Very good, solid piece by Yglesias in Slate:

The Miracle of the Loaves and FishesPainting by Lambert Lombard.

I’m having a little bit of trouble discerning what exactly Caleb Crain and I are disagreeing about. He seems to think I’m mistaken about copyright policy, but he doesn’t quite specify what the nature of the disagreement is. He clearly finds me distasteful, and thus finds it pleasurable to muse on the possibility that he might steal my lunch (or reduce my salary to $0). But after considering these possibilities at length, he concedes—as I wrote earlier this month—that copying is in fact not stealing.

I’ve long been concerned that Creative Commons (CC) licenses are not enforceable. I’d like to explain, but a bit of background is necessary first.

General Confusion About IP

My main focus here is copyright, one type of so-called “intellectual property,” or IP, since CC has to do with licenses (permissions) for copyright-protected works or authorship.

Now IP is an umbrella term encompassing a number of different, but related, areas of law, such as patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secret.¹ Each of them is unjust and full of arcane, specialized concepts, non-intuitive and arbitrary rules, and ambiguous or even inconsistent provisions. It can be frustrating to discuss IP policy with laymen because of this. (And it’s always frustrating to discuss IP policy with “experts” because they almost always favor IP or at least take an ad hoc, unprincipled, utilitarian approach. They are never in favor of striking at the root or of radical proposals like copyright abolition, but only tepid and never-realized “reform.”)

The first problem is that most people can’t even keep the types of IP law straight. They talk about copyrighting an invention, though that’s what patents are for (Rothbard, in his critique of patent and state copyright, tried to articulate some limited defense of a type of private, contract-based protection for inventions, like mousetraps, using the term “copyright” to describe this).² They confuse patent with trade secret. They confuse copyright infringement with plagiarism when these have nothing to do with each other. They confuse trademark with protecting consumers from fraud, even though this is a big lie (if it’s about consumer fraud why not just rely on fraud law? why is it the trademark owner who gets to sue the guy who defrauds his customers, instead of the customers having the cause of action? why can the trademark owner sue the guy who sells a knockoff purse even when the consumer knows it’s a knockoff? why can the trademark owner sue someone else for “antidilution” even when there is no consumer confusion whatsoever?).

And another problem is business people often use “IP” to refer to their knowhow or technology. “Our IP is our way of doing X,” etc. This seems to be some form of metonymy (or is it reverse metonymy?), in which people refer to the thing protected by IP law (designs, recipes, etc.), as IP itself. It does get confusing. And this is to the advantage of the state, and advocates of IP. Proponents are special interest factions; those harmed by IP are diffuse and ignorant of the details. The story of the state.

Most people do not understand IP law at all, yet they cling to bromides and slogans they’ve heard the intellectual propagandists sling around. They think copyright is meant to protect the author, and so on. They think copying information is somehow “theft” or “piracy”³ and that emulating others in the market is somehow “unfair competition,” even though, umm, competition is what the free market is supposed to be about.⁴

Copyright, Public Domain, Hypocrisy, and Ignorance

A strange criticism is often made of copyright opponents, due to the above-noted ignorance and confusion. As I noted in Copyright is very sticky!, often we opponents of copyright are accused of hypocrisy because we purportedly “copyright” our articles and books. [continue reading…]

1. “Intellectual Property” as an umbrella term and as propaganda: a reply to Richard Stallman; Types of IP. [↩]
2. Discussed in Against Intellectual Property. [↩]
3. Sharing Is Not Piracy; Stop calling patent and copyright “property”; stop calling copying “theft” and “piracy”. [↩]
4. Intellectual Property Advocates Hate Competition. [↩]

I’ve argued before that There are No Good Arguments for Intellectual Property. This is why we are seeing The Death Throes of Pro-IP Libertarianism.¹ The latest competitor for the worst argument for IP comes in the section “MORAL 5: Anything can be property,” of one “Tomkow”‘s post The Origins of Property II. The argument is too insipid and stupid to spend much time on, but here are a few comments I dashed off to the author after he wasted my time by emailing me about this dreck.

He wrote me “Among the morals is that intellectual property can be property simpliciter.” My reply (edited to remove profanity and typos, because this stuff really annoys me):

Yes, you “can” treat non-scarce things as property. but “so what”? https://c4sif.org/2011/10/classifying-patent-and-copyright-law-as-property-so-what/

You “can” treat other humans as property too. So what?

