🚀 go-pugleaf

rjc@cstr.ed.ac.uk (Richard Caley) writes:
[regarding Copyright]
> Many people would argue that the ability to control what happens to
> the things which one produces _is_ a basic right and also a
> responsibility. 

You might want to sit down with a copy of Rollins's "The Myth of Natural
Rights" or Wilson's "Natural Rights -or- Never Put a Rubber on your Willy".

It's only relatively recently that information was regarded as a product
at all, and thus became subject to property laws.  This is a matter of
public consensus, and nothing more.  You seem to think that the right to
copyright has always been around, and it was only when someone built a
sufficiently powerful right-detector that it was discovered and laws were
rewritten to compensate for it.  This isn't the case - rights are created,
not discovered.  The English parliament decided that things worked better
with copyright than without it; and the American colonialists agreed.

If it turns out to be a bad idea after all, the "right" can be erased as
easily as it was created in the first place.

> For instance it is one of the few things that
> liberatarians and marxists seem to agree on.

This is hardly a good example.  While both groups agree that the producer
of a thing has rights to it, they don't agree on who produces it in the
first place: the owner of the assembly line or the person in front of it.

---
Tom Fitzgerald   Wang Labs        fitz@wang.com
1-508-967-5278   Lowell MA, USA   ...!uunet!wang!fitz