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Stephan Kinsella is a libertarian writer and patent attorney in Houston, Texas. He has published widely on various areas of libertarian legal theory and on legal topics such as intellectual property law and international law. His publications include Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Papinian Press, 2023), Against Intellectual Property (Mises Institute, 2008), and International Investment, Political Risk, and Dispute Resolution: A Practitioner’s Guide (Oxford, 2020).
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Question!
How about the labor that was put into the arrangement? In the digital era, where copies can be made using minimal resources, it is the labor and time that is the most “expensive” part of the creation. Do we have rights to that labor?
I suppose you can argue that in things digital and online, it is the bandwidth that is the scarce resource that is appropriated when someone makes a copy directly from the original content creator’s server. Though, that argument would only apply to specific situations where copies are made from the source server. Once a “legal copy” has been made, there is not an ethical argument that can be made against people who willingly allocate their bandwidth to share their “legal copy” with thousands of people through BitTorrent. The source server is bypassed altogether.