The workings of plutocracy: part 10^6.

Slashdot has been trumpeting copyright reform for a while. This issue was revived recently when the Republican Study Committee issues a report calling for restraints on copyright law. The report was quickly withdrawn and the author fired, apparently following pressure from the copyright cartel. This has all culminated in an article in Harvard Business Review describing how political corruption is strangling innovation.

Copyright is Slavery

With the recent protests against SOPA and PIPA, the prosecution of Megaupload's staff, and the subsequent Anonymous attacks on the websites of various copyright enforcers (e.g. DoJ, RIAA, MPAA), it is time to distill this issue to its essence: copyright is slavery.

This statement may seem a bit extreme, since our own experience demonstrates that copyright is compatible with basic political and economic freedoms (more or less). Still, I stand by this blunt statement; copyright may be just a tiny slice of slavery, but it is still slavery.

Copyright is slavery because it empowers one person to prohibit another person from engaging in a fundamental human activity -- the sharing of songs and stories. The owners of copyright will argue that these songs and stories would not exist except for the efforts of the copyright owner (and perhaps the copyright system itself), and therefore the copyright owner does not deprive anyone of anything. This may be true in the narrow sense -- that a particular song or story would be unavailable -- but it ignores how these songs and stories interact with the human brain and are assembled into "a personal cultural catalog", as I'll call it. It is this catalog that is unjustly privatized by copyright, ultimately giving copyright owners a sort of ownership over other persons. Furthermore, the commercial value of copyright is largely derived from how humans relate to each other by sharing stories and songs, so copyright results in the privatization of our social lives by third parties and the centralization of cultural control.

Supporters of copyright dismiss the idea that our personal cultural catalogs are in any way relevant to the legitimacy of their copyrights. They point out that the assembly of our catalogs are our business, and that they did not force us to listen to their songs, nor did they force us to obsess over the characters of their stories. In some sense (they claim), copyright can be viewed as a contract between the producers and consumers of culture, where access to the story or song is only granted if the consumer agrees to respect the copyright of the producer; given this contract, if the consumer decides to weave the story or song into their own life, that is their own decision taken as a free person. Leaving aside the issue of whether slavery contracts are legitimate, this contract theory of copyright does not hold water. The main reason is that no such contract exists. Without an explicit contract (agreed to before any exchange takes place), a person cannot be expected to understand the implications of the restrictions that are being placed on him. Furthermore, there are only some situations in which such a contract could even be feasible -- such as when purchasing a book or entering a movie theater; the idea of a contract is absurd when copyrighted content is broadcast to our radios or televisions. Finally, the most important parts of our cultural catalogs are collected when we are children, and children cannot be expected to enter into contracts that will restrict their actions for their entire lives.

So that's my argument that copyright is a form of slavery. A quick Google search did not reveal any other arguments for this position. Still, if you want a more elaborate legalistic examination of the issue, I refer you to Stephan Kinsella.

Let's wrap up with a song (Copyright Slavery, by Der Plan [German with some English phrases])

Wikipedia anti-SOPA blackout

Wikipedia will be offline tomorrow in protest of two bills before Congess -- SOPA and PROIP. The reason is basically this:

We depend on a legal infrastructure that makes it possible for us to operate. And we depend on a legal infrastructure that also allows other sites to host user-contributed material, both information and expression. For the most part, Wikimedia projects are organizing and summarizing and collecting the world’s knowledge. We’re putting it in context, and showing people how to make to sense of it.

But that knowledge has to be published somewhere for anyone to find and use it. Where it can be censored without due process, it hurts the speaker, the public, and Wikimedia. Where you can only speak if you have sufficient resources to fight legal challenges, or if your views are pre-approved by someone who does, the same narrow set of ideas already popular will continue to be all anyone has meaningful access to.

More at: English Wikipedia anti-SOPA blackout - Wikimedia Foundation

Copyright, Patents, and Trademark

This is a plank of my "Left-Libertarian Platform". This post may be updated to better explain the left-libertarian position on this issue, and therefore the comments section is not the best place for esoteric discussion. However, I would appreciate comments that help to clarify the left-libertarian position. Please let me know if I have overlooked an important aspect of this issue, if many left-libertarians disagree with my description of the issue, or if there is a particularly good external resource discussing this issue in depth.

The existing system of intellectual property (IP) in the USA is corrupt. This system is supposed to promote innovation, facilitate honest commerce, and fairly reward productive work; yet, in reality it stifles creativity, enables fraud, and allows a plutocratic elite to transform their political power into monopoly profits. To make maters worse, in response to public disdain for the restrictive privileges granted to the IP industry, Congress is resorting to increasingly intrusive enforcement methods that threaten to disrupt the Internet and limit freedom of speech (e.g. the DMCA).

Left-libertarians support radical reform, if not abolition, of the intellectual property system in America and worldwide. In addition to the harm caused to Americans -- as consumers, producers, and citizens -- the USA's IP cartel is restricting prosperity-promoting international trade. They demand punitive trade restrictions on any country that does not provide them with powers similar to those that they have in the USA. These mandates are enshrined in treaties such as NAFTA and CAFTA, which have had the effect of limiting access to life-saving drugs (along with other technologies) for the residents of these developing nations. The people of America have been used as bargaining chips in these efforts to extend the USA's exploitative system of IP to countries that America's plutocratic elite have plundered for many decades (with the help of local elites). [see International Trade]

To address these problems, we must first recognize that intellectual property is a government policy (as specified in the USA's Constitution), not a natural right (as asserted by advocates such as Sonny Bono). As such, we are justified in limiting these grants of monopoly privilege in whatever manner serves the public interest. We support the following reforms to limit the powers granted by IP:

Copyright:

• Immediate revocation of any copyright that has extended beyond its initial time-span (i.e. nullification of the retroactive provisions of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension act).
• Elimination of the variable-time components of copyright duration (e.g. "life + 70 years) so that there is never any doubt over whether a copyright is still effective.
• Reduction of the term of copyright so that important aspects of culture become public within a reasonable time. The initial term of American copyright (14-28 years) is sufficient to maintain most of the commercial value of most copyrights, while recognizing the role of the general public in creating value for cultural goods.
• Expansion of "fair use" exemptions to prevent copyright from being used as a tool for silencing critics.

Patent:

• Greater scrutiny of inventions before granting patents, so that competing inventors do not need an army of lawyers to protect them from unjustified patent suits.
• Greater stringency on the criteria used for deciding if an invention is patent-worthy.

Trademark:

• Non-transferability of trademark to parties that cannot reasonably be expected to provide a product or service that is comparable to that provided by the original owner of the trademark (e.g. the Cult Awareness Network).

Enforcement:

• Limiting IP enforcement to civil cases seeking monetary compensation comparable to the lost profits arising from IP infringement.
• Revoking IP (partially or fully) whenever the owner exaggerates the powers granted by IP, or denies the fair use rights of others.