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Politics : The Castle -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (976)	1/17/2003 11:40:54 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7936

Of course,the straight libertarian position is that property is property, and it is heritable, and therefore that copyrights and patents should exist in perpetuity That is not so obvious. A libertarian could also view copyrights as a government restriction imposed on people. When you own a car, if I use the car I take it away from you. If you write a story and I write a new story with the same characters then I am not depriving you of the story. I might reduce the amount you make from the story and the incentive to create and publish. But is that your property? Your view makes sense but so does the idea that the copyright itself is putting the public interest ahead of libertarian ideals. Or the idea that the property in this case is the right to exclusive use for a specified period of time, and that neither copyrights or the expiration of copyrights is an infringement on libertarian ideals. I'm not really arguing either of these ideas, or your idea, just pointing out that there is not one simple libertarian ideal for copyrights with all other ideas incompatible with libertarianism. Tim