Owning an information commodity only gives a person power at the level of legality.
Here is a copyright notice I came across in "BURNING THE VILLAGE TO ROAST THE PIG" by Felipe Rodriquez ("[email protected]")
Copyright © 2002 Felipe Rodriquez. Permission is granted to copy and distribute this document in verbatim under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. A copy of the license can be found at
I use the equivalent of the above in some circumstances, usually with some contextualizing remarks.
Here is an "anarchist" notice (my favorite, from ASAN#7, p. 2):
Please reproduce this or any other intellectual property however you see fit.
The state at present considers everything published to have an implicit copyright. I see no need to make a statement granting legal right to anyone to reproduce this material. Those who know how to use this material should need no permission to use any information in the fashion they see fit. I of course will not invoke the state or legal right in any attempt to maintain my “property.”
Those “mainstream” individuals who reproduce this material for profit or deception will face sanctions on a different level.
Please do contact us if you like the spirit of this magazine. Email is the only effective way and using email has allowed us to increase the speed of our contact. Red Hughes
It is often argued that industrial deception is a uniquely self-rectifying problem, in that an engineering firm with rotten patents will get a reputation of shoddiness and unreliability and will eventually suffer in the marketplace. But this rottenness can take an extremely long time to reveal itself, while secrecy, accumulated mistakes, and economically motivated disinformation slowly clog the pipeline of innovation. In this sense, ownership—more accurately the secrecy it necessitates—is not the engine of progress, but its enemy. One cannot both expose knowledge to scrutiny and keep it for oneself to sell. It has to be one or the other.
Robert B. Laughlin in Physics Today, volume 55, issue 12, page 10
As creator of Grok32`, I distribute a mixture of copyrighted and "free" published materials. The notions guiding my use of "copyright" are:
• The use of "copyright" as a license for commoditized property is quaint.
• Intellectual "property" has legal force as an incubator and protector of an expression and its creator by giving the author exclusive control of its distribution, content and form. In this sense, copyright is an extension of a person's right to control their products. If an author did not have this copyright, he would have no control over his own work, and less incentive to create the work.
• A corporate copyright is a legal abuse because it assigns ownership to a fiction, hence transforming the copyrighted work into a commodity abstraction. Why trust any document that insulates the creators from the consequences of their work? (Corporations exist to shelter venal owners through "limited liability".)
• Since egoism is a delusion, intellectual property is like squatters rights. It's "your" land (for most purposes) because you live there.1
• Some expressions are standards, and should be copyrighted so their creators can control modification of their expression. Not allowing copyright threatens standards.
• In the same way a patent is designed to provide innovators with legal protection to allay the costs of inventing, so a copyright is a legitimate means of rewarding authors for their work.
• Unfortunately, the law has made corporations into "persons". Corporate legal fictions give copyright a bad name. To say that a corporation can be found liable is disingenuous; a fiction cannot be liable for anything. The venal corporate cloak provides the benefit of ownership without liability. Disembodied representational value is the tender myth supporting fiat money. If each dollar copyrighted by the Federal Reserve was backed by a specific person, (who must respond substantively when asked), then human relations would be very different.
• The capitalist world order, as represented by the increasingly desperate mass-marketed myths and propaganda, is doomed. This is an identity crisis (that will probably manifest as a rapid devaluation of the dollar when international investors understand how American "wealth" is) created by legal fictions and Ponzi schemes. Evaporating profits have driven the corporate culture of American rackets into managing and creating scarcity. Creating both supply and scarcity is demoralizing and creates a culture of lies and denial. As corporate media spins “normalcy” to a civilization in rampant denial, people are sucking down more booze, drugs, and the images from T.V. to blunt the violence to personal ethics and integrity. At the very least, legal fictions should be outlawed. Law itself is not going to go away…
An enterprise may have a highly structured, (hierarchical, if necessary), corporate structure, but there is no good reason and many bad reasons for giving this organizational construct the legal status of a person.
venal adj.
1. Capable of being bought or obtained for money or other valuable consideration; made matter of trade or barter; salable; now esp., mercenary; open to corrupt influence, bribery, etc; as, a venal legislative; venal services, venal votes.
