Some idiot on Richarddawins dot net, opining on the latest in the “Expelled” rip-off of XVIVO debacle:
Copyright is a form of speech restriction. I believe restricting speech does more harm than good. The best cure for bad speech is more speech, rather than censorship. Imagine if, instead of standing on the shoulders of giants, Newton had been sued by all of them for infringement. Making it easy for Newton to “rip off” earlier work (with proper attribution) created more value for humanity than all the value destroyed by cranks who misused the same easy access to information.
“Copyright is a form of speech restriction”? Yep, it certainly is. Then again, so are laws against slander, libel, defamation of character, disturbance of the peace, false advertising, incitement to violence, physical threats, etc. You’d have to be insane to argue that we didn’t need some form of any of the preceding, so restrictions on speech are not a priori illegitimate. “The best cure for bad speech is more speech, rather than censorship”? So to a copyright holder, who needs to make returns on substantial resource investments, the cure for copyright infringement would be….more investments? Copyright is in place to prevent a tragedy of the commons scenario. This writer probably doesn’t have a clue of the kind of work that went into XVIVO’s animation, or that XVIVO is a small, private outfit that has to make that kind of money back to function and produce content.
I’ve been critical of overzealous copyright maximalism in the past, including legislation like the “Induce Act” and certain aspects of the DMCA. But to blithely dismiss the need for some kind of institutional protection of content creators is not only wrong, but malicious.
BTW, Newton himself did happen to accuse a certain someone of infringement.
