←back to thread

1503 points participant3 | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.435s | source
Show context
djoldman ◴[] No.43577414[source]
I don't condone or endorse breaking any laws.

That said, trademark laws like life of the author + 95 years are absolutely absurd. The ONLY reason to have any law prohibiting unlicensed copying of intangible property is to incentivize the creation of intangible property. The reasoning being that if you don't allow people to exclude 3rd party copying, then the primary party will assumedly not receive compensation for their creation and they'll never create.

Even in the case where the above is assumed true, the length of time that a protection should be afforded should be no more than the length of time necessary to ensure that creators create.

There are approximately zero people who decide they'll create something if they're protected for 95 years after their death but won't if it's 94 years. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the same for 1 year past death.

For that matter, this argument extends to other criminal penalties, but that's a whole other subject.

replies(18): >>43578724 #>>43578771 #>>43578899 #>>43578932 #>>43578976 #>>43579090 #>>43579150 #>>43579222 #>>43579392 #>>43579505 #>>43581686 #>>43583556 #>>43583637 #>>43583944 #>>43584544 #>>43585156 #>>43588217 #>>43653146 #
1. RataNova ◴[] No.43578976[source]
While I think the laws are broken, I also get why companies fight so hard to defend their IP: it is valuable, and they've built empires around it. But at some point, we have to ask: are we preserving culture or just hoarding it?
replies(1): >>43585189 #
2. seadan83 ◴[] No.43585189[source]
Missing is why laws fight so hard too, missing the opposite of what we have (in the west), namely blatant and rampant piracy. The other extreme is really bad, creators of any type pirated by organized crime. There was no video game nor movie market in eastern Europe for example, can't compete against large scale piracy.

Which is to say, preservation without awareness of the threat will look like hoarding. A secondary question is to what extent is that threat real? Without seeing what true rampant piracy looks like, I think it would be easy to be ignorant of the threat.