On Mar 31, 2010, at 11:48 AM, [email protected] wrote:
http://futurismic.com/2010/03/26/a-dialogue-with-a-book-pirate/
Also, FYI, is Nancy's own blog on it (linked at the beginning of the
article):
http://nancykress.blogspot.com/2010/03/dialgue-with-pirate.html
I think it's only fair to say that http://www.truly-free.org/ should
absolutely be claimed and simply redirect to the Library of Congress.
Pirate can have his books, just not share them. I think it's curious
that he has a "borrowing quota" -- that should definitely be
eliminated. After all, bits are intangible and therefore have zero
value. Zero times 10^24 is still zero -- I'm sure his web provider
will have no trouble with that logic.
Snark aside, he's right that "property" is an artificial manifestation.
I'd further argue that the primary value of law is to protect property
because it is the only injustice that it can have reasonable
expectation to undo. All other codified morality is to remove people
from society who do not abide by a (supposedly) agreed-upon set of
morality; you can't undo murder, rape, kidnapping, extortion -- most of
what people do automatically, hence making them "civilized". Whether
that's good or bad is a matter of debate. I favor individual ownership
of property and oppose non-individual ownership of property as I think
that is the most effective system.
What I think he's dancing around is that there is almost no place for
The Commons in our fiercely litigious property-based system. That is,
society is more efficient if some resources (specifically, plentiful
ones) are not owned and sold, but shared freely. We still have the
commons of breathable air and potable water -- although the "machine"
seems to be making efforts to make them not usable by man so it can own
them (and I say it that way partly to be cute, but also because I don't
believe it's in civilized human nature to _deliberately_ destroy that
which allows us to survive).
As far as I know, it's always been frowned upon to to claim what
someone else claims as property (in property-based parlance, "steal")
as yours and deliver it to The Commons. Further, it's frowned upon to
claim said property is yours to liberate. This is essentially what
your pirate is claiming to do.
--- Jason Olshefsky
http://JayceLand.com
http://JayceLand.com/blog
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