But what TPB mainly distributed, was not information, it was products. And they are not essential products, you can live just fine without TV series or movies. People don't die because they can't play their favourite video game. It's like saying designer clothes should be free.
Information should be shared without profit, yeah, that's what wikipedia is doing fine.
But video games are not information, so are TV shows, movies, etc. They are products which cost money to produce. It doesn't make economical sense to give it away for free hoping to get money from ads or whatever. Mobile games do that, and mostly they are unplayable without purchasing credits, etc. Even then, the quality is often very poor.
You can point to open source, but people producing open source software are minority of all engineers.
What you are saying might be morally 'right' but unfortunately being morally right doesn't pay the rent, bills and food.
I wonder if it's not more like "designer cloths shouldn't be copyrighted" - which is actually true in the fashion world. And because of that tens if not hundreds of millions of people can get "cheap cloths" that look good.
Similar idea would be that ideas of movies and video games should not be copyrighted. IANAL, but there are many many similar movies and video games and don't think there are any copyright infringements unless you create a video game with almost identical name, etc.
That's because they're copying the ideas and not the implementation, copyright protects implementations ("works") and not the ideas behind them (at least that's the intention).
Similar names would be trademark law rather than copyright FWIW.
I used to pirate stuff much more when I was younger (a poor student). Now, I often pay for music that I really like, to support the artists! Other music I just watch on YouTube. If I was sure that Netflix would provide a better service than downloading (i.e. good quality, little wait time, superb selection, offline viewing, no geo-restrictions), I would subscribe.
It's absolutely been demonstrated to be true, many many times. Do you think game studios, console makers, movie studios etc put money into DRM because none of them understand their own business?
There are lots of people who spoken either on or off the record who say the same things: the moment their copy protection fails, sales fall off a cliff and you can see it in the data. For video games it's even worse. The general figure I see for video game piracy on the PC platform is around 90-95% of players are not paying for it, yet, often they are still consuming resources on e.g. multiplayer servers.
Movie studio executives have graphs of sales and you can see the point at which high quality rips were uploaded to the internet.
Example:
http://www.develop-online.net/news/lgc-2013-sports-interacti...
Hang on a sec. If you pirate games, you can't get online on the official servers, that's the whole downside to pirating and the reason so many games now require always-online. Once the game is released through a torrent site, that's it, the developer has no more hand in it. The whole point of cracking a game is to cut the umbilical cord of DRM and online-based play.
Plus, DRM is its own detriment. Some days ago I saw Child of Light on sale on Steam and was going to buy it, but then noticed it has uPlay DRM. And as we all know uplay means nobuy.
Personally, I'd rather have no DRM and less games, than more games that need to strongarm people into paying.
Might be. But the cost to produce Candy Crush Saga and a AAA title is, well, different. But if you try to find a non-digital analogy, e.g. food, it doesn't make it right for me to steel expensive whisky just because I don't agree with pricing model :)
>>> I used to pirate stuff much more when I was younger (a poor student)
Agree with this, I perfectly know what you mean. When I was a poor student, I would buy a video game once a year on my b-day and keep playing it for a year or two :) completely objective, but it felt really better than downloading a batch on games. But that's not the point :)
This is a different problem (pricing, not intellectual property). HumbleBundle sometimes has games by big publishers for $1, Steam has good weekend sales sometimes (grabbed a few relatively new good games for under $15). I think solution to provide poorer markets can be found in this direction.
It did no such thing. It provided a searchable list of user-generated content. It was no different than hacker news or reddit. It was used in a fashion that facilitated "crimes", but so are computers, Internet, and cash in general.
Nor is it especially relevant that computers, cash, the Internet, etc. all facilitate crimes, in some sense. TPB is easily distinguishable because its express purpose, and dominant actual use, is to facilitate crime.
I do respect that Sunde was willing to go to jail for his cause. But given the dubious specific goals of TPB as it was actually operated (despite whatever ideology might have supported or motivated it) I can't say that I'm particularly cowed by his moral courage generally.
Stop repeating that. It isn't. Even the courts agree on this one.
