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The principles behind the recent Swedish decision against the file-sharing site, thepiratebay.org, have no moral basis and have had no legal basis for 99.99% of the time laws have been written.  So, motormanmark.com offers this explanation of why good people are called “pirates,” dashing the absurd notion of “intellectual property.”

 

Pirateer of the Immaterial World

by Alger Q. Hiss

 

 

 The Depravity of My Soul

 

I am writing under a clever pseudonym because I am an enemy of the state, a shameless evildoer who selfishly disrupts the good order all decent people depend on.

 

If only I had been born in a previous century I’d have no avenue through which to spread my wickedness, long ago when there was no internet, there were no recordings or logos or brand names–before there came the temptation of these invisible, incorporeal–what shall I call them?  …things! –and with them came a new set of rules. 

 

Some of us are not obeying the rules.  As technology becomes more accessible, a criminal army is growing.  Used to be, the drug dealers were the ones making all the money.  People who were holed up in their basements copying vinyl LP’s onto little Radio Shack cassette tapes had to work pretty hard for a slim profit.  As a teenager, I enjoyed making Walkman-friendly taped compilations of my record collection.  I gave away a tape here or there, but I never thought about it as an income stream. 

 

The first time I really put my nose to the pirating grindstone was with VCR tapes.  It was Christmas time.  I was trying to find a copy of “The Homecoming”–you know, the Waltons movie where John Boy goes looking through a snowstorm for his Daddy in the back seat of a sleigh that belongs to whom?? 

 

Bootleggers.  

 

I wanted to show it to my kids, because I almost cry at various scenes (…well, actually, I’m nearly a blubbering idiot every time I see John Boy unwrap his Christmas gift.)  But “The Homecoming” was not available on VCR tape for some reason.

 

I eventually bought a copy on EBay for a load of money–in those days, rare VCR tapes could go for over a hundred dollars–and then I started bootlegging it over EBay.  I was initially inspired to place both feet squarely in this nefarious world because the out-of-print tape was so hard to get and was so outlandishly priced that, like the movie’s Robin-Hooding turkey thief, it was more the pleasure of providing Christmas cheer that inspired me than the small profit the $20 offering gleaned.  And the principle of intellectual property was not in the moral equation, not one little bit.

 

But I’ll get to that.

 

I also, at about the same time, liquidated my extensive CD collection.  Having obtained a French freeware CD-burning program at Koyotesoft.com, I found my computer could turn any CD into properly labeled MP3 computer files in a few minutes.  I sold my CD’s on Half.com for a tidy sum, and, just like a true outlaw, I spent that money.  I used the extra shelf space for books, which look a hell of a lot better if you ask me. 

 

Once I had run through my own CD collection, I turned to the public library’s, though I was at the same time growing more and more picky about what I would have the patience to burn. 

 

Getting more familiar with the MP3 format led me back onto the internet, where I found I could download songs for free off MySpace in less time than it took to burn something from a CD.  The free music on MySpace was usually of the amateur or struggling-professional type, but was comparable in quality to store-bought music.  That’s not hard to understand, considering that the cheapest music editing freeware can put together a more sophisticated recording console than, for example, the 4-track boards the Beatles used when they made their first legendary hits. 

 

These amateur MySpace tracks have character, too, of the type pop music producers routinely edit away.

 

And for the first time I came to wonder why music costs money at all.  Why don’t we all just trade recordings we like?  Why can’t the Ipod have one of those little beaming plastic window thingees to allow us to just zap an mp3 we like to a friend?  If not for intellectual property laws, art wouldn’t need to be centralized as it is; you wouldn’t have to have millions of people turning to the same peanut gallery of artists offered by the recording industry.  

 

Think about it: is it really so necessary that artists preserve the lottery-ticket route to wealth that the recording industry provides to a slim few?  I mean, there’d still be a good living to be made.  Springsteen’d be the act you’d just have to see when you were visiting Asbury Park (which could use the tourism.)  And Bruce wouldn’t have to hole himself up in a 400-acre compound, either.  He could live in a house on Ocean Avenue and stay a regular working-class guy.  And other artists would be heard this way, too.  Tuning the car radio, you might hear anything at all, not the same old droning goldies from month-to-month, year-to-year, generation-to-generation. 

 

Where Did Our Love Go, Desperado, Gimme Some Lovin’, California Girls, Sugar Sugar…,  only became crappy songs the hundredth or so time you heard them.

 

The question is even more basic: is there something truly great about great art?  Is Bruce Springsteen’s talent really so remarkable?  –Being as it is so derivative of Dylan, who was derivative of Woody Guthrie (who, as a true folk singer, would’ve been pleased for you to know he borrowed more than he created,) and isn’t it true that all art is derivative? 

