So, apparently I am not the only one who realizes that John Degen is full of crap.
Rute Correia has written a reaction to Degan’s 5 Seriously Dumb Myths About Copyright the Media Should Stop Repeating, in which he attacks copyright”myths” that are anything but.
Correia’s article is called 5 Seriously Important Facts about Copyright the Media Should Keep on Repeating. It is worth reading.
And, for comparison, you can also re-read my article, John Degen Loses Argument Against Straw Man.
April 23rd was the anniversary of the deaths of Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Garcilaso de la Vega, and in celebration, UNESCO has declared that day World Book Day. It is also called “World Book and Copyright Day,” but I don’t think the term is appropriate, since none of those authors’ works were ever under any form of copyright.
Someone who does think the term is appropriate is John Degan. This should not be any surprise: Degen is an outspoken copyright maximalist. He is currently Executive Director of The Writers’ Union of Canada, and Chair of the International Authors Forum; he was formerly Executive Director of the Professional Writers Association of Canada, and Communications Manager for Magazines Canada.
So, Degen decided to write an article called 5 Seriously Dumb Myths About Copyright the Media Should Stop Repeating. Here’s the first problem with that article: nobody in the media is actually repeating the “myths” he’s supposedly debunking. Here’s the second problem: all of the “truths” that he uses to debunk these “myths” are misleading, one-sided, or flat-out wrong. Even when he’s arguing against his own straw man, he loses.
When people use the word “right,” they often mean drastically different things. For example, the right to free speech is very different from the right to make a right turn at a red light, and both are different from the right to receive a public education. Talking about rights often enters the intersection of jurisprudence and ethics, so people have been discussing this for a long time.
In this article, I’m going to explain the various types of rights, and then relate them to copyright law.
When someone says that someone else is “against copyright,” they are usually making a meaningless statement. If they simply mean “one who is against the current copyright laws,” then almost everyone is “against copyright.” If that were the case, then organizations like the RIAA, MPAA, or ASCAP are the ones who are most “against copyright,” since they are the ones who are the most active in lobbying Congress to promote changes to copyright laws.
That is pretty clearly absurd. What the accuser usually means is “they hold views on copyright that are not mine.” And because the implication is that copyright is ethical, the people making this statement do nothing but make an ad hominem attack. It holds no value in any rational discussion.
Instead, we must use some kind of terminology that captures both one’s own views, and the views of the opposing speaker. Only then can we even start to have any kind of dialog at all. Obviously, people have a wide variety of opinions on copyright law (when they have them at all). No single category, or set of categories, could possibly capture the nuances of the viewpoint held by any single person, or even of any single organization. Even so, copyright viewpoints generally fall into specific categories. This is because they hold common normative views about the nature of copyright itself.
