If the content is anyway not available, that argument vanishes and you are left without copyright.
Copyright is not some fundamental right that always exists, it only exists in certain limited circumstances.
(And seriously? Dangerous thinking?)
Except that if people already has a copy of your work and then you finally manage to secure a deal with a publisher in country x, you now can't sell it. Most of the interested parties already have it.
> (And seriously? Dangerous thinking?)
It's a slippery slope. Content creators should have full control over how their content can be consumed. This goes both ways - if they want it to be free then it should be free. Also, no other company should be able to infringe their copyright and start charging money for it, or modify it, or use it in a context that they haven't approved.
I record a piece of music, I own it. I say if you want to own a copy for personal consumption, it costs $5. End of the argument.
But making the real argument, if it's my DVD, I should be able to copy it.
Sure, but my point still stands :) Your friend shouldn't be allowed to copy their purchase and send it to you. They should be allowed to send you their purchase as a gift. People need to understand that just because something is digital it's not suddenly ok to endlessly copy and distribute it for free. What gives you the right? It may be unfortunate that the copyright owner of the show you like hasn't secured publishing/distribution rights in your country yet, but that doesn't give you the right to copy it for free because you really want to watch it.
> The movie companies put a technological mechanism in place to make that not work (in violation of EU regulations, but nothing seems to have happened about that), and got laws passed to make it illegal to circumvent that mechanism.
Yes, and I agree on this point. Region blocking sucks and it kills the gifting to an international friend scenario.
> But making the real argument, if it's my DVD, I should be able to copy it.
For your own personal use, yes.
I think you've inverted this. When things weren't digital, it was perfectly ok to e.g. buy a nice table, make a copy, and give that copy to a friend.
The argument for copyright is a balance of positives and negatives, the idea that the benefit to society of incentivising creators outweighs the cost to society of disallowing copying. It's very difficult to argue that this adds up in cases where the creator isn't selling something in a particular region.
I think you've just changed what we're talking about. But I'll run with it. Technically, copying furniture is not ok, it's infringing on the copyright of the design. But since it requires so much effort to copy the table manually, it's not done much, so no one really cares if a guy takes the nice table he bought and hand crafts a copy for his mate for Christmas. If he started a company cranking out copies of this design though, then it's another matter entirely and he would be shut down and sued.
In the case of digital files, copying literally takes half a second and no effort. And this ease makes it something that a lot of people do, which is why people really care about it.
> It's very difficult to argue that this adds up in cases where the creator isn't selling something in a particular region.
You say that like it's a choice for the creator of the work. For a lot of people it isn't, and it's just the way the system works. They have to wait until a publisher in that region of the world wants to publish their work, or wait until legal issues clear up before things can progress etc. I'm not saying it's a great system, but it's what is in place, and freely copying people's works because it isn't available in your region is probably harming the creator of the work since their potential market is taken away from them.
The idea that a design would be something you'd own, license, or keep track of, is a very new one.
> freely copying people's works because it isn't available in your region is probably harming the creator of the work since their potential market is taken away from them.
Sure, but by how much? Does it actually lead to works not being made, to creators going back to their day job? Is the cost actually bigger than the benefit of copying the work?
Also, as a policy this aligns the incentives correctly: it means creators and publishers are encouraged to find a way to distribute their work everywhere as soon as possible. Which is what copyright is supposed to do.
Just because people in the US have legal access to content doesn't mean you're allowed to steal it. You make the assumption that you're entitled to something if it's commercially available to people in other parts of the world. You're not.
Movies and TV Shows aren't basic necessities that you're entitled to. They are luxuries that you can have if companies decide to sell them to you.