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

[Andy Robinson]

*"IP doesn't block free and open.  It blocks theft"*

The alleged difference between "free and open" and "theft" is a matter of
judgement, not structure.  A very poor basis for analysis.  By all means
say, "I support free and open in some circumstances but not others"...
don't play doublethink.

*""Artificial scarcity" is as absurd as communal property"*

Nope, both are matters which have demonstrably existed.  Communal property
is no different conceptually from joint property, which is recognised
everywhere even in bourgeois law; and communal rights are recognised in
countries such as Australia and Mexico in relation to indigenous peoples
also.  "Artificial scarcity" is conceptually as simple as someone buying all
the grain and hoarding it to drive the prices up.

*"The world disagrees with you."*

How many Indians, Africans, Latin Americans, Russians, or even Americans did
you ask before reaching this conclusion?  Must be nice to be able to speak
for "the world", even when a big segment of it are actually doing exactly
what "the world" supposedly condemns.

*"People have rights."*

Indeed.  And the real, basic rights such as the right not to be tortured,
the right to subsistence, the right not to be executed, freedom of
expression, freedom of religion, and the right to voice are only compromised
by the accumulation of bogus "rights" of corporations, rich individuals and
specific systems transmuted into the language of rights.  In the past,
things were easier: reactionaries just eschewed the language of rights and
could be condemned outright for it.  Now we have all these absurd claims
that every single legally constituted benefit is a right - that people have
a 'right' to security, a 'right' to peace and quiet, a 'right' not to be
disrupted by protests, a 'right' not to see homeless people when they go
out, a 'right' not to have to pay taxes to support other people who don't
work, and before we know it, the real rights are being compromised and
trampled to make space for all these fake rights, which are really either
sideways terms for systemic conditions (utility, welfare, order and so on)
or are actually matters of privilege.  It's a very clever tactic of the
people who believe in state control and 'order', and not in rights at all;
they get to pose as the defenders of rights, at the same time as stealing
away the 'right to have rights' by simply rendering 'rights' equivalent to
the persistence of the totality of the status quo.

I would add that what's being talked about here is not a right because not
everyone can exercise it.  It is, therefore, a privilege.  You may try to
justify it as a privilege if you wish, but do not confuse it with rights,
which are of their very nature egalitarian.

Finally - there are certainly a few people who believe that some kind of
property rights are rights in the full sense, but these people arrive at a
total system very different from that existing today - they at least
recognise the 'right to have rights'.  On the other hand, most of those who
*appear* to be justifying property as a right, turn out on closer inspection
to actually be trying to justify a capitalist/market system as a totality,
on the basis of its general benefits such as productivity, efficiency,
progress, character-building or welfare.  Hence, the argument is really from
a teleological, not a deontological ethics.

*"Obviously balances need to be struck."*

Another contradiction.  An ethic of rights is absolutely incompatible with
an ethics of balancing.  Balancing is a characteristic of intuitive or
utilitarian ethics - there is a calculus of maximisation to be reached.
This type of ethics is the antithesis of an ethic of rights.  Rights, to be
rights, do not permit exceptions, because by definition they are right -
they are something a person can take a stand on principle about and insist,
'this is my right', without fear of rebuttal on a technicality.  If
something is somebody's right, then someone else shouldn't stop them from
exercising it; if they are allowed to do so and it is recognised
asjustified, then it is not being recognised as a right, simply as a
preference.

*"in most of the world it is 75 years after a death...not unreasonable."*

You're kidding, right?  Not unreasonable with increased speeds of
obsolescence mean most cultural products are unsaleable within a few years?
Not unreasonable when not only console games but entire systems become
'abandonware' in less than a decade?  Not unreasonable when mass market
paperbacks can be selling for $0.01 six months after their release - and
then unavailable a few years later?

The crucial question, of course, being by what criteria we determine
'reasonable'.  If IP is really a 'right', even one that's being hedged in
various ways, there's no good reason why this exception should be recognised
at all.  If on the other hand IP is being upheld based on considerations of
its effects - if the intent, for instance, is to encourage greater
intellectual productivity - it would certainly be beneficial for the period
to be far shorter, so as to compel people to continue to be productive over
time, and companies to invest in new material.  If the goal is to 'strike a
balance' between claims to rent-extraction and claims of public use, then
the period should be closely linked to the ordinary shelf-life of a product
- thereby maximising rent (the product will generate maximum rent during the
protected period) and maximising public use relative to the current system,
in particular, protecting availability.  But anyone can *assert* that
something seems reasonable.

