This New York Times opinion piece investigates the question of whether the color red can be trademarked and enforced. The op-ed is right in drawing attention to the absurdity but wrong in calling for a comprehensive package of legislation for fashion. How about a free market instead?
P.S. I would add the cool image from the NYT story but these days who knows anymore what might get you arrested at gunpoint?
Great LewRockwell.com piece by Gary North:
by Gary North
Recently by Gary North: Auditing the FED’s Gold
“When we feel the heat, we see the light.” ~ Senator Everett Dirksen
On Wednesday, January 18, the forces of liberty gained a major political victory over the entrenched meddlers in Congress. The owners of a handful of popular Internet sites joined together to protest SOPA/PIPA. They blacked out their sites and provided information on the threat to Internet liberty this bill posed.
Before the day was over, a majority of our elected representatives were doing a superb imitation of the captain of the grounded Italian cruise ship. They abandoned ship as fast as he did, and for the same reason. (Note: the reason was not that they had slipped and fallen into the lifeboat, then to be carried to safety against their will.)
A few weeks before, the Senate version of the House’s SOPA (Stop Online Piracy ACT) bill, called PIPA, was unanimously passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee. PIPA stands for the Protect IP [Intellectual Property] Act. It was non-controversial at the time. It was on a well-greased skid to passage.
Let us not be naive. SOPA/PIPA is a payback for to the entertainment industry’s generous support of PACs and campaign donations. For a list of who got how much, click here.
Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) did object. He was not on the committee. He vowed to filibuster PIPA. So, Harry Reid announced that he would push it through. He vowed to introduce a 60-vote cloture motion to limit debate. Senator Reid said he would schedule the debate on January 24. There is a Website called Unanimous Consent. It tracks the fast-track bills. Here was its assessment on December 23. [continue reading…]
Amazing, insightful piece by Jeff Tucker from Laissez-Faire Today:
Power vs. People in the Digital Age
The government seems determined to turn out the lights on the digital age. And this is with or without SOPA or the other bills that were only this week shouted down by the global digital community on Blackout Wednesday. The very next day, after support for that legislation collapsed after an impressive mass protest, the FBI and the Justice Department demonstrated that they don’t have to pay any attention to all this silly clamor. Congress, legislation, polling, debates, politicians, the will of the people — it’s all a sideshow to these people.
The FBI and Justice Department, on their own initiative, shut down megaupload.com, the biggest of thousands of file-sharing sites online, and arrested four of its top officials. The FBI is hunting down three others who seem to be on the lam. They all face extradition and 20 years in prison. As part of the sweep, the feds issued 20 search warrants and arrived at individual houses in helicopters. They cut their way into houses, threatened with guns, confiscated $50 million in assets and outright stole 18 domain names and many servers.
And what is the grave crime? The site is accused of abetting copyright infringement, that is permitting the creating of copies of ideas expressed in media. No violence, no fraud, no force, no victims (but plenty of corporate moguls who claim, without proof, that their profits are lower as a result of file sharing).
Megaupload had millions of happy users. It was the 71st-most-popular website in the world. Only 2% of its traffic came from search engines, which means that its customer base was loyal and collected through the hard work and entrepreneurship of site owners. For its users, it was a wholly legitimate service. For the owners, their profits were hard earned through advertising.
But the government saw it differently. And contrary to what many people believe, the already-existing law permits the government to do pretty much whatever it wants, as this case shows. The government relied on a 2008 law to make criminal, instead of civil, charges. A newly created IP task force is the one that worked with the foreign governments to seal the deal.
In the end, it was a presentation of exactly the nightmare scenario that anti-SOPA protesters said would happen if SOPA had passed. It turns out, as the deeper realms of the state already knew, that all of this was possible with no congressional action at all. Congress doesn’t need to do anything. We can watch the debates, go to the polls, elect people to represent us and perform all the rest of the rituals of the civic religion, but none of it matters. Power is here, active, oppressive, in charge and permanent, regardless of what you might believe.
Might it be that some of the users’ shared content on Megaupload was copyright protected? Absolutely. It is nearly impossible not to violate the law, as shown by SOPA sponsor Lamar Smith’s own campaign website, which used an unattributed background image in technical violation of the law. The leading opponent of piracy might himself be a pirate!
