I used to think that copyright was justified simply because I had grown up to assume it unquestionably. Even in the pirate-prone world, I thought it was just to reward creators for their works. I was half right. Creators do deserve reward, but we deserve liberty more. However, with virtual ticket models like Kickstarter we can get the best of both worlds, and copyright has absolutely no place in the world of common sense anymore. Its philosophy of treating services as goods has inherent contradictions. We no longer have to put up with it.

All it took to change my mind was somebody asking me “just why exactly should the whole world give up so much liberty simply because of the assumption, based on no evidence whatsoever, that copyright is the only way to solve the free rider problem for funding artists?”. I did not have a clever answer to this, and it caused me to reconsider a lot of things indeed. I had read 1984 recently and I knew that the consequences of what copyright was really asking for were to be innately distrusted. Indeed, the country that ironically no doubt has the lowest levels of piracy in the world right now is North Korea. You can use that as a powerful comeback towards anyone who tries to passive-aggressively slander copyright abolitionists with the claim that China’s “Communistic” ideology, as opposed to North Korea’s Communistic ideology, causes 80% of the world’s piracy (the reason for this rate – assuming that the rate is not so high simply because of China’s high population – is because China blocks free trade especially when it comes to iTunes and other services, forcing people to pirate and hide under the country’s strict trade and free speech laws… sounds like a certain industry that tries to make content as unavailable as possible, doesn’t it?) It is no different to the “Hitler was an atheist!” slander I get in religious debates.

And speaking of 1984 and the piracy in China caused by trade blockades, I have heard of some stories about the Soviet Union’s underground opposition. People would pass around pirated copies of 1984 (and Animal Farm, too) to read and copy for one another. They had to be pirated because the Soviet Union, just like China, would not tolerate any trade from the West, which meant very few printing presses. The proles would keep any notice of 1984 copies being passed around off the record, and would give them an instinctive knowledge that would help them ease the difficult fall of the Soviet Union. So my question to any copyright maximalist/apologist is this: should the publishers of 1984 or George Orwell himself (I can guess HIS answer to this question) have been in a position to forbid the proles from obtaining such important literature for their resistance simply because they were not in a position, let alone any kind of liberty at all, to reward the author for his works? The implications are important – copyright economics at their very core have more Communistic potential than non-copyright economics. They must do, because copyright by its definition restricts trade.

I must say, reading the sign by Lester Chambers made me angry. It sums up everything about what is so horrible about copyright: eventually the buck of power gets passed to an unwelcome party who can overrule an artist’s rights on his own works, even although that party took no part whatsoever in the creative process. I have similar rage over what I heard about EMI preventing the Beatles from letting Carl Sagan use “Here Comes The Sun” for his Voyager Golden Record project.

This is tyranny by the way. There is no other way to describe it. A gross accumulation of power that reveals the worst possible aspects of unchallenged corporatism. These labels do not just have “a” monopoly – they have numerous monopolies consisting of every artist who ever signed with them. The concept of self-publishing or even self-management will never truly have a fair shot against this. These labels will always have unjust power as long as copyright exists, and have the ability to crush random innocent people in a “Go Postal!”, draconian fashion by bankrupting anyone who does the equivalent of letting their friends borrow DVDs over the internet.

People who laugh at this common sense… people who insist that this transparent stupidity is the best thing possible for both creators and audiences, and that anyone who even asks gentle questions about it are on par with car thieves and terrorists are just flippant. I cannot tell you how finished I am with people who talk like that. How fucking sick and tired I am of their absolute refusal to accept responsibility for the dangers that copyright poses to modern communication technology and, indeed, creativity as a whole.

Anything done in the name of copyright is okay, apparently. I hear that attempting to restore French Colonialism in Vietnam was justified in the name of fighting Communism, too.