Once again the fact that a right is not recognized does not mean it doesn't exist. If the Maori did not wish to own land, it doesn't mean they couldn't legitimately do so.
Alright then, I hereby create a law that makes it a crime to breath. Since a crime is "An act committed or omitted in violation of a law" then breathing is now a crime.
You seem to be making a few confusions here. First of all, just because a right is not recognized doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Obviously, the fact that a murderer doesn't recognize your right to live doesn't mean you don't have that right. Similarly, should millions of people refuse to recognize your right to live, it doesn't mean you don't have that right. If a culture or society doesn't recognize property rights, it doesn't make them any less universal. Second, community sharing of goods is not a contradiction of individual property rights, the rights to the fruits of one's labor are simply voluntarily distributed to the community. Third, "natural rights" does not mean that these rights occur in nature but that they are defined and discovered *from the nature of man*.
The road was built with the proceeds of theft. It is forcefully occupied land combined with stolen goods.
No I am not, and to complicate things further, it can be moral to commit a crime and immoral acts are not necessarily crimes. Morality, law abiding, and respect of rights are not identical although they share a lot in common. For example, I hold hate speech to be immoral although it is certainly not a crime and different laws label it differently.
I suggest you look into the principles of natural rights for further information.
The law says you committed a crime, it doesn't mean you did. In that particular case, it is very hard to figure out if you did since the rights associated to the road are ill-defined (the road was stolen in the first place). I'd probably say you didn't though.
Once again, if crime is merely defined by positive law, why should it be the US government official's law ? Why not mine, or yours ? What if you live in a country with two governments that disagree on their definition of crime (it happens). What if you live in a dictatorship and hide a family that is to be tortured and killed, is it still a crime because the dictator says so?
Of course there are limits, and exceeding these limits is what defines a crime. But these limit are not set by governments, they are inherent to human nature. These limits are essentially property rights.
The law pretends to define what a crime is. You can commit crimes * according to the law * but the law can be wrong. For example, the law is correct in recognizing murder as a crime, but incorrect in saying gambling is.
Rights are not mercifully granted by some authority, they're natural, and so is crime - as an infringement of these rights. One can break the law while infringing on someone's right (committing a crime), or one can even commit a crime without breaking the law.
There's a difference between an objective distinction is hard to draw and a subjective call. For example, many people would have a hard time deciding which answer is correct in an advanced quiz, it doesn't make the answer subjective.
Sure it's hard to tell if a death threat is specific enough to constitute a crime and that's the whole point of justice by trial.
Now I don't care that it has been labeled a "crime" in Sweden. Who said so? The Swedish lawmakers... But you cannot just "claim" that something is a crime to make it so. I can also claim that posting on/. is a crime in the US, that doesn't make it a crime, similarly the US govt can claim the same thing and it doesn't *really* make it a crime, although they'll call it that.
When I silently point a gun at you in a dark alley, I am making a death threat without speaking. The point is that speech should not be limited *for itself*, for being speech.
Advocating genocide is somehow a death threat but it is to vague to constitute a crime, you are not involved in the crime. There's a difference between saying "quick, shoot that guy over there" and "death to group X".
There's no limit on baking cakes either, that doesn't mean you can make an arsenic cake for your mother-in-law. There is nothing wrong with "expressing a death stress", what's wrong is the threat to kill, be it in form of speech, explicit, implicit etc. In the cases you mention, speech is just a vehicle for a crime (breach of contract, death threat etc), it doesn't make speech *the* crime.
There ought to be no limit on free speech means that speech should not be limited *for itself*. Hating someone is not a crime, therefore, spreading hateful messages isn't either.
If you can't cope with not being allowed to copy the DVD, don't buy it. The movie companies want you to waive your right to copy the DVD before buying it, otherwise they won't sell it to you, you can't force them to sell it to you.
Will that put a dent in p2p sharing of copied dvds (which is fine as long as you're not the original copier)? Certainly not !
I think it'd make more sense to use the money as a bounty for advances in hybrid cars than to throw it around, the same way the x-prize does. It saves you the difficulty of efficient capital allocation.
Disclosing information should not be considered a crime, unless of course you are bound by contract not to disclose it. Similarly, grabbing information should not be considered a crime, unless of course you invade someone's property by doing it (breaking in one's house, trash, computer etc)
How are contrasts between the rich and the poor "repugnant" ? I understand that poverty, famine, diseases and everything that creates human suffering is repugnant, but how is the contrast itself repugnant ? The only "suffering" contrasts creates by itself is envy.