 

In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins says genes are “tokens,” meaning a gene survives not for the sake of its own physical self, but for the sake of what its DNA sequence represents.  A real simple example may be a trait, like brown eyes; the reason brown eyes reproduce is not because of the greatness of any one brown-irised eyeball or for the strength of the matter that composes its particular gene, but they reproduce because the brown iris as a concept works. 

 

And so, every artistic achievement is merely a token packet of constituent parts of information, competitively replicated ideas that have passed brain-to-brain.  Perhaps it is hubris to put our individual arrangements on much of a pedestal, a property pageant holding meager human expression (however intense) up like an idol.

 

Knowing nothing about such things, I cannot say.

 

As time went by, my perversions became more degenerate than just selling videos for what I saw was a virtuous purpose.  For extra holiday money, I bootlegged the following two items:

 

·        A recording that presents a variety of the working tracks that were produced in the creation of, perhaps, the finest of all the Beatles’ work, the song, “Strawberry Fields Forever.” The recording features narrated analysis by producer, George Martin, and reveals the extent to which the song was a product of George Martin’s creativity.  The Beatles never allowed this to be published.  I think it was speculatively recorded while Martin was digitalizing the master tapes for CD.

·        “Merry Monster Christmas.”  This record, for my money, is the best comedy recording ever made, and it has been completely neglected by the recording industry. 

 

[A postscript:  A guy who knew the original artist emailed me after seeing my EBay ad, and I encouraged him to get the great Len Maxwell to reissue "Merry Monster Christmas."  Mr. Maxwell died shortly after self-re-releasing the album for the first time since 1967 as a CD on EBay.]

 

Let’s see, from my recent jury duty experience I can tell you a drug sale that can throw you in prison for six months nets a person about $8 profit.  I was clearing about $15 on each Homecoming VCR/DVD recording or other bootlegged CD sale, and, as there was no national “War on Bootlegs,” I was safe from prosecution and waterboarding torture.

 

Then, my sister in-law picked a small box of Adobe Acrobat software from the trash at her job at Columbia University.  She gave me the entire box, which I could carry under an arm.  There were about 70 disks, each, I discovered, worth over $100 retail, about $60 on EBAY.  I am talking about $10 worth of paper and plastic here worth $4,200.  The sale of my previous idealistic holiday offerings seemed in comparison a grind, and never again did I waste my time bootlegging recordings.

 

Once the box of Adobe CD’s was liquidated, I started producing copies of them.  I guess you’d say this was my big jump down into the 7th layer of intellectual property theft.  It was soooo easy.  I merely had to drop the software and a blank 20-cent CD into my computer and click copy.  I would add a label in a foreign language, and I could sell it on EBAY for $40 as a foreign copy “identical in every way to the English version but for the label.” 

 

Not that anyone believed the foreign label ruse–it would just provide them with an excuse to save money on a ridiculously expensive purchase they really had no choice about making.  I mean, computer software isn’t something you can go browsing for, like a pair of shoes.  How many other pieces of software are there that can do what the Acrobat Writer can do? 

 

None, and not because computer programming is brain science, but because Adobe got its patents first and was the first to mobilize an effective promotion.

 

It is as if some strange nuclear bomb went off and we each sprouted a third leg and oddly-shaped foot, and some absolute genius immediately filed a patent for shoes to fit the new feet, and now we all have to wait around for his patent to expire while we pay through the nose for his crummy little loafers.

 

Like that.

 

The only problem with selling software was that, in those days, it was remotely possible I could be sued.  Being the father of four wonderful kids, and so somewhat of an overly-prudent fellow, I dropped out of the software bootlegging industry as soon as it got a little tiring.  I never made such easy money, and, as a result, I now have a hard time finding the motivation to sell anything if my profit is not an absolute bonanza.

 

Maybe that’s the entertainment industry’s problem.

 

 

What’s Mine Is (Still) Yours

  

Oddly, all along I’d let myriad references to file sharing networks float in one ear and out the other.  I knew that millions of people were using them for music, but still my brain stubbornly associated file sharing with computer-overliterate, graphic-novel-reading gamers.  I stumbled into the light while in search of one of the rare movie titles the New York Public Library does not have a copy of–you may remember it, a movie called “Mindwalk,” where three characters talk deeply for two hours, all very meaningful and enriching.  I wanted to watch it again because I was working on a children’s book that featured the beautiful French commune of Mont Saint Michel, and “Mindwalk” has a scene, I’d remembered, where the tide comes in and turns the place into an island. 