But the trendline with Megaupload was clearly toward using the space to launch new artists with new content — not piracy, but creativity. As Wired.co.uk wrote, this crackdown:
“came shortly after Megaupload announced music producer Swizz Beatz — married to Alicia Keys — as their CEO. They had rallied a whole host of musicians, including Will.i.am, P. Diddy, Kanye West and Jamie Foxx to endorse the cloud locker service. Megaupload was building a legitimate system for artists to make money and fans to get content.”
What‘s this all about? It is some powerful corporate lobbyists trying to prevent the emergence of an alternative system of art and music delivery, one powered by people, rather than merely the well connected.
The Internet’s great glory is its seemingly magical capacity for distributing information of all sorts universally unto infinity. The idea of the state’s regulations on information — instituted by legislators in the 19th century — is that this trait is deeply dangerous and must be stopped. So it is inevitable that the powers that be will try to shut it down; copyright enforcement is only the most-convenient Taser of choice.
This is the battle for whether the digital age is permitted to exist in an atmosphere of free speech, free association, free enterprise and real property rights or whether it will be controlled by government in conjunction with aging media moguls from monopolistic corporate oligarchies. The lines are clearly drawn, and the battle is taking place in real-time.
Example: Within minutes after the officials of Megaupload were arrested, a global hacker group called Anonymous shut down the Justice Department’s website and the sites of the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, Universal music and BMI — the major lobbying forces in Washington for restriction and reaction against the Internet.
In another stage of the great battle over information freedom, the Supreme Court, on the very day of the SOPA protests, handed down a decision that could have a devastating effect in the months and years ahead. It permitted the re-copyrighting of works that are already in the public domain so that the domestic law accords with the international law. If that sounds like no big deal, consider that many local orchestras have already changed their season lineups to remove some major works from their repertoire because they can no longer handle the licensing fees.
It’s hard to know what to call this but cultural masochism.
Regardless of how the legal struggles turn out, a culture of rational and irrational fear has gripped the Web. I’ve noticed this growing over the last months, but just this week, it has become worse, to the point of paranoia, and even mania. The successful protests against SOPA ended up only causing the censors to redouble their efforts, and the message is getting out: Almost everything you want to do online could be illegal.
A small sample of what I mean… Just this morning, I received the following email: “BBC Four recently broadcast a stunningly beautiful documentary called God’s Composer (Tomás Luis de Victoria), hosted by Simon Russell Beale. A friend in Rome sent me a link to it, but I’m not sure I’m free to share it. Have you seen this documentary? It is stunning both visually and musically.”
Not free to share a link? What? To be sure, I don’t know whether he intended to send me to the BBC or some other site that is hosting an additional copy of it. Regardless, this is what it has come down to: a belief that every email is traced, every site is monitored, every act of individual volition on the Web could be a crime, every website is vulnerable to an overnight takedown, every domain owner could be subject to arrest and jail.
The battle between power and freedom dates to the beginning of recorded history, and we are seeing it play out right before our eyes in the digital age. It’s as if at the beginning of the Bronze Age, the leading tribal chieftain made smelting ore illegal; or if at the transition from iron to steel, the ruling elite put a cap on the temperature of refining ovens; or if at the beginning of flight, some despot declared the whole enterprise to be too risky and economically damaging to the industry that depended on land travel.
In the current version, the issue of “intellectual property” is at the forefront of this battle. The first most people heard of this was on Blackout Wednesday, when Wikipedia went black. This is a foretaste of the future in a world in which power achieves victory after victory, while the rest of the world cowers with fear in darkening times.
Jeffrey Tucker
Jeffrey Tucker, publisher and executive editor of Laissez-Faire Books, is author of Bourbon for Breakfast: Living Outside the Statist Quo and It’s a Jetsons World. You can write him directly here.
From the great Nina Paley on Techdirt:
Clay Shirky: Why SOPA’s Not Going Away
from the it’s-about-eliminating-competition dept
I’m not big on videos over a minute long, but this one really lays out the war on sharing that underlies bills like SOPA (and its predecessors COICA, ACTA, and the DMCA). Some excerpts:
SOPA and PIPA…want to raise the cost of copyright compliance, to the point where people simply get out of the business of offering it as a capability to amateurs….
