Kirn quibble

Haven’t done one of these quibbles in a LONG time. This one is a real clanger. Kirn was responding to a twitterite who said (somewhat more accurately) that communists hate private property but love copyrights, which are only fictional.

= = = = = START KIRN:

Copywrights, along with patents, are the LEAST fictional form of property. They are born of the mind, out of the intellect & imagination. They are novel creations, owned at conception, whereas other property is merely claimed, the title to it purchased, inherited, or expropriated.

= = = = = END KIRN.

Historically and legally wrong. A copyright is purely fictional and theoretical until it’s bought by a publisher. It isn’t owned at conception. That was an unfortunate trick introduced by Disney in 1996 when it bought the US law to insure that it could always monetize Mickey. Before Disney, the property could only be defended in a court after you REGISTERED it, which is just like real estate or cars.

With real estate, until you pay the government for a deed, the government won’t help you defend the property. A “right” that can’t be defended in court is purely fictional.

Cars are a better analogy. You don’t need to license a car if you’re going to leave it in your garage or drive it around your farm. You need to license it if you’re going to drive it on public streets. You don’t need to copyright a text if you’re going to keep it on your own computer for your own use. If you want to make money by distributing it, you need to register it so you can LEGALLY prevent other businesses from copying and selling it.

Copyrights and patents have NOTHING to do with creation or authorship. They exist PURELY to enable commercial use of the property FOR MONEY.

FWIW, the Soviet patent system was much closer to the concept of inherent authorship.

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Footnote for fairness. A practical difference between the digital and analog worlds could lead to Kirn’s confusion. Before the web, publishing a text in large enough quantities to make a living was a big business, needing buildings and equipment and hundreds of employees. Authors had better things to do with their time, so authors never owned big printing businesses. Now it’s practically possible to self-publish both text and art in large enough quantities, so the author and the publisher are often the same person. The art world had more self-publishing in the analog era. A famous artist who could charge hundreds or thousands per copy in limited quantities often made engravings and ran them off in a manual process. (eg ‘Etchings’)