Barrel Strength

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.

The science-fictional conjecture about appropriating the English language itself is but an extension of the claims of the IP community. Every recent revision of IP in the United States has extended the duration of IP and eased the formal requirements for claiming it. Disney appropriates the folk-tales of European and Asian history (Cinderella, Mulan), embeds them in an artistic expression, and prevents you from playing with it further. They own it; you don’t.

Now they want to reach into the design of computers and cause technology to be embedded that would prevent the evasion of IP rights; lawyers would now be designing computers. This has alrady occurred in the United States, and there is strong pressure to extend this regime to Canada.

These points have all been made brilliantly in Larry Lessig’s Free Culture, and The Future of Ideas, Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, and James Boyle’s Shamans, Software and Spleens.The thrust of what these people are saying is that the vibrancy of a culture depends on a balance between the rights of creators and those of users,and that IP law revision has strongly tilted the balance away from the rights of users to fair comment, reasonable use, mockery, re-rearrangement, or reinterpretation. In so doing the health of the culture is at stake.

The basic idea of copyright law is to balance the interest of users and authors. Recent American legislation has reversed and overthrown the ancient balances between authors and users.

The American Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which Canada may be in the process of emulating, reversed two hundred years of copyright law. The DMCA prohibits the circumvention of any device or measure designed to protect IP, thus freezing technology and preventing tinkering. Moreover, the DMCA allows the virtually eternal extension of copyright in the case of works created for the use of corporations, and allows users to bind contractually users from reusing facts or ideas contained in the work. Many of our cultural products will be triple protected by copyright, licenses and contracts, and code. That means you will not be able to use them for your purposes: Mickey Mouse will never enter the public domain, and corporations will own the culture.

You can get in touch with Michael Geist at http://www.michaelgeist.ca/

People who support Ezra Levant support the freedom of expression that the Internet offers. That freedom is threatened from another direction. Do not ignore it. Copyright “reform” in the United States was a cover to extend private property rights over the common culture; do not let it happen here, my fellow bloggers. It is the right cause by which to show the liberal side of your conservatism.