On Piracy & Copyright

Digital Piracy is the copying and streaming - which in practical terms are the same thing - of digital sets of data which are perceived as “intellectual property” and thus allegedly protected by the copyright monopoly. Copying sets of data for criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, research or parodies is protected under Fair Use doctrine, codified in section 107 of U.S. copyright law (title 17, U. S. Code) and further explained in the fair use section of U.S. copyright website.

Who put the United States in charge of the world? Its copyright law does not apply everywhere. Neither it should, for its existence cannot be credited to its own merits - especially if you consider the fact it is unconstitutional -, but solely to the continuous pushing by its lobbyists. Copyright Law is a tool built to crack on free speech and privacy, through the use of the shadiest methods, often at the expense of information that could be actually saving lives.

It also artificially turns the limitless possibilities of innovative ideas into a scarce resource. Ludwig von Mises, in Human Action, p. 128, points out: “A thing rendering such unlimited services is, for instance, the knowledge of the causal relation implied. The formula, the recipe that teaches us how to prepare coffee, provided it is known, renders unlimited services. It does not lose anything from its capacity to produce however often it is used; its productive power is inexhaustible; it is therefore not an economic good. Acting man is never faced with a situation in which he must choose between the use-value of a known formula and any other useful thing”. Ayn Rand, in Patents and Copyrights, p. 131, too stated that “intellectual property cannot be consumed”, and therefore it is not a limited resource.

Piracy is the act of standing up against the copyright monopoly. It is used to show that not even the crackdown on the right to free speech can prevent humans from acting within their nature and sharing culture with each other. It is a tool to secure the human rights of access to science, culture and education.

Copyright, on the other hand, is a tool to induce the accumulation of wealth into the hands of middlemen that have no power without such laws. It is used to perpetuate an already obsolete business model that survives by stomping on those harmed by income inequality. It is a business model that can only be through the use of immoral methods to push several draconian, horrendous, unconstitutional laws down every government’s throat.

The people should not accept that, they should not fear the copyright monopoly industry, neither they should fear their governments. Both owe their jobs to the leniency of the people, and both can be fired from such jobs at any time, should the people declare so.

Reading list:
* The Case for Copyright Reform, a book by Rick Falkvinge and Christian Engström;

* Against Intellectual Property, a monograph by Stephan Kinsella;

* Sites that work as news outlets and carry on with a whistleblowing effort like torrentfreak.com, falkvinge.net and questioncopyright.org;

* Watch QuestionCopyright’s minute memes and read its information on free content, licenses and so on;

* Watch Cory Doctorow’s speeches (especially that one about DRM) and read his novels;

* Watch TED speeches on the subject (there’s a great one about “copyright math”);

* Watch and read what the OpenRightsGroup has to say, they only have your interests in mind (props to their interview with Neil Gaiman);

* Red up on the Free Software Foundation’s mission and why free software is important, not only from a moral but also from an economic standpoint. Remember, just because it is called “free”, does not mean one cannot charge for it;

* Stallman’s The Right to Read short story isn’t a paranoid dystopia, it is pratically a reality today. We cannot let that happen, it would set back humankind for several years, decades even;

* The Free Culture Movement has produced so far a great deal of improvements to the copyright licenses subject, especially with the introduction of CreativeCommons licences;

* If you only read what the MAFIAA feeds you, you haven’t truly seen both sides of the issue, and thus are in no position to act as if everyone else’s opinions are always wrong (just to be clear: no one is in position to act like that, ever). Do your homework, and make an informed decision.