[free-sklyarov] Libertarian anti-DMCA is fantasy

[Seth Finkelstein]

> On Wed, Jul 25, 2001 at 02:57:49PM -0500, sjh wrote:
>> Yes, this is a shameless plug for the Libertarian party.  But no one
>> else cares about the Constitution anymore....  If Libertarians made
>> up half of Congress, the DMCA would never have passed;

> Declan McCullagh wrote
> This is true. I'm not intimately familiar with the Libertarian Party,

	Ahem.

"In Defense of Libertarianism" by Declan McCullagh and Solveig Singleton
http://hotwired.com/synapse/feature/97/36/mccullagh4a_1.html

	While you may not be "intimately familiar" with the Libertarian
PARTY, your extreme advocacy of the ideology has gained you
special notice in Lawrence Lessig's book _Code_ :
http://code-is-law.org/conclusion_excerpt.html

	And extends to being literally, not metaphorically, a joke about it:

http://www.g21.net/tunanow18.html

> but from my interviews with their officials, they would have opposed
> the DMCA.

	But they didn't have to get a big campaign contribution from
the RIAA or MPAA to run against their opponents. So they could say
anything they thought would be the right answer for that interview.

	This is a key part of the fantasy of Libertarianism. Since
there ARE no Libertarian Party members in Congress, they can promise
you the earth, the moon, the sky, there will never be a vote to prove
them wrong. In fact, what this is doing is contrasting less - that's
less - than a campaign promise, with real-world imperatives. That's
hardly an intelligent comparison.

	There were no lobbyists calling on a Libertarian congress
member saying "This is about PROPERTY RIGHTS. It's about THEFT
of OUR PROPERTY. You should see that Libertarianism requires that
PROPERTY be protected from hacker-THIEVES. And here is a very
large campaign contribution to help you study our point of view."

	If that happened, I think the votes would be a different
story.

	By the way, Declan, I'm still waiting to tell me 
how you reconcile your views with making a living from a
government-granted monopoly which punishes people for
(too much) speech if someone happens to have said that speech
earlier (aka "copyrighted articles").

-- 
Seth Finkelstein  Consulting Programmer  sethf at sethf.com  http://sethf.com
http://www10.nytimes.com/2001/07/19/technology/circuits/19HACK.html