Copyright Is Not a Right

There is a Japanese animated series called *Full Moon* that became hugely popular in Korea about 15 years ago. It was an enormous hit in the early 2000s, and perhaps because people who spent their childhood at that time—those now in their early to mid-20s—have acquired considerable purchasing power, a crowdfunding campaign was launched last September to release an album of the Korean dubbed soundtrack. As if proving just how massive the cultural consumption of people in their early to mid-20s has become, the project set a new all-time record in Korean crowdfunding history. Its original funding target was around 33 million won, but in the end approximately 70,000 people participated, and the campaign closed at 2.64 billion won. However, despite being a massive project worth nearly 2.6 billion won, criticism has begun spreading vigorously online since the day before yesterday that the actual content is shoddy. The album cover has absolutely nothing to do with the animation itself and consists solely of a photograph of the voice actress who played the female protagonist. The core criticism is that it looks not like an album commemorating the specific animated series *Full Moon*, but rather like an album commemorating a particular voice actress. In my view as well, this is clearly consumer deception and fraud, and it seems to require a strong response. From the standpoint of the libertarian ethics established by Murray N. Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, this is also an irrefutable criminal act. However, in light of libertarian rights theory, there is one point in this controversy that deserves attention.

The voice actress who led this project and voiced the female protagonist of the animation previously explained the purpose of the project by saying, “Half of the profits from the animation OST are taken by the music distributor (Google), and the other half goes to the original copyright holder.” (Source) In other words, the claim is that the profits from the Korean OST she recorded do not return to her but are instead taken by outsiders. At the time, when the project still seemed to be proceeding smoothly, this was not a major issue. But after the album cover was changed to a photograph of the voice actress, it triggered major controversy. The first line of criticism was that although the project had generated as much as 2.6 billion won in revenue, it still did not intend to acquire the copyright to a work that was already 15 years old. The second line of criticism was that because the voice actress merely added her voice to melodies created by Japanese composers, it was only right that the profits should go to the original composers or the music company. Yet from the standpoint of libertarian rights theory, both criticisms are unjustified. Copyright is not a right; it is merely a plunder privilege granted by the state. Therefore, the voice actress should be criticized only for consumer deception and fraud. Borrowing the expression of the great libertarian economist Murray Rothbard, the voice actress herself is also highly likely to be a victim of “triangular intervention.”

Many ordinary people may find it quite puzzling that libertarianism places such extreme importance on individual rights while at the same time regarding copyright as unjust. That is because copyright is commonly understood as the legitimate right of a creator who has “brought something out of nothing.” Yet even if the author of a literary work were to publish a book on the condition that purchasers may not reproduce it without permission or use it commercially, that still could not become a legitimate right. All forms of plagiarism and so-called “illegal copying” are lawful, and there is no basis for legal punishment. This is because no property right can be formed over a creative work.

The great libertarian rights theorists Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Stephan Kinsella, applying the praxeological methodology invented by Ludwig von Mises, argue for the logical impossibility of intellectual property and copyright. According to Hoppe’s argument, property rights are fundamentally a concept that arises from the scarcity of resources. Because the amount of resources we can occupy is limited, property rights were devised in order to prevent disputes over ownership. Accordingly, with respect to resources that have a physical character, an objectively verifiable distribution of property rights is possible. Since it is logically impossible for two people to occupy the same physical entity simultaneously, physical entities are “scarce.”

By contrast, an “idea,” once someone has thought of it, can no longer be scarce. If B thinks in his own mind exactly what A has thought, B is not thereby taking anything from A. A can still think the same thought without interference, and nothing is diminished for him. Therefore, everything mentally created by human beings is a kind of “free good.” It exists in the realm of ideas; it is a good that can be possessed by as many people as wish to possess it, and it lacks scarcity. No conflict can arise over it. All literary works, papers, essays, musical melodies and lyrics—in short, every product of the human mind—falls into the category of free goods.

If we deny that the products of the human mind are free goods, ordinary life becomes impossible. In Hoppe’s terms, we inevitably run into a “performative contradiction.” Let us take the starkest possible example. We would be unable to engage in any logical thinking unless we paid money. Since Aristotle was the first in human history to document and present the laws of logical thought, then if Aristotle’s descendants or the descendants of his relatives were to assert rights over them, we should not be allowed to think logically without paying royalties. We might not even be able to use Hangul. If the Jeonju Yi Family Association, as descendants of King Sejong, were to claim copyright over Hangul, we would have no right to use Hangul unless we paid them royalties. Even names commonly used in the West, such as David, John, and Abraham, all originating from the Bible, might be unusable unless royalties were paid to the Vatican. Under the current state system, copyright terms are limited in order to avoid precisely this kind of logical bankruptcy. But if an ideal entity I create is my property, then there is no basis for claiming that it somehow ceases to be mine after 50 or 70 years. Such limits are merely arbitrary deadlines set for administrative convenience. To avoid the contradiction of inconsistency, we have only two choices. First, to deny intellectual property and copyright entirely. Second, to acknowledge that intellectual property and copyright are as valid as rights over physical entities, and therefore to recognize in them the same permanent inheritability that physical property rights enjoy. In that case, if the Jeonju Yi Family Association as descendants of King Sejong were to demand copyright over Hangul, we would either have to pay them to use Hangul, or if Aristotle’s closest bloodline or genealogical descendants were to claim rights over all logical thought, we would have to cease all mental activity until we paid them.

Rational property rights apply only to physical entities. I own my book. If someone steals my book, that is a criminal act. But if someone else freely copies the contents of the book I wrote and publishes them as though they were his own creation, that is merely unethical; it is not a legal crime. In a free society, there would be no legal punishment for plagiarism or illegal downloading. It would simply be regarded as ethically unscrupulous, and spontaneous disadvantages would follow within civil society.

Likewise, the voice actress in question has no need to pay copyright royalties to the original Japanese composers or the music company for the songs she sang. And this also means that we too may download her music so-called illegally. She has the right to release the album however she wishes. We have the right either to purchase that album or not to purchase it and instead extract only the audio online.

In the controversy over the release of the *Full Moon* OST album, from a libertarian perspective the only thing that is genuinely problematic is the consumer deception and fraud arising from the voice actress’s arbitrary change of the album cover. Copyright is not the issue. It was legitimate for her not to pay copyright royalties to a Japanese company, and it is equally legitimate for her to express dissatisfaction with paying such royalties.

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Original title: 저작권은 권리가 아니다

Author: Gyeong-hun Kim

Date: 2019-12-05

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=free_opinion&pn=16&idx=22131