>Making money from producing entertainment isn't a human right.

No, but at least in the U.S., and most of the rest of the world, it is a legal right. Does that count for nothing just because we're on the internet?

Human rights exist regardless of whether a particular legal framework honors them. Everyone has the right to speech, including the right to the private transmission of data, the right to assemble to pursue common interests, etc. Those rights have limitations when it comes to harming people, but people aren't being harmed by any particular copy of Duck Dynasty S06E03.

The thing being harmed here is a business model. I vehemently disagree that someone should be fined or imprisoned in the name of a business model, especially an entertainment one. If the law says that's what happens, the law is unjust.

That being said, copying things that aren't yours without permission is a jerk thing to do. That shouldn't make you a criminal, however.

Do business models not pay people's salaries? Is this not an interest worth protecting? I think you're view is in trouble (or at least, extremely radical) if it depends on the premise that no law that protects only financial interests can result in imprisonment.

I think this is actually the one (perhaps only) point where copyright infringement is actually analogous to theft. Why do we prohibit shoplifting? Because shoplifting prevents a business owner from profiting off of the thing he had intended to sell, in addition to depriving him of his investment in the inventory (of course, no business owner cares much about his inventory for its own sake, he cares about it because it represents potential profit).

As many will be eager to point out, intellectual property is not finite. But this only means that you're depriving the IP owner of less profit than you would be if it were a tangible good, not that it deprives him of none. You might just as well say, oh well the thief would never have bought that DVD anyway, and the business owner has millions of them (and insurance!), so it's not really something the law should worry about... Also see mc32's sibling comment with some other excellent examples.

I am distinguishing between financial interests and financial prospects. Financial interests are a form of property: shares in companies, contractually entitled benefits, etc.

Financial prospects are things like next year's record sales. "Past performance does not necessarily predict future results" and all that.

Business models exist to help predict the future. That's why their called business models and not business facts. To imprison someone because she didn't fall in line with your plans for the future is a terrible thing to do.

Contrast this with actual theft of real money. It was yours, now you don't have it. That's harming your financial interests and violating your inalienable rights to property and the freedom to use it at your own discretion.

grandparent said that he disagreed with people being imprisoned or fined for copyright infringement.

Those are punishments.

Asking the violator to cough up the retail price of the pirated product on the other hand wouldn't be a punishment for criminal acts, it would be solving a civil dispute.

Of course making this work at scale is not something that can be done in courts. And making unilateral claims sufficient to require someone to pay up is a bad idea too.

That's why some propose a general copyright levy, or a "culture tax" that gets redistributed to producers.

> That's why some propose a general copyright levy, or a "culture tax" that gets redistributed to producers.

Except then you have to have a great big state bureaucracy to arbitrarily allocate tax funds.

No, the correct solution is still free information - but all it takes is a change of perspective and mindset on the parts of content creators.

You have a valuable, scarce, useful asset. It is not the infinitely reproducible digital information at the end of the process that you use a legal framework to restrict distribution of. People want that, but information is no longer scarce, and to try to restrict it is unethical.

The valuable resource you have is your creativity. Your ability to produce that digital information is a scarce resource that few possess. The current model that most creators pursue is that an investor of some sort seeks to take advantage of the arbitrage the artificial implications that copyright imparts upon free markets to profit off the perpetual legal ownership of information, and pays you either a fixed salary or a fraction of the returns to actually produce the work, in exchange for the up front funding.

Kickstarter, patreon, gittip, etc are demonstrating the ability for consumers of information to also pay the scarce resource - the creation - themselves. And it would make a lot more sense for consumers to just pay for the culture they want to be made directly, and then everyone can experience it - rather than having some state institution doing it.

No, those current platforms are not appropriate to replace copyright. Of course they are not. They exist under copyright. We cannot conceive of what it would look like to have a legitimate free culture patronage service because one cannot exist right now. But I wrote this post and a bunch of others and keep debating the topic because I fundamentally have faith it would work, and that the ongoing cultural death of western civilization since the advent of perpetual copyright is much more detrimental to society than the free availability of Jersey Shore.

I think I could support such a thing. But I also think GGP needs to come up with something better than "no criminal punishment for interfering with another's profit" to support it. That cuts far too wide to be plausible, I think. Why not this more narrow and, I think, more obvious claim? Prison is disproportionate to the harm caused by copyright infringement.

Depriving someone of profit isn't a crime though. If I choose not to buy your product, I am depriving you of that profit. If I make a better product and consumers choose mine over yours, I'm depriving you of profit. Neither of these things is or should be illegal.

>The thing being harmed here is a business model.

But everything is a "business model." If you get paid for work performed, that's a "business model". Should I be free to upset that business model? Can I talk to someone's employer and convince them to pay me 20% of someone's salary without their permission?

Rihanna shows up for an event, a promoter promised her 50,000 for showing up and singing 60 seconds of a song and signing a few autographs. Can this promoter turn around and say, sorry, I was kidding, I don't have money for you, it was just entertainment, here's your cab and airfare?

