L. Neil Smith on Anti-IP “Thieves”

IP Law
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As a followup to various posts (The L. Neil Smith – FreeTalkLive Copyright Dispute; Russell Madden’s “The Death Throes of Pro-IP Libertarianism”; Replies to Neil Schulman and Neil Smith re IP), I see Smith has posted another article, “The Medium and the Message,” that touches on IP.

In this piece, he again states that IP is valid but without offering any justification. He explicitly compares IP abolitionists to those who want to tax and regulate and censor the Internet: after describing these nefarious types, he turns to IP opponents, describing us as an “equally deadly threat to freedom of expression”. Yes, he literally said that. We are simply envy-filled socialists: “Like the socialists they are, most of them appear to envy and hate the creators of intellectual property, and relish a future they imagine in which it’s impossible to earn a living by writing.”  We are not libertarians; we are thieves: “Opponents of intellectual property rights are nothing more than thieves, and, no matter what they may claim, neither are they libertarians.”

But he provides no argument at all for the proposition that IP is a legitimate type of property. He just calls it theft. And he says, “There can be, of course, no moral distinction between physical and intellectual property …..” The “of course” apparently is supposed to do all the work here.

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Pundits: Play Whack-A-Mole with WikiLeaks. Oh wait…

Anti-Statism, Imperialism, Police Statism, Technology, War
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In How to Mirror a Censored WordPress Blog, I discussed how the Mises Institute open-sourcing all of Mises.org and putting its entire literature and media library online as a set of torrents will help ensure the continued existence of this treasure trove of liberty in the event of a natural disaster or a future crackdown by the US government.

Here’s a practical example taking place before us. Some technologically and strategically-incompetent pundits are clamoring for the United States federal government to use its cyber capabilities to take out WikiLeaks before the organization puts online the remaining 15,000 documents of the leaked Afghan war logs.

Kevin Poulsen of Wired.com explains how a previous attempt to take down wikileaks.org has already failed in the past and how future attempts to take out WikiLeaks will fail as well.

In 2008, federal judge Jeffrey White in San Francisco ordered the WikiLeaks.org domain name seized as part of a lawsuit filed by Julius Baer Bank and Trust, a Swiss bank that suffered a leak of some of its internal documents. Two weeks later the judge admitted he’d acted hastily, and he had the site restored. “There are serious questions of prior restraint, possible violations of the First Amendment,” he said.

Even while the order was in effect, WikiLeaks lived on: supporters and free speech advocates distributed the internet IP address of the site, so it could be reached directly. Mirrors of the site were unaffected by the court order, and a copy of the entire WikiLeaks archive of leaked documents circulated freely on the Pirate Bay.

The U.S. government has other, less legal, options, of course — the “cyber” capabilities Thiessen alludes to. The Pentagon probably has the ability to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks against WikiLeaks’ public-facing servers. If it doesn’t, the Army could rent a formidable botnet from Russian hackers for less than the cost of a Humvee.

But that wouldn’t do much good either. WikiLeaks wrote its own insurance policy two weeks ago, when it posted a 1.4 GB file called insurance.aes256.

The file’s contents are encrypted, so there’s no way to know what’s in it. But, as we’ve previously reported, it’s more than 19 times the size of the Afghan war log — large enough to contain the entire Afghan database, as well as the other, larger classified databases said to be in WikiLeaks’ possession. Accused Army leaker Bradley Manning claimed to have provided WikiLeaks with a log of events in the Iraq war containing 500,000 entries from 2004 through 2009, as well as a database of 260,000 State Department cables to and from diplomatic posts around the globe.

Whatever the insurance file contains, Assange — appearing via Skype on a panel at the Frontline Club — reminded everyone Thursday that he could make it public at any time. “All we have to do is release the password to that material and it’s instantly available,” he said.

WikiLeaks is encouraging supporters to download the insurance file through the BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay. “Keep it safe,” reads a message greeting visitors to the WikiLeaks chat room. After two weeks, the insurance file is doubtless in the hands of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of netizens already.