And TPB did not engage in it either way.
As a content creator, shouldn't I have the opportunity to give away my products (or sell them) in a way that I see fit?
So you can easily control initial distribution. But to restrict further distribution you have to restrict actions of others. You have to limit their freedoms to do with that new copy of information.
Is there a good reason to limit their freedoms? Maybe. But it doesn't occur to me as a natural right. Once you handed over a copy to someone else each of you control an identical set of information. You severed your ties.
So if you want the rights of others restricted then - in my opinion - the burden of constructing a case why they should be is on you.
... in a way that's not particularly different from the restrictions we place on physical books. JK Rowling doesn't give up her right to control sales/distribution of Harry Potter just because someone bought a hardback edition and owns a scanner or photocopier. Making a pdf or a photocopy of Harry Potter doesn't result in "stealing" any of her physical inventory, but if you resell it or even give it away (private personal use as a backup copy is OK) you can get in serious legal trouble (it would probably be termed "copyright infringement" rather than "theft", but IANAL TINLA.)
If you want to argue that purely digital goods should be handled differently than a digital scan someone made of a physical book, the burden of proof is back on you. Why should Rowling be entitled to sell Harry Potter in dead tree format and be able to treat scans as infringement, but not entitled to sell Harry Potter in digital format while treating unauthorized copies as infringement?
I do not. And those restrictions are exactly the same, they are about information. It's not about the dead trees with some pigment sprinkled onto them. It's about the particular arrangement of ink.
And I also say that I am naturally free to do whatever with the book - and the information therein - once I have obtained it.
If my freedom to do anything with it what I want should be restricted - as above, there may be good reasons to do so - then one would have to explain to me why that is, because I see no natural right that the author have over things they passed on to others.
In US law, you are free to resell the book, but you are not free to produce a copy to resell (or to keep the copy and resell the original). You bought a copy of the book, not the rights to redistribute the content as you see fit; those still reside with the author. Others have made the argument about incentivizing content producers by granting those rights, so I will not rehash them.
(I reject your treatment of "natural law" as the only relevant system; I recognize the additional value of "common law" and "positive law".)
You place me in a tricky position, as I am generally against the limitation of freedom.
Yet, it seems that some basic limitation on freedom is an essential part of society.
In general, the most agreeable limitations involve restricting a person's freedom to harm others.
Have content producers been harmed by piracy? I would argue that they have.
Since piracy harms content producers, the rights of others to infringe on their content should be limited.
If you do not assume such a right then no harm is done.
I don't want to defend the actions of the copy-write robber-barons. I do not know what the appropriate response for infringement should be. I ignore violations of my own content. Yet I believe that I have a right to the content that I produce. And I respect the rights of others' content. Do you believe that content producers should not have these rights?
There is nothing natural about them. But that does not mean that these rights do not exist.
The question I ask you is, to whom should these rights belong?
The entity that has labored to produce the content? Or the entity that has obtained a copy of that content?
In a previous post you said
>"As a content creator, shouldn't I have the opportunity to give away my products (or sell them) in a way that I see fit?"
Which seemed to me like an argument for an intrinsic, natural right that a content creator should have, irrespective of current law.
So either we are arguing over current law, in which case the questions you ask are already settled by courts and we should be discussing whether current law is acceptable.
Or you are arguing about rights that people ought to have, but then you cannot say
>"But that does not mean that these rights do not exist."
If we are arguing about rights that one ought to have then they do no exist a priori, they have to be constructed first.
Describing these in such a way doesn't imply anything about the moral implications.
Secondly, downloading a work under a non-permissive copyright is not theft, and may not even be illegal. Content shifting is a legal thing to do. If I own a DVD one could argue that I could download an already ripped version of the DVD (CSS issues aside).
Third, not everything linked to on TPB was covered under a non-permissive copyright.
Please stop assuming everyone is an idiot and immoral.
Small point, but it actually depends on the country's laws. In New Zealand, it's illegal to do that. It's even illegal to rip a CD you own. It's stupid and would never be enforecd, but it is the law.