2. Originating in, or characterized by; or associated with corrupt bargaining as, a venal throne; a venal arrangement with the police.
[From the 1949 Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.]
Peer-to-peer file sharing technologies fragmented into a dozen different networks and are more popular than ever. Most of these networks have no central point of control such as Napster had, making it impossible to litigate against a single entity to close down these networks.
On July 25, 2002, Representative Howard Berman (D-Cal.) introduced a bill, H.R. 5211 in the House of Representatives that would give copyright owners the right to violate the law in their efforts to stop the unauthorized circulation of their works on peer-to-peer networks.
If passed this bill would allow copyright holders to organize sabotage against copyright infringement, a form of state sanctioned cyber terrorism. The bill has not yet passed, and has been referred to the US Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property.
A recent research paper published by computer scientists working for Microsoft Corporation concluded that attempts to stop the swapping of copyrighted works on online peer to peer networks will not work.
[SUING FILE SHARERS: PRIVACY & LIBERTY IMPLICATIONS
12:00-1:00 CONCURRENT Copyright owners have sued p2p network services, providers of software, ISPs, phone companies, and even venture capitalists who fund p2p companies.
While those initial suits were successful, content industries have recently suffered reversals, most notably in their litigation against Streamcast & Grokster. Unable to shut down p2p networks altogether, the music industry has begun to sue individuals who upload music files.
These law suits present numerous legal, moral and policy issues. What First Amendment and privacy rights are affected by the RIAA’s subpoenas to ISPs for file sharers’ identities?
How to balance the fact that p2p software has legal uses as well as illegal ones, with the RIAA’s claims that it is more efficient, and better business, to sue the p2p software companies rather than users? Or should the RIAA simply find a new business model? This panel will involve a vigorous and wide-ranging debate among advocates of each of these positions, with a focus on the privacy and liberty implications of the recent spate of lawsuits.”Moderator: Mark Lemley, UC Berkeley and Keker & Van Nest. Panelists: Stacey Dogan, Northeastern University; Jon Healey, LA Times; Wendy Seltzer, EFF; Ian Clarke, Freenet
]
Software-piracy - The term software piracy refers to copyright violation for profit, i.e., the unauthorised
selling of counterfeit computer software, music, movies etc. The copying of software, music and films
where no money changes hands, sometimes known as warez, is legal in some jurisdictions. In Russia, it is
legal to copy any software as long as it is not in the Russian language.
Napster - Created by Shawn Fanning, Napster was a music and file sharing service that made a major
impact on the Internet scene during the year 2000. Its technology allowed music fans to easily share MP3
format song files with each other, thus leading to massive copyright violations.
Operation Clambake - Operation Clambake is the title of a World Wide Web page that has become known as the single most important site with information about Scientology. It is run by Andreas Heldal-Lund, a critic of Scientology who views the organization as a cult. The Web site provides considerable insight into the workings of Scientology, and it includes links to Scientology's "secret" documents as well as other information that the organization has tried to suppress. The Web site is one of the focus points of the war between Scientology and the Internet. Scientology had made numerous legal threats to various Internet service providers that have hosted the site, demanding that it be removed from the Internet. In various incidents that have been documented in such publications as the New York Times, Slashdot and Wired Online, Scientology has also used copyright law to force notable Web sites (including the Google search engine) to remove all references to the Operation Clambake site.
Software cracking - Software cracking is software hacking in order to remove encoded copyright protection. Distribution of cracked software (warez) is generally an illegal (or more recently, criminal) act of copyright infringement.
1. Property is a legal construct founded on egoism. Egoism is the inability to distinguish between transpersonal consciousness and the instruments of perception, mostly visual. Since egoism is a delusion, property is like squatters rights. It's "your" land (for most purposes) because you live there.
©
by John Van Wie Bergamini (author of Grok32`.)
I check my E-mail on a weekly basis and can be reached at "[email protected]".
This copyrite exists because I don't want to find myself in court defending against something I had nothing to do with. Presumably, the reader knows how to use this material and needs no permission from me or the state.
© 2005, 2006 John Van Wie Bergamini. Permission is granted to copy and distribute this document in verbatim under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. A copy of the license can be found at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html