[pp.int.general] Purpose of copyright

[Ray Jenson]

> Because the US government is the tool of big business.
> It caved in completely around 1980 or so.

It was 1981, the same year that the US Supreme Court issued its edict
that software could be both copyrighted and patented. Before that
time, software was protected in the same way books were: mixing and
matching code could be considered research in exactly the same way
that mixing and matching references from books could be considered
research. And up until that time, that's the way it was handled, more
or less.

The issue is that Big Business started asserting that it had rights
to, and worked hard to move the United States to a more plutocratic
system than it had had, even up to that point. Money became the chief
cause for right from that day forward.


> The ideals on which the US was based are very wise, but the US
> government today is their worst enemy.  Sad to say, the European Union
> is following the same path.  One indication of this is its tendency to
> use the term "intellectual property".
>
> It is biased: it suggests a bad basis for thinking about copyright
> law, or whatever law one is talking about.  It is also confused: it
> encourges people to treat copyright law, patent law, trademark law,
> and other laws as a single issue, and that leads people to be "for
> intellectual property" or "against intellectual property", which are
> both simplistic.
>
> I would therefore like to make a suggestion for Pirate Parties'
> program:
>
> To explicitly reject and denounce the term "intellectual property",
> and propose to undo recent government reorganizations motivated by
> that term that with the goal of grouping unrelated laws together
> under that term, with a view towards discouraging the public confusion
> that this grouping causes.

As the Promotions Officer for the Pirate Party of the United States, I
would like to announce that I support this suggestion. I also see some
issues with it, as the solution presented is a little simplistic
itself.

The concept of "intellectual property" at present does indeed serve to
twist the issues into one complex issue, rather than keeping things
simple. However, it is already the accepted norm because people
haven't been listening for the past 30 years (give or take a few
years). We constantly have a need to protect our own rights as
citizens, but the issue is confused when we let entities which are
non-living (such as corporations) have more rights than living people.
A single corporation does not have the right to vote, yet it holds
more sway right now in Washington than any individual can.

The right to lobby is funded by millions of dollars that funnel into
Washington--a large portion of which are from the entertainment
industry, the software industry, and many industries whose livelihoods
depend on patent and copyright to work. Disney, Microsoft, and Sony
are the chief offenders in this arena, and they poured no less than
US$24 million into lobbies in 2007, and this money has fueled the fire
of politicians who must now bow to these constituents who are funded
from California, Washington State, and Florida in order to enhance the
perceived influence of these admitted giants.

It is therefore not enough to merely reject a term (which I said I
support, and I would like to add emphasis that I unequivocally and
emphatically support this, and once I'm back online at home, I'll make
the wording in the US Pirate Party's constitution a bit stronger). The
term itself is a problem, it's true. But the bigger problem is the
underlying corrupting influence that we allow on a regular basis. It
is therefore necessary that we add political support to our
legislative process in the form of letters and telephone calls, and
even our own lobbying monies. We need to support greater transparency,
so that we know what our government is doing and with whom they are
doing it; and at the same time we need to increase individual privacy,
so that governing agencies such as corporations don't have a right to
eavesdrop on our home computing systems in the name of their so-called
"intellectual property" rights.

Fighting terminology is pointless if the activities to support the
terminology are not also directly countered. This is the entire point
for the Pirate Party in the United States, and a good raison d'etre
for any political party. The issue is that partisan politics are more
important to the majority of the government than doing the right
things.

So, rms, I would therefore invite you to do the right thing, and join
us in writing letters and getting some good "hacktivism" going in
order to ensure that we can ultimately win the political fight. I'll
admit that the words "intellectual property" are a government hack,
but the results are potentially disastrous for us all. We don't have
access to rewrite the code of the world governments who use this term,
so what we need is a different hack altogether. Until that hack is
devised, the only thing we can use is the government equivalent to a
virus, so that we can create the channels necessary to fix the system
we've been locked out of: old-fashioned letter-writing.

Hope this makes sense in an esoteric kind of way.

Sincerely,

Ray Jenson