DISQUS

Technology Liberation Front: The Anti-Libertarian Case for Copyright Maximalism

  • eee_eff · 2 years ago
    This essay argues that many of the technological challenges to intellectual property rights such as peer-to-peer software are a movement against democratically chosen intellectual property rules.

    Fundamental to our democracy are certain 'inalienable rights' that are part of the Bill of rights, and they can not be abrogated by a simple majority vote. This has long been recognized.

    It is profondly disturbing that such fundamental concepts, deeply embedded in nearly all concepts of morality, can be so thoughtlessly brushed aside.

    Make no mistake, the corporate power advocates want to take away your freedoms. just as surely as any fascist would.

    Their aim to make a quick profit may seem more benign (at first) than those aims of traditional fascists, but once our freedoms start to erode, (if we are so careless as to let that happen) they will certainly find other uses for the power infrastructure that they are trying to build.

    Their role model is China: capitalism without democracy.

    http://enigmafoundry.wordpress.com/2006/09/07/p...

    http://enigmafoundry.wordpress.com/2007/02/20/d...
  • eee_eff · 2 years ago
    Oh, yes since apparently TLF no longer allows clickable links in comments, and the ends of longer links get truncated, here are a few:

    http://wordpress.com/tag/sideways-adjectives/

    http://wordpress.com/tag/ip-central/
  • dmarti · 2 years ago

    I get your point here, Tim. "In effect, open code shifts fundamentally political decisions from democratic institutions to technological and network elites. This shift undermines the philosophy of freedom and citizens' rights in democracy."

    So, in other words, the Peoples' Industrial Commisiariat is supposed to take control of Ms. Taggart's railroad, I mean Mr. Stallman's development tools.

    But really, not worth reading the whole thing. It's half-assed. Really, "the DMCA prohibits anti-circumvention devices"?

    And can we really say that the "democratically expressed preference for proprietary intellectual property" includes anticircumvention, when the Elcomsoft jury basically nullified the DMCA?

    "Under the eBook formats, you have no rights at all, and the jury had trouble with that concept," the foreman told an AP reporter after the trial.

    Regular users tend to catch up with the technical elite's preferences on policy issues once they get to understand the technology. Remember how all the email spammers were saying that just the technical elite were against spam, and once enough regular people got email they would prefer to get valuable marketing messages in their inboxes?