First off, yes I think the armed forces would not want to go up against the US citizenry. There are over 100 million gun owners in the USA and nearly half the guns on the planet are in the US. Piss off the most radical extreme 1% and you have a major problem on your hands, 10% and you have an uncontrolable unmanagable disaster, plus many of the citizenry IS ex military and well trained - not fun to mess with either. (renember when the ATF went up against the NRA and the militas and Clinton later backed off - you don't think he did it cause of his character do you)
Second, in the US - the military is highly integrated into the civilian population. You would have treason out the yin yang. (this integration is there for a reason BTW)
Third, renember that the economic engine that pays for all that nice military equiptment, supplies, and logistics IS the civilian population. Good luck trying to seize and supply it all by force.
Finally, they nearly tried a military occupation after the civil war. I forgot what happened, but it turned out to be such a disaster that it is taught as a no-no in military text and training to this day.
Now the Iraqi pilots get get up to snuff in their large fleet of Blackhawk choppers using US simulators!
No No No - you got it all wrong. Contrary to the title, I refuse to believe this is a open source software issue. We all know both the US armed forces and the Iraqi's have a right to use it as much as anyone else does. IMHO this is about the war, so I'll bite. (I know I'm gonna get it, but I can't resist)
Screw the UN, screw France, and screw Saddam Hussein. We simply need to invade now and get it over with. Let's get real - you can't possibly expect the US gov to dally while this guy biulds god only knows what. C'mon we all know the first place any terrorist is going to go when they're looking for those big bad bombs - Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. But unlike the other two, we've patiently been trying to rid ourselves of Saddam's bullshit for 12 years. Even if he didn't have massive amounts of oil to finance his nuke programs, and even if he hadn't killed millions, and even if he didn't genocide his own people - it would still be a just war if for anything for the sake of trying to resuce the Iraqi people. I think even the folks in France know I'm right.
SLC schools are pretty good, but more often than not I would say the real problem is the nature of public schools in general. The problem is that what looks politically popular is not necissarly the most intellectual or in the kids best interest. More often than not, no matter how incompetent, irresponsible, stupid, and foolish public schools are - you can't keep them from getting your tax money anyhow, unless you go through monumental god like efforts. The best solution is to do what you can to send your kids to non-public schools whenever possible.
You'd think with all that money coming in, they could spend it to invest it on product changes to make their products more competitive instead of, oh, say, lawyers and lobbyists...
I wish they would, but they won't. History is repeating itself, it's the 1850's all over again. The planataion masters had a vision that the entire purpose and meaning of the industrial revolution was to use inventions like the cotton gin to expand their plantations for unlimited growth and profit. And they had a lot of money to back it up, but they could not compete with the industial revolution which relied on an educated and mobile workforce. In a desperate attempt to regain controll, they seperated from the union - it didn't work.
Today I see large and profitable companies who think that the entire purpose of the information age is to use inventions like the internet to leverage their "intellectual property" holdings over every corner of the planet. They are desperately trying to use technologies like DRM to fence off their territories. God only knows what's next.
IMHO, this just highlites whats really going on in the US economey now days. Companies with big revenue streams like MS (and even RIAA members) are in effect forbidden from investing in the next generation technology with the highest growth rates like Linux (and p2p) because they cut into this revenue. Magnify this by millions of other companies and industries and you have a real economic problem - that will not be solved nicely. With trillions at stake, don't be supprised if all hell breaks loose.
I was going to say they are failing because they are too liberal. Just like talk radio, nobody want's to hear it. People are sick and tired of hearing how the government isn't taxing and regulating us enough to support causes that don't work. Even the good liberal articles were more libertarian than liberal. The liberal agenda offers nothing that the republican and libertarian agendas couldn't offer 10 times better. People are just sick of it.
No, the parent of this thread had a point. Common property rights are not natural rights. Natural would be that what you can take by force or by stealth is your possession, but only for as long as you are willing and able to guard it. Witness "property" in the animal kingdom
And there is the flaw. Rights between humans are not equivalnet to rights of animals. Animals do not have free will. They can know of no difference between right and wrong, because they are incapable of making choices and their link to consequences. This is not true of humans, who by their very nature can understand consequences from their perspective and that of others. When you can reach this level, right and wrong are no longer appear subjective - but universal measurable and observable. It is from this nature that property rights derive, from an understanding that not everyone can use something at the same time, and a non subjective method of allocation and mutual respect. IP does not follow this mantra.
