Another socialist blog

When governments are run by corporations, you’ll hear a lot about “private property,” but it won’t refer to your stuff. Only the corporations will actually have property rights, and your stuff will all be rented from them. Just a few recent examples:

• Virgin Media cable says that the record industry is in charge of your router configuration. Customers of the British internet provider are being told they can’t provide open WiFi connections because someone could use them to download music. The internet connection you paid for, and the router you thought you owned, turn out to be someone else’s.
• The MPAA has convinced the FCC to begin a proceeding on whether to let video program distributors remotely block consumers from recording recently released movies on their DVRs. The technology is called Selectable Output Control (SOC), but the FCC restricts its use. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) wants a waiver on that restriction in the case of high-definition movies broadcast prior to their release as DVDs. All your DVRs are belong to us.
• The Associated Press now expects you to pay a license fee to them, for the privilege of quoting and commenting on an A.P. story. And they reserve the right to cancel your license if you criticize A.P.

Fortunately I don’t have to pay to quote Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s excellent comment:

The New York Times, an AP member organization, refers to this as an “attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt.” I suggest it’s better described as yet another attempt by a big media company to replace the established legal and social order with with a system of private law (the very definition of the word “privilege”) in which a few private organizations get to dictate to the rest of society what the rules will be. See also Virgin Media claiming the right to dictate to private citizens in Britain how they’re allowed to configure their home routers, or the new copyright bill being introduced in Canada, under which the international entertainment industry, rather than democratically-accountable representatives of the Canadian people, will get to define what does and doesn’t amount to proscribed “circumvention.” Hey, why have laws? Let’s just ask established businesses what kinds of behaviors they find inconvenient, and then send the police around to shut those behaviors down. Imagine the effort we’ll save.

Welcome to a world in which you won’t be able to effectively criticize the press, because you’ll be required to pay to quote as few as five words from what they publish.

Welcome to a world in which you won’t own any of your technology or your music or your books, because ensuring that someone makes their profit margins will justify depriving you of the even the most basic, commonsensical rights in your personal, hand-level household goods.

The people pushing for this stuff are not well-meaning, and they are not interested in making life better for artists, writers, or any other kind of individual creators. They are would-be aristocrats who fully intend to return us to a society of orders and classes, and they’re using so-called “intellectual property” law as a tool with which to do it. Whether or not you have ever personally taped a TV show or written a blog post, if you think you’re going to wind up on top in the sort of world these people are working to build, you are out of your mind.

When in doubt, attempt to shut up your critics? The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints seems to be having mixed success with this strategy. Someone leaked a copy of the church’s Church Handbook of Instructions, a two-volume book of policies and is a guide for leaders of the Mormon Church. You wouldn’t think church policies would be secret, let alone copyrighted, but church lawyers have been busy silencing anyone who tries to bring the handbook into the light of day. They’ve managed, through abuse of copyright law, to force several people and organizations to take down the leaked—and presumably embarrassing— material, including Jerald and Sandra Tanner, Scribd and Wikimedia Foundation. Wikileaks, a whistleblower website which publishes anonymous submissions of sensitive documents while preserving the anonymity of its contributors, has refused to take the handbook down. Wikileaks describes the material as significant because “…the book is strictly confidential among the Mormon (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, aka LDS in short form) bishops and stake presidents and it reveals the procedure of handling confidential matters related to tithing payment, excommunication, baptism and doctrine teaching (indoctrination).”

Good for Wikileaks. This document is a perfect example of the twisting of intellectual property law, to cover material that isn’t valuable but is something the rich and powerful would like to hide. It’s madness to give new power to people who already have too much. Unless, of course, you’re a legislator who’s for sale to Hollywood.

The House of Representatives has passed a bill that permits local police to demand the forfeiture in criminal proceedings of stuff used to violate copyright. That’s right. Instead of civil lawsuits for money, the recording industry wants to criminalize what they call copyright violation, and empower law enforcement to permanently seize any property they claim was used to violate copyright. This expands a government power that even some conservatives will acknowledge has been widely abused.

This is the future of property rights. They will own the property. You can only rent it.