It's absurd that there are people there are people waiting cash in hand to get content, and they are denied because of some sort of broken mentality on how content should be distributed.
Calling it theft is using a legal concept that is outmoded for the digital world. Theft implies that an object is removed from someone's possession in order to be taken.
You can argue all you like that it deprives content creators of income (although even that is complex, in many contexts), but it is not, and never will be theft.
In this case we can use the word "culture" instead of "information", and the original point still stands. And I am sure we can all agree that TV and movies are culture.
All in all it's a terrible analogy.
EDIT: By all means go ahead and downvote, but don't forget to explain why the analogy doesn't fail.
The Pirate Bay isn't some noble cause like the latter two.
It did have a minor effect of disrupting the industry and accelerating the inevitable change in business model for the film and movie industry.
Consider it as a litmus test for free speech.
Providing links to pirated content, not even the content itself, can easily be seen as free speech.
Freedom of speech is the political right to communicate one's opinions and ideas using one's body and property to anyone who is willing to receive them.
Not sharing hashcodes to copyrighted works over the internet.
Why do people confuse the concept of free speech with some specific political or legal idea?
There are many other ways in which a reduction of free speech is extremely harmful. Look at the great firewall of China blocking democratic content, look at reviews being censored by websites or posters afraid of lawsuits.
Free speech is important and extends far outside of politics.
So please, tell me, is this number illegal to possess or distribute? What sort of disturbing thought or speech crime is that?
1272705567343948816021070860118743823207760906496
I don't think I want to live anywhere where it's illegal to possess or distribute a number.
Yes, there are rich people who make money off of TV shows, movies, videogames, etc. But there are also regular hardworking people who depend on it for their living, and saying TPB is just exercising free speech really skips over the issue.
Does it though? TPB themselves are not doing any sort of piracy, nor are they harming anyone. That exercise is left entirely up to the users.
The only thing they do is distribute numbers, exactly like I just did. Your choice what you do with that. If you choose to use that number to harm someone, that's up to you, not me. I'm not at fault for giving you a number.
Perhaps those users look at it from another perspective: maybe people shouldn't be making money like that. We live in a post-scarcity world with digital resources, we have no need for such people anymore. We've shown time and time again that even without enforcement, some will thrive and profit greatly, some will operate for free, and others will fall. Maybe it's time to just let it happen and give up on the use of coercive force to create a false market.
I can't say whether it's right or wrong, I don't think there's a correct answer there, but you have to understand that different people view these issues entirely differently.
This thread is really exposing to me the variety of views on the topic. I get your argument, but it's like you're deliberately ignoring the reality of how TPB is used.
Which people are you talking about that we have no need for? The people who make the content? You don't feel we have a need for them? I love cutting out middle men as much as anyone, but eventually somebody has to make the product. I've seen people argue that authors shouldn't be paid for their work, they should do it as a side project of passion and be happy to see somebody reading a copy of their work. I'd much rather do my art all day than have to do it as a side project while I work at something else to pay the bills.
And as an aside, we may live in a post-scarcity world but it sure as hell isn't distributed.
I'm simply saying TPB cannot be held directly responsible for how their users behave. Same as any website operator really. Not "deliberately ignoring" anything. TPB doesn't pirate. TPB helps pirates by offering names and comments on hashes. I don't see why that should be illegal at all.
Their name and marketing is simply the best marketing for their platform to get the most ad views. Nothing wrong with that.
> Which people are you talking about that we have no need for? The people who make the content? You don't feel we have a need for them? I love cutting out middle men as much as anyone, but eventually somebody has to make the product.
Simply "working hard" alone should not be rewarded. And as we've seen time and time again, plenty of people are willing to make a product for free, with or without ad revenue or to find alternative ways to profit. Just because 1 business model fails doesn't mean everybody loses out. Just some people. I'm saying the people who _rely_ upon the failing business model should in fact lose rather than being encouraged by archaic laws.
If someone obtained your family's credit card numbers and PINs, you would consider them to be in their good right to distribute them freely? They're just numbers, after all.
