Re: Blasting Bidzos Blather

[tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)]

George Gleason writes:

> Oh, here goes another Big Bad Corporation abusing our rights...!  Well, are
> there any Libertarians out there who will please speak up for the right of
> Bidzos & co to earn a legal profit any way they see fit...?  Or am I, the
> token leftist in the crowd, going to stick my neck out solo on this one...?
> 
> Pardon my rhetoric, but I find it truly amazing how the much extolled rights
> of private property can suddenly become a non-issue when you consider you've
> found a bigger issue.   Some of us feel that way about ecology.  


I'm a card-carrying Libertarian, and I respect certain types of
private property--but not others. When someone "claims" the Amazon
jungle, perhaps with the blessings of a corrupt Pope, I don't. (Just
and out-of-band example to quickly make the point the even
Libertarians can have doubts about some property claims and even have
sympathies with radical environmentalists.)

The whole cloud of issues surrounding intellectual property, patents
on algorithms and methods, the specifics of RSA, and so on, is a
complicated set. Discussions on this list and in newsgroups makes this
clear.

RSADSI has licensed some of their patents to the Clipper folks. What
this means is not clear to me. If Clipper (or related things) is ever
_mandated_, with alternatives outlawed, then the government would
effectively have granted an exclusive franchise to RSADSI, and others,
sort of like _mandating_ MacDonald's hamburgers as the national
standard and requiring license fees be paid to MacDonald's every time
a hamburger is made or bought.

So, in answer to George's question, this Libertarian is angry at the
growing police state (RICO, civil forfeiture, no knock searches, the
War on Drugs, national socialist health care, wars on several fronts,
etc.) and fears the imminent outlawing of unapproved encryption.


-Tim

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