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Round and round it goes...
It might pay to look at the three examples in terms of who's being deprived. If you pinch something from a local shop, you're basically lifting something from the storeholder's pocket, food from their table. If you defraud an insurance company, you're becoming part of a statistic which is factored into the cost of doing business, and it's hard to identify exactly who pays - everyone, probably, subsidises your new laptop to the tune of a few pence in the annual insurance payments they make. And in the case of P2P, there's often no loser, because some piece of music from 1947, the rights to which are lost in darkness, has just regained a lease on life. Or, of course, you're stealing from a record company which prints CDs for tuppence hapenny, and then sell them for twenty quid a shot.
Stealing in potential isn't stealing? Not such a great line. Does that mean that if I steal someone's wages before the cheque is written, that isn't really depriving them of anything because they never saw the money? Non.
Does copyright stifle or protect creativity? Both, of course. It seeks to encourage creativity by allowing someone to be identified as the author of a work (a notion many here have a problem with) and protects that author's right to ownership of what is original in that work (ditto, ditto) and so on. At the same time, it seeks to prevent passing off, devaluation, and infringement, and thus could be said to stifle works inspired by and building on that foundation, blah blah. There are separate arguments here:
1. is there a need to protect the right of a creative to make money from that process? Yes, given the world we live in and our desire for good, well-finished, actualised creative entertainments and technologies.
2. what is the moral or spiritual relationship between a person and their ideas? What rights, if any, does the having of an idea and the actualisation of it confer upon the creative worker? In copyright, just having an idea isn't enough to give you rights. You have to formulate it, and (roughly) the more involved and finished the formulation, the stronger the claim. A cigarette-pack sketch is one thing, a manuscript another. There's also nothing to protect you from someone having the same idea at the same time. I have suggested that the creative process is a matter of ideational exploration and self-generation, and that the creative product is an artefact of the creator's identity, hence the fierce possessiveness of many creatives regarding their work. It may not be a good idea for the law to seek to control this aspect of creativity in society, but if the law doesn't society itself and individual creatives must recognise some kind of boundary line between what is fair use and what is invasion. This inevitably brings on a rash of discussions about privilege and identity in problematised situations.
3. how practical is any copyright law? Some are point blank unenforceable, and there's a great deal of drift in one direction or another anyway. Corporate bodies such as the RIAA and the big pharmas keep trying to say that everything belongs to them forever, individuals and NGOs and less developed nations keeps saying it doesn't. Any answers to the questions of copyright and ownership of creativity must be practical - although it will also have to social.
As to "property is theft" - collective ownership, thus far, has always ultimately meant that something belongs to no one, rather than being held in common. Rather than each invididual having a stake, it seems to come down to the collective entity owning everything, with the consequence that everyone steals, and the collective chest is empty - see The Oceans, The Atmosphere. |
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