[free-sklyarov] Libertarian party is not our friends, they are no better then the democrats and republicans.

[Declan McCullagh]

I'm actually writing an article on how conservative and libertarian
groups view intellectual property, and I have not yet found one
libertarian group that supports the DMCA.

[Obviously Democrats and Republicans are a little more enthusiastic
(http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,45522,00.html). Then there's
the SSSCA, which top Dems and Repubs in the Senate are supporting.]

If there is one, please let me know. The article's on hold for
obvious reasons, but I am fairly confident my statement above
is accurate.

-Declan


On Wed, Sep 12, 2001 at 01:11:39PM -0700, Seth David Schoen wrote:
> Xcott Craver writes:
> 
> > 	I've had baffling discussions
> > 	with [self-proclaimed] libertarians, who believe the DMCA is good
> > 	because it allows fair use disputes to be resolved by market
> > 	forces, rather than by law.  I.e., companies sell restrictive
> > 	technologies and consumers "vote with their wallets."  The anti-
> > 	circumvention part prevents people from circumventing the market.
> 
> Thus the article Declan told us about,
> 
> http://www.cfif.org/5_8_2001/Free_line/current/free_line_copyright.htm
> 
> and also something Fred von Lohmann found along similar lines:
> 
> http://www.cato.org/dailys/08-23-01.html
> 
> I was writing a reply in which I maintained that copyright was a
> government regulation which interfered with the free market in
> creative works.  So there is an exactly parallel argument -- and it's
> unlikely that CFIC and Cato would maintain that copyright should
> exist because there is a market failure in the absence of regulation.
> 
> This leads me to the (unsurprising) conclusion that the most important
> thing you can do to get libertarians and trade proponents to oppose
> things like the DMCA is to spread the word that copyright is a form of
> government regulation.
> 
> In the trade world, this could be surprisingly difficult.  I recently
> learned that the U.S. government adopted the position that inadequate
> intellectual property laws constitute an "unfair trade practice" way
> back in 1984, after an intense lobbying campaign by copyright
> industries.  This policy decision came years before either copyright
> law or international trade law were on the public's radar; at that
> time, they were both very obscure and it was hard to imagine that
> there would be protests in the street over either.
> 
> But there is a long legacy in U.S. trade policy of viewing countries
> which don't have U.S.-equivalent copyright laws as somehow deficient
> or criminal.  This is strange.  People in the U.S. don't think that a
> foreign country is doing something wrong if it doesn't have a Federal
> Reserve Bank, if it doesn't have a federal system with states and a
> central government, if it doesn't have ZIP codes... but if you don't
> follow us on copyright policy, you're a rogue nation!
> 
> This policy is only really defensible if you view copyright law _not
> as a public policy choice but as a recognition of right and wrong_ --
> which is certainly the way libertarians and many other people have
> viewed legislation about murder, and frequently about physical
> property.  The distinction is more or less equivalent to the archaic
> distinction between the malum prohibitum and the malum per se, the
> infraction of the law as violation of government policy, or as
> inherently evil act.  That's what I was getting at when I wrote that
> copyright infringement was like tax evasion rather than like theft.
> 
> If infringing copyrights is seen as a malum per se, then almost
> everybody will agree that countries which tolerate it or don't crack
> down firmly as though they were havens of actual piracy, what the
> U.S. alleged of the Barbary States.
> 
> If it's a malum prohibitum, then eventually many people will ask why
> the U.S. is imposing this legislation on the rest of the world.
> 
> This, I think, is the real intellectual battle of the copyright wars.
> If copyright is not a form of property (and I pass over the question of
> whether anything is really a form of property), then copyright law, as
> all legal scholars seem to think, _was made by a legislature, and can
> be unmade if the public interest requires_.  But if copyright is a
> real right of creators, everywhere and always wrong to infringe,
> legislatures are just doing their duty in approximating an ideal of
> perfect protection.
> 
> That's why I complain about the two pieces mentioned above.  I don't
> care whether MOCA passes; I don't care whether we have any particular
> scheme of compulsory licensing for on-line music.  I care about
> refuting the suggestion that we shouldn't even _propose_ to reform
> copyright law, shouldn't even _consider_ reforming it, because to make
> any reform at all would violate the property rights of authors.
> 
> That is a bad suggestion, but one which underlies huge expanses of
> debate in the world today, not to mention U.S. trade policy.
> 
> -- 
> Seth David Schoen <schoen at loyalty.org> | Its really terrible when FBI arrested
> Temp.  http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/ | hacker, who visited USA with peacefull
> down:  http://www.loyalty.org/   (CAF) | mission -- to share his knowledge with
>      http://www.freesklyarov.org/      | american nation.  (Ilya V. Vasilyev)
> 
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