Monday 8 April 2013

Copyright is the freedom to choose

Video produced by the Copyright Alliance

13 comments:

UglyTruth said...

Mike Mozart, of Jeepers Media, produced a controversial yet well-informed video several weeks ago that shed light on how the piracy problem came to be.

“Who do you think really caused all that piracy, huh?” he asks. “Was it all these kids? Nah. They needed the tools to do it. Who distributed those tools? Guess who? CBS Television; the CNET division of CBS has almost the exclusive distribution of things like LimeWire, Kazaa, Morpheus, BitTorrent, etc.”

He goes on to widen the net. The evidence he has compiled, including years of screenshots and web history should cause everyone from the average Internet user to the U.S. Congress and Senate to demand an explanation from the companies who created the piracy problem as to why the solution should now be legislated on their terms, for their protection.

“CNET, Download.com, and ZDNet are divisions of CBS Interactive, which is owned by CBS Viacom.” Mozart goes on to explain how CNET distributed piracy software widgets for years and even branded them for companies like Disney.

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2139890/SOPA-Explained-Why-Its-Bad-for-the-Web-How-to-StopSOPA

Richard said...

War is peace. Ignorance is strength. Copyright is the freedom to choose.

Richard said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Peter Cresswell said...

You do realise the concept of a comments section, don't you.

It's supposed to be a place for intelligent debate, not a homs for spam and snide smart-arsery.

Richard said...

Brevity is the soul of wit.

Copyright is not a freedom, it is a *restriction* on freedom. To call it freedom is Orwellian.

Peter Cresswell said...

@Richard: Except of course that's still not an argument, merely a fatuous assertion that would be the *conclusion* of an argument--if indeed you had one.

Because the point of the title is to challenger you--by pointing out that copyright protects the freedom of the artist, the musician, the writer, the designer, the architect, the composer, to protect the work that they've brought into the world.

It gives them the complete freedom to choose whether to hide it, sell it, give it away cheaply, or to give it away for nothing at all but handshakes and hugs.

It's their work, so they get to choose.

Only pirates, or an Orwellian state, can take that away.

Terry said...

@ Richard,

The freedom to choose does not extend to the freedom to steal any more than the freedom to act extends to the freedom to enslave.

Richard said...

If indeed I had one? I did, and I linked to it. You mistook it for "spam" and/or "snide smart-arsery" and deleted it.

Way to shut down the intelligent debate.

"Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims."

You are prepared to invoke the full force of the state - legalised violence - against copyright infringers on the basis that copying is theft. But it's not. Consider the possibility that you've made a terrible mistake.

http://blog.eternalvigilance.me/2012/05/if-property-rights-is-the-answer-whats-the-question/

Peter Cresswell said...

@Richard, Government, or any agency, acting to protect an intellectual propety is no different than it acting to protect any other right.

If your argument is that a govt, or agency, should not so act, i.e., that its job is not to protect individual rights, then that is a different argument.

But if you do accept that is govt's legitimate job, then your statement simply boils down to saying that you don't agree with me about which rights are legitimate.

Which is still really just a statemwnt without an argument.

Richard said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Richard said...

I don't agree with you about which rights are legitimate.

So-called IP rights are illegitimate. The link to my argument is in the comment before this one.

Peter Cresswell said...

@Richard: You don't agree which rights are legitimate. But that's not an argument.

You say your argument is in your posts. But when I go there I find the 'argument' consists of 1. "Copyright is the government telling you what songs you can and cannot sing in the shower." (Hint, no it doesn't); and 2. "The question [answered by property rights] is, how do we allocate scarce resources in a free society? " (Hint, no it's not).

The first neither an argument nor correct. The second is neither the correct starting point for property rights, nor a very good argument.

“Contrary to the view of ‘libertarians’ opposed to intellectual property, the essential basis of property is not scarcity—it is production. The complaint that intellectual property is an oxymoron because ideas are not scarce in the same way as apples has no merit, for the concepts of property and ownership lie fundamentally in the need for man to produce and enjoy values in support of their lives—not merely in the narrower and subsidiary need to avoid conflict with one another in that enjoyment.”
- (Greg Perkins, ‘Don't steal this article,’ Noodle Food)

So both are bad arguments, spammed here, used to justify your wish to steal someone else's work. Any wonder I don't respect them?

Richard said...

I have no wish to steal anyone else's work. To suggest that I do is defamatory.