We can reduce things till they lose some of their properties and our arguments appear reasonable, but most people will disagree with that reduction, I think.

I'm not arguing against business models as a concept. I'm arguing that any particular business model does not overrule the natural rights to speech, privacy, and property (arguably, legal DRM cartels violate my right to own and modify my own property).

All your examples involve fraud, so they don't really apply here. If I promised to pay someone for work and didn't pay them, I deserve to lose a lawsuit and be forced to make restitution. In certain circumstances, the fraud is criminal and I deserve jail time for preying on the vulnerable or uninformed.

There may be counterexamples worth addressing, though. Can someone can come up with one? They probably involve at least the threat of tangible harm in some form. And arguably, there are already laws against those things, such as your fraud examples.

>arguably, legal DRM cartels violate my right to own and modify my own property

I think DRM is more analogous to leasing. I don't like DRM, there being alternatives I'd go with the unDRMed product/service. But it's up to us the consumers to say, yeah, I'll make that deal or no, I won't make that deal because it's unfair to me. We could also call for legislation to make DRM unattractive to DR holders as well -but unilateral action is not the solution.

>All your examples involve fraud, so they don't really apply here.

True, but if an artist or distributor in essence "says" I'll exchange music with you for compensation but you don't hold your end of the understanding, that's arguably fraud. In the Rihanna example, let's say the promoter says, in lieu of cash, I'm giving you exposure which I think is equivalent to 50,000 that does not absolve the promoter? She expected cash, not exposure to an audience who might represent future sales.

Making money from media is NOT a legal right. You don't have a right to profit.

You have the right to attempt to profit from it and exclude others from doing the same with your work.

That's all copyright provides. A limited right to an opportunity to make money, granted to you by society so you can make more of that work if society (by proxy of "The Market") deems your works as successful.

This right is granted to you because it's considered beneficial to society as a whole, because it incentivizes you to create more and ultimately have all the things you produced released into the public domain once your limited right expires.

So you're not getting the right to copyright because it's a natural right, you're getting it as part of a contract with society. The question is whether that contract is worth it to restrict speech, to have all the side-effects of the DMCA, to put people in prison, to slap families who pirated a few songs with 200k$ fines etc.

Let's say some people are questioning the tradeoff being made, at least in its current state.

> Making money from media is NOT a legal right. You don't have a right to profit.

> You have the right to attempt to profit from it and exclude others from doing the same with your work.

I think this is a distinction without a difference when the context is whether someone can interfere with your "attempt" to profit by violating your right to exclude others.

The context is that it's just a legal right and not a human one. It's one that society constructed for a purpose and then got extended further and further over time for commercial purposes.

People's moral compass does not always align with what's legal and at some point they may simply start ignoring the law.

Which is what's happening with copyright.

> Making money from producing entertainment isn't a human right.

I don't know why you claim this is some sort of absolute fact. Whether "human rights" are made up or inherent, it seems plausible to me that being able to take ownership of creative works could be a natural right the same as having ownership of physical property would be.

I've explained it elsewhere, but a business model is a projection of future results, it's not actual property. I think the burden of proof is on the claimant when someone says that protecting business models is more important than protecting freedom of speech (sharing documents), freedom of privacy (no combing through my documents), or the freedom of movement (not being in prison).

As far as a critique on whether human right exist or what they are if they do, that's way out of scope for this topic. But I'll say that it's hard to have any morality without some concept of human rights, whether that term is used or not.

I didn't say a business model was property. I said that intellectual property is plausibly property or something that people could have a right to. In fact, since copyright as intellectual property is a virtually infinite, highly-dimensional landscape, it should arguably have more absolutist protection than physical property, because monopolizing a unit of intellectual property won't prevent other people from getting their own.

And real property ownership interferes with freedom to travel the same way that copyright property interferes with freedom to send arbitrary bit sequences, only moreso. All of that was claimed and defended by violence too, so if you're going to make an argument along those lines you're going to have to find something that distinguishes copyright property from real property. From what I can see copyright seems like a much more benign form of ownership.

> But I'll say that it's hard to have any morality without some concept of human rights, whether that term is used or not.

No it isn't. You could just go pure utilitarian, or you could say people have no intrinsic rights but we should be nice to them anyways.

What makes entertainment so special? How is a hollywood movie different from any other product, like your laptop, smartphone, or even your web-app you charge money for?

> even your web-app you charge money for?

Great example! With AWS the incremental cost of supporting each additional user approaches $0. So it's okay for people to use your $10/month web app, paying you the $0.05 or whatever covers their AWS costs? After all, as long as your hosting costs are covered, you're not any worse off, you've just lost the opportunity to make a sale.

The rightful owners of stolen physical property lose their possessions. The owners of copied data aren't deprived of their data.

Using a web-app without permission usually falls under contract violation or fraud. Maybe trespassing in some exotic cases.

Preventing the scraping the data from a web app (actually a political issue in Spain and Germany right now) shouldn't be more important than basic human rights like the freedom of speech. Nobody has the right to ownership of facts, for example.