Private Property, Rights of Use, Irony, and Nonsense
April 17, 2010
Recently working in a legal firm, it has come to my attention the ironic, and perhaps moronic, nature of private property, with respect to intellectual property. I do not deny the importance of private property; however, to accumulate private property in today’s world must ride the vehicle of purchase, given we can no longer blatantly claim seemingly un-owned land, textiles, and such because either everything is owned and commodified or we must resort to Imperialism, a method no longer normally practiced through militarization but through insidious economic alliance, entrapment, and ultimately exploitation or political diplomacy (See John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hitman).
Consumables, land, and other tangible units certainly fall sensibly under private property. They can be distributed, shared, modified, exchanged, etc., at the owner’s decision. Such intangible products, namely “intellectual” property, or the focus of essay, are not properties at all but merely the rights of usage. Certainly, the spirit or intention of copyrighting is to protect an intellect from thoughtful theft, so that no one pawns the author’s ideas or words as his own. But the rise of the internet, the information age, the digital world, and globalization, intellectual properties, which are merely units of language, become deterritorialized and quickly move from one person to the next.
Capitalistic intellectual property, indeed, seeks to commodify language and restrict speaking. The entertainment industries allow one to merely purchase the “right” to use the music but not share it, so that entertainers can make a living. One cannot distribute the intellectual property in anyway so that each participant in the industry earns its dividend.
However, since intellectual property is certainly well-constructed language, how can it not be shared? Isn’t language intrinsically exchange? How do you prohibit the distribution of language without annihilating exchange, and thus, language itself? Language cannot be commodified because this restricts exchange, and to restrict exchange in such a fashion would render us all mute.
Therefore, intellectual property can not be truly restricted with our current copyright laws without silencing us. And any attempt to do so would require extreme policing of the populace, which already happens. For example, the Super Bowl denies anyone the right to distribute the broadcast and every year some church will advertise a gather where they project the game in the sanctuary or fellowship hall. Those from the National Football League will quickly hear of such an event and shut the operation down.
In any event, such a police effort to enforce these copyright laws would require just as many enforcers as there are distributors, and this doesn’t even include the confusion that occurs when those identities are intertwined. It is my contention, that copyright laws should enforce the “ownership” and originality of the creator; however, the laws cannot police distribution, because the nature of the anything intellectual is linguistic and intrinsically exchangeable. We will never see an end to pirating music, TV shows, and movies because that would result in tyranny and certainly the un-freedom on the market.
