> Copyright is not about morality

That seems like a weirdly narrow definition of morality, maybe due to the long association with the Christianity and the faith's retreat from the public sphere.

I prefer the definition of morality as the set of shared rules and norms that we as a society decide are to our mutual benefit. In that case, laws and morality are absolutely closely intertwined.

If indeed there was broad consensus that copyright law as it exists in the United States right now is to everyone's benefit, there might be a moral obligation to follow that law.

But all I see is a bunch of interest groups trying to pretend that there is a consensus and painting anyone who disagrees as a modern day Jack Sparrow. It's easy to manufacture a consensus if all the opponents are criminals, isn't it?

I don't deny that there might be some kind of broad consensus on the issue of copyright. I just don't think that the content of it will be anywhere near what the law of the United States currently says.

I agree, yet to say that 'copyright law is is currently not moral' is a very different claim than 'copyright law and morality are unrelated'. Most of our discussions of whether something should be law or not imply morality at some level (e.g. 'copyright law is wrong because...', 'this law is evil', etc.)

I didn't say "copyright law and morality are unrelated." Everything is related to morality at some level, so I don't think it adds anything interesting to say that copyright is either related or unrelated to morality in that roundabout way.

I said "Copyright is not about morality." Copyright is about promoting creativity first and foremost. It has zero moral value apart from whatever starlight it might reflect from the more fundamental value of creativity when it's in the right point along its orbit (when it works effectively).

Suppose you're building a startup to help poor people. That's obviously about morality. But how about your choice of javascript framework? You just use whatever floats your MVP without torturing your devs too much. And as soon as it outlives its usefulness, you can throw it away without a second thought and there's nothing morality has to say about it.

I think where I depart from your analogy is that copyright law has been explicitly framed and discussed using the language of morality by both proponents and opponents.

E.g. copyright maximalists say that pirates are thieves, that they unjustly take from content creators what is rightfully theirs.

Copyright opponents will say that this is a cash grab by greedy corporations, that this will destroy the freedom of the web, etc.

Theft, destroying freedom -- these are explicitly moral claims.

You might be right that morality is not the appropriate framework with which to think about copyright, and I tend to agree, although that certainly hasn't stopped both sides from harnessing moral outrage to buttress their viewpoints.

There are different ways to relate something to morality.

The maximalists claim that copyright violation is identical to theft, whereas their opponents claim that copyright law is being used to make huge profits and destroy freedom. The former puts copyright at the center of the moral spotlight, but the latter pushes it aside and helps us see that justice and freedom are the true moral issues.

Don't we have an obligation to follow the laws of the land we live in? I see no more philosophical justification for physical property than for intellectual property.

In the same way that we have some folk intuitions about the validity of ownership of property, we have them about intellectual property. Namely, we (the citizen of the western world) have an intuition that creators of intellectual works should have some say in how their work is exploited.

When it comes to the abstraction required to create a system of property, the one that strikes me a the most bonkers is the concept that people can "own" a geographic section of the earth.

We don't really have those folk intuitions. That is just our cultural baggage. No form of property is universal. No form of intellectual property existed until the 17th century, and it took until the 20th century before it IP worked the way we think about it today and became commonplace in the majority of the world. Guam in the 16th century didn't have a concept of personal property, leading to Magellan to dub it the Island of Thieves. Ownership of land was also a non-existent concept in many societies, famously many Native American ones.

Laws and ideas about ownership and property don't exist as some Platonic Ideal, but they change and morph to fit the societies they exist in. IMHO, IP law today, especially but not exclusively in the United States, does not serve content creators but publishers, and it is my belief that it is time to adjust the laws to fit the society we want to live in.

With the obligation to follow the law comes the right to demand changes in the law.

> I see no more philosophical justification for physical property than for intellectual property.

TL;DR: physical property="who gets to have this", 'intellectual property laws'="who gets to make money from this".

Physical property isn't natural, but it's an answer to physical scarcity, which is natural.

