As I’ve pointed out a few times before, language has changed in the last few centuries. The term ‘privilege’ was soon described as a ‘legal right’ and then shortened to simply ‘right’. Meanwhile the original term, ‘natural right’ that ‘right’ used to describe without needing qualification, has now to be qualified as ‘natural right’ to distinguish it from ‘legal right’.

Consequently, the labels are always very happy to say ‘our rights must be protected’, because as we all know, rights are good. Er no, only natural rights are good. Legal rights (aka privileges) are, as Thomas Paine would say, an injustice.

Liberty = right (natural right) to copy and build upon one’s own possessions (even if originally produced by someone else)
Copyright = privilege (’legal right’) to suspend the aforementioned, excluding others from making or distributing copies/derivatives of what they have.

So, Houston, we have a problem: the record labels and the people both want their rights protected.

Plainly one of these ‘rights’ to be protected can’t actually be a natural right, but must be a privilege. This is because privileges reserve a right from the many to the one. That’s why the privilege of copyright is in direct opposition to the right to copy.

Which do you think is the natural right? The one mankind’s had since he copied his fellows to learn the art of making baskets and painting on cave walls, or the one created in the 18th century for printers?

The right to copy, or the privilege of excluding others from making copies?

You can see why the privileged would like to call their privilege a right can’t you? They don’t want you to notice that it isn’t actually a right in the natural sense of the word.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_of_Man

Human rights originate in Nature, thus, rights cannot be granted via political charter, because that implies that rights are legally revocable, hence, would be privileges:

It is a perversion of terms to say that a charter gives rights. It operates by a contrary effect — that of taking rights away. Rights are inherently in all the inhabitants; but charters, by annulling those rights, in the majority, leave the right, by exclusion, in the hands of a few . . . They . . . consequently are instruments of injustice.

No, you “don’t.”

The second anyone refers to file-sharing as “stealing” or makes references to the amount of jobs lost based on the false premise that every song downloaded is a sale lost, that is the moment that I immediately put on my rubber boots and prepare of the flood of excrement.

There is no “legal alternative” to the desire for the elimination of the RIAA. It’s a decade too late for forgiveness.