...Long ago, we humans realized that we would collectively be better off if we would acknowledge property. This is a social contract, one which most people agree is beneficiary. IP is a different contract. Talented individuals are promised a great amount of control to give them more incentive to produce. It seems likely that there is a point between too much control and too little that is most beneficiary to mankind. Finding this is rather difficult, since the overall benefits and losses are hard to quantify. But the main point of this reply is, common property is no more "natural" than IP is.
People may have collectively realized that property is a natural right at a given time, just as they collectively realised that gravity exists at another. But neither is or ever has been subjective. No social contract takes away rights, any more than one can take away gravity. Social contracts give government and leaders permission to lead on the assumption that they most effectively secure rights that already exist. But rights exist independently, as part of human nature, the human condition. Rights by defenition are not subjective, they are measurable learnable and observable and rational. Just as we assume any other natural event in the universe is.
There is a difference though. You can not take controll of say my car without depriving me use or access to it, but with information - my access to it does not deprive you of yours. Me having my car is not an attempt to controll you any more than you having your information is an attempt to controll me. But if you make a copy available at large, and then try to restrict my copying and personal use - that is controll.
Also the creation of information has an inherent value even if you can't controll it - e.g. I can still enjoy my music even if you have a copy too. But even so, incentive does not a property make - otherwise we would have anarchy.
Creators and especially publishers are not moral gods, they are moral equivalents to everyone else. Unlike with private property, there is no natural reason why they should have this right at the exclusion of everyone else.
IMHO, DRM is about the copyright lords trying to fense off their own territory as society moves into the information age. Of course noone is going to respect that fense, so with trillions at stake all hell will certainly break loose.
It is analogous to the plantation masters trying to get back controll over slavery as society moved into the industrial age. In a desperate attempt, they broke off from the union. Of course, noone respected that boundary either.
Government is not about sacrificing rights for common unity and security, but rather about people having natural law rights who organize to secure those rights. Property rights are a natural law right, copyrights and patents are not. (accept that if you invent something you always have the right to keep it secret, and you have the right to be acknowledged as the first creator because someone else who claimed to would be acting fradulently)
The right to copy things is a natural law right that exists outside of government. It is like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and the right to bear arms. These rights exist outside of government, or anywhere in the world even if local governments refuse to acknowledge them. Unlike other property rights that derive from the fact that not every body can use something at the same time. With information and ideas they can - copyrights and patents are an artificial construct that has artificialy harmfull consequences.
First off, IBM, Microsoft, and Sun are too large precicely because of intellectual property. I saw this happen once when I was working at a fab-facuility. It was bought out, and pretty much shut down, not because it couldn't make a good profit, but because the buyer bought it to corner a strategic market using its patent holdings. Second off, if you and everyone else loose say a million worth of IP, but in return gain access to a trillion worth of IP - then this is not a net loss for anyone. In fact, it would likely create an innovation and business explosion.
It is such a relief to hear this. Intellectual property is not free market, or even a valid form of property. People just take it on faith that just because the government calls something a property, that it is - and has all the advantages of free market property ownership. In fact if you don't believe in it, you are even called socialist. Identifying myself as libertarian, this irks me even more. They just don't get it, IP is not about property at all - it is about controll.
I agree, I suppose I should mention that the death of copyrights, the boom in p2p, and global mesh networks, are the next waves that I see. I'd be nice if I could use this knowledge to bring myself some financial security - but I loathe the day that I try telling some executive that can give me a leg up that copyrights are dead. Yeah right, God help me.
