Although I’m still focussed on 1p2U.com, some time later this year I hope to set up the website culturalliberty.org – a site dedicated to the restoration of everyone’s cultural liberty, especially from its constraint by anachronistic privileges such as copyright and patent (which should have been abolished along with slavery).

There’ll be a wiki upon which I hope ethical law can be developed (for legislative protection of all individuals’ natural rights concerning the possession, production and communication of information and intellectual works).

So, in getting started, I thought I’d sketch out some definitions, i.e. without explanations or examples (which can come later). Suffice it to say, these definitions will be tweaked.

Definitions

1. Individuals are human beings, a priori equal.
2. Human Rights, the rights of all individuals, are naturally: life, privacy, truth, liberty.
3. Right always and exclusively refers to right in the natural sense, implicitly qualified as natural right.
4. Life is the naturally optimal functioning of an individual human being, the preservation of its health and integrity, the necessary maintenance and protection of its body’s boundaries, sustenance and environment, and the perpetuation of its operating period.
5. Privacy describes the individual’s natural ability to exclude others from particular objects, information, and spaces that they possess, occupy, or are otherwise able to physically defend or secure. Privacy may be enjoyed jointly as well as singly.
6. The right to Truth is against interference with, or impairment of, anyone’s natural ability to perceive, pursue or apprehend it, e.g. against fraud or misrepresentation.
7. Liberty includes an individual’s freedom of movement, speech, or senses, in their natural habitat among their fellows, and entails that these freedoms remain without physical constraint – until the individual has been found in violation of anyone’s rights, and only then to the least extent possible and necessary for their rehabilitation and the protection of others’ rights.
8. Freedom is the natural, unconstrained condition of the individual, i.e. one not subject to government. It is delimited by all individuals’ natural power and interest to protect their natural rights – who may collectively empower a government.
9. Rights are inalienable. That means the individual cannot be parted from them, neither by themselves nor by their government.
10. Rights take precedence: Privacy must cede to Life (invasion may be warranted in the protection of life). Truth must cede to Privacy (the public’s interest does not outweigh the individual’s interest in excluding it). Liberty must cede to Truth (where its impairment through deceit or fraud risks harm or social disharmony). In this way each right delimits the next, and all rights delimit freedom.
11. Rights are imbued by nature in all individuals equally. They are not conditional, e.g. on gender, skin colour, religion, payment of taxes, nor good behaviour. If rights are not protected for the pariahs of society they are not protected for the paragons. If a government exempts terrorists from its protection it terrorises its own citizens as a consequence.
12. A harmonious society is epiphenomenal. It is that which results when a government carefully protects the rights of the citizens that empower it. Their protection is primary – not secondary to protection of society nor to the existence of the government they create, and thus rights should not be derogated in pursuit of social harmony, benefit to society, ‘the encouragement of learning’, ‘progress’, ‘the common good’, nor upon a wish by the people to engage in a ‘social contract’ to surrender, waive or relax their rights to that end, whether in whole or part.
13. Privileges (legislatively enacted analogues of rights) are always referred to as ‘privileges’, not as some call them: ‘legally granted rights’, ‘legal rights’ or simply ‘rights’. Privileges are instruments of injustice and not to be found in an egalitarian society nor any legislature primarily concerned with the protection of individuals’ natural rights.
14. A Contract is an equitable agreement (voluntary) between two individuals concerning the conditioned exchange of their property, whether material or intellectual. A contract cannot surrender, abrogate, nor derogate from any individual’s rights – it is not a promise (as would alienate liberty). A government has no power to enforce completion nor penalise incompletion, only to arbitrate in any dispute as to equity or agreeability, and to mandate a remedy to that end as far as is practicable.
15. A government is created and continuously empowered by its individual citizens, and those individuals are the only source of its power, which may be removed or redirected by them.
16. A government may be empowered to collect taxes to provide and care for its citizens’ common interest: the protection of their rights, their safety, health, and social well being, e.g. policing, defence, energy, utilities, transport, and communications infrastructure, healthcare, education, environment, etc.
17. Corporations or any other legally created entity are not individuals nor even comparable let alone equivalent, and being unnatural are not imbued with rights. All such entities should be regulated to ensure their activities and motives are aligned with the common good, i.e. not simply maximisation of share value.

News International retreats from the public, disagreeing with the idea that mere readers should be allowed, let alone encouraged to freely read and quote from newspapers, e.g. as I do now from “The Times paywall: An end to sharing” by Rory Cellan-Jones.

