The exploitation and exchange of copyright and patent are the exploitation and exchange of the people’s suspended liberty (to reproduce/perform/utilise covered works).

Copyright and patent are legal manacles upon the people’s cultural liberty and are 18th century anachronisms impeding mankind’s progress that should have been abolished along with slavery.

Unfortunately, as with slavery, those wealthy industrialists that make colossal profits through the exploitation of others’ lack of liberty will lobby most persuasively for the retention of such legal shackles. And the state colludes given its interest in an (intellectually) emasculated citizenry (that might otherwise threaten stability).

And as we see here, manumission in the form of copyleft is a despicable practice by bleeding heart liberals (if not a treasonable offence), and calls for abolition are pure heresy (we will all starve without slavery/copyright!).

We are in the midst of a civil cyberwar between the old guard of 18th century cultural monopolists and the new generation of 21st century cultural libertarians – or as the former put it: between starving artists and pirate scum.

I’m thinking of droit de suite that denies an artist the ability to unencumber their work from this resale royalty.

If natural rights are inalienable then how better to make privileges seem natural rather than legal ‘rights’ if they are made non-transferable?

There’s a barely perceptible echo of this underlying Creative Commons licenses, that they help wrest copyright back from the publisher, back into the rightful hands of the author where it belongs, i.e. copyright as a quasi-natural authorial right. The King Author ruling his loyal subjects concerning what they may or may not do with his beneficent cultural largesse.

See http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7163 for evidence that ‘copyright as authorial right’ is the Creative Commons philosophy (as far as it dare have one) – in considerable contrast to the FSF’s far more libertarian emancipation of the public.