Author: Rick Falkvinge

It would appear that when a subject is sufficiently peripheral to policymakers, slow incumbent industries can get whatever repressive and counterproductive policy they want, even in the face of overwhelming public opinion to the opposite for about 40 years.

In 1968, at the height of the hippie movement when everybody and their brother were doing joints, everybody and their brother were equally convinced cannabis would be legal in just a few years. How could it not be?

Twenty years later, in 1990, the war on certain species of plants was harsher than ever before.

Around 1995, at the dawn of file-sharing with ZModem over BBS networks and early dialup, and even more so with the advent of Napster a few years later, everybody and their brother were convinced copyright monopoly laws needed to be updated to reflect reality – like you unceremoniously adjust a map to the observed factual terrain. It was deemed to be a couple of years out, five years tops.

Here we are, twenty years later, and utterly insane corporate power grabs in the name of TPP, TTIP, and TISA are being cooked, while policitians remain dangerously clueless on the matter. Meanwhile, respect for the copyright monopoly as a law is considerably lower than the respect for speed limits.

The pattern here is that while the delusion and the disconnect remains active, punishments become increasingly harsher as policymakers desperately try to align the terrain with the map in their delusional heads, kind of how a military force with a bad mapmaker need to use an ever-increasing amount of explosives to fix the terrain instead of the map.

This goes on until the system comes down, until the hypocrisy ends, until people just stop pretending.

Slow cracks in the facade start appearing before the 40 years are up and you hit some sort of tipping point: in 1992, Bill Clinton famously said that he had smoked cannabis, but defended himself saying he “didn’t inhale”, as if that somehow made it politically acceptable in the eyes of the vested interests.

In 2007, a full fifteen years later, Barack Obama said “of course I inhaled, that was the point”, and didn’t try to excuse himself in the slightest. That was forty years after 1968. (Well, 39.)

The pattern here is that the people with crazy delusions of entitlement, such as the copyright industry, simply take forty years to die, so those ideas get naturally erased from the group and the population at large. This is not a new pattern; it is present as early as the Christian/Jewish/Muslim sacred texts, when Moses led a bunch of people from Egypt to the Levant, which according to said texts took 40 years.

Now, it doesn’t take 40 years to walk from Egypt to the Levant. It takes two months to walk westward from the Levant across all of Europe, and Egypt is one-tenth that distance. The only way to make it take 40 years is to walk around in the desert at random, making 40 years of time pass.

We’ve frequently said that the current idiocy will solve itself once the people of the net generation come into the string-pulling positions of power, but that’s still some time out, and we gotta hold the barricades against dark-black dystopia until then. If we’re extrapolating 40 years from Napster, that puts us about 2040. People with the most political power are usually 50-60 years old, which means they will have been born in 1980-1990: the net arrived when they were in their late childhood to early teens. The people born in this time understand the net, and they have absolutely no sympathy whatsoever for the parasitic copyright industry swimming in its despicable and damaging delusions of entitlement.

But should we really have to wait another 25 years for the blatantly and painfully obvious to become apparent to policymakers? Can’t we use, you know, this Internet thing to make ideas move just a little faster today?

As a complete side note, another plant was banned earlier in history with the roughly same pattern and the same arguments. The plant was coffee.

About The Author

Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.

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The copyright industry has long repeated the claim to politicians that the copyright monopoly is necessary for any culture to be created at all, to the point where politicians actually believe this nonsense. Actually, their ‘lie’ is divided into two parts:

The first falsehood is that authors, makers, and inventors must be paid for anything to be created at all. This lie is actually rather obscene coming from an industry which has deliberately created structures that make sure 99.99% of musicians never see a single cent in royalties: 99% of good musicians are never signed by a label, and of those who are, 99% never see a cent in royalties. So it’s quite obscene arguing that culture must be paid for, when this very industry makes sure that less than one artist in ten thousand get any money for their art.

The second lie is that the only way for artists to make any money is to give the copyright industry an absolute private governmentally-sanctioned distribution monopoly, the copyright monopoly, that takes precedence over any kind of innovation, technology, and civil liberties. This is an equally obscene lie: all research shows that artists make more money than ever since the advent of file sharing, but the sales-per-copy is down the drain. The fact that the parasitic middlemen are hurting is the best news ever for artists, who get a much larger piece of the pie. Of course, the copyright industry – the parasitic middlemen in question – insist on pretending their interests are aligned with those of the artist, which they never were.

Therefore, in believing these two lies combined, politicians grant this private governmentally-sanctioned monopoly – the copyright monopoly – in the belief that such a harmful monopoly is necessary for culture to exist in society. (Just to illustrate what kind of blatant nonsense this is, all archeological digs have been rich in various expressions of culture. We create as a species because we can’t exist in a society and not express culture – it’s because of our fundamental wiring: not because of a harmful monopoly.)

