p2pnet news view | P2P | Music:- Let’s recap some of the stuff I’ve discussed here on p2pnet:

1. “Intellectual Property” is not a fundamental right.  Copy’right’ and patent “protection” was explicitly intended as a monopoly granted for a “limited time”, and — at least as worded in the US Constitution — for a specific purpose, namely, advancing “science and the useful arts”.

2. Thomas Jefferson (a key player in the drafting of that Constitution) was extremely aware of the potential dangers posted by such monopolies:

Relevant quotes »»»

Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.”

“But grants of this sort can be justified in very peculiar cases only, if at all; the danger being very great that the good resulting from the operation of the monopoly, will be overbalanced by the evil effect of the precedent; and it being not impossible that the monopoly itself, in its original operation, may produce more evil than good.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080220/020252302.shtml

Now, notice something: in the above, he explicitly states “Grants of this sort” (read: coercive monopolies) can be justified in very peculiar cases only, if at all”.  Nowhere is there any suggestion he believed them to be a “fundamental right” deserving perpetuity.

3.  There’s a lot of blather about how p2p/copyfighters advocate doing “illegal” things.  This is, of course, equally applicable to »»»

• Those participating in the “Boston Tea Party”.
• Anybody involved in the “Underground Railroad”.
  
• Civil Rights advocates in the 1960s who urged Black people to occupy “White’s only” lunch counters.

The claim that “law” should be obeyed simply because they ARE “laws” asks us to PASSIVELY SUBMIT TO ANYTHING THE LOBBYISTS MANAGE TO DO TO US.

It ain’t gonna happen. Oppression breeds resistance.  More importantly, absurd laws inevitably make “the law” itself seem absurd.

I don’t know about you all, but when I hear RIAA apologists yammering about the “sacred right to property”, there’s an echo of Bull Connor, Strom Thurmond, and other defenders of segregation claiming that opposition to federal civil rights’ legislation was about “State’s Rights” (as opposed to, say “Equal protection under the law.”)

Think about that: these people were willing to support a manifestly evil racial caste system, in order to defend what they THOUGHT was a good principle.

How different is this from your average apologist for “Intellectual property”?

I may be sentimental, but I genuinely believe that at least a few of them — misguided and propagandized by the RIAA and other corporate lobbyists — simply misunderstand the issues involved. That’s why “Sam I am” could claim that expiration of copyright would “take” from his daughter. Instead of a monopoly granted for an explicit purpose and MEANT TO EXPIRE fairly quickly, HE — and other RIAA dupes — see “the sacred right to property.”

Well, there’s an answer to that, too.

Richard Stallman said it best »»»

Instead of speaking of “intellectual property”, which invokes that feel-good idea of property and ownership, we should speak of “intellectual monopolies”. For this is precisely what copyrights and patents are: they are monopolies granted by governments for a limited period as part of a bargain – that, in return, those who are granted those monopolies hand them over to the public domain once the term of the monopoly has lapsed.

http://limulus.wordpress.com/2007/08/28/the-myth-of-intellectual-property/

‘Culture is instinctual. Culture is participatory’

So, having clarified — yet again — what copyright and patents are (and are NOT), we’re left with one relatively simple question:

HAVE those granted such “intellectual monopolies” upheld THEIR part of the deal, by allowing those monopolies to lapse?

Yes, up until relatively recently.

Not anymore — if they can help it:

http://old.macedition.com/soup/soup_20000627a.shtml
http://old.macedition.com/soup/soup_20000627b.shtml

In case you don’t want to follow the links, here’s some of the most relevant chunks:

“Culture is instinctual. Culture is participatory. Any distinction between producer and consumer in music and art and literature and film is artificial. Clamping down on the distribution and dissemination of art, literature, learning and music is dehumanizing, and now it’s enshrined in law. The “rights” afforded the owners of copyright are so out of control, Girl Scouts can’t even sing “God Bless America” around the campfire without getting express written consent and paying a royalty. You think I’m kidding?“

“Now here comes the backlash. If copyright is dead, then our culture sure as hell isn’t going to suck up to it anymore. Copyright law was intended to benefit both the owners of intellectual property and the general public, a carefully considered compromise that lets the individual and the civilization both benefit. This balance has been deliberately and maliciously destroyed. Copyright law is so powerful and wide reaching, it is no longer recognizable – leaving the public domain a derelict and dusty wreck. In essence, war was declared on Western culture by a wealthy and powerful elite. Too bad they’re up against the smartest and most resourceful foe imaginable: the computer geek. Thanks to the propellerheads populating our new digital world, culture has freed itself. Welcome to the Internet age.“

“You, too, can be part of this backlash. If you want to listen to Apotheosis’ “O Fortuna” for yourself, you can. You cannot buy it legally, but you can still listen to it, cut it to a CD-R to play in your car, and groove to it at your next party. Simply fire up Rapster or Macster, and search for “O Fortuna” or “Apotheosis” on the free Napster service. Hell, download the original “Carmina Burana” while you’re at it, and compare it to its derivative.“

“Napster is currently under assault by the RIAA, the legal monster bankrolled by the multi-billion-dollar recording label giants. This legal sturm-und-drang doesn’t matter very much. New technologies, like Freenet and Gnutella, are being devised to ensure anonymity and decentralization when sharing information on the Internet, making it impossible for the RIAA and its ilk to find anyone to sue.”

