Stello's Choice

War's on.

An interesting, narrow, and ideological synopsis of a convoluted controversy. Intellectual property rights are taken for granted by most people who without thinking accept that they have to pay inflated prices for music, movies, or books. They pay prices established not by the artist, production crew, or author, but by the publishing and retail industries who, through elision, want to control what you hear, see, or read.

Despite the vehemence and authoritative tone of that mission statement, it seems inevitable that if proponents of free knowledge rely on a stripped down for-or-against-property argument they are destined to lose. They are trying to battle a network of industries and associations with enough money, lawyers, and PR firms in their pockets to make any coalition of noble pirates look ill-equipped.

Those further interested can start with Lawrence Lessig's (very large & free PDF) book here.

Lessig argues that this debate cannot center on the adjudication of an inherent right to property. He states, correctly, that all advancements of knowledge rely in some part on the act of plagiarism, no matter if it is an exact copy and blatantly 'illegal,' or if it is an array of information pulled from varied sources and compiled into an argument or idea previously nonexistent. (See also: The ecstasy of influence) This leads to the conclusion that relying solely on leading industries to formulate Digital Rights Management standards and intellectual property laws would inevitably make the rules too strict, therefore hindering potential innovation.

On the other end lies the argument that ideas and artwork need to be protected by a just copyright law. What Helprin fails to note is that his argument easily slides down an illogical slope against pirates, instead of against the publishing industry that chokes the potential crowdsourcing that would enable talented authors to receive credit proportional to their skill, not proportional to the amount of money spent hyping their work. Look at the success of Radiohead and Cory Doctorow's essay Giving It Away(PDF).

Money and international trade law is stacked against the pirate amateurs, so it is hardly surprising that the language espoused by Oil21 is hostile and Marxist:

The spectre that is haunting Intellectual Proprietors world-wide is no longer just the much-lamented "death of the author", but the becoming-producer and becoming-distributor of the capitalist consumer.

While the staggering number of illegal downloads supports this populist foray, it is yet to be seen if a very large group of amateurs (if you listen to a quack like Andrew Keen) can evolve and crawl from their birth in the virtual primordial soup of "ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule" to overtake the controlling class. Odd that while arguing at opposite sides of parallel tables Lessig affirms what Keen pines for:

We have built a kind of cultural nobility; those within the noble class live easily; those outside it don’t.

Thankfully, we can always count on the spectators from social sciences to weigh options.