In order to fake the ability to sell uncopyable bits, the DMCA also made it legal to force you use systems that broke the copying function of your devices…they also made it illegal for you to try to re-set the copyability of that content. The DMCA marks the moment where the media industries gave up on distinguishing between legal and illegal copying, and simply tried to prevent copying through technical means….
PIPA and SOPA are round two. But where the DMCA was surgical – we want to go down into your computer, into your television set, your game machine, and prevent it from doing what they said it would do at the store – PIPA and SOPA are nuclear. They’re saying we want to go anywhere in the world and censor content.
If you’re trying to explain the issues regarding SOPA to someone else, try showing them this. Yes, it’s 14 minutes, but still much more concise and comprehensible than anything I could accomplish in a much longer conversation.
I was a guest today on the Liberty Underground Radio Show on the 1787 Radio Network, discussing IP for about 25 minutes. The reason they invited me on was the hosts, in discussing SOPA and PIPA in the Dec. 31, 2011 show (hour 1, starting about 10 minutes in), had a dispute about IP. Although the main host questioning me was on the fence about IP, he was open-minded, fair, and civil, and I think he moved a bit in the anti-IP direction by the end.
The show has a podcast (feed) and my segment was on the second hour, starting at about 25:25 (audio).
[From my Webnote series]
[Update:
In Masnick on the Horrible PROTECT IP Act: The Coming IPolice State, I noted some insane excesses of patent and copyright (like the precursor to SOPA), and wrote:
I believe in days past, say, before the Internet, IP was bad but it was not even in the top 20 or 30 of harmful state policies. But nowadays I believe it is in the top six most evil and harmful state laws, institutions, and policies:
- war;
- the Fed/central banking/fiat money;
- government schools;
- taxation;
- the drug war;
- intellectual property.
IP is extremely insidious because, unlike the drug war, tax, or war, it is held out as a type of property right. Thus, in its name, the state can spy, fine, and jail, or even enlist private citizens to enforce these laws on their own behalf, as mini-state agents. Truly, we are becoming an IPolice State.
And if we divide them out, copyright, I am now convinced, is significantly worse than patent, for reasons given in Patent vs. Copyright: Which is Worse?:1
Over the years I have vacillated on this issue. But I am becoming convinced that copyright is worse than patent, for the following reasons:
Length. The patent term is about 17 years, while copyright usually lasts over 100 years (life of author plus 70 years).
Trends. Copyright law keeps getting worse,2 while patent law has been basically the same for a while now, and in fact has slightly improved–in recent years it’s more difficult to get injunctions; and the recent patent reform law, the America Invents Act, actually added a general prior commercial user defense, the first significant legislative improvement to patent law … ever.3
Taxation versus Censorship, the Police State, and Regulation of the Internet. The patent system imposes costs of at least $100 billion a year, by reducing innovation and competition.4 So it basically acts like a tax. It’s bad, it impoverishes us, it slows things down. But it’s just another tax.
The copyright system, by contrast, besides imposing untold billions of cost on the economy, consumers, and artistic creation, and distorting the entire domain of creative works, is also being used as an excuse by the state to increase its surveillance, warrantless searches and seizures, punitive bans of people from the Internet without due process, censorship, cutting off websites accused of piracy, and control and regulation of the Internet and related technologies. As the Internet is one of the most significant tools ever to emerge to help people battle the state and communicate and learn and spread ideas, this is very chilling. In the name of stopping copyright piracy, the state is trying to squash mankind’s greatest anti-state weapon.5 Taxes are bad, but killing or restricting the Internet is just horrible. Copyright is worse.
And in light of recent events–Revised ‘Net censorship bill requires search engines to block sites, too, British student Richard O’Dwyer can be extradited to US for having website with links to pirated movies, Copyright and the End of Internet Freedom, the threat posed by SOPA, Man sentenced to federal prison for uploading “Wolverine” movie, the Supreme Court ruling (on the day of the SOPA blackout “victory”) that Congress has the power to take public domain works and subject them again to copyright, and the Department of Justice’s/FBI’s shutting down of MegaUpload.com and arresting four of its personnel IN NEW ZEALAND, without the use of SOPA/PIPA (as noted inAnti-SOPA “victory”? The fight is not over: Courts and Justice Dept Give us the finger)–I’m thinking we need to move IP a notch or two up the list.
