Legal Deposit

I learned that some government libraries tax authors by demanding they supply free books to The State. For example, in Ireland, the government demands an author provide 13 copies of their book for free!

Stealing 13 of every book you write is still a crime. Just a legalised one!

“legal deposit is not theft. It’s an international convention designed to preserve publications for posterity. It benefits authors…” – Facebook comment

Does this international-designed-preservation-posterity-beneficial-convention involve taking people’s property away from them without their consent?

That’s theft. No matter how many adjectives you pile up before the word.

“..don’t be ridiculous, no-one is taking anything away without their consent. Do you think bully-boys come around to your house and snatch books out of your hands? Your assertions are absurd.” – Facebook comment

“Legal deposit is a legal requirement that a person or group submit copies of their publications to a repository, usually a library. The number of copies required varies from country to country…” – Wiki

The commenter linked me to the Wikipedia page of which the above is the opening passage.

If you don’t think that’s theft then you have some loose definitions of ‘submit’ and ‘take’ and ‘legal requirement’.

It’s OK. You think it’s justified theft. Anarchists evaluate it as unjust. But let’s not disagree on the nature of the act. There’s no doubt about what’s happening here only some trouble calling a spade a spade.

” it’s no more theft than tax is theft. And whatever you think of tax, without it no country could function (unless you are Brunei and are sitting on a tonne of oil). And without books no country could function either.” – ibid

The core belief you have that tax cannot be theft (which of course it is) has spilled over into the way you are evaluating other forms of theft. When you make an in-principle decision to sanction stealing you have opened Pandora’s whatever…

This has been an instructive exchange in how Statists think about theft and the cognitive dissonance web they weave.

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