Intellectual Property (moral, creation, America, moral)

[No*s]

I've defended the neo-cons a plenty on this site. It's time for me to express a rabidly liberal opinion *evil grin*.

I'm of the opinion that copyright has largely ceased being a positive element in society, but has become a detrimental one. It was originally designed to protect book publishers, because it still cost a good deal to produce a book when it was first created. This continued over time, and the concept was limited to copying. You could dang near do whatever you wanted with it. The law also defaulted so that if someone produced something, and they didn't actively copyright it, then it was public domain.

It's changed, though, and the concept that we can own an idea is working itself out to its logical conclusions (as all ideas are wont to do). For starters, now it has changed so that if you write something, you own the copyright to it automatically. This decision alone greatly slows down the transfer of information. Worse, we copyright terms keep getting extended so that owners' accounts expand, but the power of the public domain is weakening.

However, computers have brought on far more troubling changes. When you read this page, your computer makes a copy of the file on the remote server, and stores it in a temporary directory. On my system, it normally does this in /var/tmp/ or /tmp. The IE browser files should be in C:\WINDOWS\TEMPORARY INTERNET FILES. If you look, and you haven't been cleaning up your cache, you'll find the vast majority of those sites you visited with "Don't copy this file" on your hard drive. It's a requirement for digital media.

In effect now, files are not only copied perfectly and instantly, they are copied perfectly and instantly by requirement. The internet is troubling enough there for copyright holders, but it got worse. MP3, OGG, and other file formats copy music in small formats and with excellent results. I can stick a DVD in my computer, download a copy script, and rip the whole DVD and transport it over the internet. My connection, a dial-up, is the only thing that prevents me from being able to do so.

This situation sparked copyright holders into action. With their money and influence in Washington, they have made it illegal to circumvent a copy-protection algorhythm. Do you want to make a copy of your CD (note: not for distribution here)? You are contemplating a federal crime that could land you thousands per song in damages and possibly even time in the pen. They even have federal authority to issue a binding warrant without a court, search your ISP, take the information to court, and have you prosecuted. It is a crime for the ISP to reveal what is happening as well.

With the DMCA's non-circumvention clause, we even find Canon filed a lawsuit against Recycler Assist. The charge was that RA had violated Canon's copyright by circumventing a security device and producing a third party printer. Fortunately, the courts sided with RA there (which is more sense than we see in some rulings). Other rulings weren't so fortunate.

I think this is a logical result of the idea of copyright, and I think it'll get much worse. So much so, that I believe we'll see books that are licensed only to be used on certain machines, and the staunch prosecution of it. If you doubt that, look at some of the licenses for the e-texts that we may buy. It's already beginning to be written in. It's hard to imagine that sharing a book could become a crime (and before the American political parties blame each other, this progress is wholly bi-partisan). In fact, companies are already beginning to reward people for telling on others' copyright infringements.

I worry about this making us like fascists more than I worry about Bush. It has bi-partisan support. It's not hard to get people to back down, by saying "copying that is wrong." To me, giving a court the ability to make rulings over me is an affront to my rights. Restraining what I can say or do, simply because the government is enforcing a monopoly that a company cannot possibly enforce themselves is morally repugnant.

That is, after all, exactly what a copyright (or a patent for that matter) is. It is an idea that the government has placed a stamp on and agreed to make a monopoly where one could not otherwise exist. Owning ideas, and this ever increasing restriction of our usage of them, is contrary to the entire human creative process. We take from other people, in order to create our own. Nobody has ever had a wholly original idea. It is a creational chain, and copyright is no longer reinforcing that. It is attacking that.

I would challenge anyone to think about this, and if you can avoid supporting a copyright, do so. Use stuff with copyrights specifically designed to reliquish power to users. The Creative Commons has such a license, so does the Free Software Foundation (GPL), there's the BSD license for the BSDs, and so on. We can get free music. Free games. We can contribute and help these people by sending money, coding, or something like that. In effect, we can help with this. I'm not saying use something for nothing. I'm saying contribute to the projects, because we have to do something now, or the situation will get very ugly.

Sorry for the long post...I just feel strongly that copyright and whatnot is immoral in our current situation. If it isn't revamped to restabalize it to protect users and copyright holders, then it should be abolished. I don't know a way to restabalize it, therefore I want it thrown out or hindered as best as possible. At the very least, I'll be able to look down at my nephews and neices when they're my age with dignity when it comes to the fact that I didn't cooperate and help this issue along. I feel it is a greater threat to our liberty than anything that Bush or Kerry would do...

[No*s]

The real reason I feel this way, though...is that those danged patents are holding up my robot parts! If I could just build them, I could build my killer robot and finally defeat that accursed Superman!