You have the option to sell your ideas in the marketplace because the
law maintains a monopoly for you. I think you're confusing which came
first, intellectual property law or the marketplace. Most of us have
grown up in cultures that pretty much take for granted the idea that
ideas can be owned, but the concept that something like a novel or a
song exists immaterially, can be owned, and that the distribution of its
physical manifestation can be controlled are relatively new. People
created works of art before there were any such legal protections. I'm
not necessarily saying we should abolish intellectual property, but it
should be clear that the idea of intellectual property is problematic. I
believe in contracts. It isn't apparent that these kinds of contracts
are so great, and the implications of the monopolistic control of images
and ideas are actually rather frightening. I understand how it sucks
that some people download terabytes of music and don't give a dime to
anyone involved in its production, but calling that stealing still
doesn't legitimize the concept of copyright itself (the fact that it is
a law doesn't make it legitimate). And no, it's not the same thing as
stealing to download music when CDs containing the same music exist. I
don't think it's all that relevant how large or small a label or artist
is. Laws should apply equally to everyone. I don't blindly accept the
laws, though. When you bring up laws against violence and for suffrage,
are you saying that the creation of new laws necessarily promotes
progress towards something better, and if so, whose idea of "better?"
-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff/Ninja Tune [mailto:jeff@ninjatune.net]
Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2003 5:41 PM
To: idm@hyperreal.org
Subject: Re: [idm] Indie Ethics
Look the way I see it, if someone spends money to create something and
they put it in the marketplace to profit from that creation then
anything that doesn't involve the exchange of money for it qualifies as
a form of stealing. If they wanted to give it away for free then it
should be their choice as to whether they want to do so, not arbitrarily
decided by people with access to the ability to do so.
I'm not going to get all heavy about it as I see all sorts of negative
and positive aspects to file sharing/swapping (mostly positive at this
particular juncture of its history), but can we at least admit that when
one obtains something for free when that thing exists in the physical
realm with a price tag attached then it technically is stealing.
And yes copyright laws were made by the people standing to benefit from
them, but then murder laws were presumably made by the people who didn't
want to be murdered, and that whole allowing woman to vote law was
probably made by some woman who wanted to vote....
Jeff
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