The bolded jsut makes an argument why those pirating other's work should accept the consequences for trying to use someone else's intellectual property for their own gain.
You have a choice not to associate with an ISP if they're going to far, but I don't understand the argument that just because the internet's ability to share information has made their business "faulty" through no fault of their own, that it somehow makes it right to rip the works that others might have devoted all of their time and resources into. Intellectual property is still property.
If I make a movie to sell even just to break even, I do not deserve for you to feel it's your right to take it for free and take money out of my pocket.
Further, as is argued here all the time, businesses have the right to protect themselves. It's when they use the government to grant them special priveledges that they're going to far. They have every right to self-regulate and ensure that they're not supporting piracy that could stand to bankrupt the entertainment they provide.
Whether or not you believe in copyrights/patents, please don't use the phrase "intellectual property." It's a propaganda term coined in the 20th century by the copyright lobby to conflate patents, copyrights, and trademarks in the court of public opinion and treat each of them like any of the others at the most convenient possible times. In reality, the three concepts each have their own distinct history and purpose.
Patents are not property, and neither are copyrights: They are limited-time
government-granted monopolies intended to promote progress in the arts and sciences by artificially and coercively maintaining profit motive for easily replicated works. However, they are not property or an individualist construct; they're a collectivist construct, and they're not natural to the market but alien to it. The difficulty of enforcing them (and the typical drive to create a police state to do so) should be your first hint.
Physical property is property, and "intellectual property" ironically infringes upon people's right to do what they want with their physical property, for the benefit of the "greater good." Copyrights and patents function by coercively protecting a monopoly supplier and maintaining their desired cost-based price levels (Marxist labor theory of value) through artificial scarcity, but that's not how the market works...in a free market, competition/imitation/reproduction/etc. is intrinsic, and buyers determine the legitimate value of any good or service without respect to initial production cost.
techdirt has great articles on this subject. You can believe in the virtues of copyrights and patents if you want, and I agree that
very limited-time copyrights and patents have their benefits in the utilitarian sense...but they're ultimately unnecessary IMO, and unlimited "intellectual property" is absolutely destructive to freedom, market size and profitability (ironically), and even art and science (by hampering derivative works and risking destruction of culture...do you know how many thousands of old films cannot be legally archived in a secure/multiple-copy manner before the media decays, because the copyright holders are nowhere to be found?). I'm not really here to make the argument against limited-time copyrights/patents (there is one, and it's been the subject of more than one libertarian book), but at least don't swallow and peddle the copyright lobby's bullshit rhetoric.
Trademarks are a little more interesting in the property sense, because others using them can constitute fraud or plagiarism...but in the general case, no, "intellectual property" doesn't exist as anything other than a government construct.
rolleyes: cry me a river) should learn methods of copy-proofing rather than cry to ISPs to use force against others.