Copyrights really half to go though. Society could live with people breathing down your neck about what to copy at the library, but now with the intnernt they cant do it without nearly enslaving everyone on the planet. Contrary to popular belief, people who find a need to copy things are not worthless parasites, any more than artists are artificial gods. This propaganda is probably to distracting from the fact that for every artist that makes it from copyrights, 10000 are living in dirt poverty - hindered on even the things they can replicate. The worst thing I see with copyrights is a clash of the titans, with industries that have these huge revenue streams and ones that have captured the next paradigm and have huge growth rates. eg companies like Microsoft can't invent in latest greatest paradigm - Linux, for fear of choking their own revenue stream, but they can sure fight and attack them in amazingly energetic ways.
You could have rights managment systems out the yinyang, but if the software running it is full of bugs, buffer overflows, back doors, code that auto preruns unauthorized stuff, or sends private info to MS headquarters (Yeah I know MS would never have eny of these problems) Then it will not matter a bit, even if every damn piece of data and code is digitally signed, registered, and pre-authed - it won't matter. In fact it could make things worse as people actually leave their systems less secure - assuming that they are less hackable or that they will know when people copy stuff. BZZZT. God help them, they'll need it.
In all fairness, about 2 years ago there was a slashdot post asking about the future of UNIX and I replied something like - the only future of UNIX is Linux. Boy if I wasn't beat down and humiliated by an army of Sun techies and moded out of existence.
Wish I could find that post.
Of course a few years before that I said to some executives that SCO UNIX (renember them) is dead. If I didn't nearly loose my job over that, and was blowen off by all the "important" people in the company who thought Linux was "a toy opperating system"
But the worst was a few years before that when a company I worked for refused to get an internet hookup because it was "a passing fad"
So okay, here I am having the last laugh because I was right, and they are reeling from it. But I really didn't want the last laugh, I wanted some credit for being right - perhaps a promotion, perhaps a pay raise, perhaps being hired back to one of my old companies with nice pay and actually being listened to and respected about the future of technology. Rather I am an unemployed bum techie who jumped arround jobs too much, who got paid too much during the dot.com insanity, who might be able to get a job flipping burgers - but other than that I am surely screwed. At least with an RHCE, I'll be the smartest burger flipper arround.
You eliminate copyright and you destroy the information age. Copyrights do not merely protect overpaid musicians. The sooner this simple fact sinks into your fucking head, the sooner society canfigure out how to balance copyrights with the digital medium of the internet.
Their is no balance, information is so easy to copy and manipulte - that either it will all half to be controlled or none of it. That's the whole point, it's not about balance, but controll - it's not about overpaid musicians, but controll - it's not about protection, but controll - the information age should about sharing and the free flow of information, not controll. Speaking of me I needing to get something into my f***ing head... well I digress.
A symptom that copyrights are unenforceable, so the only way they can compensate is by fear mongering with draconian punishments. Our response should be to act in civil disobedience whenever possible. The sooner we force this thru, the sooner we can get on with the information age.
Actually I like politics when it works, because is it so much better to fight with words rather than force. But politics is not an end in itself, libery is, and politics is just one of many way's to secure my rights; another way is by leveraging tecnology.
If anyone knows how to make the system work, how to out politic the RIAA, DCMA, the abuses of "intellectual property", insane taxes, phone regulations and what not - I would love that, I would cry out place tham on a pedistal to be adorned. But, to be honest, this is not happening and I can't see it happening unless change is forced from the outside. By leveraging technology, I can actually see a light at the end of the tunnel.
When it comes to anything other than basic crime or perhaps national defense, I just don't trust the govt anymore to secure my rights. I honestly trust technological solutions alot more than political ones. e.g. Implementing technology that makes it impossible for them to regulate voice calls without shutting down the internet. This is the way the future simply has to go, and I think our efforts and money would simply be better spent there.
No, I do get it. As a libertarian I am very well aware that just because the government calls somthing a right does not mean that it is. It wasn't true in the 1850's with slavery as a property right, and it's not true with patents or copyrights today. As a libertarian I understand that property rights exist as a means to deal with the fact that not everybody can use something at the same time, implying markets, and implying that people organize in the form of government to secure those rights. With patents and copyrights, this philosophy becomes bogus.
