Free exchange on doesn’t like Posner’s plan for to ban online copy write infringement.

It also seems like perhaps the worst economic approach to ensuring that valuable news-gathering activities continue. The news that’s gathered either has private value, in which the news gatherer can simply charge for access to it, or it has some value as a public good, in which case, the appropriate policy is to directly subsidise the activity of gathering publicly valuable news.

This seems to me a false choice. We make policy all the time to ensure that private value can be realized. The most obvious is patents. Once an invention is created it can be copied, but we bar that in an effort to allow patentees to hold on to their private value. The most basic example, however, might be the common law itself. We don’t allow stealing, murder, manslaughter, etc in large part because these actions deprive someone of private value.

We can speak in terms of basic human rights, but a right that no one values is not a right that the law will take great pains to protect. These laws are enforced because people value their property and their personal security and are worse off when it is forcibly taken from them.

Is taking copy from the web any different? Are we not, in effect, stealing from a house with no walls?