One group controls the distribution method, the media...
One group controls the playback...
One group controls everything between the artist and the speakers...
If that one group wants the market to go a certain way, say towards pervasive copy-protection, then it will.
Ah, but maybe, just maybe, the Net really is undermining this. We're moving away from monolithic omnisuppliers and into commodity-like small distributors. Maybe all this screaming is just the dinosaur's last roar.
Just in case anyone is curious I definitely do not consider myself a Marxist. I think capitalism has a lot of positive traits. However, there are also many less than attractive features of it and we need to be wary of them.
Well said. Capitalism is an engine - a powerful and might engine, but just an engine. Properly directed and harnessed, it can move mountains. Left to its own devices, it spins pointlessly and eventually shakes itself to pieces.
The thought that keeps me up at night is: who's really benefiting from the new world taking shape? I mean, even the corporate droids at the top are still droids. Their lives are being stripped of meaning, too. I see the corporations as a new life form that is gorging itself on the old.
A lot of times the entities you think are evil empires are really just collectives of nice normal people who go to their jobs everyday and come home with paychecks to feed their children.
It's dangerous to extrapolate from the "nice people" who make up a collective to the actions and intents of the collective as a whole. Mobs are generally made up of mostly "nice people". Germany in the 1930s was made up of mostly "nice people". People acting in concert are different than those same people acting individually.
Just because people want to make a living, we need not condone all actions. I'm sure the people who made horse-and-buggy rigs were mostly nice people who just wanted to support their families. Would that have justified them in distorting the laws of the nation to prevent the rise of the automobile?
Corporations are driven by the need to survive, just as people are. But in civil society, we reconginze that some things you could do to get ahead are simply not acceptable. We recognize that there are creative channels for such drives and destructive ones. We recognize that there are many values in a constantly-shifting tension, and that personal affluence is not sufficient to trample on all the others.
Corporations don't. Plain and simple -- a corporate droid sees nothing wrong in crushing his rivals, in destroying their ability to make a living, in suppressing free expression, or in trouncing basic human dignity. A corporate droid sees no problem in abusing its workers or its customers (if it can get away with it).
There are people who refuse to compromise their principles in order to make their business grow. There are those who, seeing the cost of "success", decide to remain small. You don't hear about them much because they threaten the premises of the consumer-based, gigantistic corporate culture we know and hold so dear.
Most corporations are as fanatical and dangerous as any cult. True, they don't fixate on their warped ideas of God. Instead they fixate on profit and the bottom line, which they raise to godhood. Anything that stands in the way becomes more than a obstacle, it becomes an unholy threat. And they pursue their ends with the same bloody-minded, single-minded head-in-the-sand blindness as any religious nut every dreamed of.
the local community funds a library... Whoever built the access gets to set the filter settings... Government filters are bad
Um, how can you possibly reconcile these two sentiments? "The community" that funds a library does so through the local government. So if the library has a filter, that is a "government filter"... and you're back to censorship.
Why does everyone seem to have a compulsive need to see Snowcrash turned into a movie? Can't a really great novel remain just a novel and yet remain great? Does everything have to be de-literatized and turned into visual goop?
Books and movies are two different art forms. They don't have to cross-over.
The original means used to determine that Smith was selling pot were unconstitutional. But they busted him anyway just by coincindentally having a local cop help them out
If they manage to keep it completely quiet, yeah. But that isn't easy. As soon as it comes out that their investigation benefited materially from an unconstitutional act, the whole case is tainted. "A poisoned vine bears no good fruit" or some such , in fancy Latin. The key thing is, if a piece of evidence is obtained illegaly, it is dismissed -- and all evidence flowing from it might also be dismissed.
If you simply assume collusion between the police and the courts and therefore say they can always "get around" the law, then you've essentially given up on civil society. I haven't yet. That's why it's important to establish in principle that such actions are illegal.
In the eyes of the law, your "confessional" with your preist should be no more significant than if I call a friend and say "I have to tell you something really really secret and this can't ever be known by another soul."
In the eyes of the law, discussions between a person and his confessor are privileged, in much the same way as lawyer-client confidentiality is privileged. This is partly historical accident and partly a recognition that "confessor" is in some way a profession and that it relies on confidentiality.
Although it's easy to argue this is invalid under the First Amendment, it's also relatively easy to argue it is valid, interestingly under exactly the same amendment. I can speak only of Roman Catholicism, since that's my background. The sanctity of the confessional is a key part of the Rite of Reconciliation, which the Church holds to be a sacrament and a core of the belief system. Even the Pope cannot order a priest to violate that sanctity. The assumption is that the confessor is acting like a telecom device and that the confessee is speaking directly to God.
