The piracy of digital copyrighted content: SOPA, PIPA, etc.

Readers will be aware of legislative endeavors such as SOPA and PIPA (also ACTA and others), superficially intended to tackle the problem of piracy of digital copyrighted content, and the recent seizure of megaupload.com and associated arrests. Whereas the copyright owners could work out deals with file hosts to charge reasonable fees for the distribution of their copyrighted content, they’re not interested. It has been pointed out that a major reason is that they wish to control the dissemination of information—“they” being the very small minority that owns the copyrights to the majority of accessible-for-fee digital content. Digital technologies make it easy to cheaply produce, or simply upload, and use the bandwidth of file hosts, such as the former megaupload, to disseminate gigabytes of information that the authorities may not like. But there are two other perspectives that should also be discussed.

The first is about the nature of copyrighted content and the meaning of piracy. The pirate bay says:

Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would “do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear.” He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first person to own the copyright to a motion picture.

Because of Edison’s patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures in the North American east coast. The movie studios therefore relocated to California, and founded what we today call Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there was no patent. There was also no copyright to speak of, so the studios could copy old stories and make movies out of them—like

Fantasia, one of Disney’s biggest hits ever.

So, the whole basis of this industry, that today is screaming about losing control over immaterial rights, is that they circumvented immaterial rights. They copied (or put in their terminology: “stole”) other people’s creative works, without paying for it. They did it in order to make a huge profit. Today they’re all successful and most of the studios are on the Fortune 500 list of the richest companies in the world. Congratulations—it’s all based on being able to re-use other people’s creative works. And today they hold the rights to what other people create.

If you want to get something released, you have to abide to their rules. The ones they created after circumventing other people’s rules.

The reason they are always complaintng about “pirates” today is simple. We’ve done what they did. We circumvented the rules they created and created our own. We crushed their monopoly by giving people something more efficient. We allow people to have direct communication between each other, circumventing the profitable middle man, that in some cases take over 107% of the profits (yes, you pay to work for them).

It’s all based on the fact that we’re competition. We’ve proven that their existence in their current form is no longer needed. We’re just better than they are.

And the funny part is that our rules are very similar to the founding ideas of the USA. We fight for freedom of speech. We see all people as equal. We believe that the public, not the elite, should rule the nation. We believe that laws should be created to serve the public, not the rich corporations.

The Pirate Bay is truly an international community. The team is spread all over the globe—but we’ve stayed out of the USA. We have Swedish roots and a Swedish friend said this: The word SOPA means “trash” in Swedish. The word PIPA means “a pipe” in Swedish. This is of course not a coincidence. They want to make the internet into a one-way pipe, with them at the top, shoving trash through the pipe down to the rest of us obedient consumers. The public opinion on this matter is clear. Ask anyone on the street and you’ll learn that no one wants to be fed with trash. Why the U.S. government wants the American people to be fed with trash is beyond our imagination but we hope that you will stop them, before we all drown...

...To fix the “problem of piracy” one should go to the source of the problem. The entertainment industry say they’re creating “culture” but what they really do is stuff like selling overpriced plushy dolls and making 11-year-old girls become anorexic... either from working in the factories that creates the dolls for basically no salary or by watching movies and tv shows that make them think that they’re fat.

More here.

Thaddeus Russell provides additional details about how Thomas Edison’s intellectual property and equipment were stolen:

Soon after he invented the motion picture camera and projector, Thomas Edison formed his own movie production and distribution company. In 1908, Edison joined with nine other film companies to form the Motion Picture Patents Company, a monopoly that attempted to control the making, distribution, and showing of all movies in the United States. Edison and “The Trust” pledged to make only movies that promoted wholesome, Christian, and “American” values. But on the Lower East Side, a group of entrepreneurial Jewish immigrants used Edison’s inventions to produce and screen their own films, which were shown in thousands of nickelodeons – five-cent movie theaters – in working-class neighborhoods all over the country. These “outlaw” filmmakers started out as vaudeville and burlesque promoters, and many of their movies were sexier, more violent, and far more entertaining than the bland fare put out by the Edison monopoly.

The great inventor was furious that “Jewish profiteers” were stealing his patent, getting rich from it, and using it to spread “smut” across America. So too were law enforcement officials. In 1907 a judge in Chicago wrote that the nickelodeons “caused, indirectly or directly, more juvenile crime coming into my court than all other causes combined.” Shortly thereafter the Chicago city council passed an ordinance granting power to the chief of police to censor motion pictures played in the city. In New York in 1907, soon after the police commissioner recommended that nickel shows be wiped out entirely, Mayor George McClellan was so moved by the evidence of immoral motion pictures polluting the minds of his citizens that on Christmas Day he ordered that all of the illicit motion picture houses be shut down.

Moral condemnations and court injunctions didn’t stop the proliferation of nickelodeons that showed unseemly fare and violated Edison’s patent, so the inventor and his colleagues hired squads of thugs to shut them down. They seized film, beat up directors and actors, forced audiences out of theaters, smashed the nickelodeon arcades and set fire to entire city blocks where they were concentrated. But fortunately for the Jewish renegades, they lived and operated in neighborhoods where hundreds of soldiers stood ready and able to protect them – men like “Big” Jack Zelig, “Lefty Louie” Rosenberg, “Gyp the Blood” Horowitz, Joe “The Greaser” Rosenzweig, and the leaders of the notorious Yiddish Black Hand, Jacob “Johnny” Levinsky and “Charley the Cripple” Vitoffsky. There were even women ready for the fight – fierce, well-armed “gun-mols” like Bessie London, Tillie Finkelstein, Birdie Pomerantz, and Jennie “The Factory” Morris.

Cameras, projectors, film, and sound equipment disappeared from the storerooms of Edison companies and showed up on makeshift movie lots on the Lower East Side. Bullets rained down on the Trust’s enforcers from the rooftops of nickelodeons. And massive fires destroyed the Edison distributors’ warehouses in the Bronx, Philadelphia, and Chicago. By 1915 the Trust had disbanded and the outlaw filmmakers moved west, where they could make bigger and better movies. Who were the men who, with the help of their nicknamed friends, fought Thomas Edison and the law and won? They were Marcus Loew of Loews Theatres and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Carl Laemmle of Universal Pictures, Adolph Zukor of Paramount Pictures, William Fox of Twentieth-Century Fox, and the brothers Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack Warner.

More.

The second issue’s about disposable income. Most people will support the singers, musicians, authors and content producers they like if they have disposable income, but the same community that has acquired copyright of most written works, music, TV programming and movies produced in recent decades, producing a substantial amount of this work in bad faith—e.g., lies, propaganda—is also behind international banking, thereby impoverishing the majority and making disposable income hard to come up with.

The Hell with these people!

Posted by J Richards on Thursday, January 26, 2012 at 02:23 PM in Global Elitism,  Media,  That Question Again,  World Affairs
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