 

I did a little search for the flick online and found a blog that mentioned a copy of it could be had on a file sharing network at Slsknet.org.  I dutifully went straight there and found a download of an easy-to-use program that was free and required only a made-up screen name. 

 

“Mindwalk” could not be had (I eventually picked it off Google Videos,) but in the following few weeks I downloaded thousands of songs off this Slsknet.org.  Forever destroying my mind’s conception of music, I no longer libraried it.  I started keeping only the songs I really liked–not the filler you find on most CDs.   I kept my Beatles library and certain other perfect album constructions intact, but rooted through everything else. 

 

Then, I logged off.  Another surprise: once you fill up, you don’t need to go back to the well.  Music had always been a nag to me, my interests wandering into nearly every genre.  I needed to hook up with this or that recording.  I needed to hear the original “Billy” to see where Kathy Linden’s song came from.  I wanted to hear Woody perform with the Almanac Singers.  I’d always kept a scribbled list of music I wanted to hear in my wallet, so that I could keep my eye out at rummage sales or especially large record stores.

 

But now I was sated.  I was done gathering music, and it fit neatly on my hard drive.  Separated by style, I could then carry large batches of my tunes on little memory cards for my MP3 player–which is one of those Chinese things you get off EBay that don’t hook you into a pay-per-listen deal, but just acts as a player of MP3 files you load into the memory card.  I have deleted an enormous amount of music, much more than I have kept.

 

Idle hands over the keyboard being the devil’s workshop, though, there was one more click I was destined to mouse. 

 

Listening to an MP3 file of a public radio discussion of file sharing (see where your pledge money goes?) I learned of the subversive thepiratebay.org, and their success in foiling the Swedish government’s efforts to pull their plug.  (Despite the recent conviction of its founders, the site is still in full operation.)   I logged on and found a simple search window, thickly bedecked with bikini-clad ladies offering to date me. 

 

I’ve never felt so much love. 

 

With the help of Bittorrent freeware, thepiratebay.org, (or isohunt.com or mininova.org,) will let you download just about any popular movie, TV show, music, or software.   (College kids can also get textbooks for free there.)  For quicker downloads, you’ll also want the freeware at download.com, so you can choose to watch .avi or .mp4 files when they are available. With broadband, it takes about two hours to download a 2-hour movie, and it works great.  There is a coding system that foils anyone looking to spread a virus or worm. 

 

I don’t have a television cable (or any interest in wasting my life-moments watching commercials between things I view,) so I downloaded the BBC TV series, “The Office.” 

 

The absolute crazy thing is this: that and a few other foreign sitcoms is all I’ve downloaded.  I can’t think of anything else I want.  Sure, with young kids it’s hard to get out to the movies, but there are no movies so special I’d rather use up my hard drive space than just wait for the DVD to come to the library.

 

Too much of a good thing.

 

 

Idea Property

 

I sit down with my kids to watch the latest superhero movie–a copy of a library DVD I burned with the copying and shoehorning freeware, “DVD Shrink” (which needs the program Nero if you want to make a new DVD rather than just storing it on your hard drive–and, which won’t always get over DVD copyright protection, in which case you need to use it in tandem with DVDFab HD Decrypter.)  Anyhow, I am starting up this superhero movie for my kids and, just after the copyright warning comes up, there’s this overhead shot of a dark, rainy alley (I’m working from memory, here,) a grimy character in the shadows spreads out some titles amid an audio drumbeat and flashing car headlights–he has the crooked smile of the pusher man.  The youngster waves the baddie off and moves on.  A comparison is made to a pickpocket, a shoplifter, and (if my memory suits me,) a rapist.

 

My kids know I have been a bootlegger, and I am wondering if they are thinking of me.

 

“When you copy a DVD, you are stealing, plain and simple,” the voiceover asserts.  “Intellectual property is just like real property, no difference really.  Those are the facts, plain and simple.  Pirating DVD’s is stealing!”

 

My son’s eyes wander in my direction.  “Ahoy, Matey!” I scream.  “Shiver me timbers!  Stop me before I burn another one!  Aargh!”  My boy, a big fan of pirate flicks, falls over laughing and contributing his own silly piratese.

 

The thing is, though, that pickpocketry, shoplifting, and rape are self-apparently wrong.  We don’t need commercials to tell us not to do these things.  Why the big campaign for intellectual property?

 

Intellectual property is a bogus concept, that’s why.

 

Property has substance, but when I copy a DVD, I use materials owned by me entirely.  When the cops come to confiscate those Chinese Coach and Prada handbags from immigrant street peddlers, they are taking away property 100% of which the bootlegger paid good money for.

