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Copyright and intellectual property: Who owns our ideas?

An Idea. Ephemeral, elusive. They can wall us in with theirborders, deny us the material necessities of life, but the flow and travelof an idea is difficult to imprison or control.

Dangerous and ‘immoral’ ideas can be denied us – through censorship. Profitable ideas aresold to us in a controlled and selective way.

Our contemporary culture is defined by ideasthat are owned by corporations. The imagery which fills our environment,what we read, watch and hear, these ideas surround us and invade our livesyet they are someone’s private property.

Even when we can afford to buy and own a commodity wecan never possess the ideas that are embodied within it. Society lives in ashop filled with ideas, in which it is permitted to look but not totouch.

Art – supposedly the free expression of ideas through a variety offorms – endures a uneasy existence alongside those privately ownedexpressions. So–called ‘Art’ as we are taught atschool, grows out of and reflects upon our culture.

But if Art goes too far in this direction, if it triesto takethis material that is sacred to capitalist interests and use it forits own purposes, then it becomes illegal. This is copyright.

Does copyright law promote the interests of artists? Does it provide themaccess to income through royalties and allow them control over theiroutput?

A recording musician may receive a few cents for every CD of their musicsold. But then again, so do door–to–door salespeople. Doesthe musician’s cut reflect the amount of labour time the musician has put into theirwork? In the vast majority of cases it falls far short.

Possessing copyright is almost worthless unless it is accompanied with theability to exercise the right to copy. In other words, one must have accessto the means of production. Obviously this access is purchased with largeamounts of capital. This means that artists are usually compelled to sell away all or part of theirrights through publishing deals and employment contracts to get their workpublished.

Intellectual property is bought and sold as commodity. Wealthy artcollectors can afford to pay thousands for a painting and stuff it away intheir mansions, thereby gaining exclusive control over who gets to view thework.

It is in the same way that publishers and other commercial interests have the ultimate control over whogets to see or hear what cultural material, and how much they must pay todo so. In this way access to art is very much in the hands of thecapitalist class.

Unique to capitalism

The rights of creative authorship have a short history.

You might travel all the way to the Louvre in Paris to see a Mona Lisa‘original’ or be highly appreciative of a ridiculous squiggleon the wall because the artist is ‘someone’ in New York.

The cult of the individual and the virtue in ‘originality’ is historically specific to capitalism and provide it (amongst other aspects ofcapitalism) with the ideological bolstering needed to enforce the privateownership of ideas and the control over the right to copy. These institutions arose and becameestablished with the development of capitalism.

In pre–capitalist European society authorship was blurred. Forexample, in the field of music composers and performers borrowed freelyfrom each other – reworking and interpolating their own music intoanother composers’ work.

A standard practice in medieval Europe it was a sort of courtesy nodto one’s mentors, moving on from where others had left off. Historians often have difficulty determining the origin of old worksbecause the recording of the composer’s name on a manuscript was often neglected.

In literature: a form popular with British writers of the first half of the18th century was the ‘imitation’ – a loose translation of a classical work. And yet no critic complained thatthe worth of the poetry or the reputation of these authors was compromisedfrom any lack of ‘originality’.

If copyright laws had existed throughout European history the course ofartistic development would have been radically different.

With the emergence of capitalism, the ‘rights of authorship’were slowly conceived of, yet it wasn’t until much more than ahundred years ago that copyright on printed media such as books and musicbegan to be enshrined in law.

Design took on a new significance under capitalism with development of themeans of production and so the means of mechanical reproduction – providing the ability for exact reproduction of a single item over andover again. This meant that a single idea could provide the basis for agreat deal of profit-making and hence could be very valuable to acapitalist.

Capitalism relies on ownership over the right to copy and intellectualproperty for the capitalist system to work. The secretive development oftechnology is essential to the competitive development of the forces ofproduction.

Capitalism has been a forcefor creativity: to survive as a capitalist you must innovate, developingthe productive forces, find new markets by creating new needs and desires,research into product development; but you must innovate in secret, at theexpense of other capitalists. Others must innovate in turn, to keep pacewith competition.

If ideas were free this mechanism which is the essence of competition wouldbreak down. Capitalism cannot afford to unchain them. Instead they useintellectual property law to package our ideas up like pounds of butter andsell them back to us.

The myth of authorship

The financial justification given for intellectual property law is that itrewards the originator of an idea and it protects the so-called little people fromhaving their idea taken and exploited by larger, more powerful interests.But this is seldom the experience of workers – the ‘little’ people.

Marx observed that workers experience alienation – they arealienated from the products of their labour. Now we may be alienated fromthe products of our entire existence.

Universities and employers have sought to own our minds 24 hours a day. Astandard employment contract for many intellectual productive workers e.g. engineers, software developers, designers etccontains a clause that allows their employer to claim ownership overanything the employee produces outside work if it is of value to thecompany.

This is like a contract with the devil – you’re not only required to sell your labour power forthe whole day – you’re required to sell your soul: theexpression and output of your mind. If you come up with anything outsidework that your bosses’ lust for profit sees gold in what you do – they have the legalright to take it.