*"People should be encouraged by the commons to add to it.  It is
antithetical to the commons to be compelled to participate in it."*

Well, people are compelled to participate in capitalism because of the lack
of a basic income.  But leaving that aside - indeed, people have a right to
not participate if they really don't want to - they can exercise it by not
writing, designing games, playing music, etc., or by doing it in private and
keeping it to themselves.

But, we aren't really talking about the right to participate here, are we?
We're talking about the *terms* on which people choose to participate -
whether certain privileges can be used to extract rents on an act which is
always, one way or the other, a *socialised* action.  We're talking about
whether a social act will be recognised as social or treated to the legal
fiction that it's really private.  And the question is, wheher people should
have the choice to exercise a *privilege* over something through which they
can get rich, rather than contribute it to the commons.  While some people
may ethically choose to contribute to the commons anyway, I daresay the *big
bribe not to* will have an impact on a lot of people, especially when their
conditions of life are also not being guaranteed.

Which brings us to Zhivago's *house*.  Interesting that houses so often
figure in discussions such as this.  Well, a house is not at all like IP, or
even like a consumer good.  Firstly it is intimately connected to basic
rights such as privacy, family life, and subsistence.  Secondly, it is
genuinely a space of individual or small-group use.  More, of course, needs
to be added.  If a house is a right, then all have a right to a house -
including to squat an empty one, or seize land to build one.  And if a house
is a right, then police raids on houses would normally be completely
unjustifiable - at the very least they would have to be preventing (not
detecting) a serious human rights abuse (not merely a crime) for such a
thing to be justifiable.  Yet it is the people with arguments like Ryan's,
the neoliberals and pro-capitalists, who justify driving people from their
homes through foreclosures, draconian urban planning laws, 'eminent domain',
'asset seizures', no-knock drug raids...  We can tell they don't
*really*think houses are a right.  (Of course not, since they are
really using
'rights' as doublethink for 'order' and 'privilege').  Yet they use this
right *that they know other people believe in and they don't*, to ground
'rights' to other things which have none of the sociocultural density of
houses.

Seriously...  downloading someone's song is like turfing someone out of
their home?  Reminds me of Nozick's similarly exorbitant claim that
(excessively) taxing someone is the same as enslaving them.  Which I would
frankly like to see him say after a few weeks on a cotton plantation.

"To say we all need free access to Let It Be because we can copy it from one
machine to another is a farce."

Nobody said 'need'.  But the point is that something that is infinitely
copiable is inherently abundant (certain background conditions assumed).
This is very different from a situation

"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."

You were with me because as a good Third Way liberal you're no doubt quite
prepared to add all the other stuff as long as it doesn't disrupt the core,
the 'touchy nodal point' of your ideology...  it can all be added as
supplement and do no harm whatsoever.

Read carefully and you will see that I did not mention 'competition' at
all.  Replace it with 'antagonism' or 'difference' and I might agree that it
is crucial to politics, though it can be pursued as reconciliation and
complementarity as well as conflict.

As to humanity's alleged species-being (assuming this unmentioned 'we' is
actually humans and not just American stockbrokers) - have you ever read any
anthropology at all?!  You should really see how people live outside
capitalist societies before making these kinds of vast essentialising
claims.  Of course it's dangerous to extrapolate humanity's past from
today's societies, but we must bear in mind that when human genetic
evolution stopped, somewhere near the Olduvai Gorge, we were all
hunter-gatherers.  Look at how hunter-gatherers live and you will find
highly cooperative societies with no sign of what you term 'self-interest'.
Granted, some of them experience conflict (*between groups*); but nothing
like capitalist competition.  So, either-or:  either human nature is
basically cooperative and not competitive; or people are malleable, and
become competitive because of social causality.  If you don't want to be
bothered with anthropology, try looking at humanity's closest relatives in
nature, Bonobo chimpanzees - so close to us that they can learn human
language.  Not a sign of competition among them.

Another contradiction...  Now you are referring back to a species-essence of
humanity, yet not so long ago, you were expounding on how humans are about
to be rendered obsolete by autonomous machines.  Which, of course, would be
immune to whatever biological absolutes you presume govern human behaviour
despite all the evidence to the contrary.  Hence, if your
techno-(dys)utopian future is pending, this basis in conflict *is* going to
change.  And, weren't you admonishing me not too long ago for supposedly
grieving the loss of a human essence amidst computerised prediction and
supplementation?  Yet now you are exhibiting this very fear of loss of a
human essence and trying to ward it off - the loss of competition...

Let me turn it upside down:  you need IP because without it people would not
be forced to behave competitively, and this would destroy your "human
essence".  You need the coercive imposition of scarcity lest your
cosmological edifice come tumbling down.




On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 6:22 PM, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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