The question is what property rules are justified.

“You can’t homestead on intellectual property.” Hunh? Awkward phrasing. confused. A sign of unclear thinking.

“The most rabidly libertarian sites on the internet regularly feature writers [i.e. Kinsella] who demand the socialization of intellectual property with the same fervor (and mostly the same arguments) as Marxists decrying the private ownership of steel mills.”

This is bullshit and dishonest question-begging. It’s only “socialist” if IP is property, or should be.

“The problem is usually framed like this: How can the simple fact that someone else thought of it first make it wrong for me to practice an invention or play a tune without that person’s permission?

I don’t think there is a good answer to that question, but it is the wrong question.”

It’s only the wrong question insofar as patents don’t even require you to be the first inventor to get the effing monopoly.

“in appreciation for his great service I now say to him and all of you that, from this day forward, if I should ever sing a note of that song I hereby grant permission to Wilt and everyone else here assembled to beat the crap out of me.”

Two problems here. First, in most cases today there IS no actual agreement. Second, even if this statement was made it ought not be enforceable for inalienability reasons. And by the way, not only does this “argument” for IP not even purport to justify patent, it doesn’t justify copyright either since copyright has nothing to do with contract. Nothing. Contracts is between two or some limited number of actual parties. Property rights, which IP pretends to be, is in rem–good against everyone in the world, whether there is a contract negotiated or not.

This is the worst argument for IP that I have ever seen. Just about. Completely sucks. Dishonest or shoddy or stupid, I am not sure which, but it is incoherent and moronic

1. See also The Four Historical Phases of IP Abolitionism. [↩]

Free software advocate Richard Stallman, a critic of some aspects of IP law (though not completely consistently, and not from a libertarian perspective),¹ emailed me recently to suggest that we opponents of IP should not use the term “Intellectual Property” to include patent, copyright, trademark, trade secret, etc., for two reasons. First: the term is biased in favor of the legitimacy of various IP laws. Second, it is inappropriate to treat various legal regimes under a common heading, as they are all very different. I agree with the first but not with the second point.

In support of his contentions he cited his article  Did You Say “Intellectual Property”? It’s a Seductive Mirage for the reasons. Below is an edited version of my response to his article.

[Update: See also Stallman, Did You Say ‘Intellectual Property’? It’s a Seductive Mirage; pdf; gnu; pdf]

***

Thanks for your comments. My book Against Intellectual Property [which Stallman had referred to but had not read] is online here https://c4sif.org/resources/ along with shorter pieces.

I have admired your work in the area, by the way, and your general skepticism of copyright, though I believe my view goes further than yours and has a different base, as my remarks below will reveal.

Here is my take on this issue.

I don’t like the term IP because it is a propaganda term used to justify state monopolies. But the fact I don’t like it doesn’t change the fact that words have meanings and we need to use them to communicate with others. Though I have flirted with other names and often call them pattern privileges, censorship, monopolies, and so on.

My main targets are patent and copyright, and I do think they bear some similarities. When I write they are usually the main things I attack and I treat them together since they suffer from similar flaws, and wreak similar damage. And I usually am careful to say “by IP I mean patent and copyright”.

But the fact is I oppose all IP of all types (and there are many types)—not only trademark and trade secret but other things like defamation law etc. I would abolish all of them as they all violate property rights, and in similar ways (I am a libertarian). I would abolish trademark and trade secret as well. The worst of all is copyright, and the next worst is patent. The others are all far behind, but are all unambiguously bad. I have tried to present a very coherent and consistent framework of justice and property rights (“Intellectual Property and Libertarianism”, “What Libertarianism Is“) and explain from that framework what is the nature of so-called IP (or pattern privileges) and why they are all completely unjust.

So I would agree that I don’t like the loaded term IP, and would prefer another term; but I would still use an overall umbrella concept to refer to the various types of IP, all of which are statist and amount to theft of real property. That is because my approach is a principled, systematic one, and I want to totally abolish all these forms of false property, for the same reasons, more or less. That said, as a practicing patent/IP attorney I can assure you I know the differences and point it out when necessary, e.g. when giving examples of how various types of IP cause harm (The Patent, Copyright, Trademark, and Trade Secret Horror Files) or when recommending incremental reform (How to Improve Patent, Copyright, and Trademark Law).

Let me address some of the claims in your article you linked, though not comprehensively, as my general stance is probably already evident from the above comments.