“The merry hackers who invented the Internet thang are motivated by a gift culture: the more you give away, the more noble you are perceived as being. Linus Torvalds gave away an operating system kernel he wrote (you may have heard of it: it’s called Linux), and now he’s the most famous computer programmer in the world. These geeks and counterculture technologists hold an ethos that’s slightly out of step with current cultural trends, a chief tenet of which is: all information should be set free. They don’t see themselves as pirates or thieves – they see themselves as liberators. Considering the sorry state the law has allowed intellectual property rights to slide to, I see them as liberators, too. Big business and bigger governments will do their absolute best to censor, silence and control what is being shared and said online, but the geeks so far have always remained two steps ahead of them. Society needs the propellerheads too much to outlaw or suppress their work completely, so it’s likely the renegade geeks will remain two steps ahead.“

“So now you know why it’s useless to worry about protecting your copyright. Modern copyrights are so ludicrously powerful on paper, they run against the public interest. That means all those marvelous rights are all but unenforceable.“ 

http://www.unhappybirthday.com/

So how do we re-establish the “delicate balance?”  Above all, how do we stop the peculiar combination of infantile whining and spittle-spraying braggadocio that characterizes defenders of the status quo?

1. First, we need to keep hammering the fact that such monopolies are MERE PRIVILEGES explicitly intended to expire.  If “the law” doesn’t allow them to “expire”, they’ll be forcibly SNUFFED by technological (or other) means, and — as we’re seeing with the growing contempt for IP law AS SUCH among the “pirates”, the backlash can be downright nasty.

Nothing the RIAA, IFPI, MPAA,  or anybody else can do about that, friends.

So a good start would be a drastic reduction in copyright terms on paper.  Say, 5 years WITH NO RENEWALS.  (We TRIED renewals, and the bastards got greedy.)

The advantage to this are two-fold:

People still get to monopolize (and monetize) content (and sue for damages during the monopoly term), but the stuff is “freed” relatively quickly, so, for example, nobody gets the shakedown treatment for singing a “traditional” birthday song:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You
http://www.unhappybirthday.com/

2. Another good step would be to require registration for copy’right’ monopolies to be enforceable at all: Other forms of so-called “Intellectual property” (patents and trademarks) require explicit registration, so why not copyright?

Let’s face it: multinational corporate megaliths have enough money to afford a reasonable registration fee, okay?  (Of course, this would require that everything NOT explicitly registered immediately default to the public domain, because, let’s be honest: there’s no clear way to tell who “owns” what, at this point.)

3.  No extensions, no renewals, and no changing the term-period.  (We tried that, and it didn’t go so well.)

4. Expllicitly restrict damages to price that would have been charged had the “content” been legally purchased.  For example:

Say you’re selling mp3 files for 10 cents each, but some nasty, evil “pirate” makes your stuff available for free without your permission.

Your monopoly privilege is still active (AND you’ve put the “sweat equity” into filing for it — an indication of willingness on your part to eventually follow through with YOUR side of the deal, by not bitching when the monopoly expires.)

So say the usage logs indicate 500 downloads each, on all of the ten songs he grabbed:

• 10 cents per download
• 10 songs
• 500 times each

That looks like 500 bucks to me.

Now, if you’re smart, you’ll maybe think of offering him some kind of “frachise” deal — pay you a percentage from the downloads, and you don’t sue his ass for the 500 bucks.

But that assumes you’re smart, and don’t want to piss off your fans — something the RIAA obviously isn’t, on either account.

The rest of the details would essentially have to be hashed out over time, but — importantly — some relatively simple changes like this COULD preserve (or even restore?) the steadily-diminishing respect for the IP monopolies, AND still provide ample opportunities (”Financial incentive”) to do what you’d probably be doing anyway.

Because face it: if you’re ONLY in it for the money, you wouldn’t have played the bad gigs, done those wedding videos, or whatever else you considered “paying your dues.”

Henry Ermich - p2pnet
[Ermich says he's, "just some guy," sometime musician, wannabe writer, sporadic blotter, and (hopefully) good-natured person.  He and his wife  live in Pennsylvania with two cats, and, "entirely too many record albums".]

March, 2009

---

Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It’s really easy!
Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php

---

Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 2:02 pm and is filed under Music, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

HOME

Viewed 3345 times