What you are saying is that without patnets nobody would have an incentive to put the money and effort into say, a cure for AIDS. That is outrageous. There is plenty of incentive for people to organize economically to stop diesase and the like without an artifical government monopoly. In fact, from newspapers I've gleamed - patents are actually intefering with a cure for AIDS as companies fight bitterly over conflicting patents, and researchers are forbidden to share critical information with other researchers, for fear of giving competitors the lead on a patnet claim.
I don't buy their conclusions for (say) the pharmaceutical industry, in which the indivisibility of research cost, the practically zero marginal cost of production, and the commoditized nature of cures for a particular illness make a stronger argument for patents and artificial monopoly as incentive for innovation
Pharmaceutical patnets are the worst. The most evil example I could think of was when corporate executives wrote an article to the newspaper that effectively said they had no incentive to innovate unless they had the right to lock out millions of people dying of AIDS in Africa. Other examples include the antibotic - Cipiro where a generic was being made in India for I think 10 cents a pill - and was offered to the USA during the worst of the Anthrax chrises, but was rebuffed for patent reasons. Not to consider all the research and development of natural, alternative, or other cures that involved the use of medicines with expired patents that was outright blackballed by industry giants in favor of more dangerous drugs that could be patented. And don't forget the millions of old people who are litterally "reamed" over medicines that they can't afford, but if they try to order generic's or non-generics that are sold at a cheaper price outside the country they could end up with a fine I think of $250,000. The real question, is how many people are we willing to let suffer and die in the name pharmaceutical patents? For all the people that are needlessly suffering and dying I would expect amazing and overwhelming justifications, but have rather gotten nothing but crap.
I honestly half to say I'm not too concerned about the absoluteness of democracy (for lack of better wording). Democracy is not an end in itself, but a tool for protecting individual liberties - and like any tool it can be abused too. It's disgusting to hear people suggesting that if you don't like something isn't right in a democracy - you have no right to have any other recourse accept to vote.
What's right and wrong, good and bad, truth or lie is not decided by popular vote or public opinion - but by observable facts that exist independently. What I hope happens is that new technologies "force" democracy to become more free even if it tries not to. EG, a voting popluace would never shut down the internet - but it may be impossible to stop free mp3's any other way. A voting population would never shut down ecommerce - but this would provide the infrastructure to avoid unjust tax even if the mob desperately tries to impose it.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, yes I think the armed forces would not want to go up against the US citizenry. There are over 100 million gun owners in the USA and nearly half the guns on the planet are in the US. Piss off the most radical extreme 1% and you have a major problem on your hands, 10% and you have an uncontrolable unmanagable disaster, plus many of the citizenry IS ex military and well trained - not fun to mess with either. (renember when the ATF went up against the NRA and the militas and Clinton later backed off - you don't think he did it cause of his character do you)
Second, in the US - the military is highly integrated into the civilian population. You would have treason out the yin yang. (this integration is there for a reason BTW)
Third, renember that the economic engine that pays for all that nice military equiptment, supplies, and logistics IS the civilian population. Good luck trying to seize and supply it all by force.
Finally, they nearly tried a military occupation after the civil war. I forgot what happened, but it turned out to be such a disaster that it is taught as a no-no in military text and training to this day.
How come every post in this thread that is sympathetic to war is modded down as flamebait?
Now the Iraqi pilots get get up to snuff in their large fleet of Blackhawk choppers using US simulators!
No No No - you got it all wrong. Contrary to the title, I refuse to believe this is a open source software issue. We all know both the US armed forces and the Iraqi's have a right to use it as much as anyone else does. IMHO this is about the war, so I'll bite. (I know I'm gonna get it, but I can't resist)
Screw the UN, screw France, and screw Saddam Hussein. We simply need to invade now and get it over with. Let's get real - you can't possibly expect the US gov to dally while this guy biulds god only knows what. C'mon we all know the first place any terrorist is going to go when they're looking for those big bad bombs - Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. But unlike the other two, we've patiently been trying to rid ourselves of Saddam's bullshit for 12 years. Even if he didn't have massive amounts of oil to finance his nuke programs, and even if he hadn't killed millions, and even if he didn't genocide his own people - it would still be a just war if for anything for the sake of trying to resuce the Iraqi people. I think even the folks in France know I'm right.
