My point is none of the reasons that copyright ever seemed like a reasonable idea at the time have actually changed, and so if it was pragmatic then, it is no less pragmatic today. I would argue that there is a moral obligation to respect such a pragmatic compromise, since the very reason it was ever devised in the first place was with the goal of trying to enrich society. Even if its goal has been "twisted", as you allege (and I do not refute), if they were correct about that goal then, in that published works somehow *did* enrich society, then that point should be no less true today than it was when copyright was invented.

And on the subject of copyright giving people the option to rent-seek, which you mentioned above... not all copyrighted works are for monetary gain. If, again, public domain is such a viable alternative to copyright when monetary compensation is not being sought, what incentive do people who copyright under BSD terms or many other types of open source licenses (other than the GPL, which explicitly forbids copying to anyone who, in action, disagrees with the terms of the license) have to bother explicitly copyrighting their works and attaching their name to it when they could, with no less effort, put a disclaimer stating the work was simply domain? I would argue that the fact that more works intended to be freely available are *not* being put into public domain, but are almost invariably explicitly put under some copyright terms such as a BSD license or what have you suggests to me that the dissolution of copyright would result in fewer published works other than those of the caliber that people put into public domain today, which tends to set a pretty low bar for quality, and thus does not particularly enrich society to the same extent that copyrighted works otherwise would have. This is fundamentally why I maintain that respecting copyright is a moral decision, and not just a legal one. I'll admit that this suggestion is only my opinion based on what I interpret from the presently available observable data, but do you have any actually observable evidence to support a contrary position?

Also bear in mind that I don't refute people put stuff into public domain today, and that there's not even a particularly small amount of it.... some of it is even actually pretty good. The average caliber, however, tends to be considerably lower than even the freely available copyrighted works, which are also far more abundant. I feel in the absence of copyright, therefore, all we would be left with is a smaller stream of published content of about the same quality as currently published public domain works, which is what I think would lead to societal stagnation, and again, why I think that respecting copyright has moral weight to it unless one's morals do not advocate supporting a mechanism that benefits society (I do not allege that is your position, only that I acknowledge that there may be some who would hold such a position, and there is no point at which I would ever expect to be able to convince one who held such a position that copyright had any moral value whatsoever).

And on the question I posed above, and sticking just to content that is legally freely available so as to just compare apples to apples here, do you have any evidence to show that a significant percentage of public domain content is actually of higher caliber than content that may be no less freely available than open source content, for instance, but is usually explicitly copyrighted? This isn't a rhetorical question.... I ask it because I've attempted to present the evidence that I believe supports my position, and I am genuinely oblivious to evidence that contradicts it. I don't allege that the monetary stranglehold that copyright seems to offer the content publishers may be a morally bankrupt tenet, but if published works still somehow enriches society, as I allege that it does, then that moral bankruptcy is actually irrelevant to the still-existing underlying benefit of published works. I don't advocate that the ends justify the means, but I *do* advocate that if bad intentions can still produce good results, particularly when those results were the original intent in the first place, then those good results, and even the original good intentions, are not somehow made any less good just because of any currently existing bad intentions unless one can somehow show that the original intentions are simply no longer applicable in this day and age. I believe that publishers who may have morally invalid reasons for doing what they do are responsible for their own moral decisions and must bear the consequences of those, something for which neither you nor I have, or should have, any responsibility for. The benefits of published content seem to remain despite the existence of such goals, and in turn, the underlying benefit of copyright. If one would actually advocate the dissolution of copyright then it is of critical importance to somehow illustrate that the absence of copyright would result in no fewer published works of respectable quality that could continue to enrich society. Do you have such evidence? If one agrees that copyright still serves at least some of the same purpose for which it was originally created, however pragmatic a compromise that might have been when it was invented, then in what way is it not a moral obligation on the part of a good citizen to advocate the unadulterated support of mechanisms that enrich society, and to deeply criticize actions which might undermine those mechanism?

As you pointed out, the concept of copyright was created as a pragmatic compromise.

Exactly.... and that compromise is not an unreasonable one, even today.... although you seem to allege that it has become so.

However, you may have meant that B is not *ruled out* by A. That I agree with. That life was designed is not ruled out by observing that the chance of life occurring (when we take the universe as a random system) is small. But starting from A it is not valid to definitively conclude B. A does not imply that B is true.

In this context, I was saying that A may imply B, and can even go so far as to actually *suggest* B. I would not say it implies it beyond that, however.

So do you allege that the notion that copyright was invented to give content creators some assurance that their works would not be copied, to the extent that the law could control, even if they published is false?

Because if that notion is not false, then copyright *DOES*, or at least one time did, give content creators some amount of incentive to publish.

But really, if public domain were really so popular with people, and negligibly different from BSD, as you allege, then why don't people explicitly put more stuff into public domain instead of often explicitly stating that it is copyrighted and dictating the copying terms, however lax they might seem be?

By this scientist's own admission, life appears to be deigned. Evolution can create the same appearance, but why bother to say that it looks designed in the first place if you are going to just assume it was caused by evolution originally anyways? In fact, it would make more sense to say that anything that would otherwise appear to be designed actually look like it evolved that way if the possibility of being designed were that implausible

Would Linus have had the same incentive to publish if Linux were *required* to be public domain if he were to publish it instead of being an open source project that is protected by copyright? One could always just ask him.

FTA:

"The appearance of design of life on Earth is also overwhelming," Krauss replied, "but we now understand, thanks to Charles Darwin that the appearance of design is not the same as design, it is in fact a remnant of the remarkable efficiency of natural selection."