Hey I didn't think of that:) I do have issues with quantum immortality though, mostly because it seems to me that there is a continuum of consciousness states...
I'd say you're most likely to win the bet and end up in coma with 0.0001% self consciousness.
You still make money in the many world interpretation. Though trading on a sport event might not be your best bet, By having a view of the future you can sell or invest in right technologies etc, this is robust enough not to be affected by small changes.
Trademarks are used so that the consumer can identify the product, they work like a guarantee. Trials based on trademark infringement should only be possible when people are fooled. I don't see how anyone could reasonably think Gildas' show and Microsoft's OS are related in any way. Unfortunately, trademarks are more understood nowadays as a form of property right which makes no sense.
Let's put apart the issue of whether net neutrality would be good / bad for the Internet. Do we want the government involved in regulating the Internet ? HELL NO! It is government regulation that made AT&T what it is today. Regulating for net neutrality would be like curing a burn with a flamethrower.
that someone buying a dell with linux has much more chance of spilling coffee on the hard-drive than a regular folk
I think it also has to do with their call support system. Once I broke my laptop screen, it was really broken with pixels leaking everywhere... yet, when I called they made me jump through a lot of hoops to make sure I didn't mess my windows settings... I played along pretending to click. Halas, I guess the procedure makes sense for most of the callers.
First of all, liberty has nothing to do with legality. The fact that it is "illegal" to download films is completely irrelevant.
The question is: am I invading someone's property when I download music, am I breaking a contract ? While it is definitely wrong to copy a CD when the license prohibits you to do so, once it is released on P2P, this license does not bind any third party. Property is acquired through exchange or by transforming nature's resource with my work. It is justified because finite resources and products are scarce. There is however no such thing as scarce information, the only scarce things are information production (and I can make people pay for producing information or releasing it) and diffusion (in P2P people offer their bandwith for free)
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And how exactly do you turn water into steam in your steam-engine ?
By which law do you gain authority to create laws ?
Once again the fact that a right is not recognized does not mean it doesn't exist. If the Maori did not wish to own land, it doesn't mean they couldn't legitimately do so.
Alright then, I hereby create a law that makes it a crime to breath. Since a crime is "An act committed or omitted in violation of a law" then breathing is now a crime.
You seem to be making a few confusions here. First of all, just because a right is not recognized doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Obviously, the fact that a murderer doesn't recognize your right to live doesn't mean you don't have that right. Similarly, should millions of people refuse to recognize your right to live, it doesn't mean you don't have that right. If a culture or society doesn't recognize property rights, it doesn't make them any less universal. Second, community sharing of goods is not a contradiction of individual property rights, the rights to the fruits of one's labor are simply voluntarily distributed to the community. Third, "natural rights" does not mean that these rights occur in nature but that they are defined and discovered *from the nature of man*.
The road was built with the proceeds of theft. It is forcefully occupied land combined with stolen goods.
No I am not, and to complicate things further, it can be moral to commit a crime and immoral acts are not necessarily crimes.
Morality, law abiding, and respect of rights are not identical although they share a lot in common. For example, I hold hate speech to be immoral although it is certainly not a crime and different laws label it differently.
I suggest you look into the principles of natural rights for further information.
The law says you committed a crime, it doesn't mean you did. In that particular case, it is very hard to figure out if you did since the rights associated to the road are ill-defined (the road was stolen in the first place). I'd probably say you didn't though.
Once again, if crime is merely defined by positive law, why should it be the US government official's law ? Why not mine, or yours ? What if you live in a country with two governments that disagree on their definition of crime (it happens). What if you live in a dictatorship and hide a family that is to be tortured and killed, is it still a crime because the dictator says so?
Of course there are limits, and exceeding these limits is what defines a crime. But these limit are not set by governments, they are inherent to human nature. These limits are essentially property rights.
The law pretends to define what a crime is. You can commit crimes * according to the law * but the law can be wrong. For example, the law is correct in recognizing murder as a crime, but incorrect in saying gambling is.
Rights are not mercifully granted by some authority, they're natural, and so is crime - as an infringement of these rights. One can break the law while infringing on someone's right (committing a crime), or one can even commit a crime without breaking the law.
There's a difference between an objective distinction is hard to draw and a subjective call. For example, many people would have a hard time deciding which answer is correct in an advanced quiz, it doesn't make the answer subjective.
