Comment

Comment on "Grow up. These are my movies, not yours": George Lucas Won't be Happy How Star Wars Fan Group is Illegally Saving the Original Trilogy

<- View Parent

grue@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

All works are inherently public domain: copyright isn’t property, which is why it expiring isn’t an unconstitutional “taking.” Congress merely chooses to grant control back to the Creator for a while, as an incentive to create more works. It’s a power Congress has, not an obligation.

It’s ironic: publishers claim copies are “licensed, not sold,” but that’s a lie: individual copies are property, and are sold. The real “licensed, not sold” is Congress granting the temporary monopoly privilege itself.

source

Sort:hotnew top

rickyrigatoni@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
what the fuck are you smoking

source
- grue@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The same thing Thomas Jefferson smoked, I guess? I’m not saying anything much different than what he wrote in this letter explaining his philosophical underpinning of the Copyright (and Patent) Clause:
  
  It has been pretended by some (and in England especially) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions; & not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. but while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural, and even an hereditary right to inventions. it is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. by an universal law indeed, whatever, whether fixed or moveable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property, for the moment, of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation the property goes with it. stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. it would be curious then if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. if nature has made any one thing less susceptible, than all others, of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an Idea; which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the reciever cannot dispossess himself of it. it’s peculiar character too is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. he who recieves an idea from me, recieves instruction himself, without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, recieves light without darkening me.
  
  source