On Feb 12, 2013 11:12 PM, "Louigi Verona" <louigi.verona@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hey James!
>
> Kinsella argues copyright from the point of view of non-aggression, i.e.
> property rights.
Aggressive to whom? It doesn't answer the concern I raised.
Suppose: I own a DVD burner and a stack of blank DVDs. Kinsella would say that it's my right to do *anything I want* with these material goods. If I want to increase the value of the blank DVDs by printing onto them content created by someone else, that's *just fine* because I own the material goods. If I then sell these newly-valuable DVDs for higher than the cost of the blank ones, I am earning a profit. The work that I did to earn that profit is a tiny iota of the work that went into the content that I used, but I am making money off of it and I am not paying the people who did the hard work.
I benefit, but I didn't pay (either by paying the author or by adding my own work to make something new, as Fair Use or Creative Commons allow). That's... theft. And the author is justified in feeling violated. If it is an aggressive act to punish me for using MY dvd burner to make money from someone else's work, why is it not an aggressive act to steal that work in the first place? Kinsella has a simple answer: Possession is everything. Creative labor counts for nothing. Like all simple answers to hard problems, it's wrong.
Ask a third grader if it's right for his desk mate to get a grade for work that he didn't do. That will tell you what is fair by common sense.
It's a necessary consequence of Kinsella's argument that some idiot with a DVD burner can spend a few hours copying content he didn't create, and he has exercised his inviolable property right while the people who made that profit possible -- on the basis of years of training and practice -- are screwed. They get nothing. If this is fair, then fairness has no meaning. (I am ignoring your follow-up email for this reason. To respond to it would not further the discussion.)
(Note here, I'm beating Kinsella at his own game. His main stratagem is to start with assertions that seem to be common sense, and lead them to a surprising conclusion. I've done that to his premises, leading to the conclusion that certain forms of theft deserve legal protection. Common sense objects to the conclusion, making it highly likely that either the premises or the reasoning, or both, are mistaken.)
Copyright is not a good solution, and the media industry's abuse of copyright is appalling. But the failure of copyright to solve the problem does not mean that there is no problem.
> As pointed out on my site, producing IP is necessary. How will people get paid?
> In various different ways. Just like they get paid now. In Russia copyright law is
> not enforced that much, yet Russia has scientists, composers, actors and movie directors.
> So they must be getting paid somehow.
Like you, I don't know what is the solution. I simply object to Kinsella's denial that creative labor is worth anything.
hjh
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