From: Cari Machet <[email protected]>
To: coderman <[email protected]>
Cc: cpunks <[email protected]>; jim bell <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, October 30, 2015 8:03 PM
Subject: Re: The Black List
>Law mother fucking suit ... i will contact my lawyer friends - see if anyone
>thinks you have standing
Don't bother. It was somewhat of a joke for me to mention the "story
royalty" line. Since having spent thousands of hours in Federal prison law
libraries, I studied many different areas of law, far beyond criminal law and
appeals, including copyright law. I am not aware that copyright law would
protect such an idea. If I had written a play or a script for a movie, THAT
would be my own under copyright law. But not merely the underlying idea. Now,
nothing would prevent one of these studios from giving me some sort of credit
on a line at the end of the show, but they wouldn't owe me money legally. I am
much more upset that they took TWENTY FUCKING YEARS to steal the idea, than the
fact they 'stole' it.
I should also take the opportunity to point out that I wrote my AP essay
independently from, and completely unaware of, the previous discussions by Tim
May and Robin Hanson. (I didn't even have Internet access, except as a portal,
until mid-1995, and was entirely unaware of the Cypherpunks list; AP part one
was actually published here by somebody else.).
The major differences included: Tim May and Robin Hanson both referred to
the idea, the one that would one day be seen as "assassination markets", as
being "abhorrent markets". See Cyphernomicon 16.16.4. That they were repelled
by the idea, presumably, is one reason they didn't rhetorically follow the
concept out to its ultimate, logical outcome. I, on the other hand, and
totally unaware of their work, thought that assassination markets would
actually be a truly wonderful idea, precisely because of their capability to
destroy governments, make militaries unnecessary and indeed impossible to
maintain (critically, including nuclear weapons), and completely replace the
current 'criminal justice system' with a far-fairer alternative. THEY merely
stuck their big toes into the cold pool, whereas I did a belly-flop. (With the
accompanying pain, <sigh>).
They probably started out by thinking something like, "If person A can
anonymously hire person B to kill person C, that could lead to mischief." Sure
it could. But I approached the problem differently: I saw that very few
people would want to pay, say, $10,000 to buy someone else's death. But I
immediately also saw that 10,000 people might want to pay $1 each for that
outcome. That amounts to a crowdsourced decision, with its accompanying
advantages and benefits. And I also saw that such a functioning system would
deter virtually everything which we call wrong in today's society. Anybody who
is trying to argue against an AP-type system is inherently attempting to defend
the hugely flawed status quo, even if they don't realize that.
I also solved David Friedman's "Hard problem", see his book, "The Machinery
of Freedom", the previously-assumed difficulty or impossibility of providing
for the defense of a fully libertarian or anarchistic society. Perhaps my big
advantage was that I didn't know Friedman's "Hard Problem" even existed, at
least under that label, until long after I'd already solved it.
Jim Bell
