Appropriating Property
(Feb. 2, 2012) Back in 1987, I went with a friend to see singer Joan Armatrading play Wolf Trap, an outdoor amphitheater in a national park in Virginia. We went early to stake out a good spot and laid out a big blanket. The closer it came to concert time, the more people packed in and we found our blanket covered increasingly valuable space. A couple asked to overlap their blanket behind us and offered us some wine. One group asked to infringe on a corner, and in exchange offered some fried chicken. Finally, by giving up half a foot off our right side my friend snagged some weed. We scored over a tiny piece of land we only temporarily possessed. It wasn’t as if we had any right to it. If someone had simply flung their blanket over the area our bodies didn’t cover, we could have done little except huff.
Our experience exemplified what French philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon discusses in a mind-blowing book I read last summer called What Is Property? He published it back in 1840. In it, he questioned the notion of ownership and distinguished between property, which we consider a right, and possession, which is a matter of fact. To Proudhon, the concept of property rights was wrong, even though by that time it had become more sacred than the concept of God. No one should be able to own a place they did not occupy, he felt. I read the book free on my iPad because it is in the public domain.
This month we saw how tricky the idea of property rights has become. A group of Internet insurgents known as Anonymous launched what it called “Operation Hiroshima” in protest of a congressional bill called the Stop Online Piracy Act. If passed, it would have allowed the government to go after and shut down websites that violate copyrights and sell counterfeit goods. Members of Anonymous found and published private information about media execs as well as congressional legislators and staff. And the Internet info giants — Facebook, Google and Wikipedia — launched their own protests, with dramatic banners and in some cases by temporarily letting their sites go dark.
They feared that what had happened to Megaupload.com could happen to them. The U.S. and New Zealand governments shut down the website Megaupload, which gave users a place to store media such as movies and music, and arrested five people connected with the site. The shutdown left Megaupload users without access to whatever it was they had uploaded.
In a telling quote in a Jan. 13 New York Times article about Operation Hiroshima, an unnamed congressional staffer complained about the privacy invasions, saying “Why can’t they just hire a lobbyist like everyone else?”
This is the problem. Those who own property have a hard time understanding the frustrations of those who don’t. Those who own property make money off their property, and with that money they can hire lobbyists to convince lawmakers to pass laws to protect that property. Those without property lack the money to hire lobbyists. So they have to find free ways to influence lawmakers to grant them access to property they don’t have.
More and more, the property in question is media property. Rights to the TV show House are far more valuable than any actual house you might own. If I trespass on a physical house police might arrest me. If I use without permission episodes of House, well, that’s what is at issue now.
It is hard to feel sympathetic to Fox and Disney and Viacom and the other members of Big Media. They spread their content all over the web so that their movie trailers and posters and ads for TV shows land on our Facebook pages and next to our Google search results and above the news story and in the corner of the television screen. They push their media properties into our faces like candy or chips. Then when we reach out our digital fingers to grab more of the sweet and salty snacks, they suddenly yank them back and want our cash. Not all of us have the cash, but you can’t now unwhet that appetite. When we try to consume the media by illegally viewing it or copying it or incorporating it into our own creations, the media companies scream copyright infringement. It is as if someone buys nearly every inch of property surrounding the shack I live in, and then when I cross his land he has me arrested for trespassing.
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on the cover
Railroad!
Proposed lines ‘set rich blood a-tingling’ in early 1900s
Some Other Proposed North Coast Railroads
Choo-choo Fantasies
Exposing this east-west rail nonsense
seven-o-heaven
Undeterred Will
Will chides Andrew for lack of attention to detail and makes plans for his inevitable victory.
Recent media maven
May 17
If You Tweet in a Forest
April 5
Not in My Court Yard
March 1
Take the Money and Run With It
Today
44th Annual Kinetic Grand Championship Race
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Flow 2012 Fashion Show
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Woodside Preschool's Rummage/Bake Sale
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FOUR Comments
Comment / By Richard / Feb. 2, 7:09 p.m.
When someone creates or owns something why do others get a right to it if they just want it bad? By your logic if I walk into Costco hungry and they are handing out samples of ice-cream I should be able to go all cookie monster in the frozen food isle. They made me do it! I can’t control my desire!
If a kid who wants to read Harry Potter and can’t find a used copy for a few bucks in the Tin Can or elsewhere, he or she is bound to end up in your class of poorly thought out ideas.
Comment / By Mike / Feb. 3, 1:06 a.m.
Intellectual property is a very gray area of discussion. For example, if one buys a CD, imports it to their iTunes and then gives the same CD to a friend who imports it and another friend takes it to do the same, is that illegal? The artist isn’t getting royalties for their music and most people would agree it is technically illegal. But if one takes their Harry Potter books and gives them to family members and they pass them on to friends, Rowlings isn’t getting royalties for that. So is that illegal? Most people I ask say no. But is there really a difference?
Comment / By Mitch / Feb. 3, 8:57 a.m.
Intellectual property is not the same as tangible property. The fundamental difference is that intellectual property can be reproduced at no cost to the “creator” of the property. The ethical foundations of the two forms or property are therefore fundamentally different.
If someone takes over my house, I’ve lost the use of it. If someone copies my performance, they haven’t taken anything from me at all. I am still free to perform, and to charge audiences that wish to hear me. I am free to make recordings of my performance and sell them to people who’d like to listen to them.
Yes, society can benefit by seeing to it that those who create things of value are suitably reimbursed. But the idea of a musician being able to benefit from their work, or of an inventor being able to exclusively license their invention for a few years is no longer what copyright and patent law are about — like so much else, these areas are now about what fleets of lawyers and lobbyists can legally steal from individuals and the public, including the artists and inventors. The corporations, as they always do, hide behind people they are actually screwing over.
Technology has so overwhelmed the patent office that getting patent protection mostly consists of having lawyers and the balls to assert ownership of completely trivial ideas. There are companies which exist only to “patent troll” — to assert ownership of obvious ideas and then extort money from others trying to use those ideas.
In the standard phrase, “information wants to be free.” That can have any number of interpretations, but one basic interpretation is that the cost of reproduction of information is rapidly driven to zero by technological developments.
Any legal system that cannot understand this reality and tries to fight it will have just as much success as the drug wars — that is, no success for society, but great success for those making a living off the fight.
Comment / By Jon Brooks / Today, 10:16 a.m.
Copyrights and patents are rarely independent of what went before. You draw on the work of others, then others to follow draw on your work. Thats one rationale for relatively short term absolute control over your work, after which it becomes public domain.
And, wow, what a great, thought provoking article by the Media Maven. Tying together Joan Armatrading, Operation Hiroshima, Megaupload, Congress, Proudhon, property taxes and House is a neat trick.