From Mike Masnick at Techdirt:
The Internet Wins: PIPA & SOPA Delayed
from the there-we-go dept
The writing has been on the wall for a long, long time, but now it’s finally official. Harry Reid has announced that he will not move forward with PIPA and Lamar Smith has announced the same thing about SOPA. Both are listed as “delayed” and there’s always a chance that they will come back in some form (potentially even nastier), but hopefully those on Capitol Hill have learned a big lesson about trying to mess with the internet… and what happens when you cut backroom deals to help one industry at the expense of the public.
Mike Masnick has this interesting post up today at Techdirt:
Crowd Cheers Loudly As All Four GOP Candidates Say No To SOPA/PIPA
from the national-issue dept
It really was just a few weeks ago that a Hollywood lobbyist laughed at me (literally) when I suggested that SOPA/PIPA might become a national issue during the Presidential campaign. As he noted, copyright issues just aren’t interesting outside of a small group of people. My, how things have changed. After this week’s protests made front pages and top stories everywhere, it’s not all that surprising that the candidates at the latest GOP debate were asked their opinion of the bills… and all four came out against them. Of course, this seems to fit with the new GOP positioning that they’re the anti-SOPA/PIPA party (so sorry Lamar Smith…). Mediaite has the video:
Masnick quotes each of the four candidates’ responses to the question. I provide them below, with “translations” provided by my friend Daniel Coleman for the three statist candidates:
Gingrich: “You are asking a conservative about the economic interests of Hollywood? I am weighing it and thinking fondly of the many left wing people that I am so eager to protect. On the other hand, you have so many people that are technologically advanced such as Google and You Tube and Facebook that say this is totally going to mess up the Internet. The bill in its current form is written really badly and leads to a range of censorship that is totally unacceptable. I believe in freedom and think that we have a patent office, copyright law and if a company believes it has generally been infringed upon it has the right to sue. But the idea that we have the government start preemptively start censoring the Internet and corporations’ economic interest is exactly the wrong thing to do.”
Translation: I joke about using power to hurt people who disagree with me on policy. But seriously, folks, this bill got way too unpopular for me to be able to support it. I think you need the powers of this bill vested differently so that it won’t cause as much of an outrage.
Romney: “The law as written is far too expansive, far too intrusive and far too threatening of freedom of speech and information carried across the Internet. It would have a depressing impact on one of the fastest growing industries in America. I care deeply about intellectual content going across the Internet and if we can find a way to very narrowly go after those people who are pirating especially those offshore. But a very broad law that gives the government the power to start saying who can pass what to whom, I say no and I am standing for freedom.”
Translation: I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. But once this whole to-do about SOPA has had its 15 minutes of fame in the media, slightly reword the act and I’ll support it.
Paul: “I am one of the first Republicans to oppose this law and so glad that sentiment has mellowed up here as Republicans have been on the wrong side of this issue and this is a good example on why its good to have someone who can look at civil liberties … freedom and the Constitution bring people together.”
Santorum: “I do not support this law and believe it goes too far. But I will not agree with everyone that there isn’t something that should be done to protect the intellectual content of people. The internet is not a free zone where anyone can do anything they want to do and trample the rights of other people. Particularly when we are talking about entities off shore. The idea that the government has no role to protect the intellectual property of this company, that’s not right. The idea that anything goes on the Internet? Who has that idea. Property rights should be respected.”
Translation: I basically don’t have a problem with this law, but it would be suicide to admit it. I mean, people have way too much freedom online: do you know what people are saying my name means on the internet?
Santorum was the worst and creepiest. He is bugged by freedom and the Internet. As Masnick said:
Santorum’s answer is the weakest, obviously — and isn’t too surprising. Just recently he made a statement that was about how online activity should be regulated.
But, really the most interesting part of what happened was not the candidates answering the question, but the audience’s response. When John King asked the question and gave a brief explanation of SOPA/PIPA… he also mentioned that CNN’s parent company, Time Warner, supported the bill… and the crowd booed loudly. When the candidates — particularly Gingrich and Paul — made their claims, the crowd cheered loudly.
Update: here is Santorum apparently endorsing SOPA or something like it, and regulation of the Internet and restriction of Internet freedom in the name of child pornography and piracy.