SLC schools are pretty good, but more often than not I would say the real problem is the nature of public schools in general. The problem is that what looks politically popular is not necissarly the most intellectual or in the kids best interest. More often than not, no matter how incompetent, irresponsible, stupid, and foolish public schools are - you can't keep them from getting your tax money anyhow, unless you go through monumental god like efforts. The best solution is to do what you can to send your kids to non-public schools whenever possible.
You'd think with all that money coming in, they could spend it to invest it on product changes to make their products more competitive instead of, oh, say, lawyers and lobbyists...
I wish they would, but they won't. History is repeating itself, it's the 1850's all over again. The planataion masters had a vision that the entire purpose and meaning of the industrial revolution was to use inventions like the cotton gin to expand their plantations for unlimited growth and profit. And they had a lot of money to back it up, but they could not compete with the industial revolution which relied on an educated and mobile workforce. In a desperate attempt to regain controll, they seperated from the union - it didn't work.
Today I see large and profitable companies who think that the entire purpose of the information age is to use inventions like the internet to leverage their "intellectual property" holdings over every corner of the planet. They are desperately trying to use technologies like DRM to fence off their territories. God only knows what's next.
OK, how about this. Copyrights are dead and when the companies with all the money figure this out - the shit will hit the fan.
IMHO, this just highlites whats really going on in the US economey now days. Companies with big revenue streams like MS (and even RIAA members) are in effect forbidden from investing in the next generation technology with the highest growth rates like Linux (and p2p) because they cut into this revenue. Magnify this by millions of other companies and industries and you have a real economic problem - that will not be solved nicely. With trillions at stake, don't be supprised if all hell breaks loose.
I was going to say they are failing because they are too liberal. Just like talk radio, nobody want's to hear it. People are sick and tired of hearing how the government isn't taxing and regulating us enough to support causes that don't work. Even the good liberal articles were more libertarian than liberal. The liberal agenda offers nothing that the republican and libertarian agendas couldn't offer 10 times better. People are just sick of it.
No, the parent of this thread had a point. Common property rights are not natural rights. Natural would be that what you can take by force or by stealth is your possession, but only for as long as you are willing and able to guard it. Witness "property" in the animal kingdom
And there is the flaw. Rights between humans are not equivalnet to rights of animals. Animals do not have free will. They can know of no difference between right and wrong, because they are incapable of making choices and their link to consequences. This is not true of humans, who by their very nature can understand consequences from their perspective and that of others. When you can reach this level, right and wrong are no longer appear subjective - but universal measurable and observable. It is from this nature that property rights derive, from an understanding that not everyone can use something at the same time, and a non subjective method of allocation and mutual respect. IP does not follow this mantra.
People may have collectively realized that property is a natural right at a given time, just as they collectively realised that gravity exists at another. But neither is or ever has been subjective. No social contract takes away rights, any more than one can take away gravity. Social contracts give government and leaders permission to lead on the assumption that they most effectively secure rights that already exist. But rights exist independently, as part of human nature, the human condition. Rights by defenition are not subjective, they are measurable learnable and observable and rational. Just as we assume any other natural event in the universe is.
There is a difference though. You can not take controll of say my car without depriving me use or access to it, but with information - my access to it does not deprive you of yours. Me having my car is not an attempt to controll you any more than you having your information is an attempt to controll me. But if you make a copy available at large, and then try to restrict my copying and personal use - that is controll.
Also the creation of information has an inherent value even if you can't controll it - e.g. I can still enjoy my music even if you have a copy too. But even so, incentive does not a property make - otherwise we would have anarchy.
Creators and especially publishers are not moral gods, they are moral equivalents to everyone else. Unlike with private property, there is no natural reason why they should have this right at the exclusion of everyone else.
IMHO, DRM is about the copyright lords trying to fense off their own territory as society moves into the information age. Of course noone is going to respect that fense, so with trillions at stake all hell will certainly break loose.
It is analogous to the plantation masters trying to get back controll over slavery as society moved into the industrial age. In a desperate attempt, they broke off from the union. Of course, noone respected that boundary either.
