Dennis Hackethal

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?

But it isn’t scarce in a physical sense.

Reputation is scarce in the sense that it’s limited.

Take someone’s reputation. That isn’t a ‘scarce’ thing yet it’s a good thing there are laws against defamation.

Duplicate of #1346.

Imagine living on a flat planet that extends infinitely in all directions.

Land is not scarce on this planet.

You build a house, mixing your labor with an acre of land. Someone comes and takes your land, saying you have no cause for complaint since land isn’t scarce.

See how scarcity isn’t necessary for something to be property?

It’s right for the law to address and prevent the arbitrary, and that’s about more than just property. See #1345.

But the law against murder isn’t a dumb law even though it doesn’t refer to someone’s body being scarce property.

If current law isn’t based on what you claim it’s based on then that does make it less true.

I do expect innovation to suffer from current copyright infringement, yes. Just add up all the infringed copies being shared times the average price, that’s the damage being done and it discourages creators from creating more.

Ridiculous definition of murder. Please cite a legal text where the definition of murder invokes scarce property.

But digital money isn’t physically scarce like someone’s body. Your argument rests on physical property being special in some way.

Laws (against murder and other crimes) don’t reduce to physical property.

Libertarians often think that the purpose of the law is ONLY to define and enforce property rights. In reality, the purpose of the law is to prevent and address the arbitrary in social life.

It’s true that it would be arbitrary if anyone could just take your property against your will, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only kind of arbitrariness the law should prevent/address.