13 Feb
2013
13 Feb
'13
9:21 a.m.
I'm not sure I buy this argument.
Allow me to play devil's advocate, as I'm not sure I fully agree with the
position I'm about to present.
If I never see your writing, there is no way for me to copy it. In order
to copy it I must first see it. If you were to make your writing available
only under a conditional contract of sale (copyright) that states the
writing is not to be shared with anyone else, and that contract of sale is
made known prior to any exchange of said writing, then the only people that
ever see this writing and will be "forcefully" bound to the contractual
agreement are those that agree with it. No one is forced to not copy it if
they don't buy it, and by buying they enter into a contract of sale. In
other words, copyright does not try to remove things from the public
domain, it tries to prevent them from entering into the public domain in
the first place by restricting the sharing of those things to a community
of people who respect the conditions of it being shared.
The only cases where I feel like your argument could hold is when I am
forced to read or listen to your work due to public broadcasting. However,
except for perhaps some severe fascist states, it rarely happens that
people are forcefully exposed to media in the first place that they are
then denied the right to copy it against their will.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
--
Louigi Verona
http://www.louigiverona.ru/