As for my use of outside references… umm, isn’t referencing the work of experts (including legal experts) supposed to be a good thing, especially when discussing a legal matter?  I pointed to those books because my views were directly informed by them.  I figured that would be preferable to simply rambling.  I’ll make more of an effort to construct my arguments in a vacuum next time, so I can avoid referencing other people.

Are you going to answer any of my questions are are you just going keep raising new arguments that are at best tangentially realted?  There’s not much point debating this if you aren’t going to address any of the actual points that I’ve made, much less my primary argument that a crime against one’s self is completely different than a crime against someone else. 

Perhaps you can make a viable argument that intellectual property laws should be changed, and I might even agree with you.  But the fact is that intellectual property laws going back farther than even our own Constitution are what they are, and under those laws file sharing — i.e. depriving the rightful owner of a song of the value of that song — is recognized as theft.  The technology involved has nothing to do with the fundamental rights underlying the law.

Or, if you really want to get into the status of the property rights
you think are so inviolate and intuitively obvious, we can examine the aftermath of Kelo.  Or we could discuss the wave of ruinous and meritless lawsuits filed by the RIAA.   And, despite all that, the industry is considering allowing unrestricted filesharing for a flat subscription fee
— the very solution proffered by Sean Parker when the original Napster
was sued in 1999.  Again, all of the property issues brought up by the
current state of file sharing could be addressed by a more sensible
(and less Luddite) view toward the technology involved.  There are very
few people who think music should be given away for free.  But there
are a huge number of people who find the current and hyper-restrictive
methods of legal distribution so stupid and backward as to be unworthy
of consideration.   And, to bring it back to my original point: this is
why the NSA’s stance on file sharing (especially in terms of clause as
vague as "too much," as if a little theft was okay for NSA clearance,
but only with music and movies) is so stupid.

This entire comment is so full of arrogance and condescension I’m not even certain how best to reply.  You imply that I don’t understand property rights, accuse me of being a luddite, and stupid because I recognize P2P file sharing as violative of copyright law, and yet you can’t even acknowledge the points where I’ve agreed with you.  Furthermore you haven’t demonstrated even a cursory understanding of the actual legal issues involved and instead point off in the direction of others’ writing on the topic.  Suffice it to say, unless you’ve have something to say that actually addresses anything I’ve written, or you want to lay out an actual argument in your own words, I’m done with this thread.

Similarly, there are a range of arguments to be made about property rights in a digital medium (and modern, western countries with a history of property rights come to dramatically different conclusions than we do about those rights’ ultimate expression).  Jessica Litman wrote an informative book on this topic, called Digital Copyright, in which she examines how the electronic age has made digital property rights to restrictive they threaten to strangle the very thing they were erected to protect: creativity.  The problems inherent to these laws was further driven home in Dave Koepsell’s The Ontology of Cyberspace.  Lastly, another high influential book (for my own evolution of how I believe digital property rights have been exploited) is Laurence Lessig’s Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. Anyway, my point (again) isn’t that there isn’t property involved, or even that there isn’t law breaking, but that the laws themselves are wrong and ultimately counterproductive.  The very same property rights you think are protected by suing file sharers are used to suppress previously accepted forms of expression, stifle technological innovation, and ultimately freeze out the idea of consumer rights. 

Ironically (given my original comparison), the unintended consequences of these laws (which include attempting to ban Wi-Fi) are similar to the unintended (and fascistic) consequences of our drug laws, especially now RIAA agents are allowed to conduct legal raids on private citizens.  In a great many cases, what counts as legal piracy in fact winds up being promotional genius: the entire anime boom, with all the billions of dollars it brings companies like Disney, would not be here today if it weren’t for early media pirates, stealing movies to which they did not have rights and distributing them for free.

How about one last hypothetical?  Please tell me the property rights involved when I buy a used CD.  Neither the artist nor the record label receive any financial windfall from the transaction.  As far as they’re concerned, the sale might not have ever happened.  Now, if the previous owner had made a perfectly legal copy for his own personal use, is he required by law to destroy or delete that copy once he no longer has physical ownership of the media he legally copied?  If he isn’t, then what is the difference – in property rights, mind you, not the intricacies of our chaotic laws – between that and file sharing?

