> I would say it's clearly ethical, even required, to share knowledge and information with other people. That's pretty much the highest impulse a human has, right up there with "protect your offspring".
I don't think you can assert this without providing some backup. It's certainly the case that sharing certain information with certain parties is a high impulse, but the idea that we have a strong impulse for all information to be shared freely is highly unintuitive to me, merely based on my experiences.
Furthermore, that something is an impulse does not make it ethical. We have many impulses (sex, food, violence), and acting on them unquestioningly would lead to many unethical things. We also do not categorically say that all of these impulses must be fulfilled in an ethical society. For example, most people would not agree that I have a certain right to act violently at times, because of my violent impulses.
> As Rick Falkvinge is so eloquent in saying, this is our culture, and permitting monopolies on it is just disastrously bad policy.
That's not what a monopoly is. A monopoly would be if only company could “create” culture. (Or if it was group, it'd be an oligopoly, but I'd still understand your point.) But we're not in that situation. Especially with the internet, we're not in that situation. Anyone can create culture, and they have the ability to choose how exclusive it is. I would guess, though I can't back this up, that at this point in history we have more free culture than ever before. We have the opposite of a monopoly on our culture.
> Copyright is a subsidy to distributors, not artists. And the distributors know it. There's no need to protect the business model of content distributors in a world that has the Internet.
It's both, and why shouldn't it be? The studio executives behind making Game of Thrones play their part just as George RR Martin and Aidan Gillen do. There is an argument to be had that perhaps the compensation for these roles is skewed relative to their importance, but I don't believe that argument would lead to “therefore, no one has any right to make money on Game of Thrones.”
I don't think you can assert this without providing some backup. It's certainly the case that sharing certain information with certain parties is a high impulse, but the idea that we have a strong impulse for all information to be shared freely is highly unintuitive to me, merely based on my experiences.
Furthermore, that something is an impulse does not make it ethical. We have many impulses (sex, food, violence), and acting on them unquestioningly would lead to many unethical things. We also do not categorically say that all of these impulses must be fulfilled in an ethical society. For example, most people would not agree that I have a certain right to act violently at times, because of my violent impulses.
> As Rick Falkvinge is so eloquent in saying, this is our culture, and permitting monopolies on it is just disastrously bad policy.
That's not what a monopoly is. A monopoly would be if only company could “create” culture. (Or if it was group, it'd be an oligopoly, but I'd still understand your point.) But we're not in that situation. Especially with the internet, we're not in that situation. Anyone can create culture, and they have the ability to choose how exclusive it is. I would guess, though I can't back this up, that at this point in history we have more free culture than ever before. We have the opposite of a monopoly on our culture.
> Copyright is a subsidy to distributors, not artists. And the distributors know it. There's no need to protect the business model of content distributors in a world that has the Internet.
It's both, and why shouldn't it be? The studio executives behind making Game of Thrones play their part just as George RR Martin and Aidan Gillen do. There is an argument to be had that perhaps the compensation for these roles is skewed relative to their importance, but I don't believe that argument would lead to “therefore, no one has any right to make money on Game of Thrones.”