From: Kevin Smith <[log in to unmask]> Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2016 11:26:11 +0000 Article One of the Constitution does not give anyone a right to a copyright. The copyright and patent clause is part of a series of clauses that authorize Congress, which is the subject of Article 1, to pass certain types of laws. It also authorizes Congress to collect taxes, build roads and establish post offices, but we do not believe citizens have a right to taxes or a post office, do we? These are just the areas where Congress has the Constitutional authority to make laws, it does not require that they do so or dictate what such laws must say. So copyright is just statutory; it would be entirely Constitutional for the U.S. to have no copyright at all, if Congress so decided. My use of "God-given" seems to have caused some confusion, or perhaps merriment. But it is so easy to fall into this kind of thinking that copyright is more than a mere instrumentality. Maybe I should have said that copyright is neither a natural nor a Constitutional right, it is simply a means to an end, which could be changed or eliminated if social policy goals changed. Kevin On Mar 3, 2016, at 10:57 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote: From: Michael Magoulias <[log in to unmask]> Date: Thu, 3 Mar 2016 22:43:16 +0000 So much to ponder here. "Copyright is not a god-given natural right." Well, I'm not a lawyer and only an amateur theologian, but I'm pretty sure that Article 1 of the Constitution is quite explicit about copyright as a right. The Constitution is as close to God as you can get in the US -- at least as long as we confine ourselves law and politics and can resist the temptation to appeal to the metaphysical insights of the late Tammy Faye Bakker. Then, I fail to see how confining a discussion of copyright to the nineteenth century is a knock-down argument for its abolition or "radical" reformation in the 21st. Hey, I think looking at the history of anything is worth doing, but you might as well look at the whole history. And if you are going to use only a part of the past as a way of undermining something in the present, you need to spend a lot more time on what's wrong with the present and how directly past practice can be held accountable. It's even more dubious to use a past state of affairs to justify wrongdoing in the present. This is not so much using history as abusing it. Michael -----Original Message----- From: Kevin Smith <[log in to unmask]> Date: Tue, 1 Mar 2016 10:28:33 +0000 It is probably worth remember that the policy of ignoring copyrights granted by foreign governments, which is what SciHub is doing, was also the stance of the American publishing industry throughout the 19th century. Publishing grew as fast as it did in the U.S. in part because it was able to publish works from abroad without negotiating royalties, since our nation did not recognize rights over foreign IP. , and we should avoid reifying it. It is, in fact, a form of economic social engineering design to achieve particular conditions. When it no longer serves its purpose, it may be time to reconsider our commitment to the copyright regime once again, as a policy decision made for specific historical conditions that no longer obtain. Kevin