[TLS]
From LewRockwell.com:
The heroic founder of Khan Academy–“learn almost anything for free”–explains these two State power grabs on behalf of corporatist pressure groups. (Thanks to Steve Bartin)
Update/Related post: Where does IP Rank Among the Worst State Laws?
***
The civil libertarian and Internet-lovers are celebrating a temporary quasi-victory of sorts in the wake of the blow we delivered to the proponents of censorship, control, censorship, and abrogation of property rights, with the successful anti-about SOPA/PIPA/copyright Internet blackouts and protest campaign that culminated yesterday.
But I imagine the goons at the RIAA and MPAA are snickering right now. Because they know they don’t really need SOPA. Current copyright law, aided by the DMCA, ICE seizures, and so on are bad enough.1 My guess is these fascists figured they would try for SOPA and if it snuck in, more to the better; and if not, they could adopt the pose that current regulations are reasonable and just barely enough. But under current copyright and DMCA law and associated enforcing agents of the federal thugs, the Obama administration has seized websites to censor Wikileaks; Immigrations and and Custom Enforcement (ICE) has seized hundreds of domains in the name of stopping piracy and at the behest of the MPAA, in addition to other ICE domain seizures in the name of stopping child pornography (“Operation Protect Our Children“–What do you mean “our,” kemosabe?). An innocent hip-hop site was shut down for a year by ICE in the name of IP. Jammie Thomas and thousands of college students have been persecuted. Copyright has been used by private companies like Carrier IQ in censorship attempts–and in actual censorship, such as banning books and burning movies (literally: no hyperbole). The average Internet user already has potentially $4.5 billion—yes billion—in damages per year, for normal Internet use. That ain’t enough for these Big Content parasites?
On the day of the tech community’s “victory” over SOPA–yesterday–the Supreme Court ruled that Congress has the power to take public domain works and subject them again to copyright. And today, a mere day later, the Department of Justice (sic) has given us the middle finger, by having the FBI shut down MegaUpload.com, one of the world’s most popular file-sharing websites, and now proceeding to arrest four of its personnel behind it …. IN NEW ZEALAND (!) … in a global crackdown against the suspected online pirates (as noted in the DemandProgress alert pasted below) (see also Mike Masnick’s post DOJ Gives Its Opinion On SOPA By Unilaterally Shutting Down ‘Foreign Rogue Site’ Megaupload… Without SOPA/PIPA). And just the other day, a court ruled that British student Richard O’Dwyer can be extradited to US for having website with links to pirated movies. So what does the RIAA and MPAA need SOPA for? Copyright law is already horribly oppressive. Sure, they’ll keep turning the screw to put more pressure on free people who are not sufficiently under their control. But they already have a fascist boot on our throats. We cannot let up on them. We must eradicate copyright.
Here’s the DemandProgress alert:
Fight Back: Government Shuts Down MegaUpload
Unbelievable: After history’s largest online protest, the U.S. Government nonchalantly responds with the middle finger. The Wall Street Journal reports:
The FBI shut down Thursday one of the world’s most popular file-sharing websites, MegaUpload.com, and announced the arrest of four of the people behind it in a global crackdown against the suspected online pirates.
Here — check it out: If SOPA and PIPA pass it’ll just broaden the government’s power to do things like this: MegaUpload.com. (And make it ILLEGAL for us to link to sites that are seized — like we just did in the last sentence.)
As MegaUpload’s website notes — er… noted:
The fact is that the vast majority of mega’s Internet traffic is legitimate, and we are here to stay. If the content industry would like to take advantage of our popularity, we are happy to enter into a dialogue.
This is what we’re up against. Please tell President Obama and your lawmakers to put an end to it. NOW.
Just fill out the form at right to tell Obama and your lawmakers to stop messing with the Net!
If you’re already on Facebook, click here to share with your friends. If you’re already on Twitter, click here to tweet about the campaign: Tweet
In this article on PCMagazine, 11 PCMag staffers were asked for their take on SOPA. The response was almost universally negative, although most unfortunately first prefaced their opposition to SOPA by saying IP piracy “is of course a real problem”. For example:
This was also the tack taken by Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, which said that
“rogue foreign sites that pirate American intellectual property or sell counterfeit goods pose significant problems for our economy,” but PIPA and SOPA “are not the right solution to this problem, because of the collateral damage they would cause to the Internet.”