So what could act as conclusive proof that these lies are, well, lies?

Creative Commons.

In the construct of Creative Commons, you have placed the power over this monopoly with the authors and makers themselves, rather with the parasitic middlemen. And the interesting observation is, that once you do, millions of creators renounce their already-awarded harmful monopolies for a number of reasons – because they make more money that way, because they prefer to create culture that way, or because it’s the moral thing to do.

Once you point out that the actual people who create are renouncing their already-awarded monopolies, and are doing so by the millions – actually, more than an estimated one billion works of art according to the Creative Commons organization – the entire web of lies falls apart.

The copyright monopoly isn’t necessary for culture to exist. It was always tailored to benefit the parasitic middlemen. And these middlemen have tried their damndest to prevent actual artists from seeing any of the money.

Now, you could argue that specific expressions of culture couldn’t exist. You’d be easily disproven – for example, most multimillion-dollar blockbusters make their investment back on opening weekend, far before any digital copy exists as a torrent. Besides, why would you prop up and lock in a specific form of culture with a harmful monopoly, when forms of culture have always evolved with humanity?

About The Author

Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.

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Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

The parroted question-and-assertion from the copyright industry continues to be “authors must be paid” and “how will the authors get paid?”

This question-and-assertion isn’t just irrelevant, it’s also a sickening existential defense from an industry that makes sure that 99.99% of music authors never see a single cent in royalty. (A more proper question would be how a music author or composer can possibly earn a living with the copyright industry still in existence.)

Nevertheless, the question and assertion assume that the copyright monopoly exists with the purpose of making sure somebody gets paid. That’s not why it exists. More importantly, the question and assertion also assume that no culture, knowledge, or technology would get created without the copyright monopoly (or outside of the copyright industry).

The purpose of the copyright monopoly is clear: it’s worded quite explicitly in the United States Constitution, article 8. Its purpose is “to promote the progress of science and the useful arts”. The purpose is not for anybody to get rich, or make a living, or paid at all. The purpose is and was always to benefit the public. To generate progress, with the implicit meaning of making that progress available to everyone (or it wouldn’t be progress in any meaningful sense of the word).

Now, it has been assumed – as asserted by the copyright industry – that the only way to achieve this effect, across all fields and disciplines, is to lock the authorship up in a time-limited* monopoly. Various government officials have accepted this narrative.

The copyright industry therefore has two customers: first, it sells the idea of its unique capability of producing culture and knowledge to the government, in exchange for a monopoly when it does so. Second, it sells monopolized copies of that culture and knowledge to people in exchange for money. It’s important to realize that the copyright industry has two different sets of customers, and the first set has every reason to revisit the dishonest deal and get a new supplier.

Linux and Wikipedia (as well as other, less known achievements) show unambiguously that the idea of requiring any kind of payment for great tools, culture, or knowledge to come into being is an utter falsehood. It may be true in some cases. But the cases where it hasn’t been true have all shown that the basic premise, that the copyright monopoly is any kind of necessary, is the purest oxen fecalia.

And these projects, free in all aspects as they are, now underpin the Android operating system which powers three billion smartphones and well over half of the world’s servers in various incarnations of the GNU/Linux operating system. They support every lower- and higher-level education on the planet.

According to the copyright industry, these projects do not and cannot exist, as the authors weren’t paid.

According to reality, the copyright industry is wrong.

Let’s be clear here: the most common operating kernel for servers and mobile smartphones, which underpin the entire IT industry today, was written completely outside the copyright monopoly context with no need for anyone to get paid. The richest source of knowledge available, which underpin all college educations even if unofficially, was written completely outside the copyright monopoly context with no need for anyone to get paid.

This doesn’t mean that nobody should be allowed to sell anything. Quite to the contrary! But it can be conclusively deduced that government officials have been completely in the wrong when accepting the copyright industry’s assertion that nothing will ever get produced without a strong copyright monopoly. It can also be conclusively deduced that the business models that are based on free tools, culture, and knowledge are worth enormously much more to the economy than a manufacturing industry still trying to sell round pieces of silly data-carrying plastic when their competition ship the medialess information across the world in seconds.

Government officials should just stop buying the idea from the copyright industry that a monopoly is required for progress to take place. They should get a new deal from another supplier, and as is the case when this happens, the supplier being ditched – the copyright industry – has no say whatsoever about the new supplier or the new deal. More specifically, it’s more beneficial to a government to not hand out any kind of copyright monopoly at all, as more culture and knowledge – more progress – is created without it.

The copyright monopoly has demonstrated that it’s not just unnecessary, but downright harmful to progress, to the economy, and to civil liberties. The copyright industry should not be allowed to get away with its further Norwegian Blue parroting of “how should the authors get paid”. The question is not relevant.