I don’t mean to say that this settles the issue, or that there are no valid arguments to be made that violations of copyright law are actually malum prohibitum (even as I wholeheartedly disagree with such arguments), but to equate a harm done to one’s self with a harm done to someone else misses an important distinction.  I simply wanted to draw attention to that distinction.

No one is talking about selling anything for profit.  The moment you can explain to me the moral and property distinctions
between a mix tape and a P2P network, you’ll have a decent case.  But
the file sharing debate is tricky for your argument in that it is not
commercial.  I wouldn’t make a profit if I ripped the lastest Björk
album and made a torrent seed.

It doesn’t make one bit of difference if you make a profit on it or not.  Robin Hood didn’t make any profit either, but there is no illusion that what he was doing wasn’t stealing.  And in fact if consider the issue carefully you will see that you are indeed making a profit by saving money that you would have spent on music and purchasing other things.  As for the distinction between mixed tapes and P2P networks, legally speaking there is none.  Both are an illegal appropriation of someone else’s property (although, to be fair, making copies of a work for one’s own use is exempted).

Further, many bands, such as Wilco, have found that releasing their albums for free on the Internet actually increased their final album sales, and increased the numbers of people buying tickets to their shows as well.

Bully for them.  They are free to do what they wish with their own music.  The Grateful Dead made an entire career out of allowing people to tape their concerts and trade them freely.  Of course, you couldn’t just bring a tape recorder into the concert with you.  You had to apply for a position in the taping area and have the proper equipment so that the band could have some quality control.  And maybe that is a business model that the music industry needs to emulate.  But none of that changes the fact that the intellectual property belongs to the artists and/or the recording companies.  Just as neither Wilco nor Björk would want anyone making decisions about what they can cannot do with their property, neither they nor anyone else should be making decisions about what others do with their own property.  For example, Metallica certainly does not feel the same way:

"With each project, we go through a grueling creative process to
achieve music that we feel is representative of Metallica at that very
moment in our lives," said Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich in the press
release.

"We take our craft — whether it be the music, the lyrics, or
the photos and artwork — very seriously, as do most artists. It is
therefore sickening to know that our art is being traded like a
commodity rather than the art that it is. From a business standpoint,
this is about piracy — a/k/a taking something that doesn’t belong to
you; and that is morally and legally wrong. The trading of such
information — whether it’s music, videos, photos, or whatever – is, in
effect, trafficking in stolen goods."

Why should Metallica be forced to give away its intellectual property for free?

So it’s not a strict property argument, at least from any kind of objective good.

Where is exactly that you think you’ve made such an argument?  There may be a viable argument as to the extent of intellectual property protection under the law, but there isn’t any doubt that it is a matter of property.

The equivalent would be book publishers (but not necessarily authors -
you do realize that the RIAA shares none of its lawsuit windfalls with
the artists on whose behalf it sues children, and that the artists
themselves, even big time ones, rarely ever see direct profit for their
album sales?) objecting to their book being placed in a library where
any ruffian could come in off the street and read it for free.

Not exactly.  If the "ruffian" were to print out copies of the book and distribute to whomever he pleases, then there would be a problem. 

Well, you guys WERE doing that, until Lance invited me to double post here. Moving on…

I think Lance already handled this issue above, but let me add that, to my knowledge, we never copied your work in toto and placed it here without attribution and/or linking.  I think you know what we did falls under the fair use exception to copyright law.

Umm, hyperlinks ARE an issue, right now. Read the content of this post
for info on a recent ruling, in which a company claims to own the
patent on hyperlinking from a CD to the internet, and is suing
basically everyone in existence.

I think I misunderstood your point there.  I thought that you meant hyperlinking was made illegal under the DMCA.

Your argument about the use odf the DMCA amounts to “if people wouldn’t
keep making so much meth we wouldn’t have to criminalize allergy
sufferers.” You like, like the legislators who have restricted Claritin
and Sudafed, and possibly baking soda?
“We wouldn’t write bad laws if you people would stop breaking laws that
didn’t exist before we wrote this bad law” is a pretty piss poor
argument.

