Over at C4SIF, I’ve blogged quite a bit lately about SOPA and PIPA and the recent Internet blackouts and other protests against these bills, which threaten free speech and the open Internet (Mike Masnick et al. at Techdirt have also been great on exposing and analyzing SOPA). As Jeff Tucker noted recently,1 the protests against SOPA started not with conservatives or even “libertarians,” but with civil libertarians of the “left,” as well as Silicon Valley tech types. Of course, some libertarians have been opposed to SOPA (and copyright) from the beginning–the more radical and anti-state libertarians, in particular Austro-libertarians and left-libertarians (such as some of the people associated with C4SS2 ).
Aside from the anti-state libertarians, however, most of the protests against SOPA concede that copyright is good, intellectual property is important, and piracy is bad–but then they bemoan that SOPA “goes too far.” For example, as I noted in Where does IP Rank Among the Worst State Laws?, consider this article in PC Magazine, providing the response of 11 PCMag staffers asked for their take on SOPA. The response to SOPA was universally negative, but most of them first prefaced their opposition to SOPA by genuflecting to copyright and recognizing that IP piracy “is of course a real problem”. …
Last night I appeared for two hours on FreeTalkLive (1-22-12 show), with hosts Mark Edge and Stephanie. We discussed intellectual property and SOPA. (Audio)
Just a couple days ago the New York City council voted to ban the practice by sanitation workers to sticker the window of vehicles that were violating the alternate-side street cleaning rules. Whilst the vehicle’s owner would still receive a parking violation fine, they are no longer allowed to punish drivers by defacing their vehicles with the hard-to-remove stickers. While I find the ban agreeable, I have a bone to pick with the general legislative approach.
One of the problems with positive law is that the mindset it encourages is antithetical to what should otherwise be a presumptive prohibition of aggression and the security of both property and personal liberties. Unlike the “negative” rights of common law, the legislative process of positive law will all too often err and enshrine legal principles that are unjust. This is not to say that legislators do not get it right sometimes– for example laws that prohibit murder, theft and fraud are all [potentially] perfectly just laws.
With a positive law mindset, actions that are not yet defined in the statutes lie in a grey area neither prohibited nor permitted “under the law”. And later, if ever, when the statutes are codified, the result could be in having laws that don’t prohibit or permit enough, or in fact laws that prohibit or permit too much. This is a problem inherent to a process that tries to encapsulate the entire range of possible actions and to explicitly codify them into the written law.
The presumptions now change- anything not explicitly forbidden is arguably permissible. Actions which are now prohibited lie beyond the reach of justice if they were carried out before the law was passed under the legal principle ex post facto. Of course it doesn’t necessarily have to be this way– laws that forbids theft and injury could already be understood to include all forms of theft, damage and injury without the codification of specific actions, i.e. “killing with a knife in the right hand using a stabbing motion”. What the positivist mindset encourages is the tendency to look at the codified word as the source of justice, so that one could then hair-split it so that the actual action is not specified and thereby not prohibited.
That said, property defacement should be considered a forbidden action (regardless of the actual codified law) and therefore there was no actual need for a specific law to ban the stickering practice. Instead the government could have enforced the already existing laws against property defacement to stop this punitive, vindictive crime.
Update: The Journal of Peace, Prosperity & Freedom now has its own web page: www.la.org.au/journal.
As the post below, from Liberty Australia, notes, another scholarly libertarian journal is in the works. It joins existing journals such as Libertarian Papers, The Independent Review, and Reason Papers, as another outlet for scholarly articles on the topic of liberty and related fields like Austrian economics, with a focus on Australia.
To mark the historic Mises Seminar in Sydney, Liberty Australia is launching The Journal of Peace, Prosperity and Freedom. It will be dedicated to Austrian economics, revisionist history, legal arguments from an individualist perspective and other topics not adequately addressed by the IPA Review and Policy. The primary focus will be on Australia, although analysis of other countries is welcome too.
Journals are typically peer-reviewed, so I will maintain a list of referees with expertise in the specialist topics covered by the review. If you are interested in acting as a referee please shoot me an email.
Information for Contributors
Frequency: once a year.
Distribution: Published and distributed online. A print copy can be ordered through Amazon.com. I can also set up a regular subscription system, for those who prefer it to be automatically posted to them.
Submissions are sought for:
(1) Research articles up to 5000 words in length;
(2) commentaries up to 3000 words
(3) book reviews of between 800-2000 words.
The citation format used is the Cambridge Style, so please make sure submissions conform to this.
There’s no deadline: submissions are accepted on a rolling basis.
If you’d like to be a volunteer editor, have graphic design skills or want to donate time or money in other ways, do get in touch.
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