Mises Wire

Censorship, thy name is copyright

Censorship, thy name is copyright

Interesting how 6400 videos of political clips can be pulled–by force of law–by youtube and people stand around grumbling but essentially granting the rights of youtube to pull the material and the rights of C-Span and others to insist that it be pulled.

In fact, this is the suppression of ideas and free speech through brute force, no different from any other censorship in the history of the history, but it is cleverly disguised in the form of this invention and modern myth born of legal positivism called “intellectual property,” a notion that is utterly foreign to actual property rights and actually attacks property rights..

You might say, oh, Youtube has the right to do this. Yes, but then ask yourself why they would do so in a free market. These are the source of huge traffic, items put up by invitation by customers. These are the last people that Youtube wants to anger. They are doing this because they are forced to, not directly by the state but by the mere threat of private litigation backed by force of law.

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