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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33465 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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Before patent/copyright protection, you do still see some innovation in technology, and you see that people went to extreme measures to hide and protect the ideas which they believed they "owned" that they felt were most valuable.

Can you give some examples, particularly in the field of media, entertainment, data generally?

For example, most militaries sell equipment to other countries, but they hobble the technology that goes into those products for export, specifically to prevent other countries from "stealing their ideas".

High-tech weapons and state security information generally are among the few areas where restricting knowledge is straightforwardly useful, explicitly because the entire enterprise is predicated on serious conflict between the parties in question. But what's the equivalent of this for music, art, theatre, writing, the areas where the piracy debate centers? Where's the history of people attempting to keep their plays or songs secret?

Just the same as with physical property, people can now share their ideas more freely, since they have some contextual rules governing that sharing.

This would be a more attractive argument, if we didn't see the history of copyright extensions in perpetuity.

Can you give some examples, particularly in the field of media, entertainment, data generally?

From Wikipedia:

The earliest recorded historical case-law on the right to copy comes from ancient Ireland. The Cathach is the oldest extant Irish manuscript of the Psalter and the earliest example of Irish writing. It contains a Vulgate version of Psalms XXX (30) to CV (105) with an interpretative rubric or heading before each psalm. It is traditionally ascribed to Saint Columba as the copy, made at night in haste by a miraculous light, of a Psalter lent to Columba by St. Finnian. In the 6th century, a dispute arose about the ownership of the copy and King Diarmait Mac Cerbhaill gave the judgement "To every cow belongs her calf, therefore to every book belongs its copy."[1] The Battle of Cúl Dreimhne was fought over this issue.

Literally went to war for it.

For a long time, things in media/entertainment/data weren't easily infinitely copyable. Text was hard/expensive to reproduce. With the rise of the printing press, making it much easier, we see the rise of formalized copyright law. Old plays, musical scores? They were physical objects. You could literally just keep a hold of the physical objects. Performances were ephemeral and literally uncopyable. Hell, the oldest known chess masters claimed exclusive rights to the list of moves they played.

This would be a more attractive argument, if we didn't see the history of copyright extensions in perpetuity.

I am 100% on your side that in perpetuity is a bad policy. That has literally nothing to do with your original argument, which was from first principles arguing that no such possible policy could make any theoretical sense.

As a general matter, I also reject your insistence that the debate is only concerning music/art/theatre/writing. The first principles argument you made was broader than that. We have good reason to reject your overly broad first principles argument. If you would like to make a different first principles argument such that those principles distinguish between those categories and, say, general trade secrets, I'm all ears.

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