If people didn't believe in the sanctity of the confessional, they very well might avoid confession of sins. In the eyes of the Church, this puts them at risk of damnation, which is (of course) a failure of the Church's mission. Therefore, breaking the sanctity of the confessional directly and massively impedes the practice of Roman Catholicism -- so the First Amendment (it can be argued) extends its protection across this practice.
I believe that is the argument used, although I hardly claim to be an expert, or even to play one on TV.
Now all we have to do is get law enforcement agencies to repsect the laws. Any chance of that happening? Probably not.
Cynicism aside, this is a good thing. Yes, there are cases of law enforcement abuse, and yes, we need to keep vigilant. But most law enforcement officers in the States do respect the law and live within it. What's being said here is not a statement of technological capability, but of social acceptance: The courts are saying that this sort of surveillance is not compatible with a free society. Can the law be broken? Yeah -- but a cop can beat a confession out of you, too. We still don't recognize it as right.
I would rather live in a society where evil is done through the failure of principles than through their success. The courts have affirmed tat, for now at least, our principles are not evil.
If the Japanese language was too ambiguous to give clear orders, how on earth could Japan in the space of 40 years develop a very productive, highly advanced industrial system?
To be fair, the original post implied that Japanese lacked flexibility to adapt to changed circumstances. That is, because of ambiguities in the language, one could not re-work a battle plan on the fly, and so only generic orders like "retreat" could be given in a plan went awry.
In building an industry, on the other hand, you generally can do a lot of planning and the on-the-spot adjustments -- esp. for good old early 20th century industry -- could be minimized. And indeed, some say this sort of programmatic industry is what Japan made itself good at.
Actually, I think the whole idea is bollocks, but that is my take on what had been said.
Indeed -- since Linux people spend less time on the phone waiting for Microsoft to tell them to re-install, they get more done.
You're being as biased as he is. I've never called MS over a problem, it's not worth the time, I figure it out myself or look for help on the net (sound like most Linux support?).
I don't think I'm biased. Firstbrook was deprecating Linux qua open-source and saying it wasn't fit for business use. This implied he feels that only closed-source is fit for business use, and let's face it: when a corporate type is talking "closed-source fit for business", he's really saying "Microsoft".
Additionally, Firstbrook fretted that Linux sys admins tend to spend too much time "tinkering". This implied that he sees tinkering as a bad thing. The alternative to tinkering is following vendor-supplied instructions, which in turn implies calls to support.
Can you tinker with a Microsoft system? Sure. Can you learn a lot and become expert on it through tinkering? Sure. Does that mean that open-source is worse? No. Firstbrook's attitude appeared -- to me -- to be, "Anyone who actually enjoys and understands this is a threat". I'm not sure what we're a threat to: perhaps the bottom line, perhaps the "business model", perhaps to his own sense of worth and accomplishment.
But his arguments were just specious. Firs tof all, it's not at all clear that the ability and inclination to "tinker" actually lowers one's productive worth. In fact, I think the evidence is exactly opposite. Second, tinkering is not restricted to Linux. It can happen in MS, too. Indeed, because so much of MS is opaque, a lot of MS tinkering is "try this, oops, didn't work, try this instead". I believe that this sort of tinkering is more likely to be poorly documented and non-recoverable. After all, you can always just keep old versisons of the source for Linux...
... But I think I understand the issue Firstbrook really has with using Linux: With Linux, the tech heads are one more step up in technical skill. The "priest factor" becomes significant, because every day Linus sys admins are demonstrating that they know and understand their machines... and as we know, there has long been a running battle between priests and bean counters.
Firstbrook frets that labor is
the very cost that is likely to be affected if employees spend time tinkering with Linux.
Indeed -- since Linux people spend less time on the phone waiting for Microsoft to tell them to re-install, they get more done. And since Linux people have, in general, a much better handle on what their systems are actually doing (because they "tinker" all the time), they can fix problems faster and better. All in all, the labor cost for a Linux system is almost certainly lower than a proprietary one.
If you took your car to the auto shop, would you be happier if the place was clean and ordered -- and the mechanics stood around waiting for someone to open the car for them and replace the black boxes -- or if the place was a bit messy, perhaps a bit disordered, but the mechanics obviously knew their stuff because they couldn't help "tinker" with engines, figuring out what was going on?