I was not trying to do so, just using it as an example of freedom of speech being good in other contexts than the purely political.
But yes, credit card numbers are piss poor security wise. That's why banks essentially write replacements off. Compromise is expected.
What we're seeing with copyright is governments trying to prevent bits from being copied, which is a pharaonic task and a waste of resources.
I believe you and the parent post have fundamentally different views of what's right, just and moral, and any discussion between you and him/her or anyone else with the same views will lead to nothing.
Copyright discussions in a nutshell. That's why I only play for sport.
How about a definition like - "If I create something, I own it and have the right to profit from it." Why should my right to profit from what I create have a limited term? Why should it be ok for someone to copy it just because they have the ability to?
Copyright prevents the free speech of others. There's some justification for it doing so. But it's not a natural, or absolute, right.
Edit: copyright should be more limited than physical property rights, so I'm in agreement. But neither can be absolute when the government only has a piece of paper to abide by that prevents them from being revoked.
Also, satire isn't protected, but parody is.
Copyright is only a government-granted, temporary monopoly on that idea to incentivize you to live from creating them in the first place and to create more.
Once you have given your idea to someone else, where does your natural right come from to control what they do with it?
He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper [candle] at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature.... Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
This is a much broader question about the rationale behind copyright law and the concept of intellectual property. It is really beyond the scope of the question posed (is copyright violation theft?).
You are not born in isolation from the rest of us. Everything you create originated from an idea that you learned from somebody else. You have no right of ownership over something that is not entirely yours.
What if you spend a year making a beautiful cabinet? You didn't invent the tree, or the saw, so it's okay if I come by and cart the cabinet over to my house, right?
It doesn't seem to be inherently an argument against the entire idea of "personal property", it seems to be inherently an argument against the idea that property (personal, real, or otherwise) is a matter of absolute right, rather than a matter of an exchange in which owners are granted privilege at the expense of restrictions on everyone else's freedom because of a perceived social benefit to that exchange -- where the parameters, then, of the particular privileges of owners become subject to analysis of whether the exchange really does have net social value.
In regards to intellectual property of the types dependent, in US law, on the Constitution's so-called "Copyright Clause", this is pretty explicitly the premise in the US Constitutional system; in addition, the differences in the privileges and limitations of real and personal property rights (and the particular parameters of particular subclasses of each), as well as things like eminent domain, are very hard to conceptualize under a model of property-as-absolute-right unless you simply define each feature as its own axiom of property rights, except the ones you don't like and define them as violations of axiomatic rights, whereas the whole regime of property rights and its evolution makes a lot more sense under a social benefit exchange view with an evolving view of what provisions actually provide social benefit.
Note that I agree that you should (or, rather, that as a society we should make sure that it's possible under reasonable conditions), but my reason for agreement is not able to justify perpetual copyright.
My reasoning happens to be similar to what the U.S. Constitution says, but I can imagine others having different reasoning for the same idea.
I believe that this is a very interesting entry point to a discussion, because the immediate reply to this is - that library books don't generate any extra income to the author. And that is also true. But I feel like even without calling it theft it is not entirely fair.
That's a strange assumption. Many authors fail, or only produce works in their spare time and work other jobs. I mean there's no fundamental right to be a successful author who can live off selling books.
Of course as a society we find it desirable to create an environment where artists can make a living from their works and create more art. That's why copyright exists. It's a tradeoff, all citizens are required to respect the creations of others in exchange for the opportunity for everyone to dedicate their lives to it and make an income with it. (Note: It's just an opportunity to make profit, not a right to profit)
But that societal contract gets perverted by commercial interests to the point where people stop seeing copyright as something positive and instead will refuse to adhere to it.
The internet making copying so much easier than ever before also skews that tradeoff by making it much more difficult for everyone to respect copyright. Breaking copyright is even easier than jaywalking and I don't think private citizens will stop anytime soon.
So ultimately that scheme to incentivize people to be creative used to be "fair", but now that view has somewhat shifted. And the system needs an overhaul.
