> This is the same argument that attempts to justify Mr.
> Berman's, and company, attempts to propose legislation
> that will allow copyright owners to "hack" copyright
> violators sharing copyrighted content.

It is not, and for one simple reason:

A hacker attempting to maliciously obtain access or deny access to your system is initiating force against you.

By the Non-Aggression Principle, no human being has the right -- under any circumstances -- to initiate force against another human being, nor to advocate or delegate its initiation.

If an individual is initiating force against you, you may morally use force to halt the initiation. So if a hacker is initiating force by attempting to gain or deny access to your system, you are morally justified in hacking his system in order to stop this initiation of force.

However, in the case of the totally fictitious "intellectual property" rights that various entities are trying to justify, if you look closely, you'll note that no one is initiating force against these entities.

Put it this way:

The reason I buy a music CD or DVD movie is to augment my own memory of a movie I've seen in theaters or a song I've heard elsewhere -- or perhaps to see such a movie or hear such a song for the first time.

Now, the "property" under discussion is the CD or DVD, not its content. If you argue that the content itself is property, then one cannot escape the logical conclusion that any memory I may have of the movie or song is ALSO the property of the movie studio or vocal artist.

My brain is a storage device, the same as a paper book, a hard drive, a CD, or a DVD. If the artist owns the contents of a book, hard drive, CD, or DVD after the media has been sold to me, then it's only logical that the artist also owns my memory of the movie I've seen or the song I've heard.

The media is auxiliary storage to augment my brain, plain and simple. If the property in question is the content, then the original artist must -- by extension -- own my memories.

This is, obviously, ludicrous. Indeed, it's utterly ludicrous to apply the laws of physical property to intellectual property.

In fact, "intellectual property" as defined by current law is utter nonsense, completely irreconcilable with observable reality.

Suppose I go to the store and by an audio CD. I now own the media, do I not? And law not withstanding, I own what's on that media.

I take the media to a computer I own and rip tracks from the CD I own.

How does this initiate force against anyone else? I own everything from the media on down.

This is a dramatically different circumstance than someone hacking my system, obviously.

So in short, there is no valid moral case to be had for "intellectual property." There's simply information, either known, unknown, or kept secret. If someone makes information public -- say, by releasing a song on CD or a movie on DVD, then the information becomes known and what another individual does with the information is his or her own business.

If an individual does NOT want to make the information public -- say, by virtue of a non-disclosure agreement -- and then the person who obtains the information makes it public anyway, that's obviously a violation of an explicit contract and an initiation of force.

But if Paramount Pictures doesn't want me to know the contents of the next Star Trek movie, I suggest they keep it secret and not allow me to view it. Otherwise, I'm likely to treat my memory of the movie as my property, and by extension any augmentation to my memory such as DVD or CD.

Bill Stone

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