Firstbrook is essentially a corporate droid. Like all corporate droids he can't understand how anything can be free (in either sense). What he can't understand, he instinctively fears.
Luckily, perhaps, the market is a ruthlessly efficient beast and, as they say, the truth will out...
Companies need to be able to protect their intellectual property from people who are using it in bad faith.
And here we see why the whole concept of intellectual "property" is on shaky ground. Can McDonalds the mega-fast-food chain really claim to "own" the word "McDonald's"? Does it make sense if we allow them to make such a claim? Why do we let anyone "own" any part of the language?
The fact of the matter is, fraud laws are nearly enough to avoid any abuse of words requiring trademark. The trademark system -- and now, its absurd, surreal extension into domain namespace -- is merely a front for a crooked scheme, an attempt to carve out pieces of our common ideaspace. It should probably never have been allowed; it certainly should not be enshrined and expanded.
The internet's not just about commerce for big corporations.
Heretic! What Universe have you been living in?
Actually, I agree... commercialization of the Net is in fact Evil. Day by day we're watching something wonderful slipping away, because we tolerate these assaults by Big Business: Not only can they do these things, but they're convincing us it's right that they do them... Sad.
The fact is "Ford" is a nationally recognized brand name. And it is certainly more nationally recognized than say, "Ford Musical Instruments". So of course Ford Motor Company deserves the domain ford.com.
I don't think that follows at all. Are you saying that success once, in a far-distant field, entitles a company to a perpetual advantage? Maybe Ford Motor Co. is more famous than Ford Music Co. because the latter isn't being given a chance to exist, to advertise, to spread its name.
In the end, you're saying it still comes down to money. And maybe it does... but it shouldn't, and we shouldn't accept rules changes that make it easier for money to dominate.
The Line Item Veto IMHO puts far too much power in the hands of the president, be he Republican or Democrat.
Indeed. And anyway, the line-item veto (which was primarily budgetary, anyhow) might allow a president to cross out differently-connectioned legistlation, but it would notm have obligated him/her to so do. The state constitutions, I believe, simply ban any unrelated riders -- they're not contingent on anyone's action.
To finance the rest of his venture, Jobs made some new friends. He persuaded Texas billionaire
Ross Perot to invest $20 million in NeXT and sit on its board of directors, bringing respectability and expertise to the fledgling company.
Isn't that interesting? Nowadays, I don't think anyone would bring on Perot to add "respectability"...:)
There is some disagreement among laissez-faire, free-market libertarian yahoos on this subject.
Sorry, I tarred with a broader brush than justified. I should be clear: not all libertarian yahoos feel this way. Heck, some libertarians aren't even yahoos. I was simply commenting on my perception of hypocrisy in the libertarian yahoos who do say such things.
Actually, I'm being semi-facetious. I don't mean (in this case) "history" as in a written record of events, or even the idea of the non-mythical past. I mean sort of the collected experiences of everyone we'd call humans... that is, everything experienced by the species.
So while curiosity, greed, betrayal, and fear are part of "human nature", they are also results of the evolutionary pressures upon a hairless ape on the plains of Africa. Greed and aggression are perfectly reasonable responses to a lifetime of want and scarcity. Heck, even environmental carelessness "makes sense" if your population is small and nomadic.
But ever since the invention of the steam engine, we have trembled on the edge of a world wherein those factors need not exist. Say what you want -- no one starves on planet Earth because there isn't enough food. There simply isn't enough food where it's needed. Food is no longer truly scarce; it's just hard to distribute. (Now, a rising population could easily carry us out of this regime, but that's another diatribe entirely...)
And so, yes, things will always be "scarce" in an economic sense, because the Universe is finite. But what really matters is relative scarcity. For example, the Solar System contains enough metals and materials to supply our current civilization's needs for millions of years, perhaps more. The energy available is, of course, even more amazing. If we were fully exploiting these resources, and if our civilization remained at roughly the same size and demdands, then objects would be essentially free, because the average resource cost would approach zero.
But even if you denounce this as utopian fantasy (not hard to do), that doesn't change the fact that some things are scarce in our world (and require an economy to produce and obtain) and some things simply are not. Digital information, it seems to me, is the latter -- no matter how much the copyright cartel wants it to be otherwise.
and yet you still didn't "grow it from scratch," you still didn't "break your back plowing the soil," you still didn't "worry about pests and soil pH levels," and he still did.