It has become fashionable to toss copyright, patents, and trademarks—three separate and different entities involving three separate and different sets of laws—plus a dozen other laws into one pot and call it “intellectual property”. The distorting and confusing term did not become common by accident. Companies that gain from the confusion promoted it. The clearest way out of the confusion is to reject the term entirely.

That is a strategical matter and I cannot claim to be an expert on this. If I opposed only patent, or copyright, or both, or only wanted reform instead of abolition, you might be right. I would be against drug laws, taxes, copyright, and patent, or for reform, and could not lump them all together (but actually I could: they all violate property rights; but patent and copyright do so in a similar way by a triangular intervention in the market by the state that grants a monopoly privilege to someone). But I am for abolition of all types of IP. Not just tinkering or improvement or reform.

What should I have called my book? Against Patent, Copyright, Trademark, Trade Secret, Boat Hull Design, Database Rights, Moral Rights, Defamation Law…? If there is nothing in common, why not throw in drug prohibition? If there is something in common, what general term would you propose? I could have called it Against Monopoly (and in fact Boldrin and Levine did call theirs Against Intellectual Monopoly) but I am not sure everyone knows what that means, and if I am writing against monopoly I would have to include the state’s monopoly status over courts, military, roads, etc.–yet that was not my focus. Or I could write one book on patents, one on copyright, and so on. Which seems the wrong approach.

Seriously: if I oppose the big 4: patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secret, what term would you recommend…? Your proposal below of GOLEM is not serious; no one would know what I am talking about. I don’t think becoming a lexical crank is going to help me communicate with people I am trying to communicate with. I prefer to just identify something by its common name, and then state clearly why I think it is wrong. I don’t think social security is really security, but I use that name. I don’t think the PATRIOT act is really patriotic. But that’s it’s name.  I don’t think the Dept. of Defense is engaged in defense, but rather aggression and war. I don’t think the No Child Left Behind Act really leaves no children behind. But I can’t pick the names of these statutes–their authors do.

According to Professor Mark Lemley, now of the Stanford Law School, the widespread use of the term “intellectual property” is a fashion that followed the 1967 founding of the World “Intellectual Property” Organization (WIPO), and only became really common in recent years. (WIPO is formally a UN organization, but in fact represents the interests of the holders of copyrights, patents, and trademarks.) Wide use dates from around 1990. (Local image copy)

The term carries a bias that is not hard to see: it suggests thinking about copyright, patents and trademarks by analogy with property rights for physical objects. (This analogy is at odds with the legal philosophies of copyright law, of patent law, and of trademark law, but only specialists know that.)

These laws are in fact not much like physical property law, but use of this term leads legislators to change them to be more so. Since that is the change desired by the companies that exercise copyright, patent and trademark powers, the bias introduced by the term “intellectual property” suits them.

The bias is reason enough to reject the term, and people have often asked me to propose some other name for the overall category—or have proposed their own alternatives (often humorous). Suggestions include IMPs, for Imposed Monopoly Privileges, and GOLEMs, for Government-Originated Legally Enforced Monopolies. Some speak of “exclusive rights regimes”, but referring to restrictions as “rights” is doublethink too.

Some of these alternative names would be an improvement, but it is a mistake to replace “intellectual property” with any other term. A different name will not address the term’s deeper problem: overgeneralization. There is no such unified thing as “intellectual property”—it is a mirage. The only reason people think it makes sense as a coherent category is that widespread use of the term has misled them.

The term “intellectual property” is at best a catch-all to lump together disparate laws. Nonlawyers who hear one term applied to these various laws tend to assume they are based on a common principle and function similarly.

Nothing could be further from the case. These laws originated separately, evolved differently, cover different activities, have different rules, and raise different public policy issues.

Copyright law was designed to promote authorship and art,

and covers the details of expression of a work. Patent law was intended to promote the publication of useful ideas, at the price of giving the one who publishes an idea a temporary monopoly over it—a price that may be worth paying in some fields and not in others.

Trademark law, by contrast, was not intended to promote any particular way of acting, but simply to enable buyers to know what they are buying.

Legislators under the influence of the term “intellectual property”, however, have turned it into a scheme that provides incentives for advertising.

Since these laws developed independently, they are different in every detail, as well as in their basic purposes and methods. Thus, if you learn some fact about copyright law, you’d be wise to assume that patent law is different. You’ll rarely go wrong!

People often say “intellectual property” when they really mean some larger or smaller category.

