By your own authority, then. Are you a judge, or governor, or a bishop or something?

I'm arguing based on reasoning, not authority. Are you a satire account by any chance?

By what authority do you promote illegal activity?

I mean, I support civil disobedience, and jury nullification, and such things, but those are generally personal matters, that one does not promote or encourage in public.

Absolutely remarkable that folks in this thread appear to hate freedom so much that I can't even recommend freely-licensed Creative Commons content.

Why would you assume they are promoting "illegal activity".

Not every country has signed the Berne Convention, and of those that have signed a number are only bound by the minimum copyright and IP laws of their own country rather than the maximum protections that other countries might hold to.

Because people refrained from encouraging jury nullification, it is now completely irrelevant.

No one gets a trial with which a jury could even choose to nullify the charges.

When you act coy with this stuff, they sneak around subverting it to the point that it no longer works. Did you see what happened to OWS ten years back?

Not being any of those things gives extra authority, if anything, in my experience.

Yes, IP is a handicap for the top 1% of corporations that turns into a weakness when you go toe-to-toe with countries that won't play that game anyway. It's an emperor with no clothes situation if I ever saw one.

I think IP laws are one of the best things that ever happened to human civilization and are responsible for a significant proportion of progress over the last 200-300 years.

Even if at this point they are a bit too excessive in some cases.

> are responsible for a significant proportion of progress

it's arguable that they are responsible. They help incentivize sure (at least in theory), but would the counterfactual world, in which there's no IP laws, be just as progressive?

It was very hard to make a living as an author or a publisher before IP laws existed. Basically you already had to be independently wealthy, have a sponsor or a day-job if you wanted to write. Which one could argue impedes progress to a non insignificant degree.

And that’s only content creation patents and protection of trade secrets is another matter.

Copyright terms were a lot shorter in the past. 70 years after death is absolutely unreasonable. Also crap like DRM prevents works from going into public domain.

Yes, the system definitely needs some tweaking. I wouldn’t say this means that there is something inherently wrong about it just because of that.