Ah, now you're leaving behind economics and entering the world of morality... you have some conception that Farmer Brown "should" be paid for his labor, his investment, etc. Maybe so. It's not the way the world works, though. You can spend your whole life dripping blood onto parchment and writing that book that consumes you, and if people don't want to read it, then it's worth nothing.
At least, it's worth nothing economically. There are values other than economic value. For example, if this book has been bursting inside you, the writing might provide you with contentment and peace. If Farmer Brown loves making apples and creating varieties, then he might draw emotional benefit from his new Fine Fruit. Does the world also have to pay him money on top of this? No, it doesn't.
Sure, it might pay him -- if he is contributing something worthwhile and hard to acquire. But in the world of the easy replicator, he doesn't have to work, and so his "work" is an act of joy and creation. Whatever, if anything, he gets monetarily is a bonus.
Especially in the world of the easy replicator, there is no economic incentive to create, but there is no economic penalty for it, either. Since you don't have to "support yourself", you don't have to either be paid for creating or find some other job.
It's a whole new ballgame, people. The digital world is seeing it first, that's all.
Besides, I think your new idea hinges on replication machines being expensive and few...
you'd have to charge a;bout $33,000 a new fruit to be able to support a family with 2 children about [guess]
Um, if replicators are cheap and plentiful -- the obvious contrapoint you are raising -- then why do I have to charge at all? Why do I need money to "support" my family? After all, my replicator can satisfy my material needs, unless of course some big corporation owns the repliright to Fred's fruit and restricts (artificially) what things get replicated.
This discussion is proving that even among slashdotters, people can't get their minds around the way the world is changing. We are just barely in the realm of perturbation theory here -- pretty soon, the exponential divergences are going to really take off.
So you can say, with complete certainty, that under any and all conditions, that Marx could never be right? Wow. That's an amazingly omniscient insight that you've got. It must be nice, not having to evaluate new ideas, or re-evaluate old ones, in the light of new conditions. You must have a lot of free time, since you obviously no longer need to think.
Now, I don't believe old Karl was right, on this or just about anything. But I'm not willing to dismiss him under all circumstances. Sure, Marx' philosophy seems to have proved wrong, given human nature. But human nautre is the sum of human history, and the underlying facts of history might be changing... If you have a replicator that eliminates scarcity, then Adam Smith and all his tenets go out the window.
Without the creation of new music by artists and then published and promoted by the record companies, pirates would have nothing to ever pirate.
Let's get it straight: copyright infringement is not piracy. No one wears eye patchs and cries "Aargh!" as they download the latest Britney Spears... This is more than a semantic argument. The fallacy of the label "pirate" blinds people to certain truths.
People using Napster are replicators. They take an object and reproduce it, in no way reducing the availability of that object to its "owner". They do undermine the unnatural economic value of the song (or whatever), but, that value derives from an artificial monopoly and has no a priori justification. So you really have to argue that Napster, etc., lead to an actual diminution of creative output and value. The jury is out on this -- some studies find a correlation with declining sales, some a correlation with increasing sales.
Key point: If you -- like most big corporations -- claim to believe in "free enterprise", then you must admit that according to all that is holy in Adam Smith, digital recordings have no intrinsic economic worth. Since the supply is effectively infinite, the price drops necessarily to zero. As such, the entire intellectual "property" scheme is an artificial restriction on the market. Now, I personally have no problem with such a thing -- but it must serve the public good, if it's going to back up with governmental force.
I am always amazed at the number of laissez-faire, free-market libertarian yahoos who somehow claim that IP is nonetheless valid.
2) "If I don't charge for it, it's not a violation."
False. Whether you charge can affect the damages awarded in court, but that's essentially the only difference. It's still a violation if you give it away -- and there can still be heavy damages if you hurt the commercial value of the property.
Of course, Apple is going to have to argue that free publicity hurt their commercial prospects -- I have no idea how easy that is to do in court.
Slashdot Mirror
The thought that keeps me up at night is: who's really benefiting from the new world taking shape? I mean, even the corporate droids at the top are still droids. Their lives are being stripped of meaning, too. I see the corporations as a new life form that is gorging itself on the old.
Just because people want to make a living, we need not condone all actions. I'm sure the people who made horse-and-buggy rigs were mostly nice people who just wanted to support their families. Would that have justified them in distorting the laws of the nation to prevent the rise of the automobile?
Corporations are driven by the need to survive, just as people are. But in civil society, we reconginze that some things you could do to get ahead are simply not acceptable. We recognize that there are creative channels for such drives and destructive ones. We recognize that there are many values in a constantly-shifting tension, and that personal affluence is not sufficient to trample on all the others.