A great experiment is about to get under way, and it will tell us much about the future of journalism and the willingness of readers to pay for it. In Wapping last night, News International showed off the new websites for The Times and Sunday Times which have opened to the public this morning. Four weeks from now, a paywall will go up in front of the sites and, by News international’s own calculation, more than 90% of their audience will melt away.

This is of course nothing to do with readers’ willingness to pay journalists for their journalism, but the ability for newspapers to charge each reader for reading it, and prevent anyone who hasn’t paid from doing so. When you can’t sell copies, then selling access seems very similar – if you think like a newspaper, that is.

Rory later reveals:

I asked Danny Finkelstein whether it bothered him that from now on none of his journalism would “go viral”, with the risk that he’d be left invisible on the sidelines as the online debate raged through news sites without paywalls. “No,” he insisted,“I want my employer to be paid for my intellectual property.”

That is Stockholm Syndrome. I would think most journalists care more about being paid for their intellectual work than enabling their employers to charge readers for copies of it at monopoly protected prices – and failing that, to charge readers for access.

If news can be freely distributed to the public, the only thing left to pay for is the journalism – and the readers who want more can pay the journalists directly – to write.

See earlier conversations, with:

• Dan Conover – The newspaper suicide pact
• Steve Outing – So what exactly is newspaper web ‘premium’ content? Please tell me
• Danny Sullivan – If Newspapers Were Stores, Would Visitors Be “Worthless” Then?

Unlike many, Bill Rosenblatt has graciously tolerated my engagement with him in a conversation concerning copyright. At the time of writing, his and my comments still appear beneath his Copyright and Technology blog article entitled “William Patry’s War on Copyright”.

Jason K to Dennis on Michael Geist’s Blog

“The people representing industry who want to stomp out P2P file sharing and to whom creators are listening to in reality have gotten several opportunities around the globe to do so, and it hasn’t extracted any value for content owners, nor deterred the use of these programs.

Creators like yourself are so naive to believe that law will solve your problems, when the past 10 years you guys are still eating Kraft Dinner, because the multi-nationals are not interested in seeking a pay raise for content creators, they have a fetish right now to control the uncontrollable. It has NOTHING to do with compensating creators, nothing to do with right or wrong.

There have been several positions open up on the table to help extract IP value from the digital marketplace in the form of monetization, but that has been flatly rejected by the multi-nationals, which means money for creators in the current system is being TURNED DOWN by these groups because of their fetish for control.”

NB I made a copy of Jason’s good work, but I didn’t steal it.

Publishers aren’t interested in developing business models that pay intellectual workers for their intellectual work, because they’ve never been interested in paying intellectual workers anything except as little as possible. Moreover, they know exactly how to pay intellectual workers. They’ve been doing it for centuries.

What they aren’t in the business of is selling intellectual work. No, they’re 100% focussed on selling copies and controlling the distribution channels by which intellectual work is received by those who want to receive it.

The problem is, for them, that market is over. One can no longer sell copies or control distribution channels – though they’re still trying (making the laws ever more draconian, qv ACTA).

The publishers don’t give a damn about helping the intellectual worker sell their work because they’re not in that business. They’re certainly not interested in figuring out how to help the intellectual worker sell their work direct to those who want to receive it as that removes the publisher out of the value chain (along with their 99% cut), which would be madness.

So, the intellectual worker of today has to leave the publisher to pursue their folly of trying to sell copies to people who can make their own copies for nothing (selling snow to Sámi).

The intellectual worker now has the problem of how to sell their intellectual work to those who want to receive it. And those who want to receive it have the problem of how to commission their favourite intellectual workers to produce it.

I’m labouring the distinction between intellectual work and copies because too many people still think they’re one and the same (indeed, are hypnotised to believe that). The market for copies has ended (as the more astute publishers might one day realise). However, that doesn’t mean the market for intellectual work has ended. People still want novels and movies produced even if PDF and MPEG copies of them cost nothing to make. It is thus the intellectual work that is valuable – not the copy, and persisting in this popular petulance that the law must make it otherwise is unbecoming of any intellectual worker worthy of the term.

So, publishers, gone! Defunct. Dead as dinosaurs. Let’s hear nothing more about them. They are irrelevant to the imperative we face.

And that mission, for those willing to move beyond complaint to developing a solution, is to explore how intellectual workers and those who want to receive their work, can exchange that work for money. After all, this is the foundation of all commerce. It’s all about voluntary and equitable exchange.

