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

[Michel Bauwens]

Two points:

1) I agree with Ryan that it is more beneficial to create open and free as
an option, than as coercion. In other words, I find it acceptable to have
moderate IP as a choice for those who wish so. The only way to impose open
and free in a world where many if not most individuals wish to protect their
creations would be through dictatorial coercion. However, DRM is a different
issue since it interferes with the free disposition of goods of those that
purchased it. I think we can both oppose DRM, and accept moderate IP for
those creators who wish to. A universal license for example, would both
provide for income to creators, and allow full free usage of creations by
users/produsers. Creators would freely choose whether to use the universal
license, or totally free licenses. This is NOT contradictory.


2) Both Ryan and Andy are right. Of course, politics is not just about
self-interest, and individuals are complex beings with contradictory
motivations, but, within the economic and institutional contexts of
capitalism, political and economic behaviouir is constrained towards
self-interest. I don't think Andy will deny that for example's Obama's
anti-meltdown policies were severely constrained by the self-interest of
oligarchic banking powers.

On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 1:08 AM, 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.
>
> 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.
>
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