Any honest business model is built without a legal monopoly in any case. Make money, good for you. But you don’t get to do so with a monopoly that cuts down on my rights, especially not with blatant lying.

*eternal

About The Author

Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.

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In the copyright monopoly debate, there’s significant confusion about how a market economy works, and what constitutes a right to remuneration of any kind.

There is exactly one action that entitles somebody to money, and that is an agreement that money should be paid in exchange for a good or service, otherwise known as a “sale”. There are exactly zero other things that entitle somebody to payment.

When somebody views a movie through a window? Nobody is entitled to money.

When somebody listens to a street performer? Nobody is entitled to money.

When somebody plays a video game at a friend’s? Nobody is entitled to money.

When somebody copies said video game from their friend? Nobody is entitled to money.

When somebody walks into a store and agrees to exchange money for a good? Then, and only then, is somebody entitled to money. Only then.

There are absolutely zero excuses for “wanting” money but not “getting” it. If you’re not able or willing to find a counterparty with whom to perform an exchange on mutually agreed terms, you’re entitled to exactly nothing. Just like everybody else. Specifically including people who create art and want to be paid for creating art, or for that matter, anybody doing anything they like. Nobody owns the fuzzy, wishy-washy and generally handwavy “fruits of their labor”. They own exactly what they can exchange in a mutually negotiated transaction with a voluntary and willing counterparty. Nothing less, nothing more.

This is called a market economy, and it works so vastly superior to all other alternatives tried because all people do their own valuations of the value of goods or services all the time in a decentralized fashion, rather than somebody centralized trying to establish a “proper” value for goods and services. That kind of hubris has been tried from time to time in various forms of centralization of the economy, and it has always resulted in either huge shortages, or huge surplus stocks resulting in huge shortages elsewhere. Nobody simply has the brainpower to assess the continuous valuation and re-valuation of millions of other people.

When planned economies have been tried – notably under communism – they look fine on the surface until too many people are starving and lack basic hygiene essentials because of said shortages. At that point, the first protesters are generally jailed as political prisoners. Sometimes, they’re murdered by the regime “for the cause”, whatever that is – the murdered generally don’t care. Eventually, the whole fairytale idea of one person being a better valuator of something than millions of people doing the same thing breaks down, and the Maskirovka falls.

The copyright monopoly is a strong limitation of the property rights that are essential to a market economy, and indeed a limitation of the market economy itself. The copyright monopoly is therefore not just completely immoral from this angle, but also damaging to the economy as a whole.

So what does this have to do with the “authors must be paid” cliché? Everything. Since you’re neither buyer nor seller, you’re not a party to the transaction. Therefore, frankly and literally, it’s none of your business. When a third party makes a copy of a game, a third party who was not party to the original transaction, that third party has absolutely no obligation whatsoever to the parties in the original transaction: no sale has been made.

When you’re repeating the blatant cliché of “authors must be paid”, you’re asserting a right to intervene in a market transaction between two parties where you were not involved in the transaction or negotiations. This is the direct opposite of a market economy. And when suggesting the cliché as a rule, or law, you’re advocating a planned interventionary economy – literally a communist economy.

Put differently, other people’s business failures are neither your moral, legal, or business problem to solve. Trying to blame your customer’s morals for the weaknesses in your own business plan – your inability to find a voluntary counterparty with whom to make an exchange, a “sale” – is the last step before your business dies, and frankly, it’s rather unworthy. This is where the copyright industry is currently finding itself.

And as we’ve seen before, making a copy of something – in violation of the copyright monopoly or not, that doesn’t matter – is merely exercising your own property rights: rearranging the magnetic fields on your own property according to what you’re observing with your own tools and senses. Suggesting such an action to constitute a fantasy voluntary agreed transaction with a fantasy counterparty is suggesting a planned economy, the kind that didn’t work at all under communism.

About The Author

Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.

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Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

In 2010, I got a prize from the Swedish IT Industry as “IT person of the year”, the year after I had led the Swedish and first Pirate Party into the European Parliament.

Their motivation for the prize was that I had finally, and through hard work, brought important IT issues to front row and center of the political establishment.

What we said then are the same things we say now. The Internet is the most important piece of infrastructure we have. More important than telco, than cable TV, than roads, than power, than… well, with the possible exception of tap water and sanitation infrastructure, I’ll allow the jury to confer a bit more on that one.

We were saying, and are saying, that it’s insane, asinine, repulsive and revolting to allow a cartoon industry (the copyright industry – mostly led by Disney in this regard) to regulate the infrastructure of infrastructures. To allow a cartoon industry to dismantle anonymity, the right to private correspondence and many more fundamental liberties just because they were worried about their profits.

There was some success in pushing back the worst. We didn’t get to go on the offense, but we did safeguard the most important of liberty.

