A Right to Copy

Copyright was invented for independent authors so they don't lose money on illegal copies of their creative works. In the year of 2025 where copying ubiquitously means "Ctrl+C" it may not be known to some that "copying" used to mean "use a writing utensil (a quill, possibly?) to replicate a body of text". You know, manually. Over the centuries, copying has been automated, copies became cheap, while creative work remained slightly less cheap, so for authors who wanted to make some money on the book they wrote, illegal copies became a poverty inducing nightmare. As if they weren't poor enough already!

Somewhat independently of copyright, another class of entities emerged: corporations. Corpora in Latin means "bodies", and corporation means a Tion of Bodies. The idea is pretty cool: a bunch of people (bodies) gets together, they dedicate a portion of shared wealth to run a business, which isn't really about being busy, the idea is that they used this shared wealth, known as the Capital, to make profit. Like copyright, corporation is a legal entity, i.e. pure fiction that we pretend to exist so we can apply laws to it. In other words, a legal system is a game, and corporations and copyright are game mechanics. The goal of the game is to not break the economy so the society at large is not suffering. Legal systems also exist to enforce other societal rules like "thou shalt not kill", but we're in the Economist Mode now, so let's falsely assume that nobody wants to kill anyone.

Then it occurred to someone that corporations can also be copyright holders. Intuitively, it seems nonsensical: a creative work is usually produced by a single person or a small group of dedicated people, why would copyrights be ever given to a purely fictional entity? One answer is "so the capitalist enjoys the extra wealth by oppressing the creative class". The other answer is "it's more convenient for a corporation to not fall apart over the copyright disputes by nicely asking the authors of the work to hand the copyright to the corporation".

You see, when an author is producing the work for the corporation, they're no longer the independent author. Copyright should not benefit them, because corporation already benefitted them. Nobody forced anyone to sign the contract! But suddenly copyright is serving now very different moral function.

What a beautiful dance of legal legalities, now that I think about that. As is usual, the solution is Sky Fish.