Does it?  In explaining that I would not defend the DMCA I simply meant to point out that such a law came into existence because the RIAA et al. are having a rough time protecting their property interests.  I don’t necessarily agree that they need such a law (and, I actually agree with you about the inadequate business model), since IMHO copyright law should suffice.  As I understand it, and I may be wrong here, the DMCA was passed to allow suits to be brought against firms like Napster that facilitate P2P sharing.  A better analogy, in that case, would be laws that prohibit the use of radar detectors, or rather, laws designed to make the selling of radar detectors illegal.

And your last characterization of my argument is disingenuous. I’m not
arguing that file sharing is okay because I want to do it—believe it or
not, I actually buy CDs—but because I think digital copyright laws,
including court rulings on file sharing made by judges who through
their statements demonstrate an apalling ignorance of the technology in
question (equivalent to calling the Internet a series of tubes),
actually contradict the original purpose of copyright and patent as
laid out in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution: to “promote the
progress of science and the useful arts.”

OK, fair enough.  You are completely wrong on the law, but I shouldn’t have characterized your argument as being about your desire for free music.  Even though everyone else I’ve ever spoken with about the issue who has taken your side of the argument has freely admitted that they just don’t want to buy the music (e.g. they only like one song on the album, they’re not so sure they like the music that much, etc.) you did not make any such argument. 

Regarding the law, as I said before you may have a valid argument that copyright protections are too lengthy, etc., but the technology involved does not, in any way, change the fact that intellectual property belongs to someone.  If I created a portable transportation beam with which I could transfer physical objects from one place to another instantly, that wouldn’t make legal for me to use the technology to transfer a big screen TV from Lance’s house to mine.  When you or anyone else distributes property, intellectual or otherwise, without paying for it, you deprive the owner of his property’s value.  That’s called theft.

How about another analogy.  Imagine having to pay money to walk into Brookstone or Smarter Image to play around with all the shiny gadgets and massage chairs regardless of whether or not you bought any.  Now imagine someone bought a bunch of them and let his friends play for free.  Should the friend be sued for infringing on Brookstone’s property rights?

Well, you guys WERE doing that, until Lance invited me to double post here. Moving on…

Heh. You almost had me, but I did link and suggest they go to your place. If you had asked me to stop I would have, and I did decide if I liked it so much I should just have you do it her. Free, just like you do at your place.

I will admit I am not sure I agree with either of you. In fact, I think I may post on it this weekend when I have time to deal with it properly.

Nevertheless, I think it is a problem, and one we need to get a handle on. I tell my children not to engage in using mass file sharing programs, even though I have no problem with them sharing with just their friends (or for that matter with me, or me with them.

It isn’t like a library though. I don’t think profit is the issue. If I write a book, I don’t mind if the book is shared once it has been bought. However, I would have a real problem if I was trying to make it as a novelist and someone were mass printing and distributing the book to people for free. It pretty much kills my incentive for spending a year of my life creating it (or more.) I could choose to allow that, but it shouldn’t be okay just because technology has made it possible for it to be easily scanned by anybody and reproduced cheaply.

Nevertheless, I agree with your point that the policy of the NSA is too restrictive.

So it would be fine with you then if instead of attributing this entire post to you we simply “shared” it amongst ourselves and put out there for everyone as our own, to profit from as we see fit?

Well, you guys WERE doing that, until Lance invited me to double post here. Moving on…

Umm, hyperlinks ARE an issue, right now. Read the content of this post for info on a recent ruling, in which a company claims to own the patent on hyperlinking from a CD to the internet, and is suing basically everyone in existence. Your argument about the use odf the DMCA amounts to “if people wouldn’t keep making so much meth we wouldn’t have to criminalize allergy sufferers.” You like, like the legislators who have restricted Claritin and Sudafed, and possibly baking soda? “We wouldn’t write bad laws if you people would stop breaking laws that didn’t exist before we wrote this bad law” is a pretty piss poor argument.

And your last characterization of my argument is disingenuous. I’m not arguing that file sharing is okay because I want to do it—believe it or not, I actually buy CDs—but because I think digital copyright laws, including court rulings on file sharing made by judges who through their statements demonstrate an apalling ignorance of the technology in question (equivalent to calling the Internet a series of tubes), actually contradict the original purpose of copyright and patent as laid out in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution: to “promote the progress of science and the useful arts.”

