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.
Tag Archives | Left and Right
Charles Overthrows the Government
Charles Johnson’s excellent essay “Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism,” which appeared in the anarchism/minarchism anthology that Tibor Machan and I edited, is now available online.
Read it now, or the statists win.
Tea For Two
I was going to write something about CPAC and the tea parties. But then I remembered that I’d already written this last spring.
Anarchists For Total Government
It takes the perspicacity of a Glenn Beck to detect them.
Bear Becomes Mushroom; Trout Implicated
So the picture on the left of a girl leaning against a bear is an image that appears on merchandise produced by independent artist Hidden Eloise; and the picture on the right of the same girl in the same pose, leaning against empty air in the vague vicinity of a giant mushroom, is an image that appears, more recently, on merchandise produced by the British stationery company Paperchase.
In Thoreau’s words: “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”
Without IP laws, what would prevent this blatant appropriation of artists’ ideas?
Oh, wait. Britain has IP laws, doesn’t it? So what’s gone wrong?
Well, apparently Paperchase has been ignoring Eloise’s complaints, and she hasn’t felt prepared to lay out the thousands in court costs needed to pursue legal remedies.
This example reveals a certain asymmetry in IP’s vaunted protection for artists; it turns out to be a lot more useful to large businesses than to individuals.
But Eloise (if she has a last name I haven’t located it) recently got some unexpected help. Yesterday Neil Gaiman mentioned the case in passing on Twitter; and Gaiman’s Twitter feed has about 1.5 million followers. Overnight a firestorm of publicity erupted, talk of a boycott was floated, and now Paperchase is running scared and whining about how “dangerous” Twitter is. (You and Ahmadinejad both, guys.)
Now admittedly the case isn’t over, but Twitter has clearly done more for Eloise in one day than IP laws have done in four months. This suggests that IP proponents have not only overestimated the effectiveness of IP laws as protection for artists, but they’ve likewise underestimated the usefulness of voluntary alternatives such as boycotts and bad publicity.
It could be objected, of course, that Gaiman is a big name with a rather fanatical following, making it difficult to generalise from this case. But an institutionalised version of this response might be able to make up in organisation what it lacks in star power. Remember the Law Merchant, which secured compliance solely through organised boycotts.
Help Noam Chomsky Find His Inner Anarchist
A reader tipped me off that Noam Chomsky has agreed to answer the top-rated questions submitted via this reddit page; the reader suggested that I condense my “Chomsky’s Augustinian Anarchism” gripes into a question.
So I did. Here’s my question for Chomsky:
Although as an anarchist you favour a stateless society in the long run, you’ve argued that it would be a mistake to work for the elimination of the state in the short run, and that indeed we should be trying to strengthen the state right now, because it’s needed as a check on the power of large corporations.
Yet the tendency of a lot of anarchist research – your own research most definitely included, though I would also mention in particular Kevin Carson’s – has been to show that the power of large corporations derives primarily from state privilege (which, together with the fact that powerful governments tend to get captured by concentrated private interests at the expense of the dispersed public, would seem to imply that the most likely beneficiary of a more powerful state is going to be the same corporate elite we’re trying to oppose).
If business power both derives from the state and is so good at capturing the state, why isn’t abolishing the state a better strategy for defeating business power than enhancing the state’s power would be?
Users can vote comments upward or downward on the list; so if you’d like to see Chomsky answer the above question, go here and try to boost it up the list. (Or ask one of your own, of course!)