For instance, rich countries often impose unjust laws on poor countries to squeeze money out of them. Some of these laws are “intellectual property” laws, and others are not; nonetheless, critics of the practice often grab for that label because it has become familiar to them. By using it, they misrepresent the nature of the issue. It would be better to use an accurate term, such as “legislative colonization”, that gets to the heart of the matter.

Laymen are not alone in being confused by this term. Even law professors who teach these laws are lured and distracted by the seductiveness of the term “intellectual property”, and make general statements that conflict with facts they know. For example, one professor wrote in 2006:

Unlike their descendants who now work the floor at WIPO, the framers of the US constitution had a principled, procompetitive attitude to intellectual property. They knew rights might be necessary, but…they tied congress’s hands, restricting its power in multiple ways.

That statement refers to Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the US Constitution, which authorizes copyright law and patent law. That clause, though, has nothing to do with trademark law or various others. The term “intellectual property” led that professor to make false generalization.

The term “intellectual property” also leads to simplistic thinking. It leads people to focus on the meager commonality in form that these disparate laws have—that they create artificial privileges for certain parties—and to disregard the details which form their substance: the specific restrictions each law places on the public, and the consequences that result. This simplistic focus on the form encourages an “economistic” approach to all these issues.

Economics operates here, as it often does, as a vehicle for unexamined assumptions. These include assumptions about values, such as that amount of production matters while freedom and way of life do not, and factual assumptions which are mostly false, such as that copyrights on music supports musicians, or that patents on drugs support life-saving research.

Another problem is that, at the broad scale implicit in the term “intellectual property”, the specific issues raised by the various laws become nearly invisible. These issues arise from the specifics of each law—precisely what the term “intellectual property” encourages people to ignore. For instance, one issue relating to copyright law is whether music sharing should be allowed; patent law has nothing to do with this.

Patent law raises issues such as whether poor countries should be allowed to produce life-saving drugs and sell them cheaply to save lives; copyright law has nothing to do with such matters.

Neither of these issues is solely economic in nature, and their noneconomic aspects are very different; using the shallow economic overgeneralization as the basis for considering them means ignoring the differences. Putting the two laws in the “intellectual property” pot obstructs clear thinking about each one.

Thus, any opinions about “the issue of intellectual property” and any generalizations about this supposed category are almost surely foolish.

If you think all those laws are one issue, you will tend to choose your opinions from a selection of sweeping overgeneralizations, none of which is any good.

If you want to think clearly about the issues raised by patents, or copyrights, or trademarks, or various other different laws, the first step is to forget the idea of lumping them together, and treat them as separate topics. The second step is to reject the narrow perspectives and simplistic picture the term “intellectual property” suggests. Consider each of these issues separately, in its fullness, and you have a chance of considering them well.

SK

1. See my posts Stallman: An Internet-Connectivity Tax to Compensate Artists and Authors; Eben Moglen and Leftist Opposition to Intellectual Property; and An Open Letter to Leftist Opponents of Intellectual Property: On IP and the Support of the State; also Nina Paley’s “Rantifesto”: Why are the Freedoms guaranteed for Free Software not guaranteed for Free Culture?. [↩]
2. See my posts On the Danger of Metaphors in Scientific Discourse; Hume on Intellectual Property and the Problematic “Labor” Metaphor; Objectivist Law Prof Mossoff on Copyright; or, the Misuse of Labor, Value, and Creation Metaphors; Locke, Smith, Marx and the Labor Theory of Value. [↩]
3. See The Surprising History of Copyright: Karl Fogel at Google Tech Talks. [↩]
4. See Yet Another Study Finds Patents Do Not Encourage Innovation. [↩]
5. See my The Death Throes of Pro-IP Libertarianism”, The Four Historical Phases of IP Abolitionism. [↩]
6. “Ideal objects” is Tom Palmer’s term; Roderick Long notes there should not be property in information because information “is a universal, existing in other people’s minds and other people’s property, and over these the originator has no legitimate sovereignty. You cannot own information without owning other people.” See Tom Palmer, “Intellectual Property: A Non-Posnerian Law and Economics Approach” and “Are Patents and Copyrights Morally Justified? The Philosophy of Property Rights and Ideal Objects”; Roderick Long, The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights. Also see Long’s “Bye-Bye for IP,” Austro-Athenian Empire Blog (May 20, 2010). See also “Against Intellectual Property After Twenty Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward”, the section “Resources, Properties, Features, and Universals“. [↩]

