That's like saying police shouldn't try to capture bank robbers because there are also carjackers. They can do two things.
No, it's like saying that a victimless crime shouldn't have so much attention drawn on it while cars and banks are being robbed.
You're the one supporting the idea that I should just be able to take something that somebody else created.
Thoughts are not things you can make by hand or by machine and you cannot build boarders around them. You cannot take or borrow or steal an idea from someone else. The moment you can build a boarder around some stupid rap song or something is when you can break a barrier and steal an idea that somebody "created" (and was derived from other "creations" that you probably aren't paying royalties to). The only way you can enforce patents and copyright is if you spy on people and threaten to extort money from them or throw them in jail or enact other forms of violence.
Electronic data like a song or movie is a specific series of 1's and 0's that another human being created as a product to sell.
Alrighty. I'll do a lossless rip of a CD, do a micro-marginal tweak of the sound with a mixer that will totally throw off the unstructured data, burn it back to a CD, rip it again using tools to verify it's inaccuracy and I have successfully bypassed that.
That just doesn't even make any ****ing sense.
How does it not make sense? I put an intellectual effort to make artisan modifications to my face and I want to control who looks at it with intellectual property laws like we've got with other visual arts. You cannot look at my face for free! Admit it! You just want to look at my face for free!
If we're going with your ridiculous scenario I could just as easily say you are guilty of damaging my memories by having photons bounce off your face and enter my cornea, sending signals through my optic nerve into my brain, forcing the imprint of your face into MY head! Or maybe because you placed that note on your forehead, you are agreeing to the laws of physics that dictate photons will bounce off it and hit my eyes, so you've given me implied consent to use your stupid note.
Sounds like you understand my premise perfectly. Now you're thinking and demonstrating how ridiculous and aggressive the concept of intellectual property law is.
You support being able to steal the products of other people's labors.
I don't feel that copying is stealing especially if the credits remain entact. I do not feel that thoughts are products. Coercive thought monopolies deprive me of my labor by not allowing me the ability to use my labor to make my own and sell to others.
Clearly, then, you also support my going down to the Ferrarri dealership and taking a car. After all, property laws are oppressive!
No, but I support you buying a ferarri, taking it apart to learn the design and mechanics of it, remanufacturing your own ferarri, and call it the Deuce mobile and making another one to sell it. Stealing a car actually deprives the dealership of the car you stole, unlike copying data or manufacturing something that is patented that is not permitted to you by the company that owns the patent and the state that licenses it. Property laws cannot be oppressive by definition. Intellectual property laws wouldn't be either if all they did was protect against fraud.
Just admit it: You want **** that other people make for free. I thought libertarians were supporters of that free market stuff, but implementing your ideal position would hinder business.
Thought monopolies are anti-free market and cannot be enforced without big brother and initiating force. Enforcing copyright and patents require intervention and regulation of the market which is the antithesis of free markets. Free market =/= business interests.
Since my purposefully silly scenario to illustrate the silliness of intellectual property pissed you off so badly, I'll use another.
We're all cavemen. One day, one cave man decides to take logs and other materials to an open field to build himself shelter that provides better than a cave does. His caveman neighbors see this and wish to imitate. However, IP does not allow this cavemans neighbors to use their own logs on their own land with their own labor simply because they didn't make shelter like this first unless they are willing to pay the caveman for the right. This IP gives the cave man partial ownership over the land, materials and labor of his neighbors simply for having the idea first.
Currently, the law has it so that patents eventually expire. How do you feel about that? Is the government stealing from the inventor and letting pirates run amok?