Then, something very odd and unexpected happened. Spotify came on stage, praised The Pirate Bay for raising the bar for consumer expectations of what good service means, and swept the floor with consumption patterns of music. As did Pandora in the US. Pirates tend to be early adopters and Pandora was no exception: I am paying subscriber #110 there out of today’s tens of millions. As was always noted, the fight for liberty was never a fight about money.

More people shifted toward streaming video as well with Netflix and similar services, again showing it was never about the money, but always about freedom.

After that, something even more unexpected happened. Pirates started fighting with the copyright industry, against the internet service providers, in the halls of policymaking. More specifically, pirates were siding with Microsoft against lots of old telco dinosaurs. Even more specifically, people were fighting for Net Neutrality – something that Microsoft was also fighting for, as the owner of Skype – against the mobile divisions of telco dinosaurs, who wanted to lock out competitors from their imaginary walled garden.

Of course, this is only unexpected if you thought it was about money in the first place. If you knew that it was always about liberty, about defending the infrastructure of infrastructures, about protecting the right to innovate and the freedom of speech, this comes as a no-brainer.

We care for permissionless innovation, we care for private correspondence, we care for sharing and the legacy of knowledge and culture. We do not care in the slightest for obsolete and outdated pre-internet distribution monopolies, nor do we care for pipes that want to be privileged, and we become outright hostile when the industries that benefit from old monopolies (not stakeholders, but beneficiaries!) assert a right to dismantle the liberties that our ancestors fought, bled, and died to give to us today.

“How will the authors get paid?” is an utterly uninteresting question in a market economy. The answer is equally utterly simple: “by making a sale”. There is no other way, and there should not be any other way. A much more relevant question today is “how do we protect the infrastructure of liberty against corporate encroachment and imaginary privileges of pre-internet monopolies”.

Oh, and the Swedish IT Industry Association also gives a prize to the IT Company of the year, not just the IT person of the year. The company to get that prize in the same year as me? Spotify.

About The Author

Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.

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Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Anne Frank‘s Diary, if you haven’t heard of it, is the notes of a girl who hid in Amsterdam from the nazis toward the end of World War II. Sadly, she didn’t make it, and died at nazi hands in 1945.

Her diary has become a seminal work to understand what people in the occupied countries went through on a personal level, beyond the statistics. It was compiled after her death and after the war by her father, Otto Frank.

As Anne Frank died in 1945, this work would be elevated to the public domain in six weeks, on January 1, 2016 – 70 years after her death. However, the foundation that holds the copyright (and therefore collects a significant amount of money from this work) is now trying an obvious abuse of their monopoly, by suddenly naming her father Otto a co-author of her diary where he was previously just an editor. This move purportedly extends their own monopoly on the piece of heritage by decades – all the way through 2050 – out of the blue.

What’s really infuriating about this is how oldmedia doesn’t call it out as fraud at all, but takes a completely neutral stance. Most outlets seem to be rewrites of the New York Times story, which just neutrally reports “the book now has a co-author”, quotes a few people in the worst form of abdicative “he-said-she-said journalism”, and leaves it at that.

Let’s be clear on three points here: One, this is a fraud committed for the sole purpose of preventing the work from being elevated to the public domain; two, it is committed now as the book would otherwise be elevated to the public domain a mere six weeks from now — if Otto Frank was objectively a co-author, it would reasonably have said so from the beginning, and not when then monopoly was down to the wire; and three, oldmedia remains abysmally ignorant of how the copyright monopoly is used to punish and withhold, rather than the illusory encourage and reward.

Not one single oldmedia outlet has called out the fraud, even though it’s right in their face.

The tech outlets are less inhibited. BoingBoing is much more upright, calling it fraud in the very header.

The thing is that this ignorance is endemic to oldmedia. The Internet is the single most important piece of infrastructure we have, and policymakers are letting an old printing monopoly decide how it can and cannot be used – which should be cause for revolts and uprisings. Instead, oldmedia are collectively treating it with a yawn, while tech writers who understand the issue are calling a spade a spade.

What’s worse, it’s widely assumed that the cost of the monopoly is zero. But as BoingBoing observes, there have been two houses fighting in lockstep over petty monopolies to bring the story of Anne Frank to the world – and seeing how that number is typically limited to one, now that it’s evidently possible to have two, what sets a cap at two? Why can’t it be two hundred or two thousand?

That’s the harm of the copyright monopoly. Putting it differently, were it not for the copyright monopoly, we wouldn’t have had seven Harry Potter books but rather upwards of seven thousand, many utter crap but some outright stellar. There’s a real cultural cost, a real cost to our common heritage, right there. That’s how the copyright monopoly punishes and withholds us all.

And oldmedia is completely oblivious to it.

About The Author

Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.

Book Falkvinge as speaker?

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Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.