I just came across a pretty nice review of my monograph Against Intellectual Property, by anarchist “Abject Dogma,” as part of his “10 Book Reviews in 10 Days” series (others in his 10-part series can be found here):

Abject Dogma

The Abject Dogma of an Anarchist Martinet

10 Book Reviews in 10 Days: Day 6

5-23-2011
Number 5 – Against Intellectual Property by Stephan Kinsella

Against intellectual Property is by far one of the most important documents in libertarian theory. As far as condensed information goes only Gustav de Molinari’s ‘The Production of Security’ or ‘Anatomy of the State’ rival ‘Against IP’. IP as anyone reading this already knows is a hot topic among libertarians. Because of the focus on property rights that is the crux of libertarianism and voluntarism many people take for granted the idea of IP. Others, mostly objectivists, cite Ayn Rand’s disposition towards her own works and her…some would say fanatical defense of IP. In my own personal experience there seem to be an unusual number of software engineers/coders/etc who defend IP…which makes sense due to the (near)infinitely copyable nature of their work though I wonder how many of them regularly visit The Pirate Bay. Unfortunately for them though you don’t get to violate the NAP whenever it is convenient or relevant to your employment.

Kinsella’s argument is multi-faceted; he refutes Utilitarian, Natural Rights, Contract and property-rights defences of IP and the book is targeted towards libertarians and non-libertarians alike. This book is only about 60 pages long but managed to fully convince me that this issue is settled from an An-Cap stand point. Kinsella argues that not only does IP not help innovation but stifles it. The property rights argument was actually settled by Rothbard in Man, Economy, & State where he explicitly states that recipes are not property and this extends to IP as well being that any given item of IP is not scarce and therefore not an economic good, Kinsella merely elaborates this point but it was a necessary elaboration.

The two most important arguments in ‘Against IP’ are that contracts cannot bind a third party and that you have no right to ‘the value of the property’. For the former: A contracts with B to not copy a mousetrap but C sees the mousetrap on B’s desk. C is under no contractual obligation to not copy the mousetrap. The latter is basically a reference to Hans-Herman Hoppe who successfully argued that you only have a right to your property’s physical integrity not to any ‘intrinsic value’. Both of these have been vital in the evolution of my own thought and will serve anyone as a primer to further libertarian philosophy especially Block and his endlessly entertaining defense of the right to blackmail.

Final Score: 9.25
Topic appeal: 10
Information: 8
Execution: 9.5

Special modifier: — No modifier for this one, it is a solid work with few flaws and I wish it had ended the IP discussion among libertarians once and for all, alas that is not the case which is endlessly frustrating. If anyone would like to yell at me about how vital IP is [email protected] for all of your hate-mail.

As I noted in UK Minister says website blocking proposals “imminent”, in a comment on my google+ post about this, the  Minister of Justice for Lithuania, Remigijus Šimašius, who happens to be an Austro-libertarian (he authored a chapter in the book I edited, Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe), wrote:

Lithuanian minister of Justice (me) says that ACTA (even having in mind its vagueness) may hamper internet freedom and strengthens mechanisms of IP protections to the level which is hardly justifiable.

I asked him for more detail and he pointed me to his blog post about ACTA, which google translates as “ACTA – what a beast and how terrible it is?” His description to me about it is:

I have posted my comments on my blog which was used in Lithuanian media. Today I was asked by many Lithuanian media about ACTA.

The essence of my comment was that certain provisions of ACTA are new to our legal system (more severe punishment, more control of internet providing services) and I do not see why those provisions are necessary.

I have also stated that our life is more and more dependent on R&D, new inventions, creativity. Existing IP protection system, however, is more about protecting the IP protection industry than a protection of inventors and authors. Current debate worldwide is a clear sign that we have to re-evaluate the existing IP rights system.

Below is my (lightly edited) reply to an email I received this morning from a UK grad student in economics. One brain at a time. Only 6.999 billion to go.

[Update: See also An Objectivist Recants on IP; Yet another Randian recants on IP; Does Cato’s New Objectivist CEO John Allison Presage Retrogression on IP?; “The Death Throes of Pro-IP Libertarianism”]

***

[K], thanks for your nice note. I’m glad you are thinking about these things and having some breakthroughs. This is not an easy issue for people since the idea of IP is so ingrained in our culture and law.

