[p2p-research] Fwd: [fcforum] Fw: iPad DRM is a dangerous step backward. Sign the petition!

[Ryan Lanham]

On 2/3/10, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> This is all rather contradictory...  Nobody ought to block 'free and open'
> as a model, but IP should be allowed too...  yet the whole point of IP is to
> block 'free and open'.  And the failures of DRM in previous cases, arising
> from competition with 'illegal' free distribution, cannot simultaneously be
> embraced as consumer choice while their indirect cause is condemned.


IP doesn't block free and open.  It blocks theft.  You say it isn't theft.
The world disagrees with you. So do I.  "Artificial scarcity" is as absurd
as communal property.  I always think of the wonderful scene in Dr. Zhivago
where he walks into his own house after the war to find the more "just"
solution of everyone living in it.  People have rights.  One of those rights
is the right to own their own ideas.  There are obviously boundaries as
there are with all other rights (takings from a government for the public
good are perfectly reasonable actions...in real or intellectual property.)
If someone owned a vaccine and the world needed it and they wouldn't sell,
governments ought to take it.  To say we all need free access to Let It Be
because we can copy it from one machine to another is a farce.  Obviously
balances need to be struck.  People should represent factions, interests and
approaches and sort it out.  Preferably, some turn will move IP into public
domains (which it always has...) at a reasonable length of time...in most of
the world it is 75 years after a death...not unreasonable.  People should be
encouraged by the commons to add to it.  It is antithetical to the commons
to be compelled to participate in it.

But on another point.  No, politics (and economics) is NOT about
> 'self-interest'.  The rational, egoist *homo oeconomicus* is a demonic
> creation of the simplifying gaze of 'royal scientists'.  People aren't
> really like this.  A great many societies (such as the Bushmen) show no sign
> of this way of seeing at all.  People sometimes approximate to being like
> this when they are encouraged to do so, but even then, what they mean by
> 'self' and 'interest' varies with individuals, psychologies, contexts,
> discourses.  People are a wide range of things, among them:
> affective/emotional beings, beings with bodies, beings with psychologies,
> traumas, neuroses, fantasmatic attachments; language-using and symbol-using
> beings, products and creators of discursive systems; and relational
> complexes, partly constituted through social and ecological relations.
> People do what feels right, or feels necessary, or feels comfortable; they
> do what makes sense; and they do what fits with the situation as they
> construct it.  Fantasy, ideology, habitus, line of flight, affect, episteme,
> character-structure, social logic, subject-position, perspective, standpoint
> - all very helpful ways of thinking about motivation.  Interests don't
> figure anywhere.


I was with you up to the last sentence which denies any notion of
competition.  Competition is part of who we are as animals and as
organisms.  It isn't going to change.  Saying politics is exclusively about
self-interest is indeed wrong and absurd.  To say it is not about
self-interest is no less wrong and absurd.  It is far more about
self-interest than not so.  But it is not exclusively about self-interests.
There is no good theory (biological or philosophical) I know of that
suggests otherwise.  Even false consciousness in Marxism makes the game
about self-interests.
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