Government is not about sacrificing rights for common unity and security, but rather about people having natural law rights who organize to secure those rights. Property rights are a natural law right, copyrights and patents are not. (accept that if you invent something you always have the right to keep it secret, and you have the right to be acknowledged as the first creator because someone else who claimed to would be acting fradulently)
The right to copy things is a natural law right that exists outside of government. It is like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and the right to bear arms. These rights exist outside of government, or anywhere in the world even if local governments refuse to acknowledge them. Unlike other property rights that derive from the fact that not every body can use something at the same time. With information and ideas they can - copyrights and patents are an artificial construct that has artificialy harmfull consequences.
First off, IBM, Microsoft, and Sun are too large precicely because of intellectual property. I saw this happen once when I was working at a fab-facuility. It was bought out, and pretty much shut down, not because it couldn't make a good profit, but because the buyer bought it to corner a strategic market using its patent holdings. Second off, if you and everyone else loose say a million worth of IP, but in return gain access to a trillion worth of IP - then this is not a net loss for anyone. In fact, it would likely create an innovation and business explosion.
It is such a relief to hear this. Intellectual property is not free market, or even a valid form of property. People just take it on faith that just because the government calls something a property, that it is - and has all the advantages of free market property ownership. In fact if you don't believe in it, you are even called socialist. Identifying myself as libertarian, this irks me even more. They just don't get it, IP is not about property at all - it is about controll.
I agree, I suppose I should mention that the death of copyrights, the boom in p2p, and global mesh networks, are the next waves that I see. I'd be nice if I could use this knowledge to bring myself some financial security - but I loathe the day that I try telling some executive that can give me a leg up that copyrights are dead. Yeah right, God help me.
Copyrights really half to go though. Society could live with people breathing down your neck about what to copy at the library, but now with the intnernt they cant do it without nearly enslaving everyone on the planet. Contrary to popular belief, people who find a need to copy things are not worthless parasites, any more than artists are artificial gods. This propaganda is probably to distracting from the fact that for every artist that makes it from copyrights, 10000 are living in dirt poverty - hindered on even the things they can replicate. The worst thing I see with copyrights is a clash of the titans, with industries that have these huge revenue streams and ones that have captured the next paradigm and have huge growth rates. eg companies like Microsoft can't invent in latest greatest paradigm - Linux, for fear of choking their own revenue stream, but they can sure fight and attack them in amazingly energetic ways.
You could have rights managment systems out the yinyang, but if the software running it is full of bugs, buffer overflows, back doors, code that auto preruns unauthorized stuff, or sends private info to MS headquarters (Yeah I know MS would never have eny of these problems) Then it will not matter a bit, even if every damn piece of data and code is digitally signed, registered, and pre-authed - it won't matter. In fact it could make things worse as people actually leave their systems less secure - assuming that they are less hackable or that they will know when people copy stuff. BZZZT. God help them, they'll need it.
In all fairness, about 2 years ago there was a slashdot post asking about the future of UNIX and I replied something like - the only future of UNIX is Linux. Boy if I wasn't beat down and humiliated by an army of Sun techies and moded out of existence.
Wish I could find that post.
Of course a few years before that I said to some executives that SCO UNIX (renember them) is dead.
If I didn't nearly loose my job over that, and was blowen off by all the "important" people in the company who thought Linux was "a toy opperating system"
But the worst was a few years before that when a company I worked for refused to get an internet hookup because it was "a passing fad"
So okay, here I am having the last laugh because I was right, and they are reeling from it. But I really didn't want the last laugh, I wanted some credit for being right - perhaps a promotion, perhaps a pay raise, perhaps being hired back to one of my old companies with nice pay and actually being listened to and respected about the future of technology. Rather I am an unemployed bum techie who jumped arround jobs too much, who got paid too much during the dot.com insanity, who might be able to get a job flipping burgers - but other than that I am surely screwed. At least with an RHCE, I'll be the smartest burger flipper arround.
You eliminate copyright and you destroy the information age. Copyrights do not merely protect overpaid musicians. The sooner this simple fact sinks into your fucking head, the sooner society canfigure out how to balance copyrights with the digital medium of the internet.
