In Defense Of Rock!

This is an excerpt of a reaction I had to an article expressing a Libertarian viewpoint in defense of abolishing copyright and intellectual property laws. That's the gist of it, but if you really want to read the article, its here: http://freenation.org/a/f31l1.html (Its a bit dry).

Anyway, here's what I said:

His solutions, however, are ridiculous. He seems to be suggesting some sort of artist/creator based league by which to organize boycotts as a way to curb the practice of stealing ideas. In today's age, this is simply irrelevant. Boycotts simply don't work now. There's buy-no-gas day boycotts, which do nothing to control costs. There are over 2,000,000 vegetarians, and still Burger king is the only place with a veggie burger. There's Buy Nothing day, which also is ineffective. So this guy thinks that "producers of intellectual products — authors, artists, inventors, software designers, etc. — were to set up an analogous court system for protecting copyrights and patent rights — ...Individuals and organizations accused of piracy would have a chance to plead their case at a voluntary court, but if found guilty they would be required to cease and desist, and to compensate the victims of their piracy, on pain of boycott."

Come on. Let's imagine a real word scenario with this solution:

This court of loosely affiliated authors, tv script-writers, rock musicians, and freelance painters will now come to order. Judge Bono presiding.



Judge Bono: You, Time Warner Corporation, are found guilty of stealing the music from John Roccia's self-produced and non-copyrightable harmonica solo album, giving it to Aerosmith (whom you keep on retainer with your billions of dollars) to, shadily but not illegally, record and perform at great profit to yourself. For this act of piracy, we, this court of washed up artists who have enough time in our schedules to be doing this instead of creating things, do so enact a non-legally-binding and completely voluntary boycott of Aerosmith's music and performances. Fans of the harmonica album are urged, but not required, to purchase the original John Roccia recordings, of which there are only 500 because he is poor, from his website, at no penalty for non compliance.



Yea. Seems like a good system.




Anyway, I'm all for the abolition of intellectual property, so long as it went along with the abolition of ALL property. Bear with me a moment, I'm talking theoretically here. After all, what's the difference between your latest short story, and the deed to your house? They're both just words on paper, conveying an idea of something. If we lived in a communist utopia where there was no need for money, it wouldn't fuckin matter who owned what song or book, because there's no wealth or livelihood at stake, only street-cred. Anyway, copyright laws are barely even relevant, because anyone who works in any capacity to make something (invention, art, or otherwise) at a big corporation usually surrenders those rights to the company anyway. You think Bruce Springstein owns ANY of his songs? Nope. These days, copyrights just protect the little guy who isn't making any money from situations like I hilariously described above. Since we live in a society based on valuing property, to say that stuff is property but ideas aren't greatly advantages one group of people. And in any society you need both builders and thinkers, and you need to value their contributions equally by the standards of the society.