Another copyright apologist loses it

Start here and read on. In this thread, we learn:

• Morality is the same as legality.


• Murder is morally equivalent to copyright infringement.


• People value "value", not property or the enjoyment they get from that property (utility), so causing the resale value of an item to fall is equivalent to stealing that item.


• Copying a file without permission is equivalent to keying someone's car and urinating on the seats.


• My work as a developer is a fantasy, and I have not yet reached puberty.

The Fruits of One's Labor

In a discussion of the ethics of copyright, Slashdotter "Ohreally_factor" writes the following analogy:

Do you believe that people have a reasonable expectation of being rewarded for work? Do you believe that they should be rewarded for work? For instance, say a farmer plants a field of carrots. All other things being equal (i.e., he's not renting the land, etc.), don't you think he is entitled to all the carrots that he has grown? Doesn't he deserve the fruits of his labor?

But think about it. Does a farmer own his crops because of the work he puts into growing them? No, labor has nothing to do with it. He owns the crops because they grow from seeds, fertilizer, and soil that he already owned beforehand. He can hire a laborer to come tend his fields, but the laborer won't own the crops; they'll still belong to the owner of the land and resources from which the crops are formed.

Thus, talking about the fruits of one's labor misses the mark from the beginning -- but even more so here, because like so many pro-copyright arguments, this one mistakes authorship for manufacturing. Musicians are not manufacturers. A better analogy would be, "don't you think a house painter is entitled to all the houses that he paints?" Or maybe, "don't you think an accountant is entitled to all the numbers that he calculates?" That's how absurd the question is.

Oh noes, the sun wouldn't rise without copyright!

[copied from LJ]

One might say that the ridiculous lengths someone is forced to go in order to defend an idea are a measure of how bankrupt the idea itself is. If that's true, then copyright just filed chapter 11. Feast your eyes on that thread, in which "mr_matticus" provides these startling revelations:

• There can be no privacy without copyright. Everyone's private medical records, etc., would be public information, and there'd be no way to pass a law to protect them.
  
• There would be no universities without copyright, because the only way for a professor to make money is by selling books and papers.
  
• Stocks are a form of "intellectual property".
  
• If I have a signed contract with someone who agrees to pay me for writing something, and they refuse to pay after I've written it, that contract is unenforceable. Therefore, the only way to get paid for writing anything is to sell copies.
  
• Efficiency is a bad thing, because it can eliminate jobs.
  
• Forcing people to constantly reinvent the wheel is a good thing, because it provides jobs.
  
• Every single factory worker whose job was made obsolete by automation got a job in the "information economy", i.e. selling copies.
  
• There will never be another new job created, ever. If someone's job is made obsolete by information efficiency (i.e. if he no longer needs to write something because he can use one that's already been written), he will have nowhere to go.
  
• There is no originality in programming; most programmers "don't do anything worthwhile". Every line of code I've ever written has been written by someone else before. In fact, every function in every program I've written has either been pasted from another program, or will be pasted into another eventually.
  
• Without copyright, employers would hire cheap overseas programmers who can do the same work for less than an American. However, because copyright exists, that could never happen today.
  
• Without copyright, only the single most skilled programmer in the world has any hope of making money. The only reason there's a market for more than one programmer is because of copyright.
  
• Without copyright, employers might simply write a program to write new programs, and then no one would ever get paid for writing software again, because machines could write it themselves. The reason this hasn't already happened, of course, is the existence of copyright.
  

You might think I'm making this up. So would I, if I hadn't participated in the thread myself. Perhaps I've fallen for a very, very dedicated troll... but I think this is just the natural result of trying to defend a fundamentally indefensible philosophy.