Their is no balance, information is so easy to copy and manipulte - that either it will all half to be controlled or none of it. That's the whole point, it's not about balance, but controll - it's not about overpaid musicians, but controll - it's not about protection, but controll - the information age should about sharing and the free flow of information, not controll. Speaking of me I needing to get something into my f***ing head ... well I digress.
A symptom that copyrights are unenforceable, so the only way they can compensate is by fear mongering with draconian punishments. Our response should be to act in civil disobedience whenever possible. The sooner we force this thru, the sooner we can get on with the information age.
Actually I like politics when it works, because is it so much better to fight with words rather than force. But politics is not an end in itself, libery is, and politics is just one of many way's to secure my rights; another way is by leveraging tecnology.
If anyone knows how to make the system work, how to out politic the RIAA, DCMA, the abuses of "intellectual property", insane taxes, phone regulations and what not - I would love that, I would cry out place tham on a pedistal to be adorned. But, to be honest, this is not happening and I can't see it happening unless change is forced from the outside. By leveraging technology, I can actually see a light at the end of the tunnel.
When it comes to anything other than basic crime or perhaps national defense, I just don't trust the govt anymore to secure my rights. I honestly trust technological solutions alot more than political ones. e.g. Implementing technology that makes it impossible for them to regulate voice calls without shutting down the internet. This is the way the future simply has to go, and I think our efforts and money would simply be better spent there.
No, I do get it. As a libertarian I am very well aware that just because the government calls somthing a right does not mean that it is. It wasn't true in the 1850's with slavery as a property right, and it's not true with patents or copyrights today. As a libertarian I understand that property rights exist as a means to deal with the fact that not everybody can use something at the same time, implying markets, and implying that people organize in the form of government to secure those rights. With patents and copyrights, this philosophy becomes bogus.
What you are saying is that without patnets nobody would have an incentive to put the money and effort into say, a cure for AIDS. That is outrageous. There is plenty of incentive for people to organize economically to stop diesase and the like without an artifical government monopoly. In fact, from newspapers I've gleamed - patents are actually intefering with a cure for AIDS as companies fight bitterly over conflicting patents, and researchers are forbidden to share critical information with other researchers, for fear of giving competitors the lead on a patnet claim.
I don't buy their conclusions for (say) the pharmaceutical industry, in which the indivisibility of research cost, the practically zero marginal cost of production, and the commoditized nature of cures for a particular illness make a stronger argument for patents and artificial monopoly as incentive for innovation
Pharmaceutical patnets are the worst. The most evil example I could think of was when corporate executives wrote an article to the newspaper that effectively said they had no incentive to innovate unless they had the right to lock out millions of people dying of AIDS in Africa. Other examples include the antibotic - Cipiro where a generic was being made in India for I think 10 cents a pill - and was offered to the USA during the worst of the Anthrax chrises, but was rebuffed for patent reasons. Not to consider all the research and development of natural, alternative, or other cures that involved the use of medicines with expired patents that was outright blackballed by industry giants in favor of more dangerous drugs that could be patented. And don't forget the millions of old people who are litterally "reamed" over medicines that they can't afford, but if they try to order generic's or non-generics that are sold at a cheaper price outside the country they could end up with a fine I think of $250,000. The real question, is how many people are we willing to let suffer and die in the name pharmaceutical patents? For all the people that are needlessly suffering and dying I would expect amazing and overwhelming justifications, but have rather gotten nothing but crap.
I honestly half to say I'm not too concerned about the absoluteness of democracy (for lack of better wording). Democracy is not an end in itself, but a tool for protecting individual liberties - and like any tool it can be abused too. It's disgusting to hear people suggesting that if you don't like something isn't right in a democracy - you have no right to have any other recourse accept to vote.
What's right and wrong, good and bad, truth or lie is not decided by popular vote or public opinion - but by observable facts that exist independently. What I hope happens is that new technologies "force" democracy to become more free even if it tries not to. EG, a voting popluace would never shut down the internet - but it may be impossible to stop free mp3's any other way. A voting population would never shut down ecommerce - but this would provide the infrastructure to avoid unjust tax even if the mob desperately tries to impose it.
Just have one library purchase the documents and make coppies for everyone else anonymously over a p2p network.