Villa: Pushing back against licensing and the permission culture

It doesn't really matter whether anyone "subscribes" to the idea of natural law or not. That's kind of the point of calling it a natural law, in fact. If you can justify harming someone else, someone who didn't harm you first, then they can equally well justify harming you in the same way and to the same extent. If you can't justify the harm you've done, but still argue that you shouldn't be punished for it, then your victim can harm you in turn and make the same argument against reprisals. Put simply, what you choose to do to others, they can justify doing to you.

This is also why copyright and the like have nothing to do with any natural law: the punishment sought for copyright infringement is not proportional to the supposed offense. Copyright is fundamentally different from natural-law property rights founded on the requirements of scarcity. Fines and imprisonment are grossly disproportionate responses. The most one could claim under natural law is that there is no obligation to recognize the copyright claims of a copyright infringer, which few copyright infringers would object to.