Who Are You Calling A Thief, Mr Vice President?

Who Are You Calling A Thief, Mr Vice President?

Posted: 29/11/2013 | Author: The Political Idealist | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: copyleft, copyright, entertainment, fairness, Intellectual property, Media, open source, patents, science, Technology, the internet |Comments Off

The federal governments of the United States, under Democrat and Republican administrations, have all been in the pockets of the film, software and music lobbies, which is why the US is cursed with some of the toughest “intellectual property” laws in any western democracy. What else would you expect when Joe Biden describes this piracy malarkey as “theft, clean and simple”? Unfortunately, the contagion did not take long to spread to Europe, and so the world is a much poorer place for several reasons.

Zombie patents, quietly bought out by vested interests, are left to rot in drawers while our energy and food shortages go unsolved. Many think it’s likely that the knowledge is there to replace petrol cars, do away with daily shaving and we know for certain that we could cheaply make lightbulbs with 30 year lifetimes. And yet scientific and technological progress is being scuppered to protect the markets of yesterday.

Other technologies are being kept for a select few because the intellectual property owners are applying whacking profit margins. Big pharma is particularly guilty of this moral crime, denying half of the world lifesaving medications because that wouldn’t make business sense. AmalgamatedMegaMedico would rather sell 1,000,000 pills at £1 profit than 10,000,000 pills at 7p profit apiece. Had the same principle been applied to the World Wide Web (the technology behind it has been made freely available, but it need not have been), we might have one more billionaire around, but the growth of the Internet would have been badly stunted. You certainly wouldn’t be reading this right now. Don’t dwell on that too much: you might conclude that’s a good thing!

And then we turn to entertainment. The mass entertainment cartel have created a culture that accepts piracy due to the huge royalties that have rendered CDs and DVDs, and their forerunners, cassette tapes, almost inaccurate unaffordable. To sustain this, the industry has taken to prosecuting teenagers for downloading from Pirate Bay, prefacing every DVD with dark threats to would-be pirates, and producing crude propaganda suggesting that not paying for that copy of Wrecking Ball is on a moral par with snatching bread from the hands of a starving child. Well I’m sorry, but it just isn’t.

That’s why I’m delighted to learn that the US army has used several thousand pirated copies of some software for which it bought just 500 copies. Given that this an organisation that can afford trillions of dollars’ worth of thermonuclear weaponry, I’m stunned it lacks the money for a couple of computer programs. Will Mr Biden apologise personally for this act of theft?

I’m not saying that the creativity of our artists, scientists and thinkers should not go unrewarded. Intellectual property is a concept designed to encourage riding risk taking and socio-technological development. The problem is, that same concept, in its present form, stifling those causes.

Maybe we need to rethink the model of creating artificial monopolies on new technologies and ideas altogether. Why not have a degree of innovation in reforming the system for overseeing innovation?