I suggest you start with the resources listed at www.c4sif.org/resources. That should address some of your remaining questions. And if you are in economics then I highly recommend you look into the works of the Austrian school, for what might be an eye-opening approach to your entire discipline. There are a large number of works at www.mises.org but I would suggest you take a look at Mises’s Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, Hoppe’s Austrian Science and the Economic Method and his A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, and perhaps Rothbard’s What Has Government Done to Our Money. All these are available free online at Mises.org and Hoppe’s are additionally available at www.hanshoppe.com (which I run).

And see inline below.

Best wishes

[K]

More censorship and threats to freedom of speech in the name of copyright. From IPTegrity.com:

 The British government is about to unveil proposals to block the Internet for copyright enforcement purposes. The confirmation came in a Parliamentary debate yesterday  on Intellectual Property, in which pro-copyright MPs had a little ‘chit-chat’ about   the allegedly  ‘anti-copyright’ government, and indicated their desire for the activation of the Digital Economy Act.

Read more>>

Update: In a comment on my google+ post about this, my friend Remigijus Šimašius (who authored a chapter in the book I edited, Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe), who is the Minister of Justice for Lithuania, wrote:

Lithuanian minister of Justice (me) says that ACTA (even having in mind its vagueness) may hamper internet freedom and strengthens mechanisms of IP protections to the level which is hardly justifiable.

Further update: see Lithuanian Minister of Justice Condemns ACTA and Calls for Re-evaluation of IP

“If you give away an idea, you still own that idea. In fact, giving it away strengthens it.” — Prince

But wait:

On September 14, 2007, Prince announced that he was going to sue YouTube and eBay because they “are clearly able [to] filter porn and pedophile material but appear to choose not to filter out the unauthorized music and film content which is core to their business success.”

h/t Aaron Graham

Update: as my friend Dan Coleman says: “One could probably assemble a number of these kinds of contradictions from famous people. I know Bezos has one about books where he changed from defending re-selling books through Amazon to enforcing DRM on the Kindle. Steve Jobs made an unfortunate 180 on idea sharing and stealing, too.”

Sam Raimi’s three Spider-Man movies, with Tobey Maguire playing the superhero, were very successful (and the first two, in my view, were very good). And now the film franchise is being “rebooted” with a new cast in the upcoming film The Amazing Spider-Man.

Interestingly, as noted at comicbookmovie.com, Andrew Garfield, the actor playing the new Spider-Man, watched the earlier Spider-Man first via pirated copy, and admitted as much to MTV News:

Andrew Garfield has some big shoes and a tight unitard to fill when he steps into a role that Tobey Maguire did so well at. He’ll have to overcome the comparisons, but after watching the trailer I think the bright young actor will exceed expectations and become the best live-action Spider-Man.

When MTV News’ Josh Horowitz asked Andrew describe the difference between Marc Webb’s version as compared to Sam Raimi’s version he responded:

“I can’t answer that, really. I don’t know. I know that I saw the Sam Raimi/Tobey Maguire version before it was legally out. I was so excited to see it, I got a pirate copy,” Garfield told MTV News before a screening event Monday. “I was blown away. [Tobey has] been Spider-Man in my imagination since then, in my mind’s eye.”

The star of The Social Nework went on to talk about the best way that he approached playing the iconic role of Spidey. He tells MTV, “I approached the character like any fan would: with real reverence and terror and attempt to do it justice.”

“I do feel like he’s in me, like all true fans do,” he said. “That’s what being a fan is of a character like this: feeling like there’s no separation between you and them and that you have ownership over them. Ultimately, you have no ownership over it, because he belongs to everybody.”

As Stan Lee might say, ’nuff said!

(h/t Skyler Collins)

Update: This is not the first time I’ve posted about the intersection of comics and IP/politics. See my previous posts below:

Re: Superman Renouncing His US Citizenship

Update: See more posts on Internet freedom. See also

• Whereupon Grok admits it (and AI) is severely gimped by copyright law
• ​ Libertarian and IP Answer Man: Artificial Intelligence and IP

Those who are on the fence about the patent issue and care a bit about the Internet, property rights, and freedom–time to get off the fence.

Patent Troll Claims Ownership of Interactive Web – And Might Win. But don’t worry, the patent expires in 2 years. And really, what’s two years’ loss of the Internet mean, in the grand scheme of things, after all?

