For a law to be meaningful, it takes the following conditions:
- There is a large consensus in society about the moral legitimacy of its motives and stipulations,
- The law effectively serves society’s interests,
- The law has a reasonable degree of enforceability.
It appears that Intellectual property laws - and particularly the copyright part - do not meet any of those conditions.
1) In terms of moral grounds, the concept of intellectual property is far from having unanimous support. Thomas Jefferson, for example questioned its validity in the process of writing the Constitution of the USA, stating that allowing such thing as copyrights and patents accounted to allowing the Government to grant monopoly privileges (albeit for a limited time) to private entities. Let’s look at what he wrote:
“If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”
https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12.htmlFrom this perspective, we can see how specious is the rhetorical ploy used by Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) proponents of equating IP infringement to theft: if someone steals my car, he deprives me of the use of that car, as well as the object car (as a tangible asset bearing a financial value); but if someone posts a digital copy of my work available for download on the web or a torrent website, it doesn’t prevent me from selling further legit copies on the market, (at most will it diminish the demand for such paid-for legit copies); nor does it, obviously, strip me of the revenue I have already obtained from said work. In other words, “piracy” may hurt my opportunities but not my assets. This is how the theft-analogy is fallacious.
Intuitively the public understands that, hence our reluctance to buy into the copyright lobbies’ propaganda: Indeed we wouldn’t steal a car but we download copyright content for free because those are two totally different things. Pro-copyright lobbies wanting to equate them are disingenuously oversimplifying a complex matter (not mentioning that trying to convince the masses by telling them in the first place that they are criminals is a curious concept of communication…)
Another moral issue with IPR regulation is the duration of said rights, leading to the kind of absurd occurrence that this thread is all about.
2) As far as society’s interests are concerned, proponents of IPR argue that this institution promotes science, literature and artistic creation by allowing researchers, authors, artists and creators to receive a financial compensation for their work, therefore an incentive to creation. Notwithstanding the corporate hypocrisy that it entails (considering that actually the portion of copyright royalties that actually goes to creators is ridiculously small compared to what the publishing or production company racks in!); the argument is based on two assumptions that are clearly unevidenced:
- that financial incentive is what drives intellectual creation;
- and that there is no alternative model other than IPR to financially compensate the creators.
Those two implied claims are obviously refuted by the simple fact that the concept of Copyright has been present for only over two centuries and this didn’t prevent genius creators to do their thing and make a living off it before.
Actually one could argue that, it’s precisely during the period since copyright was invented that in music, notably, we haven’t seen anymore of these geniuses. It’s a slippery slope to say that the two facts are correlated but it wouldn’t take a far-fetched argumentation to try to explain such correlation.
3) Regarding enforceability, the recent progress of information technology is such that any attempt to detect and track down IP infringement requires regulation that is going against other legal fundamental principles such as privacy, freedom of speech and freedom of information and even the presumption of innocence.
The American Entertainment industry, through the US Government is pushing a piece of global regulation named ACTA that, ironically contains provisions inviting states to resort to the same kind of eavesdropping and censorship practices that the Chinese regime uses to restrict internet freedom. The “free world” supports Google, with reason, in its struggle against Chinese authorities but in the mean time emulates the same Chinese to promote special interests’ agenda. Sounds inconsistent.
Insisting on carrying on a model that fails at making sense for most of the people, that at times creates injustice and that anyway is not even reasonably enforceable, seems not to be a very smart attitude.
When printing appeared, storytellers had to change jobs. Science and technology are fundamental game-changers and failing at acknowledging that is suicide. You can’t change things back, you have to move forward even though it’s not easy and forces you to fundamentally modify your way of thinking.
Topic: Youtube and Copyright