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You are wrong, there are fundamental rights, they are not granted by the state. http://praxeology.net/LS-NL-1.htm#ch.1

Close enough. paragraph 4

Why would anyone in the marketplace with this valuable knowledge give you this knowledge for no cost? Why would anyone make such a license available to the public at no cost?

Well, I can only speak for myself, but I'd release such a licence in order to encourage other people to use it. I don't like the kind of restrictions on end-users that many publishers impose (e.g. the jailed iPhone) and would like to make it easier for publishers of proprietary software to do the right thing by their customers.

Well, I guess we disagree on this point.

Can you give me an example of software that is freely redistributable that is profitable solely by sales of licences? I'd be more than happy to be convinced otherwise, but I just don't see any real-world examples.

That would be a free market in action, with the government granted monopoly in the mix, the free market is out the window.

That's the anarcho-capitalist view of copyright I believe; I've read a bit about it here. Can't say I agree with it though, despite being a hard-core capitalist & libertarian.

And the GPL goes against this how exactly?

The GPL doesn't go against this at all, provided people are free to choose or reject it for their projects. My objection was to Stallman claiming that no-one should have the right to ask people to accept a EULA that restricts redistribution:

I shouldn't have the power to tell you not to do these things. No one should.

I...

Libertarianism has always had the contradiction that private power would be unchecked and therefore will tend toward not only market power and monopoly, but the hijacking of government power as well. That is, a government that is too weak or indifferent to limit the concentration of private power will soon be the bitch of that power, and once that happens it won't remain small and unobtrusive for long. In fact, it's Mussolini's own definition of Fascism.

    Yep, Mussolini's what happens when the robber barons get tired of hiring armed goons to smash up unions (only to have the union men vote for legislation to protect themselves) and so the robber barons decide to put the goons in charge of the government.

  But that's not "Libertarianism" per se -- historically, "libertarian" (little-"l") has been a term for a broad number of anti-government philosophies, and outside the US is most associated with the anti-statist form of socialism. The U.S. "Libertarians" (capital-"L") are more precisely termed anarcho-capitalists. Their philosophy from the start has mostly been defined in terms of what they are not -- authoritarian marxists, to be exact. The danger of building your philosophy by looking at someone else's and then rejecting it piece by piece, is that when the other side has a fundamental contradiction underlying their philosophy, you end up ingesting the same contradiction, just turned on its head.

  Marxism holds that allowing small groups to accumulate massive power over others is bad -- if it's businessmen. Government would never abuse its power, because it comes from the will of the people, yadda yadda yadda.
  Anarcho-capitalism holds that allowing small groups to accumulate massive power over others is bad -- if it's government. Businessmen would never abuse their power, because the magic of the market, yadda yadda yadda.

  The only major difference between these contradictions is that the Marxists at least had an excuse, namely that nobody really knew what would happen if you gave a bunch of communists absolute power over a country.* The Ancaps have no such excuse -- the history of banana republics, robber barons, "company store" towns, and so forth is well documented.

  The conservative position towards these problems is "shut up, the boss knows better than you." The liberal position is "oh, that's too bad. How about we ask the boss to be a little nicer? Mmm'kay?"
  This is why I'm an anarchist now. I've come to believe that any great accumulation of power will be abused, and the only way out is to oppose the growth or continuation of such power structures, and favor anything that gives that power back to the average person.

  - mantar

* But plenty of people guessed correctly. See Benjamin Tucker's predictions about Marxism in his 1888 essay, "State Socialism and Anarchism". -- "Whatever, then, the State Socialists may claim or disclaim, their system, if adopted, is doomed to end in a State religion, to the expense of which all must contribute and at the altar of which all must kneel."

"Give to Ceaser what is Ceasers."

I do not think this means what you think it means. There might be his head and name on the coin, it does not make it his. All tax is theft, and is a sin.

"... But there is a grain of serious truth in this: If you value a good you are selling, chances are that it is rated too high. If you sell what you consider junk, chances are that you provide more value to somebody else than the good provides you."

Obviously you're a student of Friedrich von Wieser

First off, on the issue of Standard Oil: most such monsters don't do well unless the government props them up. Ma Bell was getting crushed by competition until the government regulated the phone service and set up a monopoly. Why did they do this? Because it was thought that price wars hurt the consumer.

U. S. Steel came to power in a similar way, as did Standard Oil. Here is an essay by Roy Childs that discusses the issue (the first part is a bit boring, but it gets better).

Large businesses continually seek regulation so as to squeeze out their competition.

My point of the example is that if the RIAA somehow did manage to raise the price on all RIAA CDs to $25, they would be destroyed. At that price, it becomes worth it to find indie talent and put venture capital behind a new label.

The RIAA succeeds not by jacking up prices, but by keeping their prices low enough and distribution wide enough that people aren't really pushed to buy anything else, and there's not enough money to be made in a startup.

Over time, the RIAA has gotten greedier and greedier: they keep adding layers of fat internally, and they have to support all of them. When they raise their prices high enough, one of them will break from the pack and reform, or an outsider will eat their lunch.

That is, of course, unless the RIAA somehow gets a government-granted monopoly.

The other side of it is that they have a partial monopoly: most radio stations 24x7 RIAA commercials. As long as the cost of broadcasting is artificially inflated like it is now, it will remain that way.

That's my view on the matter. I might be wrong.

The MS anti-trust trial was horrible. Some people at MS should've gone to jail for perjury. However, I'm not so sure they should've been under litigation for anti-trust. Their illegal actions in other negotiations (such as what Cringely has been talking about for a while) were enough.

Besides, even though the case folded, MS is still going to go away. If you're going to blame anyone for the whole incident, you might as well blame the executives with the mantra "no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft."

You can see the first steps of where Microsoft is going with the DMCA (no reverse engineering), attacks on the GPL, and increased use of patents. If we can prevent them from using the government against us, I think they'll die off.

Note that I say "us." I am a believer in Free Software. I view it as the only honest way to do business in software, and I think it's a market correction for all the crap software we've had to deal with for so many years.

But I think that Free Software will win in the end because it's The Right Thing, because it's what the current great programmers like to work with. I don't think we should mandate the use of Free Software, nor discourage the use of closed software. Like I said, I think it will win on its merits.

Having said that, of course, I think that if a local government doesn't consider a better, cheaper alternative when they're considering a large project, that they're doing the taxpayers a disservice.

So, there you go. As you said, we come from different angles on government and market regulation, so it's difficult for us to hear exactly what the other is saying and not the concepts that we read into it. I appreciate you being clear, I hope I've done a similar job.

It's been nice talking to you, I've enjoyed what you've had to say. Catch you around sometime.