If I believed in copyright, I’d say J. Neil Schulman’s case against the government(s) for enacting a public performance of the central plot of Schulman’s novel Alongside Night was a good one.
(But I hope JNS won’t sue us when we enact the Revolutionary Agorist Cadre part of the story.)
Another blast from the past, out of the same box: I believe this letter to the Durham-based Independent Weekly was published, in some form at any rate.
3 February 1995
To the Editor:The copyright hassles of Blaise Faint (Independent Weekly 2/1/95) [2010 note: alas, I no longer recall what Blaise Faint’s copyright hassles were] illustrate how obsolete intellectual property rights have become in the electronic age, when information can be duplicated and transmitted a hundred times over in the blink of an eye.
Intellectual property rights – copyrights, patents, and the like – have always stood on dubious ground, both ethically and economically.
Don’t get me wrong. As a wild-eyed free-marketeer, I’m a fan of property rights in general – probably more so than most people. And at one time my enthusiasm for property rights extended to intellectual property as well.
But ethically, property rights of any kind have to be justified as extensions of the right of individuals to control their own lives. Thus any alleged property rights that conflict with this moral basis – like the “right” to own slaves – are invalidated. Intellectual property rights also fail to pass this test. To enforce copyright laws and the like is to prevent people from making peaceful use of the information they possess. If you have acquired the information legitimately (say, by buying a book), the on what grounds can you be prevented from using it reproducing it, trading it? Is this not a violation of the freedom of speech and press?
It may be objected that the person who originated the information deserves ownership rights over it. But information is not a concrete thing an individual can control; it is a universal, existing in other people’s minds and other people’s property, and over those the originator has no legitimate sovereignty. You cannot own information without owning other people.
As for the economic case for property rights, that case depends on scarcity, and information is not, technically speaking, a scarce resource. If A uses some material resource, that makes less of the resource for B, so we need some legal mechanism for determining who gets to use what when. But information is not like that; when A acquires information, that does not decrease B’ share, so property rights are not needed.
Some will say that such rights are needed in order to give artists and inventors the financial incentive to create. But most of the great innovators in history operated without benefit of copyright laws. Indeed, sufficiently stringent copyright laws would have made their achievements impossible. Great playwrights like Euripides and Shakespeare never wrote an original plot in their lives; their masterpieces are all adaptations and improvements of stories written by others. Many of our greatest composers, like Bach, Tchaikovsky, and Ives, incorporated into their work the compositions of others. Such appropriation has long been an integral part of legitimate artistic freedom. (In any case, whatever protection innovators may need can be achieved through voluntary means, such as contract or boycott; there are many successful historical examples of this kind of remedy in copyright cases.)
Though never justified, copyright laws have probably not done too much damage to society so far. But in the Computer Age they are now becoming increasingly costly shackles on human progress. Consider, for instance, Project Gutenberg, a marvelous nonprofit effort to transfer as many books as possible to electronic format and make then available over the internet for free. Unfortunately, most of the works done to date have been pre-20th century – to avoid the hassles of copyright law. Thus, copyright laws today are working to restrict the availability of information, not to promote it. More importantly, modern electronic communications are simply beginning to make copyright laws unenforceable, or at least, unenforceable by any means short of a government takeover of the internet – and such a chilling threat to the future of humankind would clearly be a cure far worse than the disease.
Intellectual property rights are a luxury we can no longer afford.
Roderick T. Long
Intellectual property rights are a cause of disagreement between Lysander Spooner, Stephan Kinsella, and Ayn Rand.
That’s the first sentence of a paper I’m grading for my business ethics class. It seems true (grammar aside). But it strikes me that this creates a problem for my anti-IP position.
After all, it’s an established philosophical principle that nothing nonexistent can cause something real. Yet intellectual property rights are the cause of a real disagreement. Therefore, intellectual property rights must exist. Damn.
Okay, back to grading.
From an info page about the 1996 Doctor Who tv-movie:
Due to complicated licensing and ownership of the telefilm, no North American (a.k.a. Region 1) home video release has occurred in either VHS or DVD formats as of 2009, and no such release is expected in the foreseeable future. Ironically, several of the featurettes on the UK DVD were produced specifically for US audiences.
In fact, to compound the irony, the entire movie itself was specifically geared toward American audiences – which, incidentally, was one of the reasons it wasn’t as good as the recent BBC revival. Still, I imagine American Who fans would buy it if they were allowed to.
Gosh! What if substantial portions of the pro-IP lobby aren’t motivated by a passionate concern for property rights after all?
Next I expect we’ll hear that copylefters are violating their own rights. Or, um, something.
So law prof Karin Calvo-Goller writes a book with the catchy title Trial Proceedings of the International Criminal Court: ICTY and ICTR Precedents; and fellow law prof Thomas Weigend pens what seems to me a rather mildly negative review.
Why doesn't Karin Calvo-Goller want to let you read anything critical of her book?
Whereupon Calvo-Goller reacts by writing to journal editor (and likewise law prof) Joseph Weiler demanding that he suppress the review, on the grounds that it might have a negative impact on her “professional reputation and academic promotion.” When Weiler very politely declines (at the same time patiently explaining some of her misinterpretations of the review), she drags him into court and has him charged with criminal libel. (CHT Der Leiter. Whether similar charges are being brought against Weigend as well is unclear.)
Given that Calvo-Goller’s actions threaten to injure her reputation by making her look like an idiot and a fascistic jerk, I am hereby charging her with criminal libel against herself.
