Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine have now engaged Cambridge University Press to publish their book Against Intellectual Monopoly, which is, hypocritically, subject to the artificial reproduction monopoly of copyright. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether this indicts the authors for their selection of publisher, or the reputedly academic publisher for failing to educate themselves with the words they lay claim to and neutralise their monopoly – or both.

Check out what Casey Bowman has to say apropos the publication of this book:
freepirate.blogspot.com/boldrin-and-levine-have-published-book.

It’s very disappointing, but not too surprising to the cynics among us, to deduce that even the ‘Pirate party’ is being infested by hand wringing moderates/reformists, so in fear of being identified as a den of IP thieves that they are antipathetic toward abolition or those who propose it.

Contrast this with Bill Stepp’s comparison of those privileged by copyright to suspend the public’s liberty, with those once privileged to own slaves:

Any book published in the United States is automatically copyrighted under the copyright law. Copyright is a form of slavery, under which certain actions of non-copyright holders are proscribed (e.g. making copies of books).

Just as under chattel slavery, a baby born of a slave was automatically a slave under the law of slavery, so too a non-copyright holder is a slave to an author and copyright holder who begats a book, under the law of copyright, to the extent he can’t perform certain actions with his own property.

Anyone opposed to slavery should be against copyright. He who says copyright also says slavery in the same breath.

In accord with Bill, those who advocate appeasement and so dare nothing more radical than the aspiration of a kinder copyright and a less frivolous patent system, may be compared to those who’d bless the god given right for men to keep slaves, but who’d compassionately call for some regulation of working and living conditions. See A Balanced Approach to Copyright?

I was amused only recently to discover that abolishcopyright.com not only admits defeat in its first post (that abolition is impossible), but then compounds this surrender with a Stockholm syndrome endorsement of copyright albeit with a shorter term.

That a world without the privilege of copyright/patent is so difficult to countenance, let alone grok, has led me on past occasions to conclude that the only way of achieving its abolition is to portray this as reform, as a set of apparently more constraining intellectual property rights – possibly having to retain the misnomer of ‘copyright’ to name it (when the term will at least then truly represent a restoration of the ‘right to copy’ and cease being a misnomer).

Nevertheless, latter day pirates do need to be identified correctly, the good from the bad. The good pirates should be recognised as those in pursuit of natural rights, necessarily including liberty unconstrained by mercantile privilege, not as apologetic reformists who simply desire greater kindness from their privileged masters. The bad pirates, at the other extreme, are those nihilistic libertines who would privilege themselves above all others. See The Freedom of Pirates or the Liberty of Civilised Men.

Anyway, do give the book a read.

• Publisher: cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521879286
• Buy: amazon.co.uk/dp/0521879280
• Download: dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm

A new website AbolishCopyright.com gives another sign that this imperative is beginning to have popular appeal.

Though it is amusing for the site’s proponent to then reveal that he doesn’t mean ‘abolish copyright’ literally:

“It is not practical to abolish copyright altogether in the U.S. since doing so would require a constitutional amendment. It is our intended purpose here to counter these foes of progress by refining the term “limited times” to a more reasonable value, for example 30 days.”

How in its first article can a site called ‘Abolish Copyright’ both give up hope of achieving its raison d’être and state that a 30 day copyright term is reasonable?

Either you’re a reformist or you’re an abolitionist.

Don’t wear the wrong mantle, even if it looks like it might get you more chicks. If you find it uncomfortable, it’s a clue that it doesn’t fit.

I would have posted a comment to the effect that no constitutional amendment is required (see Constitutional Sanction), but the site has informed me I’m not even authorised to view comments – let alone post them. Site configuration issues I guess.

Let’s see how it goes…

Apparently the Northern California chapter of the US Copyright Society is advertising in its spring newsletter an event on June 26th by Professor Lawrence Lessig entitled “The Growing Copyright Abolitionist Movement, and How You Can Help Stop It”.

As I’ve said before, no-one will have done more to postpone the inevitable abolition of copyright than Professor Lawrence Lessig – despite the claims of his maximalist detractors¹ who believe Creative Commons threatens copyright, when quite to the contrary its mission is actually to recast and reinforce copyright as an authorial privilege (naturally, just as unethical as when wielded by publishers).

So, if you understand that all mercantile privilege is unethical, even if restricted to self-publishing authors, then perhaps you might turn up and put the case for copyright’s abolition and the movement of those in support – who hold that no citizen should be threatened with 5 year jail sentences and million dollar fines for enjoying their cultural freedom, just so that an author benefits from a commercial monopoly over reproduction, performance, and other use of their published works.

If you need to counter claims that the US constitution sanctions copyright, you can point to my recent post here, where I show how the state can secure authors’ natural, exclusive rights to their writings without granting them unethical privileges such as copyright over their fellow men.

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¹ PFF’s recent diatribe against Lessig: Tragedy and Farce: An Analysis of the Book FREE CULTURE by Thomas D. Sydnor II

Jacob Tummon has written a very good paper arguing the case for the elimination of copyright (HT Karl Fogel via QuestionCopyright).

Without any authorisation or permission, I have copied his paper verbatim (from LegalTree) and it appears below.

In promoting Jacob and his excellent arguments by copying his published treatise should I be prosecuted for copyright infringement?

STOP PRESS

Jacob has asked me to remove his paper (that appeared here 23/5/07-17/10/07) in order that he can attempt to meet the criteria for it to be re-published in a conventional journal, i.e. that it not be published in any form elsewhere.

This seems a rather outdated and retrograde policy for the journal to persist in maintaining, but if one must jump through old fangled hoops to reach an old fangled audience in order to demonstrate the hoops are an anachronistic folly, well, so be it.

I’m doubtful that this removal can constitute ‘not published elsewhere’ given that publication is an irreversible event. Notwithstanding that, there are situations in which there is a right to withdrawal of published works from distribution in the case of violation of privacy or jeopardy to life, but this doesn’t actually undo the historical event of publication.

For those who’d like to know what originally appeared on this page I recommend the Wayback Machine. Entering the URL of this page gives this page as at 22/07/07.

Property is that which you physically and exclusively control, and have created or otherwise have a natural right to. It is something that you can exchange or can give to another. Try not to focus beyond that.

To make it easier to explain, an example of such property is a secret formula you write in a diary.

You could sell this formula to someone if they were convinced only you had it and it was valuable. Once you’ve sold it, it is no longer your secret.

It doesn’t matter that you haven’t destroyed your diary. The property was the secret, and you no longer have that secret.

It doesn’t matter that what you sold was transformed in the process of exchange (from a secret to a ‘restricted knowledge distribution’), you and the purchaser considered the exchange equitable. You now have more money instead of a secret. They have a formula which they didn’t have before, and less money.

This buyer, could instead have burgled your house, taken a photo of your diary, and thereby STOLEN your secret.
It doesn’t matter whether you knew about this or not, the fact remains that the burglar had to breach your privacy and property in order to remove something of value from you. You lost the secret.

Naturally, owners of secrets are conscious that they may be stolen without their knowledge and are sensitive to clues that theft may have occurred, e.g. previously keen purchasers suddenly claiming they’ve found someone else who also has a good formula.

Unfortunately, copyright makes people think that all intellectual property is a pretence, even private intellectual property. This is because copyright is about pretending that public intellectual property is still privately owned when it plainly isn’t. So, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater when you ignore copyright. You’re reclaiming the public’s rightful ownership of published intellectual property, you are not also claiming ownership of people’s private intellectual property – that’s still theirs to keep or sell.