Unfortunately, whilst I could tell you the solution now, there is a perverse, inverse relationship between the severity of a problem and the likelihood that whoever professes to have a solution will be found credible instead of being considered a charlatan. But I’ll give a URL anyway: contingencymarket.com (and again, perversely, there is pressure against making this a hyperlink).

Suffice it to say, the answer is in the question. If the question is “How does an intellectual worker exchange their intellectual work for the money of those who want to receive it, at a price both agree on, and without threat or coercion?” then the answer is “Via an exchange – via a mechanism that facilitates the exchange of intellectual work for money between a producer and many customers”.

The sale of copies is irrelevant. The very idea of selling copies is an 18th century anachronism (along with the 18th century privilege of a reproduction monopoly we call copyright).

The market for copies has ended. The market for intellectual work continues unabated.

On the Open Rights Group blog post today by Jim Killock (ORG Executive Director) entitled “What Panorama Didn’t Talk About: Our Rights”, I submitted a 2nd comment by way of reply to another commenter called ‘Tom’. Unfortunately, Michael Holloway (ORG Development Manager) e-mailed me to say “We don’t want every comments thread to descend into the same philosophical argument so i’m not going to publish this.”

So, I’m publishing it here instead. Let’s hope Tom finds it one day.

It seems strange to bar my comment on the subject of rights from a post specifically concerned with ‘Our Rights’, especially by an organisation seemingly interested to encourage openness and the upholding of our rights.

Anyway, here are the respective comments:

Crosbie Fitch

Privilege of Copyright vs Natural Right to Copy
_{Reply #7 on : Tue March 16, 2010, 10:00:25}

It’s the old “Would you sleep with me for a £million?” question. If you support copyright we’ve established you’re happy to surrender your right. All that’s being quibbled about now is the price (social cost of enforcement).

You can’t surrender your natural right AND complain that those you’ve surrendered it to are too eager to protect and exploit the privilege you’ve given them.

This won’t get resolved until the doublethink ends.

Tom

Re: Crosbie
_{Reply #4 on : Tue March 16, 2010, 10:41:45}

Hi Crosbie,

Whilst I agree in principle, I think in practice we have to act. It seems to me that copyright laws will have to evolve or be got rid of altogether because I don’t think anyone can halt the growth of sharing on the internet.

Unless, that is, we end up on a glorified version of a corporate network where almost nothing except http and https to a list of approved websites is allowed (oh yes and pre approved Microsoft gaming ports and protocols for the proles). I cannot believe even the average consumer would put up with this btw., even joe public must surely be able to recognise that we’d be worse off than the Chinese if that happened?!

Nevertheless, to be absolutely certain we do not even begin to roll along that road we MUST do everything we can to prevent this bill from being passed into law.

Crosbie Fitch

Go back to the shadow. You shall not pass!
_{Posted/Failed moderation on : Tue March 16, 2010, ~11:30am}

Tom, we cannot act – unless you mean to analyse, discuss, and argue.

The people can act, but only when they are roused. And it’s going to take quite some time before that happens, before the copyright based industry’s lobbied legislation starts kicking in to cause that degree of suffering.

The best thing to do about the 18th century privilege of copyright is to abolish it, restoring the individual’s natural right to copy. Then there’d be no calls to fine people on the basis of an accusation, bankrupt them, disconnect them, or censor their websites (or other ‘Internet locations’).

It should not be surprising that unjust legislation is being passed to enforce an instrument of injustice. What surprises me is just how difficult it is for anyone to even consider that copyright might be an injustice – without simply reeling off received pretexts and platitudes, comforting myths to avoid the unpalatable truth.

However, even if people do come to realise how copyright has become a weapon to be used against them, it’s not clear that shareholder centric publishing corporations would do anything except continue to plead for more firepower, more damage, more pain and suffering to ‘educate’ and subjugate the masses.

If they really would insist on pursuing the preservation of their monopolies despite the hidden economic cost to industry as a whole, then one way of retaining copyright on the statute books, but in a far less sociopathic form, would be to exempt the individual from possible infringement, i.e. make copyright apply exclusively to corporations.

One could even suggest an intermediate, ‘Back to the 80s’ copyright reform. This would limit copyright’s applicability to the individual to cover only their illicit manufacture and distribution of material copies, i.e. any electronic communication or diffusion by the individual would be considered ‘copyright exempt’ free speech whether it involved copying or not.

