It's not the plug-in that is illegal, though the RIAA and MPAA would argue that position, but that the content is made available publicly in a way that people can download a copy to their computer. As with file-sharing networks, it is the sharing of unlicensed content which is illegal, not the method. I know the plug-in of which you speak and have always held that anything you can view on your computer (like television and radio before the Internet) is being transmitted and stored on your computer via streaming technology. By using the plug-in, I believe that converting it to a format you can use is fair use (again, the MPAA and RIAA would argue this to the end of the industry), though distribution beyond your use would infringe upon the copyright of the original owner.
There is unfortunately a lot of grey area and morality involved in these ideas, so if you feel that you are stealing the work of someone else, that would create a conflict and you are responsible for determining what is right in your mind. Conflict is a cornerstone of Libertarian and free market concepts, which are in stark contrast to the rigid capitalist system that has allowed these industries to overtake artists rights in the industry's efforts to focus on profits over the art itself.
Many libertarians abandon minarchy in favor of anarchy when they realize that even a minarchist government is unlibertarian. That was my experience. And it was like this for me also with IP. I came to see that the reason I had been unable to find a way to justify IP was because it is, in fact, unlibertarian. Perhaps this would have been obvious if Congress had not enacted patent and copyright statutes long ago, making them part and parcel of America's "free-market" legal system — and if early libertarians like Rand had not so vigorously championed such rights.
But libertarianism's initial presumption should have been that IP is invalid, not the other way around. After all, we libertarians already realize that "intellectual" rights, such as the right to a reputation protected by defamation law, are illegitimate.[4] Why, then, would we presume that other laws, protecting intangible, intellectual rights, are valid — especially artificial rights that are solely the product of legislation, i.e., decrees of the fake-law-generating wing of a criminal state?
But IP is widely seen as basically legitimate. Sure, there have always been criticisms of existing IP laws and policies. You can point to hundreds of obviously ridiculous patents, and hundreds of obviously outrageous abuses. There are absurd patents on ways of swinging on a swing, faster-than-light communications, and one-click purchasing; there are $100 million- and billion-dollar patent-lawsuit awards; there are millions of dollars in copyright liability imposed on consumers for sharing a few songs. Books are even banned — quite literally — in the name of copyright.[5]Intellectual Property and Libertarianism - Stephan Kinsella - Mises Daily
There is nothing wrong with incrementalism. Advocates of private property and free markets want patent, copyright, and other forms of IP to be abolished, but we are also in favor of measures short of abolition that move in the right direction–shortening terms and penalties, etc. Still, it’s frustrating when some commentators identify real problems with IP law but fail to make a more fundamental diagnosis. A case in point is free market economist Alex Tabarrok, who has good criticisms of the existing patent system but who nonetheless resists calls for patent abolition and advocates other statist measures to supplement or replace the statist patent system, like multi-billion dollar taxpayer-funded innovation prize systems.William Patry on How to Fix Copyright
In the field of copyright, we have Google attorney and copyright lawyer William Patry, whose recent book is How to Fix Copyright (see his recent Volokh post, How to Fix Copyright, Part I). Our mutual publisher, Oxford University Press, sent me a copy a while back. Unfortunately, although Patry makes some useful criticisms of the existing copyright system, his diagnosis and prescriptions are confused (though not as bad as those of Dean Baker, who, like Tabarrok in the field of inventions, recommends taxpayer funded multibillion-dollar “artistic freedom vouchers” to promote artistic creation).
Patry realizes the current copyright system is rife with problems. But he is not willing to support copyright abolition. It is not for failure to understand the law. He is a renowned copyright scholar, author of the seminal Patry on Copyright treatise. Legal credentials are not enough, however. One must have a firm grasp of economics, and one’s political views must be rooted in the propertarian principles that inform libertarian analysis. Given a grounding in Austro-libertarian analysis, it is easy to see that the only legitimate laws are those that enforce individual property rights, and that the purpose of property rights is to permit productive and conflict-free use of scarce resources. The function of law is to make peaceful, productive use of scarce resources possible, by assigning owners to these resources based on Lockean homesteading principles. Copyright law, like patent law, is a grant of monopoly privilege–the remnant of mercantilism and censorship regimes of the past and is antithetical to the free market, competition, and private property.
In the end, Patry’s latest book is not much different than his previous Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, which I criticized here. On p. 5 he says copyright law is “necessary”; on p. 11 that “copyright laws can serve valuable purposes” (whatever this means); on p. 262 he says that “Going after the very small number of those who are doing most of the harm is entirely justified.” Why? Elsewhere he derides the proponents of stronger copyright for failing to provide evidence that stronger copyright law is needed. Where is Patry’s evidence that any copyright law is “needed”? Where is his normative argument that these laws are justified? He has none, and does nothing to produce such an argument other than repeat commonplace bromides. And so his recipes for change are tepid: reduce the term, but not to zero!
Sam Konkin and Libertarian Theory by David Gordon
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