Surprise, surprise.
If you spend any time at all reading about Bradley Manning, the young U.S. Army private who stands accused of providing WikiLeaks with massive amounts of intelligence pulled from the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network used by the Pentagon and the State Department, the picture that emerges is one of a young man who also felt isolated, one who saw WikiLeaks as a means of ameliorating that feeling. Manning remains in custody — a particularly brutal form of solitary confinement, actually — at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Va.
Manning still faces charges of his own, but he’s played a larger role in the tensions between U.S. government officials and WikiLeaks, in that he is seen as the key figure in building a larger criminal case against WikiLeaks founder and figurehead Julian Assange. That Manning willingly provided WikiLeaks with classified information does not appear to be in dispute. The issue, rather, is one of “did Manning jump or was he pushed?”
. . . .
This case against Assange — that he had pursued Manning, with the intention of inducing the soldier into proving WikiLeaks with thousands of classified diplomatic cables — relied heavily on the word of Adrian Lamo, a high-profile hacker-turned-“threat analyst,” to whom Manning reached out in May of 2010, revealing that he had taken classified material and leaked it to Assange. Lamo reported this to authorities, and provided the contents of his chat logs with Manning to Wired Magazine.
(Read more from huffingtonpost.com)
According to Exodus 20:1-17, “Thou shalt not steal.” Please explain the moral justification of allowing someone using stolen stuff and knowing it to be stolen to justify his opinion? or his anathma to war? Using moral wrong to justify the ends?
Ed K
Reading and speaking is not stealing. When you steal, the original owner is deprived of his position. When you read/learn/see something and repeat it, you are not stealing, regardless of how badly our overlords want to describe it as such.
So when a book is written and one copy is in circulation, the writer no longer has valued interest in book?
Ed K
I would think the writer does indeed have value interest, but copying the book, I have very slowly concluded is not a crime. Intellectual property is not property. It cannot be considered property. I’ve been won over by Stephan Kinsella.
Claiming a copyright on a book lays a property claim all the paper and ink in the world. If someone truly owns something — paper and ink — they should be allowed to arrange it in any way they want.
The utilitarian arguments are very interesting too.
There are no copyrights whatsoever in the fashion industry. There is no part of a design (except the logo), which can’t be copied. This hasn’t prevented the thriving of the industry — from high-end designers, to cheap knock-off shops.
Copyrights are only good for 70 years plus the death of the author. (The arbitrariness of the term should be a clue that there are some philosophical inconsistencies.) It is already legal for ANYBODY to reproduce older literary works. This doesn’t seem to be creating any problems.
There is some evidence that works published under “creative commons,” a declaration that allows for reproduction of work, sell better than protected work. The free flow of ideas serves as advertising.