Re: [LAU] So what do you think sucks about Linux audio ?

Louigi Verona <louigi.verona@...> writes: debate.http://mises.org/document/3582Although the book is called "Against IP", the first part gives a very thorough and fair overview will starveand we will have no music". I just read through it on a flight. I admit, the first sentences gave me cause to read it skeptically, by using the term "libertarian" but not as a pejorative. Conspicuously absent from his account is the situation of people who earn their entire living by producing intellectual content. He tries to dismantle concepts both of intellectual "property" and of contracts to protect an author's labor, but has no answers: it's a purely negative exercise. He invokes "fairness" but, in his view, if you write a book and I use materials that I own to reproduce the text and sell it, profiting from work that I couldn't have produced on my own, this is "fair." It's a silly conclusion: If I sell a copy of someone else's work, I could charge roughly the price of, say, a printed novel. If I sell a sheaf of blank paper for the same cost, it would be fraud. My profits from selling the copy depend on the value added by another's work. I didn't do the work myself and I haven't paid for it, but I'd be earning profit based on it. He has no answer for this. In fact, he simply pretends this scenario either doesn't exist, or is insignificant. Effectively, he denies that the original author made any meaningful contribution to the goods from which I'm profiting: It's MY blank paper, and if I want to use it to copy your work, too bad. My material rights trump your non-material labor. (Typical libertarian claptrap, blindly following principles all the way through to stupid results.) In his defense, he is quite good at reductio ad absurdum argumentation, extending copyright or contractual protection into situations where the result really is mad. But he assumes artistic creation is the same, without arguing why. That's important. Reductio ad absurdum works by analogy. If the analogy is false, then the absurdity proves nothing. I wanted to be impressed. I'm not a big fan of copyright myself, and I hoped this would provide some strong counterarguments. Unfortunately, merely declaring that the artist's labor has no value worth protecting does not make it so. I also think the opposition to "reward" that you expressed on your site needs to explain why governments and other organizations are slashing arts funding, if it really is inevitable that societies will provide fair funding for essential human activities. I don't think copyright is the answer, but it's also a mistake, I think, to discard every economic protection of an artist's work because the current forms of that protection are flawed. "It's a hard problem, so let's not try." I'm not buying it. hjh