Great Falkvinge post:

They would cut up large blocks of ice from the frozen lakes in the winter, store them on sawdust in huge barns, then cut the blocks into smaller chunks and sell them in the streets. People would buy the ice and keep it with food in special cupboards, so the food would be in cold storage.

(This is why some senior citizens still refer to refrigerators as “ice boxes“.)

COLUMN REPOST
This column has previously been published on TorrentFreak. It has been updated here to reflect recent developments.

When households in Stockholm were electrified in the first half of the last century, these distributors of cold were made obsolete. After all, what they distributed was the ability to keep food cold, and everybody could suddenly do that themselves.

This was a fairly rapid process in the cities. With the availability of the refrigerator from circa 1920, most households had their own refrigerator by the end of the 1930s. One of the city’s largest employers – distributors of cold – had been made totally obsolete by technical development.

There were many personal tragedies in this era as the icemen lost their breadwinning capacity and needed to retrain to get new jobs in a completely new field. The iceman profession had often been tough to begin with, and seeing your industry disintegrate in real-time didn’t make it any easier.

But here are a few things that didn’t happen as the ice distribution industry became obsolete:

• No refrigerator owner was sued for making their own cold and ignoring the existing corporate cold distribution chains.
• No laws were proposed that would make electricity companies liable in court if the electricity they provided was used in a way that destroyed icemen’s jobs.
• Nobody demanded a monthly refrigerator fee from refrigerator owners that would go to the Icemen’s Union.
• No lavishly expensive expert panels were held in total consensus about how necessary icemen were for the entire economy.

Rather, the distribution monopoly became obsolete, was ignored, and the economy as a whole benefited by the resulting decentralization.

We’re now seeing a repeat of this scenario, but where the distribution industry – the copyright industry – has the audacity to stand up and demand special laws and say that the economy will collapse without their unnecessary services. But we learn from history, every time, that it is good when an industry becomes obsolete. That means we have learned something important – to do things in a more efficient way. New skills and trades always appear in its wake.

The copyright industry tells us, again and again and again, that if they can’t have their obsolete distribution monopoly enshrined into law with ever-increasing penalties for ignoring it, that no culture will be produced at all. As we have seen, equally time and again, this is hogwash.

What might be true is that the copyright industry can’t produce music to the tune of one million US dollars per track. But you can’t motivate monopoly legislation based on your costs, when others are doing the same thing for much less – practically zero. There has never been as much music available as now, just because all of us love to create. It’s not something we do because of money, it’s because of who we are. We have always created, ever since we learned to put red paint on the inside of cave walls.

What about movies, then? Hundred-million productions? There are examples of garage-produced movies (and one even has beat Casablanca to become the most-seen movie of all time in its native country). But it may appear true that the argument is somewhat stronger with the blockbuster-type cinema productions.

A recent article of mine dispels this, too; blockbusters can make double  their investment back before a digital copy can even exist in the wild, so it will not be an issue. Investments will  happen.

But I’m going go out on a limb here and say, that even if it is true that movies can’t be made the same way with the Internet and our civil liberties both in existence, then maybe it’s just the natural progression of culture.

I spend quite a bit of time with teenagers through my work with the Pirate Party. One thing that strikes me is that they don’t watch movies, at least nowhere near the quantity I did when I was a teenager. Just like I threw out my TV set 15 years ago, maybe this is just the natural progression of culture. Nobody would be surprised if we moved from monologue-style culture to dialogue- and conversation-type culture at this point in history. Immersive gaming stands out as an excellent candidate to replace movies.

After all, we have previously had operettes, ballets, and concerts as the high points of culture in the past. Even radio theaters (and famous ones). Nobody is particularly concerned that those expressions have had their peak and that society has moved on to new expressions of culture. There is no inherent value in writing today’s forms of culture into law and preventing the changes we’ve always had.

Everywhere I look, I see that the copyright monopolies need to be cut down to allow society to move on from today’s stranglehold on culture and knowledge. Teenagers today typically don’t even see the problem – they take sharing in the connected world so totally for granted, that they discard any signals to the contrary as “old-world nonsense”.

And they certainly don’t ask for a refrigerator fee.

From Falkvinge.net:

Planned Post-ACTA Repression In European Union: The Documents

Repression: Documents have leaked from the European Commission that gives a glimpse of the planned crackdown on online freedoms of speech post-ACTA. We’re seeing entirely new mechanisms and means of squelching dissent, mechanisms and means against pretty much anything online. A European Commissioner responsible for the…

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