/. is a crime in the US, that doesn't make it a crime, similarly the US govt can claim the same thing and it doesn't *really* make it a crime, although they'll call it that.
Sure it's hard to tell if a death threat is specific enough to constitute a crime and that's the whole point of justice by trial.
Now I don't care that it has been labeled a "crime" in Sweden. Who said so? The Swedish lawmakers... But you cannot just "claim" that something is a crime to make it so. I can also claim that posting on
When I silently point a gun at you in a dark alley, I am making a death threat without speaking. The point is that speech should not be limited *for itself*, for being speech.
Advocating genocide is somehow a death threat but it is to vague to constitute a crime, you are not involved in the crime. There's a difference between saying "quick, shoot that guy over there" and "death to group X".
There's no limit on baking cakes either, that doesn't mean you can make an arsenic cake for your mother-in-law. There is nothing wrong with "expressing a death stress", what's wrong is the threat to kill, be it in form of speech, explicit, implicit etc. In the cases you mention, speech is just a vehicle for a crime (breach of contract, death threat etc), it doesn't make speech *the* crime.
There ought to be no limit on free speech means that speech should not be limited *for itself*. Hating someone is not a crime, therefore, spreading hateful messages isn't either.
If you can't cope with not being allowed to copy the DVD, don't buy it. The movie companies want you to waive your right to copy the DVD before buying it, otherwise they won't sell it to you, you can't force them to sell it to you.
Will that put a dent in p2p sharing of copied dvds (which is fine as long as you're not the original copier)? Certainly not !
You still don't get the gist of it. Put a bounty on the head of corrupt regulators getting in the way.
I think it'd make more sense to use the money as a bounty for advances in hybrid cars than to throw it around, the same way the x-prize does. It saves you the difficulty of efficient capital allocation.
Disclosing information should not be considered a crime, unless of course you are bound by contract not to disclose it. Similarly, grabbing information should not be considered a crime, unless of course you invade someone's property by doing it (breaking in one's house, trash, computer etc)
How are contrasts between the rich and the poor "repugnant" ? I understand that poverty, famine, diseases and everything that creates human suffering is repugnant, but how is the contrast itself repugnant ? The only "suffering" contrasts creates by itself is envy.
Hey I didn't think of that :)
I do have issues with quantum immortality though, mostly because it seems to me that there is a continuum of consciousness states...
I'd say you're most likely to win the bet and end up in coma with 0.0001% self consciousness.
You still make money in the many world interpretation. Though trading on a sport event might not be your best bet, By having a view of the future you can sell or invest in right technologies etc, this is robust enough not to be affected by small changes.
Definitely, but how does it being unconstitutional matter ?
Or there are Everett universes in which Eve does not eat the apple, which are the ones God actually cares about.
Trademarks are used so that the consumer can identify the product, they work like a guarantee. Trials based on trademark infringement should only be possible when people are fooled. I don't see how anyone could reasonably think Gildas' show and Microsoft's OS are related in any way. Unfortunately, trademarks are more understood nowadays as a form of property right which makes no sense.
Let's put apart the issue of whether net neutrality would be good / bad for the Internet. Do we want the government involved in regulating the Internet ? HELL NO! It is government regulation that made AT&T what it is today. Regulating for net neutrality would be like curing a burn with a flamethrower.
that someone buying a dell with linux has much more chance of spilling coffee on the hard-drive than a regular folk
I think it also has to do with their call support system. Once I broke my laptop screen, it was really broken with pixels leaking everywhere... yet, when I called they made me jump through a lot of hoops to make sure I didn't mess my windows settings... I played along pretending to click. Halas, I guess the procedure makes sense for most of the callers.
First of all, liberty has nothing to do with legality. The fact that it is "illegal" to download films is completely irrelevant.
The question is: am I invading someone's property when I download music, am I breaking a contract ? While it is definitely wrong to copy a CD when the license prohibits you to do so, once it is released on P2P, this license does not bind any third party. Property is acquired through exchange or by transforming nature's resource with my work. It is justified because finite resources and products are scarce. There is however no such thing as scarce information, the only scarce things are information production (and I can make people pay for producing information or releasing it) and diffusion (in P2P people offer their bandwith for free)
Hum slavery has been mostly eradicated. Care to say who currently is a slave? (Hint, so-called "wage-slavery" is *not* slavery)
Can you also define what inequalities you are referring to?