Flushing the Net Down the Tubes

netcetra writes "From a post by on CircleID by Phillip J. Windley: 'Doc Searls has written a brilliant piece framing the battle for the Net at Linux Journal. ... if you take the time to read just one essay on the Net and the politics surround it this year, read this one.' Quote from Doc himself: 'This is a long essay. There is, however, no limit to how long I could have made it. The subjects covered here are no less enormous than the Net and its future. Even optimists agree that the Net's future as a free and open environment for business and culture is facing many threats. We can't begin to cover them all or cover all the ways we can fight them. I believe, however, that there is one sure way to fight all of these threats at once, and without doing it the bad guys will win. That's what this essay is about.' Also see additional background on the piece on Doc Searls blog."

Comments

Slavery and Copyright

[Audacious]

I know some others have touched upon how slavery used to be (although "used to be" really is misleading since there are still people being bought and sold as slaves even today - see some of the various articles about women being bought and sold as slaves in America as well as other countries. And yes, they do get shut down but these trades do also seem to pop back up after a few years.).

My take though is that copyright is more akin to slavery than monopoly. Not that it didn't use to be more like a monopoly - only that now it is more like slavery. In the article, it is talked about how Larry Lessig and John Ashcroft talked about copyright in terms of ownership versus rights. I believe that if Mr. Lessig had approached the entire copyright issue as slavery of the America people versus the needs of the copyright owners that, just as "rights" and "ownership" have certain connotations, the connotations of slavery would have thrown copyright into the evil aspect that the founding fathers saw it as and might have swayed the justices more in Mr. Lessig's favor.

Ok, so why would anyone say copyright is like slavery? Well, it shackles us in that it restricts our usage of a given item. It forces rules and regulations upon us that otherwise would not exist. It impedes our ability to do as we please. And it punishes us even if we were unaware that we were doing something wrong in the first place. It can even force us to do things we would otherwise not want to do. It takes away our freedom. Can be used to destroy our ability to invent and create new items. (All of which is collectively known as the "Chill Factor".) Copyright, therefore, has come to mean evil, unscrupulousness, hoarding, bullying, and other evil things because we have let it become evil. What used to be a law to help protect the copyright owner has become a law used to inflict pain and suffering on others.

The founding fathers set the number of years to be fourteen with a single extension of fourteen years. They set it to be that way because (as their writings say) copyright is an unbearable condition to the very foundations of American society. A form of slavery not to be kept in place but allowed to fall from the shoulders like a heavy burden is released after having to carry it for a long while. They knew that people detested having to give up any kind of freedom. Especially after having fought for it for so long and so hard. So they made it so the people of the United States would not have to carry this burden with them all of their lives. Only for a limited time. It wasn't until the founding fathers were all dead and gone that the merchants, like in biblical times, began to gnaw away at these foundations. Lesser people who came into offices of importance decided that money was worth more than the very people they had been voted into office to protect and help. Protecting, they said, meant increasing the duration of copyright. But protection for whom? Not the masses since copyright has nothing to do with the masses and everything to do with individuals. So for whom were the extensions for? That is right. Greedy merchants and greedy individuals who, once granted a copyright, fight tooth and nail to retain that copyright so they may inflict their wants and needs onto others. (Look at the recent Lego versus Mega Bloc court case where Lego, who's patents had all expired by 1988, attempted to force the Mega Bloc company to stop selling toys which looked like Legos.) This all or nothing attitude is the stumbling block to our society and like J.R.R Tolkien's poem about the One Ring. You could say:

Eternity for copyrights.
Eternity for patents.
Eternity for all things mine.
And nothing for the masses.
In the land where the laws are made.
One rule to gather it all, One rule to hoard it.
One rule to covet it all, and make the laws that bind it.
In the land where the laws are made.

Our government is mandated against the creation of monopolies, kingdoms, and other forms of total control ye