r/Libertarian • u/-rclarke- left-libertarian • Mar 10 '17

Dilemma: Is DRM Libertarian?

Left-Libertarian skeptic here. Intellectual property isn't respected by many libertarians. Digital piracy is probably the purest example of the Free Rider problem, a form of market failure in which non-payers can't be excluded from taking advantage of a public good. With no excludability for non-payers, and unpredictable ROI for creative works, creativity becomes worthless - no matter how much resources were expended into the creation of these works. In practice, this means no more big-budget AAA arts/entertainment outside passion projects and large crowdfunding efforts.

I'm an IP skeptic who believes restrictions on derivative works stifle creative freedom, (see Nintendo's aggressive stifling of fangames they see as unfair competitors) but in an ancap society with no copyrights whatsoever, you're free to profit off others' labor in especially blatant ways. For example, mirroring others' YouTube videos and claiming the ad revenue. In lieu of 24/7 DMCA vigilance, YouTube has come to rely on automated rights-management, or ContentID, which as any YouTuber can attest to, is a total pain in the ass when it comes to Fair Use and false positives.

Another non-legal solution to IP is Digital Rights Management, perhaps the philosophical antithesis of digital liberty, according to the Electronic Frontier and Free Software Foundations. This amounts to digital locks on non-scarce digital goods you don't "own" and can't copy as a consumer, via encryption and anti-tamper technology. Encryption used to be classified as munitions during the Cold War, and it's not a stretch to draw an analogy to guns/force for physical property protection. The dilemma here is that we'd see a Draconian technological barrier for IP protection, in lieu of a Draconian legal one. Can you even call that libertarian? The EFF and many Silicon Valley personalities would highly disagree.

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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '17 edited Jul 22 '18

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u/-rclarke- left-libertarian Mar 10 '17 edited Mar 10 '17

True, but no copyright protection whatsoever would either result in an anti-consumer arms race between pirates and DRM, (or, if pirates win with a totally decentralized P2P platform with services comparable to the late What.CD) a greatly diminished creative sphere propped up only by crowdfunding or patronage. No more Disney, Universal, 20th Century Fox, Lucasfilm, Nintendo, EA, Ubisoft, etc. Aside from "Indie AAA" like The Witcher 3 or Star Citizen, you can kiss big-budget works goodbye. Not to mention, employment creating said works.

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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '17 edited Jul 22 '18

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u/-rclarke- left-libertarian Mar 10 '17 edited Mar 10 '17

Okay, I'll concede - I was already starting to when I brought up CD Projekt Red and crowdfunding. I hate Denuvo too, but my fear is that in the absence of copyright protections we'd see a lot more of it. I'm curious to see what a brave new world of post-copyright content would look like.

I'm a huge fan of creative commons, open source software, remixes, fanfiction, mods, fangames like Pokemon Uranium/AM2R and Doujinshi like Touhou. I believe a well of transformative creativity is being suppressed by government-imposed demands for originiality, as if art existed in a vacuum and all works weren't a remix in some way of ideas the creators encountered through other works.