this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Copyright is not a natural law - there is nothing natural about for example not telling a joke to somebody else without first tracking down the person who invented it and agreeing on payment for being allowed to tell it.
And, no, I'm not exagerating: as soon as it is created that joke legally has a copyright, owned by its creator, and sharing it (and that includes "public performances" such as telling it to your friends) requires the authorization of the owner of that copyright in that joke.
The only reason you don't see people fined for telling jokes is because it's not enforced because it's not worth the trouble (plus it would quickly turn people against Copyright).
So, now that we've shown that Copyright does in fact go against the natural human tendency to share - literally it's anti-natura - then that means it's an artificial construct created by man, so a law, written by lawmakers, with all the problems that rules made by politicians have.
Now, if you look at the justification for creating such an artificial restriction on the naturaly human tendency of sharing what you heard, it's to "incentivise creation", which "benefits all because the copyrighted work will go into the Public Domain at the end of the copyright period".
This makes sense, and it might even have been true in the beginning but it's not anymore:
Think about it: under the current Copyright Legislation, for every single one of us and for all effects and purposes the "contract" between Society and cultural creators were Society enforces an artifical limitation to the natural human act of sharing and in return cultural creators make works which although at first requiring payment to enjoy, will one day be free to enjoy has been broken - we will never freely enjoy those works we've known since our childhood, the payment that Society (in other words: all of us) was supposed to get for that artificial limitation to sharing.
If a contract has been broken the injured side (that would be Society) doesn't have an obligation to abide by it.
Copyright is not a natural law, but neither is the trading of money for some bread.
I think IP is a (partially mistaken) attempt to enforce the same rule (that works really, really well) that we put on the trade of physical goods, on the trade of cognitive work.
It's tough because with the wheat it's conceptually simple. Yes, you're indirectly paying for their "work" in making the bread, but you don't have to think about work because the bread itself contains the value.
But information is copyable, and that's fundamentally different than bread.
Feels like something should be different, but I don't think the idea of ownership should be rejected merely because it's not natural. Ownership of goods is more natural, but still just an aspect of culture.
Exchanging stuff is absolutelly natural (you see little children doing it) and extending barter trading to "trading for tokens which can be exchanged with different people for other things" is really just introducing a new type of item being exchanged.
Going from sharing of ideas to not-sharing, on the other hand, is going for doing something naturally to the very opposite of that (hence my use of "anti-natura").
I don't think "exchanging stuff but now with tokens" is at all comparable with "stop doing what you would otherwise naturally do without even thinking about it and bring into this exchange an unrelated 3rd party".
I feel like you're trying to hammer a square peg in a round hole there: Copyright Legislation is not about the natural give and take in a exchange or trade (in this case of information) but rather it involves a 3rd party, which is not even present, which is the owner of the copyright of said information (used to be the creator, nowadays it can be anybody or a company) who is artificially inserted in what would otherwise be a normal exchange between 2 persons as an additional externaly party that also requires something.
I suspect the recurrent confusion of so many between copyright violation and theft is exactly because copyright is entirely unnatural, so people fall back to the closest instinctive human behaviour to try and understand it, ending up with the completelly way out there incorrect idea that copyright violation is like one side in an exchange taking stuff from the other and running away before giving their stuff to the other, when in reality you have to sides doing an absolutelly normal exchange (or even a gifting) and there is a 3rd party, not physicially present and never met, seen or otherwise involved with either which the powers of the land say is supposed to authorize that exchange and get a cut if it so wishes, and which both parties of that exchange choose to ignore.
It's not theft because both parties on the exchange are conducting a normal exchange just like they do with all other classes of thin and both are abidding by it. The closest "normal" illegality to copyroght violation is tax evasion and not tax in a democratic nation (were the money goes into the common pot to help everybody) but rather tax in an absolute monarchy or dictatorship were whomever was supposed to get that cut from that transaction is going to keep the money and even then the analogy fails because your're also supposed to give that 3rd party money even when GIFTING something.