Becoming a writer to make money off literature is pretty much like playing the lottery - the odds are badly stacked against you; if you have "success" most of the time you'll make a pittance, and only a tiny proportion of the people who are successful make it big.
If anything, current incentive structures created by current copyright are bad for most people in the creative fields, as the "hit culture" means they're heavily geared towards disproportionally rewarding a very small subset of people. While the hope of striking it big may lure some people to create, I'm more concerned that the bad odds of being able to make ends meet puts a lot of very creative people off those career choices.
I think it is interesting that you use a hypothetical author as an example since even before technology showed up and wrecked the party, copyright law arguably failed (or at least was never very good) at its supposed purpose.
Absolutely not. If anything, I would be flattered to meet somebody actually reading my book, and I'd probably be eager to have a chat with him, maybe ask for opinions and perhaps tell him about other books I'm working on, if it looks like he could be interested. That'd be an event that could make me very happy.
The reality is that nobody seems to be interested in what I do. Should I feel I'm being treated unfair by all the people in the train who never bought and never used my stuff? Never even heard of me?
So if I'm starving, it's not the fault of the people who aren't interested in buying my stuff. Calling them thieves solves nothing.
Free speech or theft?
But if nothing happened then there should be no reason to make your exclamation illegal.
Of course you could still be thrown out of the theater for disrupting the performance, providing further disincentive for doing something like that, but that's separate from the legality of your speech.
Not really, anyone who knows the basic structure of a magnet link can go...
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:529C39CC24553DFE030119BD35E19884F34A65E0
And it's perfectly useful. Paste it into any BT client, wind up with a copy of... Windows 7 it looks like. Practically the same as finding the link on TPB.
So, is this another's property or not? Did I just make it by appending a short string to turn it into a URL?
Also consider that Sunde has made a number of comments which are critical of TPB and how that project has turned out. So while TPB isn't necessarily the ideal, maybe more of a failed or partially-failed attempt.
So? Why would any individual industry be exempt from disruption?
People should ask themselves whether or not the law is right.
I think that the question here is a very complicated one. One can support copyright status quo but still have a problem with the heavy handed tactics being used against TPB.
If we follow their logic to it's inevitable conclusion, we could find ourselves in a place where "Unauthorized reviews" could be considered copyright infringement.
And how should the people who take the time to create that 'information' be compensated?
Why should they be compensated? Putting in effort does not equate "getting compensated" and it should not.
If they can't find a way to be compensated, they should find other work to do. Just as if I can disrupt an industry with some new cool gimmick, and thus put potentially thousands, if not millions of people out of work, why shouldn't I? Why should we play protectionism?
Why should we try to build things like DRM just to protect something which itself has little to no intristic value? As if we acknowledged that yes -- "the industry is vulnerable in this new world we live in, but actually adapting to the reality would mean billions, if not trillions of lost revenue, we should rather fight tooth and nail to protect it." I see no sense in this.
Yes, it is a race to the bottom. In the end it just means that goods and monetary compensation gets distributed differently. Obviously, those who right now benefit from the said compensation fight tooth and nail to keep their position, but as I do not -- and I say this as a person who spends considerable amount of money on actual physical CDs (along with misc. merchandise) still, most of which I do download illegally before bying and will keep doing so -- I see this as counterproductive.
I suppose some people see this first and foremost as an argument about whether or not one should get compensated for the work they do or not. And that's greatly, greatly oversimplifying the matter of immaterial property and copyright laws and wars.
I watch plenty of stuff without paying for it so I don't want to pretend that I am on some high moral horse here, but i don't get this mindset.
Of course just putting in effort doesn't give me the right to compensation. If so, I could just start digging holes and ask the world for payment. However, if I made something and you want to see it, I think I am in my good right to set a price. If you don't like that price, you are free to move along. There are plenty of files on my laptop that I created that I don't want to show anyone. They are going to stay there and nobody has the right to see them other than me. And if I decided to show one of them to a someone who gave me money in return, that still doesn't give anybody who didn't pay me or anyone else for that matter, any right to access that file, no matter how little "intrinsic value" it represents.
