Re: IP was: My Extropian Manifesto...

From: Michael S. Lorrey (retroman@turbont.net)
Date: Sat Aug 12 2000 - 20:16:00 MDT


Zero Powers wrote:
>
> >From: Dan Fabulich <daniel.fabulich@yale.edu>
>
> >Lorrey wrote:
> >
> > > > It is irrational to try to enforce intellectual property rights on a
> > > > world containing encryption.
> > >
> > > Sorry, that is a morally vacant statement. Its like saying its
> > > irrational to enforce one's right to life in a world where killing
> > > people is easy.
>
> The word "right" gets bandied about quite a bit, as if it were some sort of
> God-given entity. The fact is that the "right" to anything is nothing more
> than a man-made fiction. It is *really* perplexing to me when people who
> deny the existence of “God” nonetheless talk about human rights as if they
> were bestowed by God.
>

Your logical fallacy here is you assume that people think that rights
come from God. Excessively christian of you.

> None of us has any right which we don't have the power to enforce. In
> essence, "might makes right." For instance, at one point in time it was the
> law in the U.S. that the black man “had no rights which the white man was
> bound to respect.” Why? Because the black man was utterly without any
> power to enforce any rights he might like to take unto himself. Did the
> black man like that state of affairs? No. Was it fair, perhaps not. But
> that’s the way it was.

Yet he got his rights without any might, right? So your claim is
invalid.

>
> And that’s the way it is. If you have no power to prevent me from making
> use of content you create, you have no “right” to do so either. You can
> piss and moan all day about what rights you think you have, but its no
> different from me claiming that I have the right to inherit the moon. Get
> used to it and get over it.

So killing people is perfectly fine and alright with you? I thought so.

-- 
TANSTAAFL

Mike Lorrey

"In the end more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free." --- Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)

"A person who wants a society that is both safe and free, wants what never has been, and what never will be." --- Thomas Jefferson

"It's a Republic, if you can keep it..." --- Benjamin Franklin



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