Posts by Mark Harris
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Oh yes. Big surprise there ;-)
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Apropos KiwiPolitico - can't say the comments are adding anything to the posts thus far...
I saw Redbaiter in the "Recent Comments" list and thought "Why bother?"
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Corporates have been a massive, indeed dominant, part of music copyright since, oh, about 1850 (just ask Stephen Foster's heirs). In the US and the UK the huge publishing houses utterly controlled the use, dissemination and remuneration from, written musical composition. Not sure how much more it could be obscured in their favour.
True, for music and for a lesser extent books. There are many other things that have become part of copyright, and patents, such as gene sequences, medicines, chemical processes and plants. The markets for these things have exploded since the 60's
Stephen Foster's is a sad tale, but not directly related. As a pioneer professional songwriter, he fell afoul of the fact that America was a pirate nation and had been since its inception. Copyright should have prevented what happened to him but no-one thought too much about it until after he was dead.
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Dammit, I'd forgotton that one. Fair enough. But how often?
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I doubt that RIAA and others have been promoting the word "theft" accidentally.
Precisely. By framing the argument in 'emotional' terms, they've managed to obscure the substance of the debate, which is about the nature of copyright in a world of non-scarcity.
The use of the term "intellectual property" seems to date from the 60's and the Chicago School of Economics, in which everything can be reduced to stuff that can be bought and sold. Nothing else has value, under this philosophy.
I'll be interested to see any use of the term "intellectual property" predating 1960, and the earliest common use appears to be around the establishment of WIPO in 1965. My view is that it's always been a deliberate attempt to obscure the nature of copyright in favour of large corporates.
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sorry, mouse slipped
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Well, I could quote Proudhon and say that private property is theft. Which is representative of a current of thought that still has come purchase, even in liberal states who formulate redistributive inheritance laws or similar policies.
Which brings us full circle to the beginning of the copyright thread where we argued about copyright being a property right (which it isn't) or a social contract (which it is).
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Well, I could quote Proudhon and say that private property is theft. Which is representative of a current of thought that still has come purchase, even in liberal states who formulate redistributive inheritance laws or similar policies.
Which brings us full circle to the beginning of the copyright thread where we argued about copyright being a property right (which it isn't) or a social contract (which it is).
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Well, I could quote Proudhon and say that private property is theft.
Proudhon doesn't make law.
You can discuss the nature of theft if it rocks your socks. What I object to is the equating of copyright infringement with theft.
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It's good to know that downloading music and TV shows that you haven't paid for isn't a moral issue. I feel much better about doing it now.
Not what I said, and you know it. My point is that it's not theft.