If someone invented a teleport that allowed people to beam to whereever and back, that would cause a rise in theft of tangible goods all over the world. But this would not mean that because the old systems of doors and locks were now inefficient, people should not be allowed to claim ownership of property anymore.
Sure, this is unconditionally right if we go by the book and agree with the law. No argument here. Though, by going by the said law... The full albums, songs, movies, movie clips, whatever unauthorized there is in YouTube for example for billions of people to see every day creates a huge problem.
For example here in Finland, any person listening to an unauthorized upload of an album on YouTube breaks the law. Practically a huge majority of the youth are criminals as they do this on a daily basis, and take it for granted. Obviously it is utterly senseless to go after these people for what they are doing.
> If someone invented a teleport that allowed people to beam to whereever and back, that would cause a rise in theft of tangible goods all over the world. But this would not mean that because the old systems of doors and locks were now inefficient, people should not be allowed to claim ownership of property anymore.
But this, of course, is a flawed analogy. A better one would be with an ability to clone material for free. Say, if we were able to build a car, and then clone it for free for everyone. Why wouldn't we? For many goods we could just come up with better and better ones again and again, and people would immediately clone them for themselves and be happy. Sounds good, no?
In the end the main reason I oppose the copyright mafia bullshit is the tendency to limit my ability to use computers as computers. They want to tell me which bit patterns are illegal on my mass storage device or RAM. They want to tell me what CPU instructions I am not allowed to inspect or run. They want to tell me what network data I am allowed to capture and inspect. In essence, they want to own my general purpose computer and make it some form of "special purpose machine" with certain set of bits or instructions, or pixels on the screen. Cory Doctorow gave a great talk about this subject in 28C3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
And boy, if someone breaks these rules. Your 9-year-old daughter downloads an album on her laptop, and the police storms in after you refuse to sign NDA and pay a fine from an anti-piracy group which is 30 times higher than the value of the album in question. And I am not bullshitting you -- this really happened two years ago in Finland. See: https://torrentfreak.com/police-raid-9-year-old-pirate-bay-g...
HN submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4818159
For me personally, whether you, or someone get your living from whatever you do which people may pirate is completely irrelevant in grand scheme of things. The much larger picture is these completely messed up laws with these mafia-like anti-piarcy groups such as MPAA or RIAA, and many domestic ones in almost every country. The issue is way, way much more than just whether something is right or wrong. I see this whole issue very central on a societal level as well as from the point of view of something I'd call "computer/computing culture". I see it as something we as hackers should be very aware and vocal about. See SOPA and PIPA as examples as to why.
There are really too many ways to list here.
I see no reason why ad-based free distribution couldn't be used for e.g. music and movies. People want convenience more than they want free - nobody uses Diaspora, everybody uses Facebook.
Also, there is a lot of money to be earned by selling concerts, cinema performances, memorabilia... (I also wouldn't oppose some reasonably short copyright term, e.g. from a few months to a few years, that would allow authors to more effectively monetize e.g. cinema.)
It could be; whether it's ideal or not is another question:
* It likely wouldn't make as much money as having people pay for it.
* Imagine how much product placement there would be. If you think it's bad enough now...
Anyway, if we're purely taking music, downloading it of TPB or listing to it on Spotify more or less makes the artist the same amount of money.
Software and books are different, because you can't really compensate for lose of sales with performances. Movies I'm unsure of, cinema could make the money needed to cover the prodution cost, but I don't know if that's viable.
Should they be able to choose whatever monetization system they feel is most appropriate for their work?
If you want to keep a work to yourself, trade secret protection is adequate. If you want something that behaves like modern copyright, then you can sell copies of your work with appropriate contracts. But it should be your responsibility to track violators, just like if you sold me some land with a proviso that I had to maintain the orchard on it. Copying should not be guilty-until-proven-innocent the way it currently is.
That doesn't tell us what the law should be, though.
As owners of creative products, the content producers can do as they feel with them. They can choose which characters die, how the story is told, and how the content is presented. That is because it is "their" work, it is not just information.
