Political Bloviation

 Often the case is made that violating a copyright is just like stealing. It’s not the same in the sense that downloading a copy of song doesn’t deprive someone else the use of it in the same way that taking a car would deprive the owner of it’s use.  The related argument that allowing copyright violation will prevent artists from creating is dubious at best. There’s no shortage of people who write, sing and act without payment. Perhaps we wouldn’t get quite as many multi-million dollar special effect laden Hollywood films, but art would not grind to a halt. The notion that content once released to the world in digital format can be controlled is both silly and counter-productive. As quickly as content producers can develop a new method of securing content, hackers find a way to defeat it. Right now millions of people circumvent, ignore and mock current copyright law. Until copyright is made match the moral stand intuited by the masses enforcement will fail.

History suggests copyright crusade is a lost cause - Ars Technica
The fundamental lesson is that property rights are not—and never have been—created by Congressional fiat. Property rights emerge spontaneously from the social fabric of a community. The job of the legislature is not to create a property system from scratch, but to formalize the property arrangements that communities have already agreed upon among themselves. A system of property rights will only be effective if it is widely viewed as legitimate.

If copyrights are a form of property right, then the history of American property rights provides clues about how the copyright system will need to evolve in the future. It suggests that Congress’s current strategy of imposing ever more draconian penalties for breaking laws that lack broad public support is a recipe for failure. Congress may be forced to concede, as it did two centuries ago, that property law must accommodate the actions of ordinary Americans, and not the other way around.

The LA Times published  an op-ed piece about this last month.

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