All this says is that scientifically, one cannot prove the existence of God simply trough appearance of design, because evolution is capable of producing the same appearance. It does not say, however, that such an appearance is necessarily illusory, however, and by Krauss's own admission, that appearance is "overwhelming". I would suggest, therefore, it is not wholly unreasonable to conclude that an appearance of design makes a relatively strong case that it *was* deigned. Not proof, of course, but not an entirely irrational case for it either.

the only refutation to this merely echoes the sentiment hat there are alternative explanations for that appearance, which doesn't refute the point that life could actually have been designed is nonetheless still a perfectly valid conclusion from the observations, without assuming that you first allegedly somehow know that there isn't any designer in the first place. One might very well believe that to be the case, and such a belief might be the only thing that one is capable of believing that is consistent with their world view, but that belief, no matter how certain, is no more proof than even an overwhelming appearance of design constitutes definitive proof of design.

FTA:

"The appearance of design of life on Earth is also overwhelming," Krauss replied, "but we now understand, thanks to Charles Darwin that the appearance of design is not the same as design, it is in fact a remnant of the remarkable efficiency of natural selection."

All tha says is that scientifically, one cannot proe the existence of God simly trough appearance of design, because evolution is capable of producing the same appearance. It does not say, however, that such an appearance is necessarily illusory, however, and it is not unreasonable to conclude that an appearance of design makes a relatively strong case that it *was* deigned. Not proof, of course, but not an entirely irrational case for it either.

the only retort to this merely echoes the sentiment hat there are alternative explanations for that appearance, which doesn't refute the point that life was designed can nonetheless still be a perfectly valid conclusion from the observations without assuming that you first allegedly somehow know that there isn't any designer in the first place

I don't, however, believe this would result in society "suffering" because I don't believe this self-censorship in order to keep a deathgrip on a story would actually occur.

The suffering I speak of is more of a matter of not being enriched by the continuing publication of the content that the public might have a demand for, and the stagnation that would likely occur if people who didn't want their stuff to be copied without their permission were not offered any incentive to publish at all.

Sure you'd still get some people who are willing to put their stuff out there in public domain right away, but it is unlikely that would be sufficient to actually produce a net societal benefit.

The result: stagnation, and society suffers.

What you are describing would be equivalent to a landlord who owns adjacent houses on a block splitting his cable line and running it into to the neighboring house without paying for two subscriptions.

It's pretty conventional address fraud, actually.

Although the chances of your friend would get caught doing this for you with Netflix are probably virtually nil, as long as he doesn't do it for anyone else...

And bear in mind that not everyone will necessarily be willing to let other people who do not live with them pay them every month for access to their Netflix account.

And I think I already mentioned that what I was suggesting would *NOT* stop people from providing Netflix with bogus billing addresses anyways.

Circling back around, I believe piracy is morally null (as in, "having no moral valence"), because I don't believe IP owners morally have a right to insist on the protections they have been able to enshrine in law.

Those protections are merely a legal extension of protections that would have existed entirely naturally if the content creator had simply not published it in the first place, resorting to self-censorship in a simple attempt to keep anyone else from copying it.

The goal of publication in the first place is to ideally enrich society with the content, but if a content creator keeps their content away form the public just because they don't want anyone else to copy it, then society doesn't benefit at all. The point of copyright, therefore, could be said to create an incentive for the rights holder to publish so that society can be enriched by the content, while trying to offer an assurance to the creator, to the extent that it can be enforced by law, that nobody will copy the work. As copying technologies improved, however, the law has been progressively losing its ability to actually offer any assurance, and copyright has increasingly become a social contract. Society is supposed to agree not to copy the work, and the content creator offers to publish it so that society can be enriched by it.

Of course, this is still fundamentally supposed to be for a limited time, and I do not for a single second abide by the absurd lengths that copyright has been extended to simply hold onto copyrights. But the absurd lengths that copyright is being extended to should *NOT* entitle anyone to access content that would have fallen under more conventional copyright duration.

Ultimately, therefore, people pirate most content out of nothing better than a sense of entitlement that cannot be rationalized by any sense of moral justification without resorting to copyright abolition... where anything that anyone publishes automatically becomes public domain, and if they want to control it, they will have to keep it away from the general public, effectively resorting to self-censorship, and society will suffer as a result.

That would be because the kinds of museums that are actually interactive and hands-on are generally science and technology oriented.

I know quite well what a strawman is, and the poster stated that they *intended* to break the merely because they were being inconvenienced. The fact that they wouldn't break the law if they weren't inconvenienced is entirely beside the point.

Being 100% honest on the matter of copyrighted media is only unworkable if one possesses any sense of entitlement to the content they would otherwise probably just pirate.

Owning the content in box form should entitle one to access to that content

Leaving aside the issue that how things *should* be is rarely how things actually are, and trying to pretend that one lives in that person's view of an ideal world when things are not actually as they would like is only going to end in disaster, that is nonetheless a very interesting perspective...have you ever considered only voting for people who agree with that notion?

... then available content would be determined not by identifying the geographic area of the IP address, but instead by the billing address of the customer. Live in the USA, but are on vacation out of the country and still want to watch movies? Not a problem... since your billing address is still in the USA, so you can continue to enjoy your favorite movies and shows anywhere in the world.

This won't necessarily stop people from trying to get bogus billing addresses to get around this, but that's the credit card company's problem to crack down on, not Netflix's, and carries a not entirely insignificant risk of criminal charges for fraud that tends to discourage even people who might otherwise consider doing it from stealing credit cards in the first place.