[free-sklyarov] Libertarian anti-DMCA is fantasy

[Declan McCullagh]

To bring this debate back to "Free Dmitry," someone from Citizens for
a Sound Economy, an advocacy group that has ties with the Republican
Party but is libertarian on tech issues, showed up to the DC protest
on Monday.

I've spoken with and interviewed representatives of the Competitive
Intelligence Institute and the Cato Institute and the Pacific Research
Institute (libertarian think tanks) and not one believes that what
Dmitry did should be a crime.

These groups are your natural allies, and frothing here against "those
evil libertarians" or whatever won't help them move from criticizing
the DMCA and Dmitry's arrest to participating in an active repeal/
rewrite effort.

-Declan



On Wed, Jul 25, 2001 at 04:35:29PM -0700, Ethan Straffin wrote:
> Seth Finkelstein writes:
> > 	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.
> 
> Maybe.  Maybe not.  One thing is certain: Libertarian candidates take an
> oath to their party to oppose the initiation of force.  To the extent that
> voting for the DMCA violates that oath -- and I think most of us would
> agree that it does -- LP candidates are going to be less susceptible to
> the influence of corporate dollars than are most Democrats and
> Republicans.  (Think Libertarians would give us a corporate-controlled
> government?  Well, what exactly do we have now?)
> 
> Libertarians are very insistent that there needs to be an identifiable
> victim before the state can use force.  In Sklyarov's case, who's the
> victim?  Not Adobe: a typical Libertarian would clearly identify code as
> speech, and conclude that the First Amendment overrides any claim by Adobe
> of victimization.  The only possible victim is the publisher whose
> encrypted work is transferred to another party without his permission --
> and in that case, the perpetrator is the person who made the transfer, not
> the person who wrote the software to make the transfer possible.  A
> responsible Libertarian will not agree that it is acceptable to prosecute
> someone for "contributory infringement" simply because prosecuting the
> actual infringer is held to be impractical.
> 
> I'm not going to argue that everyone should go out and vote Libertarian in
> every race; I'm registered with the LP, but I voted for Democrats and
> Republicans in the last election as well.  But I think there's a strong
> case to be made that a Libertarian vote can be effective, and is becoming
> more so as the party grows.  In fact, the National Review thinks that we'd
> currently have a Republican rather than Democratic Senate if not for the
> influence of the LP on the last election, and the Republicans are already
> considering asking the LP to sit out certain races in 2002 -- not that
> we're likely to oblige them unless we get some firm commitments from their
> candidates to put the social conservatives in their place and give equal
> time to advancing libertarian goals.
> 
> Ethan
> --
> "One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils
> in this world are to be cured by legislation." -- Thomas Brackett-Reed
> 
> 
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