Most of us make the grave mistake of equating our legal system with morality, but law and morality are creatures that often reside at opposite ends of the spectrum under our current legal system.Since those that make our laws are also the same immoral people that control our financial system, often our laws have very little concern with governing morality and much more focus on ensuring that the very elements that hold power maintain or expand their power.Most Americans automatically equate a behavior as right or wrong depending on whether a law defines such behavior as legal or illegal without any critical thought, and this is a mistake. The fact is that today, many laws have nothing to do with morality.In fact, our legal system is laden with such hypocrisy at times that it allows for the very same behavior to be defined as legal if a financial elite is engaging in the behavior but illegal if a“regular Joe” is engaging in it.
The same, of course, is true in the era of intellectual property rights. The defenders of IP do not only contend that file-sharing is illegal, but that it’s immoral aswell. It is theft. But just because file-sharing is illegal, does not make it immoral. On the contrary. Copying is multiplying: more of the same thing exists after the copying has taken place. The original is still the property of the orginal owner, while the copies are the property of the person who did the copying with technology that he bought and owns. At least that would be the case in a system of natural property rights. However, in the world of artificial property rights that is IP my copywork is illegal. But is it immoral? No, because it isn’t theft at all.
IP is a consumer ripoff. We pay higher prices because of these monopoly rights than would be the case if the free market woul be allowed to work naturally. The result is that the industry can make artificially high profits on the backs of all us regular joe’s. It allows them to stand by their business models which have become obsolete because of technology and the free market. A regular joe on the other hand cannot be allowed to profit naturally from the free market. The IP legal system is laden with the same hypocrisy as financial regulation.