Why does Facebook blithely accept the unproven assertion that piracy harms the economy? Cato’s Julian Sanchez has debunked this nonsense.1 Sigh.
As I’ll discuss in a separate post,2 the problem is that all these people undercut their opposition to SOPA and censorship in the name of IP, by acknowledging the importance of copyright and IP, by condemning piracy. It is admirable that they are taking the ride side of the chasm caused by their cognitive dissonance, but dissonance it is. If you support copyright, you oppose piracy, and you support the state’s existence and its attempts to enforce these “property rights.” You cannot have both copyright, and Internet freedom/freedom of speech. The threat here to property rights, to individual rights, to Internet freedom and freedom of speech and expression and the press comes from copyright itself. We must strike at the root. SOPA is just a symptom of the disease. The disease is copyright. Everyone is trying to treat the symptom–enforcement efforts like SOPA–with half-hearted treatments like labeling the response “disproportionate” or going “too far.” This is like trying to treat a brain tumor by taking Tylenol–sorry, acetaminophen–in response to the headaches caused by the tumor. All opponents of SOPA and censorship, all denizens of the web and proponents of freedom, must oppose copyright itself (and patent too).
Anyway, I said “almost” above. The one holdout among PCMag staffers was John Dvorak, who
Most analysts will tell you that either of these two bills could kill the Internet as we know it. But Wikipedia’s protest and other blackouts will not solve anything. The only effective measure to take—unless you love these laws—is to directly target the supporters and co-sponsors of the bills. For more, see The Right Way to Protest SOPA.
In his linked editorial, he added:
Wikipedia’s protest and other blackouts will not solve anything. They are a total inconvenience to users who may want to use the service. What is accomplished? People will get mad at Wikipedia rather than mad at the specific Congressmen who promoted these bills.
Dvorak is smart, he is skeptical of IP, he has a libertarian streak, and I like him. But what is he smoking? Did people get mad at Wikipedia? It was a community decision! People love them for this. And it was one of the most amazingly effective and crucially important protests of our time, maybe of all time. How else were we supposed to get the attention of the demonic, evil Congresscritters in favor of these evil bills, except by waking up the people so they would rattle their cages? And now they are running scared–over a dozen Congressmen have come out against the bill or dropped their co-sponsorship of them (19 at last count). These assholes are running scared–and good. Would it have happened without the blackouts? Of course not.
The blackouts were good. They were heroic. They sent seismic shock waves through history. But the battle is not over yet. And the only true solution is to abolish the abomination that is copyright.
Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged–which had a working title of The Strike–was about the men of the mind, the producers, going on strike against an increasingly oppressive and ungrateful government and society. They withdrew their services to show the world who really needs whom.
And this is essentially what happened in yesterday’s Internet blackouts and other protests against SOPA and PIPA by tech, Internet, and Silicon Valley giants such as Google, Wikipedia, Reddit, and so on. And since SOPA and PIPA are just attempts to enforce copyright, the strike was essentially against copyright. Which is ironic, since Rand was completely in favor of patent and copyright, going so far as to maintain that “patents are the heart and core of property rights, with her followers saying that “all property is intellectual property”. And yet she would have admired the tech titans. Presumably she’d have been very horrified to see her heroes stage a mini-Atlas Shrugged strike–against copyright! The question is: would she have sued them for copyright infringement?
C4SIF is pleased to announce that Sheldon Richman has joined the Center’s Advisory Board. A long-time libertarian thinker and writer, Mr. Richman is Editor of The Freeman (Foundation for Economic Education), a contributor to The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, and the author of Separating School & State: How to Liberate America’s Families. Some of his IP-related publications may be found on the Center’s Resources page, to-wit:
It’s timely to reprint this, in the wake of SOPA protests:
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
by John Perry Barlow <[email protected]>
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don’t exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here. [continue reading…]
The Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom (C4SIF) is dedicated to building public awareness of the manner in which so-called “intellectual property” (IP) laws and policies impede innovation, creativity, communication, learning, knowledge, emulation, and information sharing. We are for property rights, free markets, competition, commerce, cooperation, and the voluntary sharing of knowledge, and oppose IP laws, which systematically impede or hamper innovation. IP law should be completely and immediately abolished.
We provide news commentary and analysis and scholarly resources from our unique pro-property, pro-market, pro-innovation perspective.
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