Digital copyright laws stifle that progress, they have been proven to. It is bad law, worthy of repeal, and certainly not of consideration at an agency desperate for younger technically qualified applicants to replace its rapidly retiring boomer force.

Well, yes and no.  There are, in fact, many arguments over the morality and property rights involved in file sharing. 

There be many who argue, but there are not many arguments, and there are none that satisfactorily account for the fact that songs are property.  Just because you have a CD with some copies of songs on it doesn’t make it your to sell.  For example, if you owned a Beatles album when their entire collection was sold to Michael Jackson, you couldn’t plausible think you would be entitled to a cut of the proceeds could you? 

I am of the opinion that file sharing in fact violates no rights, and
that an insistence on the traditional music industry in fact props up a
system that stifles artistic and technical innovation, leading to vast
unintended consequences.

So it would be fine with you then if instead of attributing this entire post to you we simply "shared" it amongst ourselves and put out there for everyone as our own, to profit from as we see fit?  What if we decided to bundle a bunch of these posts together and sell them as  a book, would you feel entitled to a cut of the proceeds.  In short, your opinion is based on something other than law and fact.  It’s based on your desire to have something for free that others worked very hard on creating and delivering to you in format that you could then "share". 

Laws like the DMCA, passed with the intention of halting music piracy,
have come to be used to stifle common technical processes like
hyperlinking. 

I won’t defend the DMCA since I know very little about it, but you are obviously incorrect about hyperlinking since you can find it everywhere, including right here in this post.  Copyright law, IMHO, should be enough to protect property rights.  Of course, perhaps if more people respected the value of property rights we wouldn’t need the DCMA to essentially criminalize the theft of intellectual property.

Anyway, the point here isn’t to belabor the arguments for or against the morality of file sharing.

Who’s doing that?  I didn’t introduce morality into the discussion.  I’m just calling "file sharing" what it is; theft. 

Such a debate exists about drug users as well (such as the argument
that it is impossible for drug users to exist in a vacuum, therefore
the state has an interest in regulating or limiting their use).

That may be a moral argument (although, actually, I think its more of a utilitarian, cost-benefit, externalities argument), but it is not comparable to violations of copyright.  While one can conceivably construct an argument that your behavior towards yourself has some effect on me, therefore I can justifiably seek state intervention, that does not create a "right" for me to control your behavior.  The very foundation of our country is based on individual rights, some control over which we have voluntarily relinquished to the state in order to receive the benefit of the state protecting those individual rights.  The fact that I am the owner of my mind and the things that are uniquely derived from it is unquestioned and deeply rooted in not just the history of this country, but in the history of the law.  To equate the harm caused by someone stealing the product of my mind with the fiction that must be created to justify teh state’s intervention in my personal activities is to forget first principles.

The point is the NSA handles file sharing, an activity that is
indicative and encouraging of technical expertise and innovation, the
same way it treats felonies like murder. That’s foolish.

It may not be practical at this point, but how can an Executive agency, from the branch charged with faithfully executing the laws of the land, condone blatant and rampant theft? That being said, perhaps you are right that some time limit should be placed on it instead of a blanket rejection.

MY point is that I don’t want anyone to get confused into thinking that "file sharing" and smoking pot are in any way comparable.  Just because you want to do it, doesn’t make it a right.  If somebody else must necessarily be involved in your enjoyment of it, then it’s not a right.

But I don’t know of a single computer literate college student who has
not done any illegal file sharing. Can the NSA afford to be that picky
in choosing its candidates? Does the CIA and other intelligence
agencies have such stringent (and, in my view, unrealistic) criteria
for its 21-year old recruits?

[...]

Now that I think of it, this is kind of similar to their attitude on
drugs.

Well, no, not exactly.  "File sharing" is stealing, plain and simple.  Using drugs is something that our betters have decided we can’t do because its not good for us.  File sharing is a violation against others, while using drugs is violations against one’s self.

Just because it’s easy to do doesn’t make any less of a theft.