An attack from first principles: Among the various kinds of power, force is special, because force is the only power that involves active harm. As political sc

An attack from first principles: Among the various kinds of power, force is special, because force is the only power that involves active harm. As political scientists see things, the fundamental role of government is to maintain a monopoly on the use of force. We distinguish liberal democracies from other governments based on how they distribute the authority to use force. Liberal democracies are systems designed to treat each citizen as equal. We treat factors that oppose this equality as bugs[1]. We build subsystems that permit transfer of this authority without the use of force. Both democracies and other governments use force to maintain their monopoly on force. (Though democracies tend not to need to use it as much.) The difference is that democracies use this force with authority that was freely given to them. Copyright was created in the belief that it would increase the wealth of a society. It is enforced with authority. If a majority of the population felt strongly that it wasn't working properly, there is a mechanism for changing it that does not involve the use of force. We treat factors that interfere with this mechanism, such as corporate sponsorship of politicians, as bugs. Censorship by government is a kind of force designed to preserve the monopoly on force. Copyright is not an exercise of power, censorship is. The use of power involved in enforcing copyright isn't designed to preserve the power itself. (Disney doesn't run the police yet.) Finally, if the citizens of a liberal democracy doesn't like censorship, they can elect a new government that does away with it. Citizens under other forms of government have no such recourse. Moral relativism gets my heckles up. [1]: Newspapers are our bug tracker, and an unsolved problem is to figure out how to build a new bug tracker.