You can have Internet and free sharing of information, or you can have Working Copyright. You CANNOT have both.
Free internet is completely incompatible with working copyright. It is impossible to have both at the same time. I first read about this concept via Stephan Kinsella a while back but it took me a long time before I understood what he meant. I understand it now so I will explain.
Copyright can only be justified if it is effective.
In other words you need to be able to enforce it. Copyright works only if it is able to prevent your customers from redistributing their purchases (in order to achieve monopoly). Once the monopoly is attained, the copyright holder becomes the SOLE distributor which means, Every copy equals a sale. This is the defining characteristic of copyright. If it can’t do this then it isn’t even copyright anymore.
Some legal principles will have to go.
As of December of 2011, an estimated 2.26 billion people are now on the net (and growing exponentially). That’s 33% of the world’s population (note: 1 billion comes from Asia). So obviously ‘Due Process’ in the US must be repealed. Same with Innocent until proven Guilty (4th, 5th & 6th amendment in the US Constitution), because in order to respect these legal principles, you would need like a tenth of the world’s population to be juries or copyright lawyers just to settle all the copyright cases generated… which would be a practical impossibility. That is why those will have to go. No court hearings. No trial. Websites get automatically taken down.
“Yes it is very important that our artists get paid. It is more important than ‘Innocent until proven guilty’.
Abolishment of the Postal Secret.
Enforcement of copyright REQUIRES the abolishment of the postal secret: you can’t sort legal from illegal without looking at it first, hence we will need to give up our privacy, which is a fundamental human right.
“Yes it is very important that our artists get paid. It is more important than our human rights.
Destruction of Free Internet
The problem with the internet is that every computer can directly communicate with every other computer. It is arranged as a peer-to-peer network.
In order to enforce copyright, you will need to conduct deep packet inspection. All of the transmitted data NEEDS to go through a central point, thus drastically altering the structure of the internet as to essentially ‘break’ it. In other words, it becomes like this:
The other way is to offload the inspection work to our ISPs so as to become so prohibitively expensive to run their business that they will have to close shop. This is the only way to attain total monopoly for copyright holders (yes they’ve tried the other methods, none of them will work).
You can have Free Internet or you can have Working Copyright. You CANNOT have both.
Because law is not God. It is not all-powerful. You cannot make piracy disappear and then have free internet too.
A commercial law like copyright HAS to be enforced in order to work and it has to be effective.
If you support copyright, you support the State’s continued enforcement of copyright (until it’s not a joke) which means free internet and free sharing of information will have to go.
Yes it’s two-step logic but not rocket science.
Why does copyright HAVE to be enforced?
What is the point of a copyright that isn’t enforced? What use is copyright if people I have sold to can just share their purchases with each other? The copyright holder HAS to have true monopoly in order to attain the effect of copyright.
You must understand that when copyright was invented, they weren’t thinking about the internet, they were thinking the Printing Press. Back in the 18th century, it was possible to employ the State’s power to shut other printers down because THERE WERE SO FEW OF THEM.
Back then, you could sue all of your competitors and have them cease operation. In 2012, you would have to sue your country’s entire population.
In an age where desktops, laptops, phones, tablets et al have all become virtual copying machines and they’re all directly connected to each other, Copyright begins to look hilariously outdated.
Why can’t we have Not-Working-Copyright?
Because the pretext behind copyright says that its purpose is to create an economic incentive to creators so as to promote the progress of learning (by granting a monopoly privilege). Not only is it not achieving this economic incentive, it is in fact regressing progress because the copyright system does not exist for free. Someone has to pay for it. These expenses are shouldered by the people. They come from YOUR wallets (via taxes). See We Must Acknowledge The Costs Of Copyright. We only have a limited amount of resource to make the best of it… why can’t we send this money to public hospitals instead? (which are now severely underfunded)
See Is There ANY Part Of The Copyright Monopoly That Meets Legislative Quality Bars? http://torrentfreak.com/is-there-any-part-of-the-copyright-monopoly-that-meets-legislative-quality-bars-120812/
You can have Internet and free sharing of information, or you can have Working Copyright. You CANNOT have both. 4:33 pm on August 24, 2012 Permalink |
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Falkvinge: You cannot stop the drive to make information free. « Sharing is Liberty 3:24 pm on September 3, 2012 Permalink |
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Aaeru 3:35 pm on September 5, 2012 Permalink |
“… If you want, in real effects, copyright to last for even one year in the non-commercial sense, then the minimum requirement is for you to start by abolishing the internet and any other form of mass communications medium. Any restrictions you’d require to enforce non-commercial copying will have to be strict enough the communications medium simply won’t work anymore. That’s how the real world works.” – Lawrence Lessig (Founder of Creative Commons)
“…The thing is you cannot enforce the copyright monopolies and other forms of intellectual property without looking at what people send online to each other. That is after all where these files are being shared. And if you are looking at what people are sending to each other, you are also by definition starting to limit freedom of speech. That is why you see hundreds of thousands of Europeans on the streets, rallying against what politicians thought was a done-deal. So they were taken completely by surprise, as were the American politicians with SOPA. You cannot enforce these old monopolies laws without cracking down on Fundamental Civil Rights. Which is why you are seeing entire generation rising up against these monopolies.” - Rick Falkvinge (Founder of the first Pirate Party)