If you believe in Copyright/Intellectual property rights … I don’t know dawg, you need to check yourself before you wreck yourself. That shit’s a meme, a joke. It’s a spook conjured by the corporate elite to trick unassuming consumers.
I don’t know, you could accept the fact that the very concept of “copyright”/“information property right” (the later being a hilarious parody of the idea of real, physical property rights developed out of English political theory and the concept of natural law) was only created to help foster the hypercapitalist expansion of predatory corporations in their victimizing of unsuspecting clientele (and their irreverent cultural deracination of independent artists) who might mistakenly, and all too often regretfully, sign their deals,- the fact that this idea of copyright is, more than any of that, metaphysically nonsensical simply because there is no scarcity in the case of a digital object, (given the fact that something like the words in a book is, you know, not an object, but information) plus the whole idea has little legal precedent in any case law or political philosophy beyond printers’ guilds in the 1800’s.
You could accept the further implication that anything that can be written on a piece of paper belongs, ultimately, not to you, not to any one man or woman, but to the human spirit alone, and should be distributed freely. I consider all humans to exist under an ethical injunction to go out of their way and pirate as much as possible: games, books, movies, music- anything; even things they don’t even plan on using, just so they can pass it along to someone else who might need it, so as to take away some of the profit going to its vendor. Knowledge itself is the sacred right of the human soul and, while you have the right to profit over physical media of exchange by selling printed materials, you do not have, metaphysically considered, the right to “own” information.
Now fraud on the other hand,- that does have legal precedent as a crime, and does make sense, again, legally as well as morally. I can freely distribute anything you write, in keeping with my own ethics, but if someone were to write something and then put your name on it, looking to profit in the case that you were a famous author with a good reputation,- and then sell it as if it was written by you when it really wasn’t: that’s justly a crime. If I make really crappy drills and decide to put the logo of a drill-making company in high repute on my own product so that I might find it a little easier to ship my inferior knockoffs in greater quantity: yeah, that’s fraud. No good. But that’s not copyright infringement, nor does it have anything to do with intellectual property. It’s just fraud. I should put “intellectual property” in quotes because the very concept is almost a contradiction in terms… You think you can… “own” information? Information can be property? LOL. Hey, riddle me this: who owns the Pythagorean theorem? Who owns the number 11,548? Who owns the curves of quickest descent? Yeah, fucking nobody, because that’s retarded, and so is the idea of owning a fucking song or a piece of prose or the 1s and 0s of a video game.
I’m pro pirating. The argument that pirating hurts these corporations and the shitty music they make, for example: yeah, good, all the more reason to pirate the shit out of them, even if you don’t listen to the shit they push out. Just pirate it so that you can give it to some cumsoomer who does listen to that crap so they don’t have to go out and give money to the music industry that produced it. Fuck em. Same with games, same with books, same with everything. It’s bad to steal a loaf of bread from you because, if I do, you can’t eat the bread anymore. If I “steal” an Mp3 from you, you can still listen to the mp3. I don’t know why I need to say anything more than that when trying to convince people to see the light on this, I’m defending their own rights by defending the sovereign right of the human soul to knowledge for fuck’s sake. But then, I have found, trying to argue in the defense of peoples’ own freedoms and rights is the very thing that most disturbs them. People hate it when you try to convince them they have rights, power, and freedom, because those things make them uncomfortable, given the fact that they’re usually, you know, pussies who’d rather not be bothered with thinking about how to live; easier to just take the factory-issued life and get on with it.
I shouldn’t have to go out of my way to convince someone that, metaphysically, and I am talking in terms of just pure philosophy… you can’t own a string of 1s and 0s, you can’t own knowledge, information. Abstractly, it doesn’t make any sense.