Thus, selling illicit copies of movies on DVDs or memory sticks in a car boot sale would remain an infringement, but file-sharing would not be (unless by a corporation). In this way the traditional printer’s monopoly is maintained, but the new technology upon which copyright is completely ineffective, warrants the removal of that invidious weapon’s use against the individual. This is the effective situation today anyway, so legislating it doesn’t actually change anything except to remove from corporations the power to randomly bankrupt or otherwise persecute fundamentally innocent citizens.

NB None of this (even abolition) derogates from any individual’s moral rights concerning their intellectual work, nor their natural exclusive right to their private intellectual works.

So there could certainly be more humane legislation, but unfortunately, it’s neither us nor the people who are able to get it rubber stamped by parliament. In any case, even if the individual was exempted by copyright, it’s likely there’d still be things like amendment 120a to permit the censorship of allegedly infringing websites. That’s why I’m a copyright abolitionist. There is nothing good either ethically or economically about copyright. Abolish copyright and you prevent disastrous enforcement measures, DMCA, EUCD, ACTA, DEBill, etc.

So, for the Digital Economy Bill, this is a demon that has now been unleashed.

Sadly, in this world there are no wizards to prevent its passing.

The interesting time in which we live is about to get more interesting…

It is sad that so many persist in thinking that copyright is a right created for the author, and a right that belongs to the author. It should be strange that it must be created for them, and very strange that they can sign it away.

As everyone should know, rights are not created – we are born with them. Privileges are created – through the derogation of the rights we already have. These privileges are like rights, but they are created through legislation, hence lawyers prefer to term them ‘legally granted rights’, ‘legal rights’, or simply ‘rights’. Because (thanks largely to copyright lawyers) the latter usage has now almost superseded the original, natural meaning of right (much to copyright holders’ pleasure), too many people use the word ‘right’ interchangeably without realising that right qua privilege is completely antagonistic to right qua right.

Now that people are twigging that something is going fundamentally awry with respect to children being sued millions for file-sharing and copyright considered a fundamental right of the artist (that prevents them starving), it’s more important than ever to resurrect the distinction between a (natural) right and a ‘right’ (crown privilege). We cannot continue to use a homophone for both.

Copyright is called ‘copyright’ because it is the suspension of the people’s right to copy, in order to reserve it into the hands of those privileged with it, who hold that privilege, hence ‘copyright holders’. We have Queen Anne to thank for granting the privilege.

For a little history concerning who copyright was created for (neither the author, nor the encouragement of learning) I’ll hand you over to Karl Fogel. Copyright actually discourages learning by impeding the free flow of ideas and communication of knowledge, because I would normally be committing copyright infringement in order to present an extract from his Question Copyright website:

Around 1700, political changes caused the government to loosen its control over the press. No longer desiring strong censorship, the government decided to allow the Stationers' monopoly to expire. This was a direct economic threat to the Stationers' monopoly-based livelihood, and they responded by proposing a compromise: they argued that authors have a "natural right" of ownership in their works, and that furthermore this right could be transferred to others by contract. The placement of original ownership with the author was a smart political ploy, by which the Stationers avoided charges that they were attempting to resurrect the old (and unpopular) monopoly mechanisms. But the stipulation that these new copyrights were a form of property, and therefore transferrable, showed the real motive behind their proposal. The Stationers correctly foresaw that authors would need to transfer copyright to a publisher as an inducement to print, and that therefore the publishers' position would about the same as it had been before. Indeed, their hand would be strengthened, because now the exclusive "ownership" of a work would now be based on well-established property law, instead of the temporary whim of the government.

The Stationers managed to persuade Parliament, and the result was the Statute of Anne: a copyright law created by the publishing industry, for the benefit of the publishing industry, and modeled on a defunct censorship system. The closest the Stationers ever came to talking about copyright's benefit to society was in arguing that they could not afford to print books (and thus encourage authors to write books) without protection against competition. Why books were to be considered different from other kinds of goods was never satisfactorily explained — one is left with the distinct impression of a monopoly-softened trade group in a panic at suddenly being asked to survive without special protections.

All this is a far cry from what the copyright lobby wants you to believe. There was no uprising of writers, clamoring counterintuitively for the right to prevent people from copying their works. The writers themselves never really participated in the debate around the creation of copyright. The argument was crafted and presented by publishers.

Copyright is not about subsidizing creators, it is about subsidizing distributors.

For further reading I highly recommend “The Surprising History of Copyright and The Promise of a Post-Copyright World” by the same author.