Corporations don't. Plain and simple -- a corporate droid sees nothing wrong in crushing his rivals, in destroying their ability to make a living, in suppressing free expression, or in trouncing basic human dignity. A corporate droid sees no problem in abusing its workers or its customers (if it can get away with it).
There are people who refuse to compromise their principles in order to make their business grow. There are those who, seeing the cost of "success", decide to remain small. You don't hear about them much because they threaten the premises of the consumer-based, gigantistic corporate culture we know and hold so dear.
Most corporations are as fanatical and dangerous as any cult. True, they don't fixate on their warped ideas of God. Instead they fixate on profit and the bottom line, which they raise to godhood. Anything that stands in the way becomes more than a obstacle, it becomes an unholy threat. And they pursue their ends with the same bloody-minded, single-minded head-in-the-sand blindness as any religious nut every dreamed of.
Why does everyone seem to have a compulsive need to see Snowcrash turned into a movie? Can't a really great novel remain just a novel and yet remain great? Does everything have to be de-literatized and turned into visual goop?
Books and movies are two different art forms. They don't have to cross-over.
:)
If you simply assume collusion between the police and the courts and therefore say they can always "get around" the law, then you've essentially given up on civil society. I haven't yet. That's why it's important to establish in principle that such actions are illegal.
Although it's easy to argue this is invalid under the First Amendment, it's also relatively easy to argue it is valid, interestingly under exactly the same amendment. I can speak only of Roman Catholicism, since that's my background. The sanctity of the confessional is a key part of the Rite of Reconciliation, which the Church holds to be a sacrament and a core of the belief system. Even the Pope cannot order a priest to violate that sanctity. The assumption is that the confessor is acting like a telecom device and that the confessee is speaking directly to God.
If people didn't believe in the sanctity of the confessional, they very well might avoid confession of sins. In the eyes of the Church, this puts them at risk of damnation, which is (of course) a failure of the Church's mission. Therefore, breaking the sanctity of the confessional directly and massively impedes the practice of Roman Catholicism -- so the First Amendment (it can be argued) extends its protection across this practice.
I believe that is the argument used, although I hardly claim to be an expert, or even to play one on TV.
I would rather live in a society where evil is done through the failure of principles than through their success. The courts have affirmed tat, for now at least, our principles are not evil.
In building an industry, on the other hand, you generally can do a lot of planning and the on-the-spot adjustments -- esp. for good old early 20th century industry -- could be minimized. And indeed, some say this sort of programmatic industry is what Japan made itself good at.
Actually, I think the whole idea is bollocks, but that is my take on what had been said.
Additionally, Firstbrook fretted that Linux sys admins tend to spend too much time "tinkering". This implied that he sees tinkering as a bad thing. The alternative to tinkering is following vendor-supplied instructions, which in turn implies calls to support.
Can you tinker with a Microsoft system? Sure. Can you learn a lot and become expert on it through tinkering? Sure. Does that mean that open-source is worse? No. Firstbrook's attitude appeared -- to me -- to be, "Anyone who actually enjoys and understands this is a threat". I'm not sure what we're a threat to: perhaps the bottom line, perhaps the "business model", perhaps to his own sense of worth and accomplishment.
But his arguments were just specious. Firs tof all, it's not at all clear that the ability and inclination to "tinker" actually lowers one's productive worth. In fact, I think the evidence is exactly opposite. Second, tinkering is not restricted to Linux. It can happen in MS, too. Indeed, because so much of MS is opaque, a lot of MS tinkering is "try this, oops, didn't work, try this instead". I believe that this sort of tinkering is more likely to be poorly documented and non-recoverable. After all, you can always just keep old versisons of the source for Linux...
Firstbrook frets that labor is
Indeed -- since Linux people spend less time on the phone waiting for Microsoft to tell them to re-install, they get more done. And since Linux people have, in general, a much better handle on what their systems are actually doing (because they "tinker" all the time), they can fix problems faster and better. All in all, the labor cost for a Linux system is almost certainly lower than a proprietary one.If you took your car to the auto shop, would you be happier if the place was clean and ordered -- and the mechanics stood around waiting for someone to open the car for them and replace the black boxes -- or if the place was a bit messy, perhaps a bit disordered, but the mechanics obviously knew their stuff because they couldn't help "tinker" with engines, figuring out what was going on?
