The comment you're replying to defines both how Sunde's, Snowden's, & Manning's actions are different and provides context for the very limited comparison being made.

If you don't agree, you should just argue your point because your straw man is just pathetic.

There is a watertight rights basis for opposing copyright. Copyright is a major structural threat to our freedoms.

Our governments are founded generally on rights, which extend from a general principle of live-and-let-live. Copyright is an anti-right. Each time it comes into effect, it removes rights away from everyone except the copyright holder.

You might say - that's just words.

But it's not. Both in software and law, when you have permissions systems that mix up positive and negative rights with one side ruining the other one.

That is what we see with copyright. A continuing encroachment on our positive rights on the basis of the state's desire to enforce the anti-right. The state will invade your house, jail and deport you... because of things you're doing with publicly released information and magnetic signals in the privacy of your own home.

Once a positive right has been eroded by a single case of an anti-right winning, that serves as precedent for removing it in other cases.

Have a think about it the next time you're working on a permission system and are tempted to create a permission that denies a right to someone. As you follow it through, you'll find you've created an unholy mess. Stick to positive rights.

Update: hi, haters. Feel free to be constructive, too.

> Our governments are founded generally on rights, which extend from a general principle of live-and-let-live. Copyright is an anti-right. Each time it comes into effect, it removes rights away from everyone except the copyright holder.

Every "right" is an "anti-right." It's a restriction on what other people can do. Your right to bodily integrity is a restriction on my natural freedom to do whatever I want with my environment, which might include you. My right to protect my copyrighted work is a restriction on your same natural freedom. Now obviously punching someone in the face is worse than using the fruits of their labor without their permission, but I don't think the two things are qualitatively different.

If you accept the principle of live-and-let-live (raised above), there's a chasm between what constitutes a right and anti-right. If you don't accept live and let live, you've got some explaining to do. It goes back thousands of years, it's well-entrenched in the new testament (defines women as being equal to men; repeatedly scorns class-based rights) and then reiterated in each of the various rights documents that have helped shape western culture since then.

I checked wikipedia on what is a positive and negative rights. There's a major error through what I've written above here (At best, I've got negative/positive backwards). Treat as suspect. Will brush up some more and come back better prepared for next time.

You don't have some fucking inalienable right to my code. If I choose to open source it fine. Just because some cracker asshole gets a copy of it doesn't make it a right.

You have it backwards. You don't have some inalienable right to government-backed control over what I do with my copy of some code. The original will always be yours, but my copy is mine, and actually I do have a close-to-inalienable right to do whatever I want to with my own property.

So then does the same apply to the copy of your emails that travel across the internet? Once the NSA obtains a copy, do they then have a close-to-inalienable right to do whatever they want with what is then their property?

Yes they do. I would argue for privacy laws, specific exceptions to that right, just as I support trade secret law. But it would be an exception, a deeply unnatural change to the legal norm, and I would have to make the case on its merits that the value to society of such privacy laws was worth that extraordinary curtailment of the NSA's usual rights.

You're not allowed to sell stolen property, and I don't think you have a right to distribute code that was obtained illegally. Now if someone got a copy from the author with his/her permission, say by buying it, and then gave you a copy, you might have a defensible point.

You're assuming a copy of code can be treated like stolen property--there are several practical differences.

Not exactly the same. But there's a difference between distributing stuff that's obtained legally or illegally. First-sale doctrine doesn't apply to stolen goods, and I think there's a similar distinction that should be made with illicit data.