January 28, 2008
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By Dalwhinnie
The right has been in a swivet about the blasphemy trial of Ezra Levant. But Human Rights Commissions are not the only enemy of free discussion. The pretensions of the guardians of intellectual property are as pernicious. My interest was stimulated by this morning’s article on Michael Geist by Deirdre McMurdy. McMurdy intimates that the opposition to copyright reform is an anti-Conservative phenomenon and worthy of suspicion, if not worse. That is a fundamental misreading of the relationship of intellectual property (IP) to conservative values. Conservatives do not wish for the infinite and eternal extension of private property rights over ideas, at the expense of free discussion.
In a capitalist society it is not forbidden to wish to own everything. If you could appropriate the words “and”, “but” and “for”, and charge a millionth of a cent for every use of those words everywhere in the world through ubiquitous machine intelligence, you could make a tidy packet. To do this you would need to embed monitoring software in every computer to see whether your ownership rights were being respected. You would need to criminalize the evasion of these ubiquitous monitors. As you can imagine, the ability to embed such monitoring devices is well within the reach of modern technology. The ability to record, upload to some central point, and bill for such use of someone’s intellectual property is now quite feasible. What cannot be done yet is to make the English language the subject of private appropriation and, second, to order such pervasive monitoring into every computer. You need a law on copyright reform to do this.
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