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KateVershov-FirstPaper 6 - 24 Mar 2008 - Main.EbenMoglen
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Margaret Jane Radin, Market-Inalienability, 100 Harv. L. Rev. 1849 (1987).
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- Of course people laugh at Picker all the time, Kate. They just weren't attending a bullshit conference put on by the enemies of freedom under the guise of supporting fair use. No one seriously believes in DRM in the music industry anymore, even inside Carey Sherman's RIAA and the cohort of thugs it represents. DRM damn near delivered their entire industry to Steve Jobs, and so they now recognize that lock-in for the "consumer" also represents potential bottlenecking by someone other than the "producer/promoter/distributor," which is the role they must keep if the industry is to remain intact. The DRM wars have moved to larger file sizes, and to upstream control by ISPs (which idiots--including on this faculty--believe to be the problem of "network neutrality").
- One small problem with your approach is demonstrated by the citation to a piece written a generation ago by Peggy Radin, who has ceased to have anything to do with these issues because her points of view are obsolete. Not wrong, just irrelevant, because the prevailing conceptual language of the forces that disbelieve in the ownership of ideas has adopted freedom of thought, rather than inalienability, as the direction of travel relevant to the changing techno-social environment. At marginal cost = 0, for one thing, the immorality of exclusion is more straightforwardly visible, and the economic paradigm breaks down, so the problem isn't one of inalienability but rather of preventing the oppressive prevention of sharing. Peggy's inquiry still has validity as the organizing principle of investigation in other areas, but its effect on copyright is now negligible.
- The issue is no longer copyright reform. There are those who believe abolition is the only sensible long-term approach (I am one). There are those who believe instead that private reordering of the system, through the free software and creative commons ideas, will remodel almost all the global "copyright" industries, so that each in turn operates on commons production based around voluntary relinquishment of some copyright rules, in return for protections for commons built around copyleft and reciprocal licensing rules. (I am also one of these, in that it is my work, theoretical and practical, which is the largest single proof of the concept currently functioning in world society.) In this view, legislation only peripherally affecting the behavior of copyright (like "open source" parity or preference rules in the acquisition of software by government, and "open science" rules concerning the licensing policy to be chosen when papers reporting government-financed research are published) becomes the dominant force in shaping the knowledge economy, and copyright, rather than being reformed, fades into insignificance. Either way, whether through abolition or through ouster by the superior attraction of private reordering, the era of copyright is nearly over.
- So what's the point of worrying about whether people are thinking about music as an economic activity or an art form? In some culture or other, music is neither. It's purely sacral, or vernacularly profane, or in some other way is either less or more material, differently or not at all blessed. But the bitstream's technological properties are dissolving those cultural distinctions, even as we speak, as the Net begins to join up all the minds of humankind, without any delimitation as to previous cultural background. I shan't bother pointing again to the dotCommunist Manifesto; I'll just say that people noticed a while back that a certain quality of European technology and the social arrangements it helped to produce was the tendency to eliminate cultural distinction. Oddly enough, concern for the maintenance of some non-commoditized view of music turns out to be in the way of change rather than furthering it.
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