Copyright is Bad
I think copyright, doubtedly a bad system in practice, is also fundamentally a bad idea. But first, let me clarify on the three broad types of intellectual property
A Taxonomy of “Intellectual Property”
First, there are trademarks. I run a company, called Acme Doodads. We make high quality thingbobs, with good customer service and a lifetime warranty. This is costly for us, but our customers love us for it, so it’s good business. You make some plastic crap and make a clanker tell your customers you won’t be honoring their warranty when it inevitably breaks after two months. You’d love to also call yourself Acme Doodads. But you would be stealing from me, and that shouldn’t be allowed. It isn’t, because “Acme Doodads” is my trademark. This extends to other branding like logos, too. Trademark law is, in my opinion, straightforwardly good.
Then, there are patents. Acme Doodads invents a new wingding. To sell our wingding, we have to factor several things into the cost:
- The marginal cost of each wingding, the cost of the raw materials it’s made of and the labour to make it;
- Our capital expenditures, the cost of our tools, machines, factory building et cetera;
- Our R&D costs, the money we spent on tools, experiments, researchers to icomnvent our wingding in the first place;
- Finally, our profit margin, the money we use to grow our company so we can keep making bigger, better wingdings.
But a competitor might want to simply copy the design of our wingding, thus skipping the R&D costs. This would let them sell their (copy of our) wingding at a lower price, outcompeting us. This would be unfair to us, perhaps even to the point of making the invention of wingdings not viable. So we probably want to keep our research a secret. So, we strike a deal. Acme Doodads will write up the details of their invention. This invention has to be novel, not seen before, and must be written up in enough detail. In exchange for contributing this knowledge, society grants Acme a limited-time monopoly on selling the newly invented wingding; this is called a patent.
There’s a lot of details to this story – what counts as novel? What counts as an invention, what should be patentable? How detailed is detailed enough? How long should the monopoly last for? I think we often get the details wrong, but I do think patents are, overall, a good idea.
Let us then return to copyright. I assume we all know what copyright is, on some level, but it is broad, complex, and variable. As a working definition, I will copy WikiPedia’s one-sentence summary: A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive legal right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time.
It’s easy to make a sympathetic case for copyright. You write a nice book. I have a printing press and an advertising budget. I sell your nice book, making a tidy profit off your labour. You get nothing. Obviously, this shouldn’t be a thing. Fine.
Now, let’s consider some examples why Copyright is Bad:
The Harms of Copyright, By Example
I. I save a lot of artworks; I have thousands of artworks saved on my computer. I do not, officially, have permission to save these artworks. Yet I do not sneak into artists’ homes like a burglar in the night. The images I save have been posted by their artists for the public to see, for instance on X, The Everything App™. But Xwitter is a bad place, less a nazi bar, more a Hitler Jugend camp built on top of a nuclear waste disposal site, built on top of an old bohemian community of artists and writers. I can neither trust nor condone it. Sometimes I include a thematically appropriate artwork in one of my diary entries. I save and redistribute the artwork in that case. But I always credit the artist; if people would find artists they like through my website, and artists I like would find an audience, that would bring me much law. But under copyright law, this is theft, criminal.
II. Some of my friends are DJs, and I occasionally also dabble. They songs people have made and compose them together, mix them, sometimes edit them, putting it all together into beautiful musical experiences to enjoy with friends. They usually, if not almost always, do this either for free, or for a “€15 and a free drink” token of appreciation. Together with my friends, I myself have helped organize such a music event, for no compensation but a free drink and a meal, and the meals ran out before I could get one. We expend much effort, make no profit, and credit all the artists. Dozens of artists. Many small, songs with view counts in the four digits. Getting permission from everyone wouldn’t be impractical, it’d be impossible. Our listeners do go back and read our setlists, check out the artists, you know! I don’t know a DJ that doesn’t from time to time buy music they could easily pirate, either. But under copyright law we are thieves, criminals.
III. Like many of my friends, I read a decent amount of manga. Manga is Japanese. I understand a decent bit of spoken Japanese, but (unlike several of my friends!) I can hardly read it – kanji are very hard! Some manga will get an official localization. But there is a lot of manga, so the vast majority will never. But many manga will get a fan translation; fans will obtain scans, translate them, clean the text bubbles and fill them in, so others can read them. I know people that have done this, and it’s labour intensive work, done for free, for the benefit of others, so that they may read good stories that otherwise might never be available to them. The cultural norm is to suspend a fan translation when an official localization gets announced. In my household, we’ve bought so much manga that we would have to get rid of some before we could store more. I own multiple Japanese manuscripts, that I cannot read, that would be easily pirated, that I bought on my own dime. But under copyright law…
IV.