On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 5:21 PM, Louigi Verona <louigi.verona@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Your thinking is in the right direction. Indeed, if you are given a book under contract, then you have to abide by the contract. But let's say you decided to break the agreement and copied the book on the Internet or gave it to your friends. All those people made no contract with the author and thus they cannot be and should not be bound by the contract. What copyright does is bind third parties, which never agreed to the contract.
Yes this was the point I was getting to. But I would disagree that copyright itself binds third parties. The current implementation via legislation and execution may do so, but that is a mistake in implementation and not in principle. Implementations can be refined so long as the principles are sound.
There are other cases. Public broadcasting is one. You turn on your TV and see Harry Potter. You were not presented with any contract. Why should you be bound by any conditions? If the author of Harry Potter wanted to distribute her book only under contract obligations, she should not have let it broadcast on TV.
It is widely accepted public knowledge that the material on television is covered under copyright. I know this when I turn it on, except for when I am very young perhaps. So there is a contract in the same way that as you say, "some things are just out there". Also the credits for television programs and films contain explicit copyright information. TV is not public domain, it is for the most part a private system of distribution that most mentally functioning adults know the conditions of use for when we buy a TV.
The other case is the one I mentioned - someone breaking a contract.
There are other options, like accidents. You leave a book on a bench. Unless the book itself contains a full blown contract in it, there is no way for Joe who finds the book to know. In fact, even if the contract is in the book, Joe did not sign it.
I assume this is explicitly why copyright information is placed at the beginning of books. And again, this is a flaw with the implementation if Joe were to be punished in such a case, and not with the principle itself. Further there is a way for Joe to know if he pays attention at all throughout life, as copyright is a well known fact of cultural life. Pleading ignorance in such a case is not a sufficient defense.
Additionally, some things are just out there. You invent something. The other person sees it. He has no contract with you. Why should he restrict actions with his own body and his own property? What legitimate reason is there to not act on a new knowledge you have?
My understanding is that this is the reason why the distinction between ideas and the execution of them is made in copyright and patent law.
Finally, if each time you enter a store and decide to buy a DVD, you were explicitly told that you will not simply be able to share copies, but that you should agree to not use the knowledge you gain from the DVD and act as if you have no such knowledge, I am not sure most people would agree.
You watch Harry Potter. And, according to the contract a typical copyright proponent would want you to sign, you hen have no right to act on the knowledge you have acquired, namely, the plot, ideas, characters. All of this is knowledge you now have in your brain. Copyright wants you to pretend you only have this information in read-only format.
Seems like a strawman to me. There are reasonable copyright proponents who don't think suing people for acting on the knowledge of a plotline is a reasonable thing to do, unless that action consists of seeking monetary gain by directly copying the original content. Yes, there are also unprincipled types who will look for any legal justification to gouge and increase profit lines, but this has very little to do with copyright itself.
To be clear, I don't consider myself a copyright proponent as such. But I do think that if a group of people wants to enter into a collective agreement to share content in a certain way, that should be their right. If I happen to come onto some of that content without having entered into their covenant, then that community should take action against the one who made that content available to me. If I take the content in full knowledge that such a covenant exists, then I am acting inappropriately So yes, I consider it a bad habit when I download an unpaid-for copy of a copyrighted artwork in full knowledge that such copyright exists. The reason I might do it is that I have desire, but desire in itself is not a justification to deny the value of content. If anything, I think we should recognize that creative content that produces desire does have real value, and that is the reason we are so keen to copy it in the first place.
Anyway, this has all gotten way off the Linux Audio track, so I'll leave it at that.
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