More rambling on copyright
Spinoff from previous item about copyright. This is just rambling, not a basic point.

The alleged American Dream has always been based on permanent private property. Libertarian and sovereign individual types bitch about property tax because they claim all property should be absolute, and property tax means you're just renting from the county.

Well, they're correct about the facts of property tax, but incorrect about the necessity of absolute permanent property.

In fact there's no such thing, and permanent holding is a bad idea.

The original copyright law was NOT permanent. It recognized that intellectual property should be temporary, and required you to officially REGISTER and RENT the material if you wanted to use it for profit. When you stopped paying the rental, the material became public domain. There was no ambiguity, no room for an arbitrary claim by an unrelated thief.

The Disney law creates a permanent "right" without any registration or rental. This means that Disney and a few other giant corporations can claim anything they want and prevent its use for as long as they want, because they have the armies of lawyers.

The old system made it possible for anyone to pay a reasonable fee and create a temporary claim which the GOVERNMENT would help you to defend, because you had PAID THE GOVERNMENT for the service of defending you. Feedback loop, pay for value.

This is closely parallel to the notion of retail vs wholesale "corruption". When petty bureaucrats are for rent, anyone with a reasonable amount of money can get service by paying. A tight feedback loop couples the payer with the servant, insuring accountability both ways.

When petty bureaucrats are supposed to be "pure", only Disney and Amazon get service, because they can exert massive economic and blackmail power over all bureaucrats in the world simultaneously.

Labels: Equipoise, From rights to duties, Natural law = Soviet law

  ¶ 5:58 AM