Freedom of information is a great concept, and one which I support. Tax payers should be able to find out how much organization x donated to politician y. But a movie, a creative work, is more than information. It is a product, an investment, and requires a substantial effort from many people.
Please let me know if I am misrepresenting your argument, but it seems that you are using this notion of freedom of information to blanket, what I view as, theft. Just because no one was strong armed for a loaf of bread does not mean that a theft did not occur. No one may have been deprived of physical property, but we do not live an entirely physical world. Piracy deprives content creators of opportunity: the opportunity to distribute their products in the way that they see fit. Perhaps this means that they give all of their work away for free through the channels of their choosing. Perhaps they sell it. Perhaps they don't sell it to people who live in certain regions.
As a content creator, shouldn't I have the opportunity to give away my products (or sell them) in a way that I see fit?
How do they own it if they make a copy and hand over that copy in its entirety to someone else? How do they not relinquish control of that copy?
>what I view as, theft But nobody is deprived of something when it gets copied. You can still modify your original and I can do as I please with mine.
This is how folk tales and our legends and everything propagates through society. Information, including creative work, flows freely.
>As a content creator, shouldn't I have the opportunity to give away my products (or sell them) in a way that I see fit?
Sure, that's at your discretion. But once you have given them away I don't see any natural reason why you should have any influence over what others do with a thing you have given away.
If you are a wood-carver and make an ornamental table for me, should I not be free to chop it up for firewood if I don't like it anymore just because you think it would be a violation of your work?
If you want to distribute copies of all the work I've ever published, or work made by me and published by the company I work for, you're free to do so. It's all under Free licenses.
So basically, I should not be allowed to say "Look at this, but don't show anybody else"? As soon as something has been copied, I have lost any say?
And "Nobody says copyright holders should be forced to publish their works." should be a warning flag to you. Once you get to a position that twisty, you should think to yourself there's probably something wrong with it.
Strange, because that's exactly how the patent/business secrets laws work; a company is free to decide what they want to do with their new invention; they can keep it secret and risk someone else reinventing it, or they can publish it (submit a patent) and receive a temporary monopoly on that technology.
That's exactly the opposite of what patents say.
Patents say if you want to publish something, you can still have protection for it.
Copyright just gets used as a tool for takedown because commercial interests have driven the law to make it a much sharper and more immediately applicable tool than privacy laws.
As for the nude celeb pictures, I think the original hack should be illegal. I don't think mere distribution should be. It wouldn't serve any purpose to do so, as we've seen - it is illegal right now, did that help anyone?
That doesn't mean I support it. Life is not a binary choice between "this is a good activity" and "this should be illegal".
If you don't agree, you should just argue your point because your straw man is just pathetic.
Our governments are founded generally on rights, which extend from a general principle of live-and-let-live. Copyright is an anti-right. Each time it comes into effect, it removes rights away from everyone except the copyright holder.
You might say - that's just words.
But it's not. Both in software and law, when you have permissions systems that mix up positive and negative rights with one side ruining the other one.
That is what we see with copyright. A continuing encroachment on our positive rights on the basis of the state's desire to enforce the anti-right. The state will invade your house, jail and deport you... because of things you're doing with publicly released information and magnetic signals in the privacy of your own home.
Once a positive right has been eroded by a single case of an anti-right winning, that serves as precedent for removing it in other cases.
Have a think about it the next time you're working on a permission system and are tempted to create a permission that denies a right to someone. As you follow it through, you'll find you've created an unholy mess. Stick to positive rights.
Update: hi, haters. Feel free to be constructive, too.
Every "right" is an "anti-right." It's a restriction on what other people can do. Your right to bodily integrity is a restriction on my natural freedom to do whatever I want with my environment, which might include you. My right to protect my copyrighted work is a restriction on your same natural freedom. Now obviously punching someone in the face is worse than using the fruits of their labor without their permission, but I don't think the two things are qualitatively different.
It's very easy to say, "he went to jail because what he did was illegal". It's harder to say "he went to jail despite what he did was right".
I support TPB's cause. I believe that non-profit sharing of information should be free.