Universities, the supposed instituationalisation of the accumulation andopen sharing of knowledge for the benefit of society, are fast becomingantithetical to their espoused values as they attempt to self-fund.

In most Australian universities the student must sign away all theirrights to whatever they produce while they’re studying at the university. Many research students however, have theirrights signed away for them to private interests who pay money to theuniversity. If the student is very promising they might get a corporatesponsored doctoral “scholarship” – in other words do highly profitableresearch for a private company for slave wages.

Perhaps, as an academic, you wanted to develop something for the good ofhumanity? Want to come up with a useful invention in your spare time orjust to do some extra paid work? Good luck, feeble-minded idealist – your boss or university can take it, stick a brand name on it and make akilling from it.

Speak of which, intellectual property isn’t only about injustice– it really does mean life or death to thousands of people. Take the AIDSvictims of south-east Asia for example. This region has very high rates ofHIV infection and yet the vast majority of sufferers cannot afford the expensive AIDS drugs that would ease their symptoms and prolongtheir lives. In response to demands from Thai AIDS activists, the Thaigovernment promised to look at producing the drugs more cheaply inThailand. Alarmed by the threat of their profits being slashed, the western drug companies stepped in and forced thegovernment to back down.

So while medicine has often been developed to treat a condition, most ofthe people who need it may miss out because of the control of a few majordrug companies who rely on exclusive rights to intellectual property inorder to keep their prices artificially high and stay competitive. Well, at least their profits are healthy.

Poor, semi-colonial countries are left backward, years behind the rest ofthe world in terms of technology precisely because they are denied accessto the developments of the Western World. While they can’t afford topay for technological ‘secrets’ they are forced to mop up the imperialist countries’over-priced hand-me-down machinery and use out-dated production techniquesThis provides a large part of the explanation for why these nationsso-called still ‘developing’.

With the increasing acceptance of Genetically Modified foods comes theincreasing possibility of committing a crime every time you plant a cropwithout paying a license fee to the company that ‘owns’ itsgenetic code.

Thankfully there is no copyright infringement associated with “taking the Lord’s name in vain”, though some religious types might have it so. And God has not as yettaken out a patent on the universe and its contents. That leaves the fieldopen for those commercial interests who plan to soon own the exclusiverights to human DNA. Life – get it while its going cheap!

On the road to human enlightenment

So what of the path of human progress under capitalism? It is littered with obstacles:increasingly all innovations are owned and controlled by corporations, lessand less research is being conducted in the public domain as state fundedresearch bodies and universities are increasingly ‘sponsored’ by private companies orattempting to turn a profit themselves in order to self–fund.

In a twist of poetic irony a student at RMIT University has recentlycreated a new breed of rose – a blue rose – which is now owned by the university. Perhaps the cruelest blow is that the creator of this rosewill be unable to follow tradition and name it after a woman headmires…

Yet who are the practicing artists, the brilliant minds of our time?Members of the working class. Amongst them were the creators of manybrilliant innovations, the nameless employees of the corporations. Theircreative ability, their ideas, plundered andperverted towards the same revolting goal: the creation and maximization ofprofit and the reinforcement of the ideology of their bosses.

Just as the working class produce all of the world’s wealth, and yetpossess so little of it, it is workers who come up with society’suseful ideas while the majority of these are owned by private companies– the companies they work for.

Hands–off the intangible

Now to the so-called moral issues associated with copyright law. Is it notunfair, some artists argue, to have your ideas appropriated by another:‘stolen’, your baby ripped out of context perverted andchanged for someone else’s purposes; used and abused – God forbid – “withoutyour permission”? Shouldn’t we be protected by law fromthis anti-social behavior?

Art is a social phenomena – it must have an audience – it must be placed in the public domain for all to see. Can anyone reallyclaim moral ownership over an idea once it has passed into the homes andinto the minds of other people, should anyone be able to enforce a claim to prevent its permutation, its evolution?

To foster anegotistical desire to lay claim to it wherever it wanders, to enforce this desire of individual benefit at theexpense of its distribution to people who would benefit from it and in somesense ‘make it their own’ – is this so morally righteous, or is it a product of the ideology ofselfish individualism that helps maintain the machinery of the marketsystem?

The exclusive right to copy is a right that is enforced by capitalist law.It is a battle of lawyers and the machinery of state. It is fought out incourts presided over by judges who pose as society’s artisticarbiters on what’s “fair use” of an old musical idea for a new work. It is enforcedby all the retribution that the law dishes out for theft and damage as ifit were real-life (as opposed to a fiction of capitalism) materialproperty.

Freedom for people and ideas

Imagine a world in which ideas could flow unrestricted, in which we aspeople could fully benefit from the vast pool of human knowledge withoutfear of punishment by these ridiculous laws. Only under a system in whichideas, like the material necessities of life, are generated and distributed forneed and not profit can this be achieved.

* Workers control of the workplace – we must demandcontrol over how our ideas are used in the workplace.

* Fight the appropriation of our ideas generated outside work– reject the “outside work” clauses and thecommercial co-option of our universities.

* Reject the subversion of humancreativity into capitalism’s anti–humanist culturalmachine.

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