Yeah: the laws about shops can either protect against economic harm or protect comptetion and technology. Where these collide you get the occasional dilemma. There is some safety in that other shops have to get planning permission which is sometimes denied if there's already enough shops, and that franchises don't put shops too close together, and that kind of thing. That's worthwhile, because protection is valuable, it adds value to the shop, and if the reduced risk outweighs the harm done to potential shops, then everyone'll be better off, maybe. If you look at an existent copyright, it similarly looks like it's preferring technology over people's freedom to copy, but the fair use doctrine is still worthwhile.
As nod points out, a lot of things wouldn't be produced at all without copyright, so that freedom to copy is created by copyright as well as restricted by it. Without competition, there wouldn't be as much prosperity at all, so it seems ok to choose competition over the old shop owner's prosperity.
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Originally Posted by Dante Hicks
I've no idea what your political philosophy is, so obviously i can't comment on you. If you're advocating all-round general pragmatism then yeah whatever really. Lots of things can be argued for on practical grounds.
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Pragmatism applies where it's pragmatic. I'm reading
this book atm. I'd say I'm roughly just against the idea that specific natural rights are always a good basis for argument. Like someone (you?) said, the Holocaust wasn't bad because it was a violation of rights, but because it was slaughtering people.
You're giving a specific conception of rights which I might call materialist. I don't despise that kind of thing, but I don't see how it's much different from people who argue it's wrong to kill a fetus, for example. An
a priori argument just seems much more tenuous than the practical grounds, looking at details, that kind of thing (btw, it seems that RMS is quite anti-libertarian, and simply promotes copyright and patent reform). At most I'd agree that it'd be ideal if we could implement systems in the future that don't require copyright. Because, hey, it makes a lot of things simpler when you can transfer numbers without worrying about their social standing. But that's a long way off, almost SF. For the meantime I'm cool with the idea of copyright protecting the arts where nothing better is on offer. Also I wouldn't object to welfare on any intrinsic grounds anymore.
DDFr is generally positivist; he gives explanations and suggestions, not a set of principles.