 

In the privacy of my own home, I log onto a file sharing network with my own computer to download files from another person who lives in, say… Lithuania.  The downloading  process occurs as I am surfing or opening emails–I tap only a few keystrokes, which will yield hundreds of files an hour.  But these words “download” and “files” are metaphors.  There are no files.  Nothing–absolutely nothing–comes “down” from anywhere into my computer.  When I turn my computer off, there are only the very same molecules and atoms that were there before the download. 

 

The illegality is located in a pattern of magnetic impulses now stored in the memory of my computer, a pattern which has been made legally exclusive by an arrangement between the government and some other (usually corporate) body.

 

Since there is nothing lost, common law theft is not the issue.  Legally, when you have a song, film, or idea and you willingly take the step to share it with the public, you have decided on your own not to keep that song, film, or idea private.  The Constitution must include a special clause even to allow laws to be passed to protect the right to copy these information sources for limited periods of time solely to “promote the progress of science and useful arts.”

 

When the recording or film industry take a thepiratebay.org to court, they are suing not for a violation of common law, but law written to protect copyright.  In the past 30 years of technological metamorphosis, our corporate congress has succeeded in transfiguring copyright law just as rapidly from its Constitutional bases.

 

Though the recording industry (RIAA) bullying threats of lawsuits against college students (who are, unlike me, making no money–just trading computer files for enjoyment,) came to an end with the “Cult of Ownership Society” Bush administration that inspired them, the RIAA would have kept them up if they hadn’t proved such a dismal failure when put to court tests.  The RIAA has taken one case through a trial, won the case through some shenanigans, then had the win thrown out on appeal.  They have not won one such lawsuit.  Not one.

 

The RIAA’s stance is still as aggressive as it can be with any hope of success, because its efforts are to defeat our very tradition, begun by the Constitution’s exclusive rights clause, which specifies “limited times” to copyrights, with no sense of such rights being bought and sold as bundled assets for decades to come. 

 

In those days of limited innovation and expensive printing processes, the goal of the clause was not to secure long-term ownership, but to allow some brief initial reward for the purpose of spurring creative expression and ingenuity.

 

About that one case the RIAA had seemed to win (before the decision was reversed on appeal:)

 

The Minnesota jury had awarded the recording industry $222,000–that was $9,250 per song–because the defendant, Jammie Thomas, shared 24 songs online.

 

But, what if she had been charged with all of the 1702 songs she allegedly downloaded?  And what if the jury had awarded the maximum $150,000 per violation?  Would the industry be due a quarter of a billion dollars??  Why the RIAA limited the suit to those 24 songs, if not to obscure the utter irrationality underlying the concept of intellectual theft, is beyond me. 

 

Now, multiply that quarter billion by the 60 million people the RIAA can document as copyrighted-file sharers in the US today, and you start to see how ridiculous it is to own property that does not really exist.  WHY DOESN’T THE RECORDING INDUSTRY WANT US TO KNOW THAT THEY ARE OWED 15 QUATRILLION DOLLARS?????

 

And what if I downloaded my MP3’s from another computer in my home?  Hmmm?  Off my son’s computer, say?  Is that theft?  What if it’s my roommate… who is my brother?  What if my son lives in Lithuania–or my brother is staying there for a few months?  Or maybe I feel in my heart that all Lithuanians are my brothers??

 

Sly and devious logic.

 

Intellectual property–a better term for which would be “idea property”–is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, promising to allow individuals to dominate what they create, what is a self-glorifyingly spiritual ideal, as if our physical reality can be left behind and we can accompany our ideas wherever they wander in the ether.  Just as much, though, the concept seeks to ubiquitously chill and control what I do with what has come into my eyes and ears, what has become my human experience.  The more media I engage, however passively, the more of an automaton I become–the more my experience is owned by another, the less of it that is mine to claim-the less there is to be claimed by future generations as their own. 

 

An artist should crow against this, and if it weren’t for their dreams of hitting the idea lottery, maybe more artists would.

 

The attempt to interfere with my control over what is already in my control offends and motivates me. 

 

Or as I heard the documentary filmmaker, Gordon Quinn, say in a recent interview while defining the “fair use” doctrine:  “Everyone has a right to participate in their own culture.”

 

Arguments in favor of intellectual property are most effectively made in discussing the expense invested in creating or promoting the work of art.  Surely, the copyright holder deserves the benefit, right?

 

For instance, those people on Canal Street selling Prada handbags.  They are stealing, because Prada spent millions popularizing those handbags to the extent that it is a waste of time to try to sell something to the ad-blitzed public that you rather designed yourself.