You and your friend can build identical houses, they can't be both exactly at the same location. Physical property creates a non-volatile answer to the question "Who gets to build his house there?".

All working societies must address this problem (even societies in which money doesn't exist), hence "property" (which I don't claim is the only answer).

Texts, recordings, etc. are a completely different issue.

Original works might be rare, however, there's no scarcity in using them : you and your friend can both listen to your copy of a recording without interfering. So there's need to answer "who gets to listen to this recording?", as there's no scarcity, and thus, no conflict.

The conflict lies between distributors, because the only scarcity that remains, when works can be copied for free, is in the exploitation. For distributors, money is scarce, so question becomes: "who gets to make money from this recording?".

This is a very different question, which already presupposes the existence of money, and exploitation.

My point is that both of these problems, who gets to occupy a spot of land, who gets to exploit an intellectual creation, are solved through the abstraction of laws.

Arguments that the concept of intellectual property serves no purpose are refuted by the increasing role it plays I our economy.

well, in a very narrow sense, if you are a creator you are in the unique position at first to copy the the piece - or not. That's not just a fictive right. And indeed, industrial entities often enough choose to refrain from public publishing. And artists may choose to remain underground and cryptic lest they be copied and their ideas diluted.

That statement is exceedingly difficult to square with a vaast body of law which preciscely and specifically claims that copyright is about moral rights.

See: Moral rights were first recognized in France and Germany,[4] before they were included in the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works in 1928.[5]:37 Canada recognizes moral rights (droits moraux) in its Copyright Act (Loi sur le droit d'auteur).[6] The United States became a signatory to the convention in 1989,[7] and incorporated a version of moral rights under its copyright law under Title 17 of the U.S. Code.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights

The article you linked to says:

> Moral rights are distinct from any economic rights tied to copyrights.

I have a moral right to insist that I wrote something, and argue against people who say otherwise, even if I assigned the copyright away, renounced it, or let it expire. It's more about honor than property. A Picasso is a Picasso no matter who owns the painting now. It's an insult to Beethoven to say that he didn't compose his 9th even though all his copyright has long expired. The same would be true even if all copyright law was repealed tomorrow.

The claim was "Copyright is not about morality". The fact is that there is an extensive scope of copyright law, dating to the 18th century, which is specifically couched in language of morality.

Reegardless of how you feel about that scope of law (and I'm not declaring views one way or the other), the point remains that your initial assertion does not square with the stated foundations of law, in at least part. Regardless of how separable or inseparable those moral rights are from any other.

If the HN hivemind wants to declare its support for the counterfactual, so be it.

Most laws in the past were couched in the language of morality, or even better, divine commandment.

But just because people think all law is about morality doesn't make it so. It's the job of a philosopher to question people's assumptions and identify errors in them. This looks like a classic case of hasty generalization. Some laws are about morality. Other laws might not be.

I think copyright belongs in the non-moral category. You have not offered any reason to disagree with my statement other than a vague "But people in the 18th century believed otherwise!" Well, I'm not disputing your historical facts. The fact is that people in the 18th century believed a lot of things. Some were true, some were not.

My point is not that the law is moral. It's that, as you've just stated, it was coached in the language of morality.

Again, this is at odds with your initial statement. And again, for some quite large and significant aspects of copyright.

You're right, many laws were (and still are) couched in the language of morality. I'm not disputing the historical facts! But why should I care how they are couched? People can couch anything in any damn language they want, and the couchings are often misleading.

I think it was you who derailed this particular subthread by confusing the concepts of "moral rights" (being named as the author of something you have written) and "morality" (not being stolen from, or randomly killed).

This confusion was no doubt intended by those who coined the term "moral rights". But they are not the same thing. Copyright law is not needed to enforce moral rights, as you can very well see from the fact that we do acknowledge the creators of works that predate copyright by hundreds or thousands of years. We can freely copy Homer's works. And we do. Be we don't remove his name from them.