YouTube - Go Frak Yourself

Well, I was forced by YouTube (Google) to view a video regarding copyright law, but my point of contention is that I really don't give a damn. While I recognize property rights, I also believe that art is meant to be viewed. YouTube is little more than a medium for viewing art. Intellectual property rights and copyright law are entirely corrupt and up for sale to the highest bidder (cough, Weinstein, cough), which invalidates those arguments in my mind. I guess I'm with the Libertarians on this one (and probably further over into the anarcho-capitalist camp).

YouTube - Broadcast Yourself

It would be interesting to discover how far a seriously critical view of the benefits to society of the law of copyright ... would have a chance of being publicly stated in a society in which the channels of expression are so largely controlled by people who have a vested interest in the existing situation. — Friedrich A. Hayek, "The Intellectuals and Socialism"

A Dispute Among Libertarians

The status of intellectual property rights (copyrights, patents, and the like) is an issue that has long divided libertarians. Such libertarian luminaries as Herbert Spencer, Lysander Spooner, and Ayn Rand have been strong supporters of intellectual property rights. Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, was ambivalent on the issue, while radical libertarians like Benjamin Tucker in the last century and Tom Palmer in the present one have rejected intellectual property rights altogether.

When libertarians of the first sort come across a purported intellectual property right, they see one more instance of an individual's rightful claim to the product of his labor. When libertarians of the second sort come across a purported intellectual property right, they see one more instance of undeserved monopoly privilege granted by government.

I used to be in the first group. Now I am in the second. I'd like to explain why I think intellectual property rights are unjustified, and how the legitimate ends currently sought through the expedient of intellectual property rights might be secured by other, voluntary means.

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The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights

"... the patent monopoly ... consists in protecting inventors ... against competition for a period long enough to extort from the people a reward enormously in excess of the labor measure of their services, — in other words, in giving certain people a right of property for a term of years in laws and facts of Nature, and the power to exact tribute from others for the use of this natural wealth, which should be open to all."
(Benjamin Tucker, Instead of a Book, By a Man Too Busy to Write One: A Fragmentary Exposition of Philosophical Anarchism (New York: Tucker, 1893), p. 13.)

I'm proud to be a pirate, I take offense at Google forcing me to view their propaganda. I appreciate the artist, the inventor, the entrepreneur for their works, their services, their products, but not the state for supporting, nay, collaborating in extorting the public in an effort to stifle competition in what could be a free market.

Frak the Weinsteins...