We dipped into the torrent Friday to get a sense of WikiLeaks’ support in that effort. In a few minutes of downloading, we pulled bits and piece of insurance.aes256 from 61 seeders around the world. We ran the IP addresses through a geolocation service and turned it into a KML file to produce the Google Map at the top of this page [go to the Wired.com article or view it on Google Maps — GAP]. The seeders are everywhere, from the U.S., to Iceland, Australia, Canada and Europe. They had all already grabbed the entire file, and are now just donating bandwidth to help WikiLeaks survive.

Cross-posted at Is-Ought GAP.

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Denver police officer assaults man for talking on phone

Police Statism, Technology, Victimless Crimes
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The brutality exhibited by the police in this video is so unwarranted, so vicious, and so totally despicable, that not even the usual “defend-the-police-no-matter-what” automatons are putting up a fight in the comments section. Of course, the “Safety Manager” maintains that the fine officer who obviously assaults a man for absolutely nothing, deserves to keep his job.

Before the video was discovered, the police officer simply made up a story that the assaulted bystander was trying to strike the police officer. The DPD, however, believes that police who lie and attack the public unprovoked should be kept on the force. Your tax dollars at work.

Note also how the video camera, being operated by a police force employee, immediately pans away from the action after it becomes apparent that excessive force is being used.

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A Critique of Frank van Dun’s “Against Libertarian Legalism”

Libertarian Theory
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The Belgian libertarian legal theorist Frank van Dun, author of the great “Argumentation Ethics and The Philosophy of Freedom,”1 in 2003 authored “Against Libertarian Legalism: A Comment on Kinsella and Block.” This generated Walter Block’s Reply to “Against Libertarian Legalism” by Frank van Dun and my Reply to van Dun: Non-Aggression and Title Transfer.

A fairly lengthy and critical comment on van Dun’s “Against Libertarian Legalism” was just posted at Answering Van Dun about the Non-Aggression Principle. The author would probably also disagree with some of van Dun’s “Freedom and Property: Where They Conflict.”

Update: See also Van Dun on Freedom versus Property and Hostile Encirclement; and The Blockean Proviso.

  1. Libertarian Papers, 2009; see also my posts Van Dun on Argumentation Ethics and Revisiting Argumentation Ethics, and Walter Block, Reply to Frank van Dun’s “Natural Law and the Jurisprudence of Freedom” ↩

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TLS Podcast Picks: Young Entrepreneurs; Mutual Aid

History, Libertarian Theory, Nanny Statism, Podcast Picks, Technology
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Recommended podcasts:

  • TWiT Live Specials 32: The Future Of The Web. In this episode–hosted by TWiT host Leo Laport’s daughter, high school senior Abby Laporte–“Young entrepreneurs give their vision of the future of technology.” It is quite impressive and inspiring to see these dynamic, intelligent, confident, ambitious, well-spoken young people–and quite a contrast to the unfortunate ignorance and aimlessness of too many young people today.
  • Sheldon Richman’s FEE talk “Mutual Aid and the Welfare State.” This is a fascinating and informative lecture, to which the libertarian can subscribe without adopting mutualism proper, which is itself problematic (see my A Critique of Mutualist Occupancy).
  • Tom Palmer’s FEE talk Theory of Rights and Property — overall, an excellent and interesting (some of it elementary) discussion of the history of ideas, “delivered to students at the History and Liberty seminar.” Note: Palmer describes the Hayekian position on socialism and attributed it to Mises; yet Mises’s calculation argument against socialism is distinct from Hayek’s emphasis on knowledge–see my Knowledge, Calculation, Conflict, and Law; Salerno, “Postscript: Why a Socialist Economy is ‘Impossible'” and Mises and Hayek Dehomogenized. Palmer’s criticism of Bork’s famous “inkblot” comment is also a bit lacking–my view is Bork’s theory of original understanding is basically sound but that he applies it incorrectly to the Ninth Amendment. Also, Palmer denigrates Rothbard’s property views for relying “only” on homesteading–Palmer says he has a “more pluralist” view of how property can arise–but doesn’t specify what this might be. Interestingly, he observes correctly that when we libertarians say we favor property rights we of course do not mean that property has rights. Of course, a parallel observation could be made regarding the notion of “states’ rights”–when libertarian decentralists say this, they just mean the federal government has limited and enumerated powers.

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