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

To: Neocon who wrote (982)	1/17/2003 2:06:55 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 7936

The libertarian position is that something is mine, without qualification, if it is produced by my labor Different people could have different views as to what is a product of someone's labor. If you write a story one person might view only the physical paper and ink or digital device that the story is on as being your property. Another view (one that more libertarians would support) would be that the story itself it your property, not just the physical representation of it but the story even abstracted from its physical representation. A third idea would be that the story was your property and anything very similar to the story would be your property. This would seem to be the theory held by Disney and a few other copyright holders. Also while libertarian is probably more precisely defined the conservative or liberal it still contains a whole range of different thoughts and ideas. Some "flavors" of libertarianism verge on anarchy and would focus more on government intrusion of not allowing someone to create a story or distribute information then they would on intellectual property rights. Certainly if taken to an extreme intellectual property rights would not result in a world with little government intrusion in to our lives and reducing such intrusion is the most important common theme in libertarian thought. In particular I think libertarians would be against restrictions on devices that have the ability to copy data or programs like DeCss that let you access data. They might support prosecuting violators of copyrights but the attempt to eliminate the possibility of violating the copyright even if it eliminates "fair use" and even can make accessing high quality versions of non copyrighted material more difficult is not something that I think most libertarians would support, at least not as a legal requirement. For some libertarian perspectives on the issue I did a search on Reason magazines sight. Reason is probably the most widely circulated libertarian magazine. reason.com reason.com reason.com Or a more extreme perspective from another site libertariannation.org

To: Neocon who wrote (982)	1/17/2003 4:27:53 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7936

They are your property, but do you have the right to demand that the state enforce your right, and if so how? I'm minded of the case earlier last century in which the issue was the legality of racially exclusionary provisions in a subdivision. Can't remember whether it excluded blacks, or jews, or both, but in any case somebody proposed selling to one of the prohibited persons and the neighbors went to court to stop it. The upshot was that the exclusionary provision was legal, that people could control what they did with their property, and could sign those agreements if they wanted to. But the court would not enforce them since they were against public policy. So they had a legal right, but fat lot of good it did them.