[p2p-research] Repurposing Profit for User Freedom

[Kevin Carson]

On 2/5/10, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/4/10, Kevin Carson
> <free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:

Taking my example above, by your standards the
> > person who uses the Star Trek replicator to make free food for his own
> > consumption is "stealing," if the state has granted ADM and Cargill a
> > "property" in the right to sell food at whatever price they set.  But
> > IMO the actual moral state of affairs is the direct contrary:  I have
> > a right to feed myself using my own tangible property in any way I see
> > fit, and to share the food I produce with anyone I see fit.  And the
> > people at Cargill and ADM, or the people who monopolize access to
> > proprietary replicators, are thieves who deserve nothing but hatred
> > and contemptuous defiance of their despicable false "property rights."

> I am all for replicators and matter printers.  We should research the heck
> out that sort of thing.  And we need to deal with those and their
> implications when we have the prospect of them.

The point of the replicator example, though, was to point out my
problems with your view on obeying laws restricting access to the
kinds of abundance that exist here and now, in order to enable rentier
classes to capitalize increased productivity as a source of rents.

For now, we need economies
> as technologies.  Economies run on IP.  And for every nation on earth at
> present my definition of stealing is clearly what holds.

Well, first of all, IP violations are not literally defined as "theft"
in the law.

And IP holds for every nation on earth at present, specifically, in
its *legal codes*.  OTOH, the kind of freedom I advocate holds on
every nation on earth at present in what a major portion of the
population actually *does*.  There is a direct conflict in every
nation between the laws (laws made at the behest of corporate
interests) and what people do.

And of course the kinds of IP laws you favor are in force in every
country on earth.  You keep writing as if that universality simply
reflects some level of understanding currently achieved in the
collective consciousness of mankind, as it evolves toward the
absolute.

I'm not at all surprised and dismayed by the fact that your idea of IP
prevails universally, or almost so, because my understanding of the
law and its significance differs almost entirely from yours.  Every
society in the world is a class society where the main purpose of the
state's laws is to enable a privileged class to extract a surplus from
everyone else's labor.  So of course IP  law is universal.

We have a global, state-privileged corporate economy in which the laws
of nations favor corporate interests.  In a world dominated by a
particular class system, the laws that predominate in all nations of
the world reflect the interests of that class system.  Big surprise.

If you lived in feudal Europe seven hundred years ago, you could just
as easily say "for every nation in the West at present my definition
of land tenure is what holds," because throughout western Europe the
peasantry would be paying feudal rents to land that they worked and
were the rightful owners of.  I would not consider this surprising.
Of course the laws universally in force would reflect the interests of
the dominant class universally in the seat of power.  And I don't
believe the peasant would be morally obligated to keep paying rent to
his feudal overlords, out of respect for "the law," until he could
persuade the landlord that society would be better off if he stopped
living off rents.  The peasant would be fully entitled to break down
enclosures, squat on vacant land, and stop paying rent, etc., to
whatever extent he could get away with it.  The state and its laws,
then as now, was not some neutral force reflecting the collective
understanding of society.  It was a weapon in the hands of an enemy,
used to promote his interests at everybody else's expense.

> For now, we have IP.  People who undermine IP are criminals.

Well, of course.  That's true by definition.  But I don't genuflect at
the word "law," nor do I shy away from the term "criminal" when the
law and the people who create it are evil.

And "we" also have the technical means of circumvention, and millions
of people who use them.  The law doesn't have any magical effect on
reality, and isn't automatically carried out by virtue of being law.
IP is a contested issue, and "the law" is a stronghold of one side.
What real people do in everyday life is a stronghold for the other
side.  The law will be the last stronghold to fall when IP has been
defeated in physical reality by actual people in the way they live
their daily lives.

Is a a great
> felonious crime?  No...not in most cases.  To me, if a college kid steals
> Coldplay's latest song, I think...shame on Coldplay for not having better
> systems to stop them doing so.  That is what the Apple iTouch is with its
> DRM.  Costs are kept low to allow (many) people to do what they want and
> artists and industry participants to get returns.  I wish everyone could
> afford want they want from it.  But the way to achieve that isn't to force
> someone to give away wealth to the poor.  That has never worked.  It isn't
> working in Venezuela, it didn't work in Soviet Russia or Maoist China, and
> it won't work anywhere else because wealth is an engine...not a item that
> can be transplanted like a tree to someone else.  Fools and money are soon
> parted.

Strawman.  Once again, nobody is "forcing" anyone to give anything
away.  The exact opposite is the case.  IP law (to the extent that it
is enforceable) is forcing people not to buy unauthorized versions of
a song.  Competition between proprietary and free versions fo the same
content is the default.  Suppressing competition from free is what
requires force.   It's the RIAA and MPAA that are forcing people to
buy their content on their terms if they want it at all, by forcibly
suppressing competing providers.

And free replication of proprietary content does not amount to "giving
up" anything, because nothing is given up.  It's still there.  It's
been duplicated, so that two people have it instead of just one.

> I have a fellow who works with me who is a guitarist from Ghana.  He used to
> work in the record industry in the UK as an accountant.  He said that IP
> theft has ruined thousands of performers who were swept out of being
> competitive by people stealing their work.

Once again, there is no such thing as "IP theft."  Even that sacred,
majestic "law" that you hold in such high regard does not literally
treat it as theft.  The only place you see it described as "theft" is
in polemics by supporters of proprietary content.  But in terms of the
law, it is explicitly the conferral of a monopoly for a limited term
in order to promote a utilitarian end.  Surely you, who hold the law
in such sacred esteem, should refrain from referring to unauthorized
copying as "theft."

By definition duplication cannot be theft, because there is no party
that ceases to have the item in question.  The only "loss" is loss of
the state-enforced right to a return on it, even at the price of
suppressing competition.  Nobody should have a right to a guaranteed
return on anything that comes from forcibly preventing other people
from entering the market and competing.

> In a post economic world of easy and free replicators, I agree.  IP is a
> waste of time.  For now, it is the basis for sanity.

The free replicator example was simply an extreme case of the real
conflict between abundance and artificial scarcity entailed in
existing technology right here and now.  The struggle, in the case of
every innovation that reduces labor and capital costs to produce an
output, is whether that cost saving should be passed on to the
consumer by free competition or capitalized as a source of rents by
those who hold a state-granted monopoly.  If the law that grants
someone to live off someone else's labor by charging a state-enforced
monopoly price is so sacred now that it should be obeyed by all, even
to the extent of paying a monopoly price, why should they do otherwise
when matter printers come about?  In the case of every incremental
improvement in abundance and reduction in cost, the question is
whether it is subject to being made property and a source of monopoly
rents.  The only difference between these incremental improvements and
the replicator idea is one of degree.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html