In reply, I want to point to this from Richard Stallman (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pirate-party.html) in which he points out that Software Freedom as we know it depends on copyright being more or less the way it is now, and that, for example, the Swedish Pirate Party's platform of shortening the copyright term to five years would result in less, not more freedom as applied to software (there's probably an analogous Free Culture situation, but I can't think of it). While weaker copyright laws are ideal, adjusting them to permit the amount of freedom available currently with respect to software would require - as Stallman suggests - additional new laws. That, as I broadly understand it, is inconsistent with libertarianism. Moreover, because important new law would need to be promulgated in order to reach an outcome approximately as just as (in some respects) the current system, little would be accomplished, aside from confusion with a new system, wherein lies the potenti al for injustice in unpredictability. I suppose I'm arguing for the status quo with regard to copyright, which surprises me. But I should also note that I am surprised at how well Free licenses can turn something as weird as copyright law into something that actually makes sense with regard to the way real humans use creative work.
-Nick ________________________________________ From: [email protected] [[email protected]] On Behalf Of Kevin Driscoll [[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2011 4:15 PM To: Discussion of Free Culture in general and this organization in particular Subject: [FC-discuss] Libertarian critique of "intellectual property" My classmate just passed along an article that critiques IP from a strictly Libertarian point-of-view. Some of it will be elementary to folks on this list but it also provides some provocative / useful links to another literature that may be less familiar. To long to copy paste so here's a link: http://mises.org/daily/5025/The-Fight-against-Intellectual-Property Curious to know what you think. Kevin _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freeculture.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss FAQ: http://wiki.freeculture.org/Fc-discuss _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freeculture.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss FAQ: http://wiki.freeculture.org/Fc-discuss
