Comment by matheusmoreira

Comment by matheusmoreira 4 days ago

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Yeah I agree with you.

> It's like the idea that the sculptor doesn't create the sculpture, the sculpture was there all along, he just had to remove the superfluous matter to reveal what was already there (i.e. the atoms belonging to the final sculpture).

I understand this argument but I have far more trouble applying this logic to real things. I'm not sure the same logic applies once the information is instantiated in the real world as a physical object. I haven't thought very deeply about it. I think the true sculpture exists only in the ideal world and the real world object is merely an approximation of it.

> Of course this is silly

It's an existential issue for me. At some point it became a political issue. I became a copyright abolitionist because of this insight. Copyright is logically reducible to monopolistic ownership of numbers. The sheer absurdity of it led me to reject the very idea of intellectual property as delusional nonsense.

saghm 4 days ago

I'm not sure the law has ever been concerned with logical reducibility. Context that can't easily been defined objectively has always been a part of legal systems, and arguably is a feature rather than a bug. Stuff like the "reasonable person" standard are intentionally flawed concepts that allow laws to exist without needing to define every possible permutation of human behavior up front. This obviously doesn't mean that you won't necessarily look at everything and decide to be an anarchist because of how convoluted it all is, but I don't think that being mathematically inconsistent is particularly unique to copyright in the legal system.

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  • bonoboTP 4 days ago

    Exactly, it's a common failure mode for math/programming-minded people when encountering the law. But the law is not like a compiler, mechanically following some fully-specified set of rules.

    The legal system is rather the spiritual successor of the original "system" where a wise Solomon-like elder would adjugate the issue based on their best judgment and intuition and customs, ideally seeking peace and social satisfaction and future harmony. Codified law channels this into some more pre-shaped form, but the fuel of the legal system is still the human judgment and common sense at the core. Often the law basically just prompts and nudges the judgment of the jurors or judge to a certain direction, but it can't account for all corner cases. The nerd mind asks ok ok but what if X, where do you draw the sharp line between X and Y? It doesn't matter. If it comes up, a court will decide it based on all available common sense and the implicit values of the culture.

    In the cases where someone seemingly gets away with "rules-lawyering", then it's not purely their genius logic-brain that wins, but there is some kind of slanted playing field that's not really available to you. Of course the line between "annoying rules-lawyering based on literal interpretation of technicalities that obviously nobody intended to be interpreted so" and something that was not anticipated initially but does fit within the rules. This decision itself is based on judgment and intuition. In life, sometimes coming up with a "technically works" thing is rewarded and lauded (math proofs, pathological counterexamples, cracking an encryption library via side-channel attacks), other times you get an eye-roll and that's obviously cheating and wasn't meant (e.g. courts of law and fun at parties).

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bonoboTP 4 days ago

Copyright is not "ownership of numbers". "Intellectual property" is a misnomer. Copyright is an instrumental tool to achieve specific socially desirable things, namely the flourishing of scientific and artistic activity. It's a relatively modern creation, born of enlightenment-style principles in the 18th century. If it were still used according to that spirit, we'd have less problems.

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  • PeterStuer 3 days ago

    Others would say copyright is an instrumental tool to stifle the flourishing of open scientific and artistic activity. Scientific and artistic activity seems to flourish just fine in environments with less copyright.

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    • matheusmoreira 3 days ago

      It flourishes better in fact. Plenty of industries were started in specific locations because of lax intellectual property laws. Including the United States: the father of the american industrial revolution is just a guy who brought british intellectual property with him.

      Intellectual property is just rent seeking by established corporations as well as protection against competition so that others can't enter the market. The days where they protected individual creators and inventors are long gone.

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skydhash 4 days ago

I'm close to you on that opinion, but there's another factor: Life and its sustenance. There's a lot of mechanisms in the body to ensure that life continues, including pain and desire. But the fact is resources that sustain life are finite. There's a lot of proxies for the act of acquiring such resources and laws like copyright is the legal framework for these proxies.

It's basically creating value out of nowhere in lieu of resources that are truly valuable, but inconvenient to trade directly. But then like a metrics that got corrupted (I forgot the name of the law for that), there are other that are trying to game the system (and succeeding) so that they can maximize their share.

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