Copyright Must Die
Copyright is supposed to give artists and creators ownership and control over their creations. Art and knowledge are intangible, merely bits of information, that can be copied and duplicated easily compared to tangible assets like money or real estate. Copyright was supposed to be the tool for protecting the small person. Yet, in all of its history copyright has only stifled creativity and commodified the commons of art beyond the reach of those who need it most: the poor, indie artists, and basically anyone who doesn’t hoard enough money to survive unemployment for six months without welfare benefits.
The need for intellectual property arises from the coupling of labor with survival. You need to work or else you can’t live. If what you labor to create is intellectual, well, you better sell it or else your basic needs won’t be covered, even though some of us – who never had to labor in their lives – live in an unimaginable excess. We produce so much surplus so efficiently that we should be working less – not more. Gatekeeping and the commodification of what makes us human shouldn’t even be up for discussion because we don’t need them, unless our goal is making life hell for each other for no actual reason.
My issues with copyright law can be extended to the liberal obsession with rule of law as well, whereby we are all supposedly equal before the law, which disregards who actually sets the rules and who can effectively make use of it. What use is a “fair” court system if all you can afford is a public defender when your opponent has a legion of lawyers working tirelessly to move their case forward in their favor? In theory, it’s all amazing – as long as we’re all equal which is far from the reality. We’re witnessing GenAI companies uncover the “rules for thee, but not for me” mantra where the ruling class has decided to disregard copyright law now that it suits them. But if I were to pirate one episode of Futurama on my residential IP address today, watch Walt Disney sue me and my descendants three generations later into homelessness.1
The whole intellectual property bullshit actually kills people. Vaccine patents make access to preventive measures such as routine COVID vaccinations virtually impossible for people in the Global South not just because of the egregious costs required for producing the necessary vaccines, but also thanks to the artificial scarcity created by the global capitalist system which has no opt-out whatsoever. Now, I admit, there’s a lot that goes into providing medicine that isn’t limited to patent acquisitions, but copyright and intellectual property laws are certainly not neutral to the whole process.
And here I am, writing all of this like OpenAI et al. aren’t just going to scrape the fuck out of my blog despite all of the scraping blocks I have enabled on my Cloudflare domain. What we need is not the effective and consistent enforcement of copyright law or the enforcement of any law, but the dismantlement of the systems that enable some to disregard rules when it suits them and enforce them when it benefits their bottom line. When you’re rich, laws, rules, and customs mean jack shit. Whatever you do in life, just don’t commit the crime of not being born into the top 1%.
-
This may or may not be an exaggeration, but I’m not holding my breath to find out. ↩︎