The BlackList

[jim bell]

From: Cari Machet <carimachet at gmail.com>
 To: coderman <coderman at gmail.com> 
Cc: cpunks <cypherpunks at cpunks.org>; jim bell <jdb10987 at yahoo.com> 
 Sent: Friday, October 30, 2015 8:03 PM
 Subject: Re: The Black List
   
>Law mother fucking suit ... i will contact my lawyer friends - see if anyone thinks you have standing
    Don't bother.  It was somewhat of a joke for me to mention the "story royalty" line.   Since having spent thousands of hours in Federal prison law libraries, I studied many different areas of law, far beyond criminal law and appeals, including copyright law.  I am not aware that copyright law would protect such an idea.  If I had written a play or a script for a movie, THAT would be my own under copyright law.  But not merely the underlying idea.  Now, nothing would prevent one of these studios from giving me some sort of credit on a line at the end of the show, but they wouldn't owe me money legally.  I am much more upset that they took TWENTY FUCKING YEARS to steal the idea, than the fact they 'stole' it.
    I should also take the opportunity to point out that I wrote my AP essay independently from, and completely unaware of, the previous discussions by Tim May and Robin Hanson.  (I didn't even have Internet access, except as a portal, until mid-1995, and was entirely unaware of the Cypherpunks list;  AP part one was actually published here by somebody else.).
    The major differences included:  Tim May and Robin Hanson both referred to the idea, the one that would one day be seen as "assassination markets", as being "abhorrent markets".  See Cyphernomicon 16.16.4. That they were repelled by the idea, presumably, is one reason they didn't rhetorically follow the concept out to its ultimate, logical outcome.  I, on the other hand, and totally unaware of their work, thought that assassination markets would actually be a truly wonderful idea, precisely because of their capability to destroy governments, make militaries unnecessary and indeed impossible to maintain (critically, including nuclear weapons), and completely replace the current 'criminal justice system' with a far-fairer alternative.  THEY merely stuck their big toes into the cold pool, whereas I did a belly-flop.  (With the accompanying pain, <sigh>).  
    They probably started out by thinking something like, "If person A can anonymously hire person B to kill person C, that could lead to mischief."  Sure it could.  But I approached the problem differently:  I saw that very few people would want to pay, say, $10,000 to buy someone else's death.  But I immediately also saw that 10,000 people might want to pay $1 each for that outcome.  That amounts to a crowdsourced decision, with its accompanying advantages and benefits.  And I also saw that such a functioning system would deter virtually everything which we call wrong in today's society.  Anybody who is trying to argue against an AP-type system is inherently attempting to defend the hugely flawed status quo, even if they don't realize that.
    I also solved David Friedman's "Hard problem", see his book, "The Machinery of Freedom",  the previously-assumed difficulty or impossibility of providing for the defense of a fully libertarian or anarchistic society.  Perhaps my big advantage was that I didn't know Friedman's "Hard Problem" even existed, at least under that label, until long after I'd already solved it.      
                 Jim Bell



  
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