Slashdot Mirror
Stop Being Poor: U.S. Piracy Watch List Hits a New Low With 2012 Report
An anonymous reader writes "The U.S. Trade Representative released its annual Special 301 Report yesterday, unsurprisingly including Canada on the Priority Watch list. While inclusion on the list is designed to generate embarrassment on target countries, Michael Geist explains why this year's report should elicit outrage. Not only is the report lacking in objective analysis, it targets some of the world's poorest countries with no evidence of legal inadequacies and picks fights with any country that dare adopt a contrary view on intellectual property issues."
Nice sentiment, but you go too easy on the concept of copyright. Paraphrased from No Safe Harbor:
Copyright was first conceived by Bloody Mary of England in 1557 as a means of censorship to persecute non-Catholics and political dissenters. It was her idea to give the printing monopoly to the London printers' guild and have anyone else caught with a printing press hanged by the state. After the proletariat took over Parliament, copyright was abolished in 1695. The publishers managed to twist the notion of copyright and get it reinstated in 1701 by saying that authors will "own" their works, even though only guild printers would have the right to print them and so the authors were still at their mercy.
The notion that copyright could exist for the sake of anything other than publishers' profits did not even exist until the drafting of the United States Constitution, where it was a compromise after a heated debate. Jefferson argued that copyright shouldn't exist at all, and only took that position when a compromise was necessary. As a result, the Constitution states that copyright is to be used for the good of society, conspicuously (but not conspicuously enough, apparently) omitting the interests of *both* authors and publishers. This is the moral equivalent of saying "You are allowed to hit people only if it makes them feel better." Apart from a few masochists out there, by the letter of the law the right may exist but should *never* be exercised. We all know how well that turned out.
So the entire concept of copyright is a reheated censorship scheme inherited from one of the most infamous dictators in history. Why anyone still thinks it's a good idea is a testament to the power of money, propaganda and groupthink.