Whatever the virtues or the vices of unions, and whether or not the motives of the Culinary make sense to outside observers, and whether or not Obama would approve, there remains one basic issue that the redevelopment machine and its apologists always dodge: whether or not taking millions out of workers’ pockets, in order to build nicer offices for Oscar Goodman and his cronies, is actually a productive use of our money.

You won’t hear anything about this, because it’s much easier to impugn the motives of your critics, or appeal to a popular politician, than to defend such a ridiculous and self-serving claim.

We are told that this will provide “construction jobs.” Of course it would; so would building a 40-foot golden statue of Oscar Goodman in downtown; so would digging a giant hole out in the desert and then filling it back up. But every dollar Oscar Goodman forces you or I to spend on his new office is a dollar that won’t be spent on providing for our own lives, or patronizing businesses that provide us with genuinely useful goods or services. Meaning a few more jobs in construction come at the expense of fewer jobs and a worse living for everyone else.

City government has no power to wish wealth into existence; they can only take wealth from taxpayers and apply it to some particular project. If they didn’t take it, it wouldn’t disappear; it would be applied to different projects. The question to ask is whether this project actually improves my life or yours in any way. If this project has any benefits worth mentioning for anyone other than city politicians, they ought to be able to persuade me those benefits are worth paying for. Not force me to pay for it by means of taxation and lawsuits.

FeedWordPress is a tool for copying hypertext from one place to another. (Specifically, hypertext stored in a handful of common machine-readable formats.) Like many other tools that can be used to copy information — such as xerox machines, optical scanners, OCR software, HTTP servers, or Bic(tm) ballpoint pens — FeedWordPress can be put to both legitimate and illegitimate uses. Like any other tool, it has no way of knowing whether or not the information being copied is being copied with or without the permission of the person who originally created it; the responsibility for using it appropriately (as many people do — for example, to create “planet” websites that contributors sign up to join, or to automate cross-posting, or to create “lifestreams” that aggregate all of their own online activity) lies with the user, not with the tool.

And, speaking of responsibility, in your article you write: “Charles John­son, the creator of Feed­Word­Press is in con­stant and fre­quent vi­o­la­tion of copyright law be­cause the ap­par­ent ma­jority of his blog’s con­tent is stolen with­out the original au­thors’ per­mis­sion.”

You then link to Feminist Blogs — a topical aggregator that I’ve run since November 2004 — as “my blog” (it’s not; my blog is at radgeek.com).

This is a serious accusation. Do you have absolutely any evidence whatsoever that any of the feeds syndicated on Feminist Blogs are syndicated without the express permission of the author or authors? If so, what evidence do you have?

Stephan,

Well, the term has broad and narrow usages. You’re right that the narrow usage (popularized by the Free Software Foundation) only applies to licenses — like the GNU GPL and FDL, or the Creative Commons ShareAlike licenses — that are viral, i.e., which not only free the work itself for redistribution and derivative works, but also require anyone who produces a derivative work to also free it under the same terms.

I don’t have any particular view on what license you ought to use on Libertarian Papers. But I think that the “Attribution-ShareAlike” license would only be “less libertarian” than a plain “Attribution” license if the powers restricted by “ShareAlike” were legitimate powers for an author to exercise. But all ShareAlike requires is that authors distributing a derivative work not try to enforce copyright restrictions with respect to their own derivative work. If enforcing copyright restrictions is illibertarian (as you and I agree), then I reckon that forbidding licensees from enforcing them, isn’t.