone to put up there own videos. as one example.)