Firstbrook is essentially a corporate droid. Like all corporate droids he can't understand how anything can be free (in either sense). What he can't understand, he instinctively fears.
Luckily, perhaps, the market is a ruthlessly efficient beast and, as they say, the truth will out...
The fact of the matter is, fraud laws are nearly enough to avoid any abuse of words requiring trademark. The trademark system -- and now, its absurd, surreal extension into domain namespace -- is merely a front for a crooked scheme, an attempt to carve out pieces of our common ideaspace. It should probably never have been allowed; it certainly should not be enshrined and expanded.
Actually, I agree ... commercialization of the Net is in fact Evil. Day by day we're watching something wonderful slipping away, because we tolerate these assaults by Big Business: Not only can they do these things, but they're convincing us it's right that they do them... Sad.
Actually, I'm being semi-facetious. I don't mean (in this case) "history" as in a written record of events, or even the idea of the non-mythical past. I mean sort of the collected experiences of everyone we'd call humans ... that is, everything experienced by the species.
So while curiosity, greed, betrayal, and fear are part of "human nature", they are also results of the evolutionary pressures upon a hairless ape on the plains of Africa. Greed and aggression are perfectly reasonable responses to a lifetime of want and scarcity. Heck, even environmental carelessness "makes sense" if your population is small and nomadic.
But ever since the invention of the steam engine, we have trembled on the edge of a world wherein those factors need not exist. Say what you want -- no one starves on planet Earth because there isn't enough food. There simply isn't enough food where it's needed. Food is no longer truly scarce; it's just hard to distribute. (Now, a rising population could easily carry us out of this regime, but that's another diatribe entirely...)
And so, yes, things will always be "scarce" in an economic sense, because the Universe is finite. But what really matters is relative scarcity. For example, the Solar System contains enough metals and materials to supply our current civilization's needs for millions of years, perhaps more. The energy available is, of course, even more amazing. If we were fully exploiting these resources, and if our civilization remained at roughly the same size and demdands, then objects would be essentially free, because the average resource cost would approach zero.
But even if you denounce this as utopian fantasy (not hard to do), that doesn't change the fact that some things are scarce in our world (and require an economy to produce and obtain) and some things simply are not. Digital information, it seems to me, is the latter -- no matter how much the copyright cartel wants it to be otherwise.
At least, it's worth nothing economically. There are values other than economic value. For example, if this book has been bursting inside you, the writing might provide you with contentment and peace. If Farmer Brown loves making apples and creating varieties, then he might draw emotional benefit from his new Fine Fruit. Does the world also have to pay him money on top of this? No, it doesn't.
Sure, it might pay him -- if he is contributing something worthwhile and hard to acquire. But in the world of the easy replicator, he doesn't have to work, and so his "work" is an act of joy and creation. Whatever, if anything, he gets monetarily is a bonus.
Especially in the world of the easy replicator, there is no economic incentive to create, but there is no economic penalty for it, either. Since you don't have to "support yourself", you don't have to either be paid for creating or find some other job.
It's a whole new ballgame, people. The digital world is seeing it first, that's all.
This discussion is proving that even among slashdotters, people can't get their minds around the way the world is changing. We are just barely in the realm of perturbation theory here -- pretty soon, the exponential divergences are going to really take off.
Now, I don't believe old Karl was right, on this or just about anything. But I'm not willing to dismiss him under all circumstances. Sure, Marx' philosophy seems to have proved wrong, given human nature. But human nautre is the sum of human history, and the underlying facts of history might be changing... If you have a replicator that eliminates scarcity, then Adam Smith and all his tenets go out the window.
People using Napster are replicators. They take an object and reproduce it, in no way reducing the availability of that object to its "owner". They do undermine the unnatural economic value of the song (or whatever), but, that value derives from an artificial monopoly and has no a priori justification. So you really have to argue that Napster, etc., lead to an actual diminution of creative output and value. The jury is out on this -- some studies find a correlation with declining sales, some a correlation with increasing sales.
Key point: If you -- like most big corporations -- claim to believe in "free enterprise", then you must admit that according to all that is holy in Adam Smith, digital recordings have no intrinsic economic worth. Since the supply is effectively infinite, the price drops necessarily to zero. As such, the entire intellectual "property" scheme is an artificial restriction on the market. Now, I personally have no problem with such a thing -- but it must serve the public good, if it's going to back up with governmental force.
I am always amazed at the number of laissez-faire, free-market libertarian yahoos who somehow claim that IP is nonetheless valid.