Clean bathrooms are nice.

Why isn't copying the work of someone else against their will not a form of aggression, whereas a threat (which is also just information) while pointing a gun peacefully at you IS a form of aggression?


That's not true. The atoms in your body has probably been claimed hundreds of times by other people, not to mention your parents. They produced you and fed you. Why don't they own you and can sell you as a slave if they like?



Why?



Why not?

Laws are not formed in a free market process. E.g. laws against murder don't arise in a free market, a free market ASSUMES laws against murder. If you mean that laws are just like any other commodity then I am sure that you will be able to find societies where it is "economically viable" to enslave, say, 10% of the population and to murder another 10% who are not fit to contribute to society. 80% say so. That does however not make it right.


When that is said I will grant you that BOTH the IP laws of today AND the practices of the various companies in the industry are bad. A major problem is in fact lack of micropayment, which in turn is largely caused by the insane regulations and taxations on money and banking. Thus, indirectly much of the cause of the current debacle on copyright are the banking laws and regulations and the taxes.

With micropayment systems much of the problems associated with piracy would be almost non-existent.

Another major problem is with industry who haven't understood that most people are actually NOT pirates. Most people respect intellectual property and want to pay for it just like they would any product. The problem is that the industry is punishing people who are legal. Where do you see a gigantic warning against piracy? On every DVD that is sold, i.e. those who actually PAY for the product and DON'T pirate are harassed by the industry. Furthermore, legal copies often have copy protection and time zone restrictions, which means that the legal product is LESS convenient and LESS available than the pirated copy. And often you simply CAN'T get the product via internet, you MUST buy a physical copy of a DVD that you care nothing about and that needs to be shipped halfway around the globe. Furthermore without proper payment systems there are no per usage payment for software. In some cases you have to pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars for a product you want to use 4 times. And why do you have to pay full price for a Blue Ray version of the movie when you bought the DVD? Here you're paying for the same information (the IP) twice, and for no good reason. And if you lose the DVD too bad for you, you have to buy a completely new one.

All this is experienced as deeply unfair by consumers and rightfully so. Part of the problem is with the laws (e.g. banking laws) and part of the problem is with the dinosaur industry that is being unreasonable. We see that as somewhat ok consumer solutions arise people do prove that they don't want to be parasitic criminals who pirate other people's hard work. spotify.com is a brilliant example which has more than 1 million paying customers now, mostly from Scandinavia. In Sweden the music industry is now making more money through Spotify than through regular channels. And remember, Sweden was the home of Pirate Bay. Once fairly reasonable solutions are available, people choose them.

The key here from a customer service point of view is not to treat your regular customer as a criminal. Look at ordinary shops. There is maybe 2% shop lifting there, and you can quite easily get away with stealing, but most people don't AND most importantly: the shop owners will rather have 3% theft than to treat their customers as criminals with draconian anti-theft measures. In other words, the ordinary customer should NOT notice any anti-theft measures (i.e. guards who searches everyone on their way out) and this is where the music and film industry has simply misunderstood everything. You cannot avoid a certain amount of piracy, but treat your paying customers with respect and provide them a good service and most people will buy, not steal.

Of course the anti-IP libertarians are not exactly doing people any favors. They are spreading an idea that goes much further than to criticize the bad service attitude of the IP industry. They are in fact spreading the idea that piracy is NOT MORALLY WRONG. In essence they are trying to normalize pillaging and violation, and by so doing they not only contribute to a more sinister form of IP theft, but actually pushes many of the pro-IP people towards draconian measures.



This is true, and as of today The Free State Initiative is the only project where Bitcoins will be accepted as a fully free and legal payment without any legal hindrances. The Free State Initiative currently accepts and a future Free State will accept donations in Bitcoins to show this. Yet, despite this not a single person in the Bitcoin-community has donated a single Bitcoin to the initiative. I find that very, very strange.

That makes even less sense than calling copyright infringement "piracy" in order to compare it to the violent mugging of a trade ship at sea.

The events are not comparable.  Copyright infringement is the violation of a state granted monopoly on data.  No physical harm, or threat of harm, comes to those who claim the copyright.  Nor are they denied the use of their data themselves for it.  Copyright has moved far from it's original intent of the framers, and of it's use in the Constitution; and even they were wary about copyright, and were very clear that they did not consider it property, nor the control of it as a natural right. 

Lacking the support of the state, private data is only protected so long as the owner can do so.  By publishing it, they are making it public by definition.  A person can protect their personal or trade secrets with strong encryption, but protecting data that has been released to the public is much harder to do, and cannot be reasonably enforced without an unnatural state supported monopoly.  I said before that IP would be the first to pass away because in anything close to an anarchist state, the public would be unconcerned about the violation of laws that only exist because of the monopolies granted by a prior state.

It's coercion.


When people die their are atoms abandoned and become unowned. As soon as my body goes from a lump of matter to "me", I am in possession of my body. My parents are still latecomers, even if late means only a split second later.



Information isn't property because it isn't scare or rivalrous. If you have a car and I take that car from you then I've deprived you that car. If I make an exact copy of that car then you can still drive the car. The only reason why we have property rights is because when disputes arise and we need some objective way of deciding who owns what. If anyone could have as much of anything they wanted, a mansion, a yacht, a space ship, a house on mars, whatever, it wouldn't make any sense to have property rights. I could never deprive you of those things because they are unlimited.


See above. Anyways, I've successfully shown that mixing your labor with something doesn't make it yours. If you steal my marble and make a statue, you don't own the statue. You owe me for damages to my marble. If you disagree then you can give me a counterexample where mixing your labor with something thereby makes it yours but simply claiming it as yours won't do. Of course, trying to offer a novel you wrote as an example would only beg the question since that's the issue we're arguing over.

The real question is, why do I owe you anything other than to not physically harm you and your property unless in self-defense, or coerce you? Do I also owe it to you to not hurt your feelings?

I think what turned me off about the freestateinitiative was because of how the site utilized Singapore and Hong Kong as examples to strive for.  Also, the freestateinitiative seemed to look down on western governments as failures when for some people it is a beacon of light.

In addition, there are a lot of concepts on your website that needs to be clarified.  For example, making things private is not the way to be free.  I think a free state should instead revolve its core principles on basic human rights, which should be guaranteed somehow to people living in the free state.

Some loop holes that really bother me is that what if there was someone how owned 100% of the water resources, 100% or the roads, etc?  That would be a monopoly and he could charge fees, deny travel, or limit water resources.

Anyways...

This is getting pretty twisted.

I can't think of anywhere else on the planet that will throw you in prison or shoot you for having an unlicensed copy of Windows. I'm disturbed that anybody would create such a place.

Free will is an illusion because we live in a deterministic universe. We have minds. I see no contradiction.

If information is always owned (i.e. someone's property), how come there should be no property rights for information?