Dennis Hackethal

Yes they are leeches

When is it "my own words?"

When you come up with it yourself. Like are you doing right now with your messages (to which you own the copyright, btw, unless the Veritula terms disagree, I’d have to double check).

What's "original"?

Drawing stick figures is not, writing down a completely new text with new concepts is. There are some gray areas but again (#1403), that doesn’t mean copyright doesn’t make sense as a whole.

Why 70 years after the author's death?

That seems excessive to me too, but you can thank lobbyists for that. Doesn’t mean copyright doesn’t make sense as a whole.

Ignorance of the law is not generally a legal defense, afaik.

If it were, any criminal could simply claim he didn’t know what he was doing was illegal. Which would be arbitrary.

Which brings us, again, to the purpose of the law: to prevent and address the arbitrary in social life (#1345).

Copyright is a well known law in widespread use.

Copyright doesn’t prevent people from talking about someone else’s text in their own words, as much as they want.

No. Copyright never prevents consenting parties from sharing text freely as long as everyone agrees that that’s ok (see #1330).

Copyright prevents the flow of ideas/information.

If someone steals a bike and then gifts it to you that doesn’t mean the owner can’t have it back just because you didn’t steal it. Same for copyright.

Not like signing NDA since you are free to talk about the ideas in the book in your own words, but kinda like breach of contract yeah.

If you’re looking for someone to assuage your guilt over having pirated copyrighted content in the past, you won’t get that from me.

Ok let’s rewind the clock and say JK Rowling has finished writing Harry Potter but she hasn’t published it yet.

And she says: I’m going to publish and sell this book on condition that anyone who buys it not distribute it further. They can read it but they can’t redistribute it without my permission.

Those are the terms of publication. It’s a contract. And anyone who buys the book is then bound by the contract.

She would not publish the book otherwise.

She created a value and she wants to trade that value for something specific (money in exchange for reading, not redistributing).

Others are free to take her up on the offer or ignore her.

Because she owns the copyright.

Your perspective on whether she loses anything really doesn’t matter. That’s the same even for cold hard property. If I exchange your tic tacs for $1,000,000 without your consent, you only win, you didn’t lose, but it’s still theft.

You’re violating her rights: specifically, her copyright. That’s an aggression.

Yes.

Credit is a different matter from copyright. Plagiarism and copyright infringement aren’t the same thing.

I should be clear though that it is only right for the law to interfere with property to protect others’ rights. It’s not right for the law to confiscate your money to collect taxes, say.

So… the law extending to others’ property is nothing new and not totalitarian in and of itself.

Right, like preventing you from murdering them.

Some people abuse the letter of the law to violate the spirit of the law, but that doesn’t mean the corresponding laws are bad per se. Those are problems, errors that can be corrected.

So if someone publishes a blog post falsely but believably accusing you of being a pedophile and then all your business partners stop talking to you and you lose all your money and your friends and family ghost you, you wouldn’t want to have any legal recourse?