Re: Piracy and cypherpunks

[Steve Schear <schear@lvcm.com>]

I tried to take a crack at it in Laissez Faire City Times
http://www.zolatimes.com/V2.16/pageone.html

Tim May wrote:
>At 7:33 AM -0800 11/19/98, Jim Gillogly wrote:
>-- all issues of intellectual property are also issues of _enforceability_.
>To the extent anonymous remailers, information markets, regulatory
>arbitrage, systems like "BlackNet" ("BlackeBay," anyone?), and other crypto
>anarchy technologies proliferate, enforcement of any particular nation's
>intellectual property laws will become problematic.
>
>
>-- finally, the U.S. position on patentability and copyrightability of
>software and words is not the only position one may find morally
>supportable. We do not, for example, allow "ideas" to be patented or
>copyrighted (I don't mean "expressions of ideas," as in patents, or
>"precise words," as in copyrights. Rather, I mean that we do not allow a
>person to "own" an idea. To imagine the alternative, cf. Galambos.)
>
>
>Long term, I expect current notions about intellectual property will have
>to change.
>
>I'm a big believer in "technological determinism." For example, in my own
>view (which I have debated with some well known cyberspace lawyers over the
>years), the widespread deployment of video cassette recorders (VCRs)
>necessarily changed the intellectual property laws. The Supreme Court, in
>Disney v. Sony, uttered a bunch of stuff about time-shifting, blah blah,
>but the real reason, I think, boiled down to this:
>
>"VCRs have become widespread. If people tape shows in their own homes, even
>violating copyrighted material, there is no way law enforcement can stop
>them short of instituting a police state and doing random spot checks. The
>horse is out of the barn, the genie is out of the bottle. The law has to
>change. But rather than admit that copyright is no longer practically
>enforceable, we have to couch our decision in terms of "time-shifting" and
>other such fig leaves."
>
>So, too, will anonymous remailers, black pipes, information markets,
>regulatory arbitrage, and suchlike change the nature of intellectual
>property.
>
>What form these changes will take, I don't know.
>
>--Tim May