Life Behind the IRon Drape: Intellectual Property

Blog description.

Accentuating the Liberal in Classical Liberal: Advocating Ascendency of the Individual & a Politick & Literature to Fight the Rise & Rise of the Tax Surveillance State. 'Illigitum non carborundum'.

Liberty and freedom are two proud words that have been executed from the political lexicon: they were frog marched and stood before a wall of blank minds, then forcibly blindfolded, and shot, with the whimpering staccato of ‘equality’ and ‘fairness’ resounding over and over. And not only did this atrocity go unreported by journalists in the mainstream media, they were in the firing squad.

The premise of this blog is simple: the Soviets thought they had equality, and welfare from cradle to grave, until the illusory free lunch of redistribution took its inevitable course, and cost them everything they had. First to go was their privacy, after that their freedom, then on being ground down to an equality of poverty only, for many of them their lives as they tried to escape a life behind the Iron Curtain. In the state-enforced common good, was found only slavery to the prison of each other's mind; instead of the caring state, they had imposed the surveillance state to keep them in line. So why are we accumulating a national debt to build the slave state again in the West? Where is the contrarian, uncomfortable literature to put the state experiment finally to rest?

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Showing posts with label Intellectual Property. Show all posts

Thursday, June 7, 2012

Crown & FBI Hand Dotcom Their Case

First, in a sobering display of the abuse of state power, seventy keystone cops armed with assault rifles raid Dotcom, his pregnant wife and nannies, over alleged non-violent crimes. Disgusting. And incompetent given the paperwork was so badly drawn the raid looks to have been illegal anyway.

I say the above as a supporter of IP: it is a valid property right, and copying is theft. Although that is not the case against Dotcom. Rather, merely that he built a platform on which unassociated individuals were trading pirated files - no different than prosecuting the owner of a road for crimes that road was used to commit, or an ISP for crimes committed by it's users.

But it gets worse. To compound the multitude of errors already made by the fumbling crown and FBI, now on the latter body illegally taking clones of Dotcom's hard drives out of the country, they've come with the following justification that hands Dotcom the case, morally, if not in actuality:

FBI agents who copied data from Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom's computers and took it overseas were not acting illegally because information isn't "physical material", the Crown says. ... Crown lawyer John Pike, for the attorney-general, said the material stored on the hard drives could be shipped overseas for the FBI to examine because it did not constitute "physical" material. The relevant legislation applied only to physical possessions rather than information ..."

Outside of the fact these two government bodies have time and again acted as if they're above the laws they are charged to uphold, they've just used as their justification for taking these files, an argument almost on all fours with the anti-IP anarchist scarcity argument - the nonsense that it is - that IP is not a physical possession, thus taking/copying files is not stealing, or, in this case, against the law. Surely, if there is no law broken by sending such copies, then Dotcom, even if he did copy files/information himself, by their own reasoning, has committed no crime. Alternatively, they have just committed the same crime they are prosecuting. Case over. Dotcom's business destroyed, livelihood taken from him by force, by two out-of-control states, for nothing.

It will be interesting to see if the defence makes something of this.

You wouldn't want these clumsy oafs, sorry, gun welding clumsy oafs, who since the raid have been making it up as they go along, re-scoping each law as they break it, running your life for you. Oh, wait a minute ...