Two Democrats propose jail time for those who swap music and movie files on peer-to-peer netwroks such as Kazaa.
Face it folks, swapping mp3’s and movie files IS stealing, if those files are unlicensed by the artist, meaning, if the artist did not consent to the distribution of his property in that given medium. Put yourself in the position of the artist in this situation. Imagine spending years of your life painstakingly developing a given talent (such as singing, performing an instrument, creating a movie, etc.), only to be told that you have no right to trade that talent with others as performed in a given medium. Imagine being told that you have no right to be compensated for all of your effort. Imagine, having your art being physically taken from you and distributed to anyone who wants it, without your consent.
When did theft stop being punished by the law in America? Apparently, in America, theft is not theft when it is done by a large group of people. A robber steals the purse of an old woman in a dark alley, it is called theft; millions of teenagers steal the property of an artist, it is called “swapping.” A burgular comes into the home of a rich family and steals their prized possessions, it is called theft; politicians steal the earned money of a large number of rich individuals, it is called “redistribution of wealth.” It is said by some of these groups that they have a “right” to what they are stealing because of the fact that they are a group, whereas those individuals who steal do not have such a right because they are an individual.
As Ayn Rand’s famous words demonstrate,
A “right” is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action–which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life…The concept of a “right” pertains only to action–specifically, to freedom of action. It means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men. Thus, for every individual, a right is the moral sanction of a positive–of his freedom to act on his own judgment, for his own goals, by his own voluntary, uncoerced choice. As to his neighbors, his rights impose no obligatons on them except of a negative kind: to abstain from violating his rights.
A group, contrary to much of modern philosophy, is not a living entity but rather the culmination of a group of individual entities. Therefore, there are no “rights” of a group separate from the rights of individuals. In the words of Ayn Rand, “Any group or ‘collective,’ large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members. In a free society, the ‘rights’ of any group are derived from the rights of its members through their voluntary, individual choice and contractual agreement, and are merely the application of these individual rights to a specific undertaking.”
Thus, no group of individuals has the right to violate the rights of individuals merely because they are a group. No group has the right to proclaim that they have the right to violate the rights of individuals merely because of their existence as a group of individuals. Therefore, those who engage in unlicensed file swapping on peer-to-peer networks have no right to steal the property of artists and swap it, politicians have no right to steal money from the rich individuals of America, nor does any single group have the right to engage in the violation of any individual’s rights.
The swapping of Mp3’s IS a violation of the individual rights of the artists whose property is stolen. By downloading their music and using it for your own purposes, you deny the ability for the artist to choose the method by which a voluntary trade is enacted for their property. Instead, by downloading their music, you steal their property and give them nothing in return. By engaging in this action, you profoundly violate the artist’s right to their own life, to take the actions necessary to support, further and enjoy one’s life, and to be free from physical compulsion.
A human being, in order to survive, and live their life to the fullest, must use their own mind constantly, which means, they must constantly choose between two or more alternatives in action. A simple example of this would be choosing to eat food that is beneficial to one’s own life or poison. By being physically forced to perform a given action, a human being is completely unable to choose between two or more alternatives because the alternative which they must perform is dictated to them through force. In accordance with the above example, physically forcing an individual to eat poison means denying that individual the ability to choose between food and poison, which means, denying that individual the ability to choose to live.
In the same token, stealing the property of an individual denies them the ability to use their own mind, to choose actions which will benefit their own life. Identify the violation of individual rights for what it is, whether it is done by an individual or a group of individuals. The mere fact that it is a group of individuals rather than a single individual violating individual rights does not make it right.
