There is almost nothing I could think to say that has not been said by the people whose posts are collected in this linkspam by ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
troisroyaumes.
If you only read one post, though, make itcolorblue 's this is not a post about yoga!:
snarp's post On Digital Piracy, By Way of My Confession That I Am a Deranged Criminal approaches what I consider the real meat of the matter only obliquely--I don't actually think this is actually about the woes of the publishing industry in the United States, at least not primarily--but she does in this paragraph get at some of the facets in common:
It always amazes me, at cons when this debate flares up, the extent to which completely unrelated people will emotionally identify with creators they've usually never even met (coffeeandink's point about people identifying "up" in a hierarchical system is certainly relevant here), to the point of attacking people who disagree with them quite virulently. I support the right of creators to profit from their creative works, but creators and their royalties are secondary to the corporate interests that make the real money off intellectual property, and to think that this debate is primarily about creators and consumers and the moral obligations between them is to ignore the real question entirely.
troisroyaumes. If you only read one post, though, make it
colorblue 's this is not a post about yoga!:The current system of intellectual property rights, embedded in the racist classist hegemonic individualist capitalist Western ownership system that by now has been imposed, in one way or another, on everyone, with or without their consent - this system is not just completely fucked up, it is a weapon wielded by those who have power, a weapon aimed directly and deliberately at the hearts of the people and communities and cultures that are considered lesser.To try to reconstruct what I said in the first version of this post, which somehow got eaten by either Chrome or DW: I have very little patience with the concept of "intellectual property rights"; their rise is part and parcel of the neoliberalization first of so-called advanced industrial societies, and then the rest of the world; the shredding of social safety nets globally; the commercialization of scholarship and the reduction of the value of all knowledge to the price it is projected to fetch in the so-called "free market"; the patent-ization of scientific research part and parcel with increased corporate profiteering therefrom. IPR are used systematically to disenfranchise and disempower vulnerable groups at all levels of societies globally, and then, the disenfranchisement complete, to sell that content back to those groups at immense profit--but only at fair market price, of course.
In this way, it is a system that does exactly what it has been designed to.
snarp's post On Digital Piracy, By Way of My Confession That I Am a Deranged Criminal approaches what I consider the real meat of the matter only obliquely--I don't actually think this is actually about the woes of the publishing industry in the United States, at least not primarily--but she does in this paragraph get at some of the facets in common: If you find this scenario depressing, there is always the dystopian-future alternative, if you're into those. Each nation, according to its own inclination, shall have a War on Piracy, similar to my own proud homeland's excellent War on Drugs, in which we will prosecute only working-class people and ethnic minorities, most of whom will have no legal access to books because they're all digital now and we have shut down most of the libraries due to budget shortfalls, and as Tucker Carlson says, "why do they need libraries? People should go to Barnes and Noble anyway." I offer this scenario freely to Cory Doctorow for use in a work of lifeless, repellent didactic fiction.To digress slightly into my own direct experience: this is an argument that's been going around anime and manga circles for years now--first it was the debate about downloading fansubs, and since the bottom dropped out of the anime market in the States, now it's about scanlations. I put my translations of manga--my own intellectual property, and a significant investment of my time and energy--up for free on this journal under a Creative Commons license, I work with scanlation groups directly and indirectly, and the images from which I make my translation are at best semi-legal. All of which is to say, it should surprise no one that my first sympathies in this debate aren't with the huge, global corporate conglomerates; they are with the readers and the consumers of content, first and foremost.
It always amazes me, at cons when this debate flares up, the extent to which completely unrelated people will emotionally identify with creators they've usually never even met (
coffeeandink's point about people identifying "up" in a hierarchical system is certainly relevant here), to the point of attacking people who disagree with them quite virulently. I support the right of creators to profit from their creative works, but creators and their royalties are secondary to the corporate interests that make the real money off intellectual property, and to think that this debate is primarily about creators and consumers and the moral obligations between them is to ignore the real question entirely. 