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Comment on Pluralistic: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing"

TootGuitar@reddthat.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

For someone who bitches all over this thread about people strawmanning their position, this is a pretty fucking great reply.

Hint: one can be pissed about people throwing around the not-based-in-legal-reality term “intellectual property.” One can be pissed about people using it as part of a strategy to purposely confuse the public into thinking that copyright infringement is the same as theft, a strategy which has apparently worked mightily well on you. One can be all of those things, and yet still feel that copyright infringement is wrong and no one should be entitled to “literally everything someone else creates.”

What you posted was a textbook definition of a straw man.

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helenslunch@feddit.nl ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

still feel that copyright infringement is wrong and no one should be entitled to “literally everything someone else creates.”

But they don’t feel that copyright infringement is wrong. How closely did you read the previous statements?

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- TootGuitar@reddthat.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I don’t know how the original poster meant it, but one possible way to interpret it (which is coincidentally my opinion) is that the concept of intellectual property is a scam, but the underlying actual legal concepts are not. Meaning, the law defines protections for copyrights, trademarks, patents, and trade secrets, and each of those has their uses and are generally not “scams,” but mixing them all together and packaging them up into this thing called intellectual property (which has no actual legal basis for its existence) is the scam. Does that make sense?
  
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  - helenslunch@feddit.nl ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    So it’s just a classic case of someone saying something entirely unrepresentative of what they actually mean, then arguing it to death…?
    
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    TootGuitar@reddthat.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Communication is hard, especially when you’re not having a verbal/visual conversation where you can pick up on audio/visual clues about what the person is saying. Have you considered that you might be jumping to a conclusion about what the person is saying, without realizing there might be other meaning to their words?
    
    Better yet, rather than having this meta-debate about what a person who is not either of us meant, could you comment on the substance of my post?
    
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  - merc@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Exactly, “intellectual property” doesn’t exist. It’s a term that was created to try to lump together various unrelated government-granted rights: trademark, copyright, patents, etc. They’re all different, and the only thing they have in common is that they’re all rights granted by the government. None of them is property though. That was just a clever term made up by a clever lobbyist to convince people to think of them as property, rather than government-granted rights related to the copying of ideas. Property is well-understood, limited government-granted rights to control the copying of ideas is less well understood. If the lobbyists can get people to think of “intellectual property” they’ve won the framing of the issue.
    
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