 

This is a clever end run around logic, as, in order to consider the argument in favor of intellectual property, it is necessary accept the premise of intellectual property. 

 

The money should not have been spent. 

 

There should be no circus of promotion and competition among works of art and ideas, as their value is not practical but in the eye of the beholder. Presuming this advertisement-free premise of non-competition takes all the teeth out of the idea of a guy copying and selling a DVD you made, because you expended the investment willingly, without expectation of exorbitant profit, and you released it willingly (or else, how did he get a copy?) and because of the nature of art and ideas his choice of your expression to try to sell over someone else’s honors you.

 

There is something inside me that says my creations are divinely original.  I will not argue whether they are or are not.   I only assert that it is a wrong step when that leads me to believe I am due some legal title to all proceeds to be made off my creation.

 

That’s all.

 

 

Big Rock Candy Mountain Redux

 

It is not that the world needs bootlegging, but that it needs to get past bootlegging.  Once all idea property has been bootlegged enough, there will be (if you like technological forecasts…,) a little $10 device you’ll be able to buy in your town’s Chinatown that’ll hold nearly all the books and music and movies that have ever been produced.  This device itself will be easily copied and so will render its vast tide of wonderful titles economically worthless, a process file sharing has already begun.

 

I am talking about the decentralization of art and culture, a democratic process that can be seen everywhere.

 

The book publishing industry as we know it is on the verge of collapse (so says me.)  With Print on demand (POD) publishers, like Lulu and iUniverse–which will print any book one-at-a-time, as they are ordered–an author is now free to market a new project at will.  Right now, I can send my digital manuscript off to a POD who will, for a fee as low as about $100, get the book an ISBN number and get it indexed on Amazon or other online retailers.  Then, I can promote it any way I want.  All people need to do is log on and they can buy a copy.  Around the world, search engines will bring people to search terms used in my book, so I can even still hope for some long-term financial rewards.  But, more importantly, local art sees a new life when I tell my friends, neighbors, co-workers about my book and they change their buying habits and learn to focus away from the mainstream.

 

As more and more amateur photographers and graphic artists post their digital images on websites like Fotolia.com, Bigstockphoto.com, and Dreamstime.com for small-fee open use, a meritocracy is afflicting this career that was once dominated by pros with expensive equipment and industry connections.  Images once very costly to acquire and print are sold for a dollar a download.  The person who uploads the image gets a quarter, which isn’t necessarily chump-change when you post thousands of your pictures.  The person downloading can choose exactly the images they are looking for through sophisticated search mechanisms, and then print them as a poster, display them as a computer desktop or even use them, royalty-free, for business purposes.  Maybe for once we’ll see what those Pollack paint scribbles and Warhol soup can images are really worth.

 

And, of course, YouTube has only just begun its contribution towards the democratic elbowing of the TV cow down the stockyard shuttle where it blunders more and more decisively toward the mindlessly riveting, to finally be (with any small belief in human decency) jolted to death, the victim of its own oversaturation.

 

Art should have never gone commercial.

 

In the meantime, decent people will follow the brawl over who gets the money from Tigger pajamas and Piglet mousepads in the tabloid business section.  Will it be Disney?  The daughter of the guy A.A.Milne gave Winnie-the-Pooh merchandising rights to in 1930?  The granddaughter of A.A.Milne–Christopher Robin’s daughter who lives in a nursing home with cerebral palsy?  This, more than 50 years after the author’s body first lay moldering in the grave. 

 

And let’s make this perfectly clear: your home movies do not belong entirely to you.  The song “Happy Birthday to You” belongs to Time-Warner.  Really.  Just try publishing a manuscript with the lyrics or a movie with the tune without forking over about $5000 and you’ll be sued faster than it takes you to say “Mildred Hill,” the lady who died 95 years ago after authoring the melody.  The trail of owners since her sister copyrighted it in the 30’s (Mildred never cashed-in,) reads like the Old Testament.  

 

And law-abiders will marvel at the talents of the Dutch trademark agency, Shieldmark, which successfully claimed the rights to the sound of the first 9 notes from Beethoven’s “Fur Elise,” while former Colorado Congresswoman Pat Schroeder, now the CEO of the Association of American Publishers, tries to find a way to make libraries charge for content.

 

You can be sure that degenerates like me, on the other hand, will be lurking here, letting our minds run free, trained on whatever little orderly sand castles we can muck up with a clean escape, patiently awaiting a New World organized around something more noble than property, as soon as humans figure this whole “life” thing out.

  

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