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.
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