Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Being fair these are semantically different meanings of “theft”.

1. Movie copyright is compared, by its owners and the law, to physical theft. This type of theft does not remove the physical use or any use from the owners.

2. GPL copyright only requires sharing changed code. Failing to disclose the changes actually does affect the owners in the way claimed.

They’re two different social contracts and we need different words for them. Honestly many social problems are like this.




We do have that. In law copyright infringement is categorically not "theft" and is not even handled by the same type of court.

The "copyright infringement (is / isn't) theft" argument is drivel on the same intellectual level as "corporations are people."


right, infringement is not theft, and corporations are not people. Corporations are governments.

The corporation you probably thinking of right now is a small private government to run a for profit endeavor. But note that cities are also corporations.


Corporations are not 'people' as in 'natural persons', but they are 'persons', as in 'juridical person' -- as are trusts, estates, and other institutions.


Trusts etc. are mechanisms to move inheritance from personal law into corporate law. This lets you game the system as corporate privilege often handles this more gracefully than personal privilege(wills and inheritance).

Probably want to contact a lawyer for the nuances, but the thousand foot view is you create a corporation with yourself as chief officer, and others as backup officers. set your corporate law to make your backup officers useless until the death of the chief officer and strict guidelines as to how the backup officers are to manage corporate assets. then finally transfer assets to the corporation.

The point being, the thing that makes a corporation a corporation is its corporate law governing its members, thus the assertion that corporations are not people, they are governments.




Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: