Over at Austro-Athenian Empire, Roderick recently mentioned a couple particularly bizarre attempts to use Intellectual Protectionism in the service of chickenshit (parrot-shit?) speech-control. I have a story about that, too, actually.

A few days ago over at Alas, A Blog, Jeff Fecke and Mandolin each put up a couple of posts featuring images of a couple racist-ass cartoons by Donna Barstow (1, 2). Specifically, these:

Hey everybody! The entire country of Mexico is dirty, dangerous, and poor! Also, they give us deadly plagues!

Hey everybody! … Um. Wait. Somebody remind me what the hell the point of this cartoon is, again?

The reason I’m using the image of these cartoons here is for the purpose of commenting on them. Specifically, for the purpose of demonstrating the fact that both cartoons are crudely racist; they also just are terrible cartoons. The first one — which is just a bullet list of standard Anglo disdain for Mexico as poor and dirty and dangerous, with a bit of topical scapegoating and racist-ass panic over the flu tossed in for good measure, all of it awkwardly shoe-horned into a joke through an awkward pastiche of insurance advertising slogans — isn’t especially funny. The second one is not merely unfunny, but, as far as I can make out, in fact is so pointless as to defy classification as even attempted humor. O.K.; yes; I understand that Barack Obama is black, and that, like many black people, he has hair that tends to be more kinky than the kind of hair stereotypical of white people. Is there a punchline here? (Really, seriously, if anyone can figure out what the point of it is, let me know. I’m seriously tempted to view it as avant-garde commentary by the deed, bringing Dada to the world of editorial cartooning in order to undermine the bourgeois affectation that cartoons need to have points or make sense.)

I’m also reposting these here because shortly after the posts went online, Donna Barstow showed up in the comments to invoke copyright law, accuse Alas of thieving, and to threaten the folks at Alas with complaints to their web host or legal action in an attempt to intimidate them into taking down the posts. As it happens, I also got a nasty-gram from Ms. Barstow, because Alas is one of the blogs syndicated at Feminist Blogs, and so the posts with the images appeared there too. So I received the following demand and threat from Ms. Barstow last Thursday:

From: Donna Barstow Cartoons <donnabarstow@sbcglobal.net>
To: Feminist Blogs Web Admin
Subject: take my copyrighted cartoon off your site immediately
Date: 4/30/2009 12:53 AM

Dear Feminist Blogs,

I’m a feminist. I’ve written 2 cartoon books for women. I am one of only 3 women out of 60 editorial cartoonists. However, I do not STEAL from other people, and I hope you don’t either. http://www.amptoons.com/blog/archives/2009/04/29/another-racist-cartoon-by-editorial-cartoonist-donna-barstow/ And frankly, I’m shocked that a FEMINIST blog would simply take for granted that anything published by the amptoons crazies would have any truth at all!!! You did no research or even ask me, and you assume it’s all right to call a person (in this case a woman) a racist and ruin her reputation???? This is a hate crime on your part, and you will not be happy if I have to contact your server.

I own all rights to the cartoon and the idea. I have already contacted amptoons server to have it taken down tomorrow, and they will get a warning.

Please refer to DMCA copyright infringement requirements at http://www.softlayer.com/legal.html before you willfully abuse copyrighted work, defame and harass innocent people. Please remove my cartoon immediately. Thank you.

Kind Regards,
Donna Barstow
And look for me all week in Slate! (all Editorial cartoons)
Why I Did It (some Editorial cartoons)
Donna Barstow Cartoons (no Editorial cartoons, but still good)

Barry Deutsch, who runs Alas, will have to choose his own course. As for Feminist Blogs, though, the answer is: Absolutely not. I will do no such thing.

As it happens, I don’t think Ms. Bartsow has a legal leg to stand on — the use of the cartoons for the purpose of commentary, especially for non-commercial educational purposes, is well within the realm of fair use. But more to the point, even if she did have a legal leg to stand on, that would only be an indictment of such a ridiculous, tyrannical and dialogue-stifling law. Barstow is not losing one penny from the reprinting of cartoons in the context of a commentary on their contents; the cartoons were and are being given away for free on the Internet to anyone who wanted to look at them. Nobody is trying to appropriate credit for the cartoons or trying to pass off her racist-ass cartoons as their own; the whole point of the posts is to point out that they were drawn by somebody else, and that that somebody else is expressing some crude racism. Barstow’s only complaint here, the only thing this stealing amounts to, is the fact that the cartoons are being used for a purpose that Barstow doesn’t like — specifically, that they are being used as visible evidence in an effort to criticize her work and to support claims about the character of her work which Barstow disagrees with, and finds insulting. Her threats are an explicit attempt to use Intellectual Protectionism as a tool of censorship, to attack those who disagree with her as thieves, and to coercively silence criticism of her work. That is nothing more than thuggery in a three-piece suit, and Ms. Barstow ought to be ashamed of herself.

I am also posting all this, not only to talk about the story itself, but to encourage you to talk about it, too. If silencing critics is what she wants to achieve, I would like Donna Barstow to find out that it will not work. I encourage anyone and everyone who supports free speech, and who believes that people who draw racist-ass cartoons oughtn’t to be able to go around threatening their critics into silence, to repost this post, or to write a post of your own that uses Donna Barstow’s racist-ass comics as evidence in the course of a critical commentary on the content of those comics, and that discusses her attempts to use Intellectual Protectionism laws as a tool to censor the critics of her work.

Consider it a form of direct action against law-waving bullies and for vigorous, open debate. People who act like this need to know that their would-be victims will not be silenced. And the more that they become convinced that these attempts to stifle criticism will reliably produce exactly the opposite of their desired outcome, with so many people reposting the criticism that any attempt to shut it down will be swamped by sheer numbers, the less likely they are to imagine that it could possibly be a good idea.

(From Portland ALLy Shawn Wilbur 2009-02-18.)

From Occupied Cascadia, Kyle Burris recently interviewed Portland ALLies Shawn Wilbur and William Gillis for KBOO-FM’s program Radiozine:

Market Anarchism: Government regulation and the financial crisis.

What roll [sic] did government regulation play in the current financial crisis? Is more regulation what we really need? What would a truly free market look like? And is there hope for radical reform, beyond the failed Marxist model?

KBOO’s Kyle Burris speaks to local anarchist activist William Gillis, and historian Shawn Wilbur, about the theory know as Market Anarchism, or Left Libertarianism. They discuss the roll [sic] government plays in the current economy, and also take a historical look at government’s affect on unions and health care in the US.

More information on the subject can be found at the website Invisible Molotov.

— KBOO.fm (2009-02-17): Market Anarchism: Government regulation and the financial crisis.

Congratulations Shawn and William!

An mp3 of the interview is available for download at the KBOO.fm website.

Several months ago, Bill Patry created quite a stir when he shuttered his blog, where he’d spent four years promoting copyright law reform. One of his two chief reasons for the shut-down was despair at the state of copyright law:

2. The Current State of Copyright Law is too depressing

This leads me to my final reason for closing the blog which is independent of the first reason: my fear that the blog was becoming too negative in tone. I regard myself as a centrist. I believe very much that in proper doses copyright is essential for certain classes of works, especially commercial movies, commercial sound recordings, and commercial books, the core copyright industries. I accept that the level of proper doses will vary from person to person and that my recommended dose may be lower (or higher) than others. But in my view, and that of my cherished brother Sir Hugh Laddie, we are well past the healthy dose stage and into the serious illness stage. Much like the U.S. economy, things are getting worse, not better. Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like Humpty-Dumpty, the copyright law we used to know can never be put back together again: multilateral and trade agreements have ensured that, and quite deliberately.

It is profoundly depressing, after 26 years full-time in a field I love, to be a constant voice of dissent. I have tried various ways to leaven this state of affairs with positive postings, much like television news shows that experiment with happy features. I have blogged about great articles others have written, or highlighted scholars who have not gotten the attention they deserve; I tried to find cases, even inconsequential ones, that I can fawn over. But after awhile, this wore thin, because the most important stories are too often ones that involve initiatives that are, in my opinion, seriously harmful to the public interest. I cannot continue to be so negative, so often. Being so negative, while deserved on the merits, gives a distorted perspective of my centrist views, and is emotionally a downer.

— Bill Patry, The Patry Copyright Blog (2008-08-01): End of the Blog

In one sense, it’s hard not to sympathize. Existing copyright law has been more or less fully transformed into an openly wielded tool of perpetual corporate monopoly. The horizons of allowable debate over copyright policy, within the Beltway, stretch from one end of Disney’s boardroom to the other. Neither political party questions that the primary purpose of copyright law is to protect copyright-holders’ monopoly profit margins, and no serious politician would ever consider spending a dime of political capital on a suggestion that perhaps we should contain — let alone roll back — the hyperaggressive efforts of copyright monopolists to protect their broken business models, by using litigation and legal coercion to cripple every advance in digital technology, and locking down every last decibel of free speech in a corporate copyright containment field. Even if a politician did choose to stand up for the freedom to peacefully exchange, adapt, and redistribute ideas, it could hardly matter; she would be immediately drowned out by a chorus of Endangered Capitalist preservationists on both sides of the aisle. And even if she could be heard, any attempt she might make at a run towards reform would be promptly tripped up by the knotted tangle of multilateral trade agreements (NAFTA, CAFTA, the WTO), which (in the name of free trade and private property rights–ha, ha) actually lock all the participating governments into a relentless commitment to granting and defending effectively perpetual government-granted monopolies, as part of their treaty obligations. There is no real hope of extricating U.S. government copyright law from this situation in any significant way; the pols and the Intellectual Protectionist lobby crossed that bridge a long time ago, and they made sure to burn it once they got to the other side.

Like I said: it’s hard not to sympathize. In fact, since my own views about copyright restrictions are far more radical than the ones Patry advances — I want them abolished immediately and completely; I think that any dose of intellectual monopoly is a dose of poison — you think I’d be far more depressed than he is about the state of affairs. But the truth is that I’m not pessimistic at all about copyright. One of the main things that struck me, back when I first read Patry’s farewell post, is how much of a disconnect I felt between his picture of the legal scene, and the actual situation on the ground when it comes to copyright restrictions. In fact, even though everything Patry says about the legal situation is true, there’s never been a better time for being able to freely access the art and literature of the world. As a recent New York Times feature points out:

On the day last July when The Dark Knight arrived in theaters, Warner Brothers was ready with an ambitious antipiracy campaign that involved months of planning and steps to monitor each physical copy of the film.

The campaign failed miserably. By the end of the year, illegal copies of the Batman movie had been downloaded more than seven million times around the world, according to the media measurement firm BigChampagne, turning it into a visible symbol of Hollywood’s helplessness against the growing problem of online video piracy.

The culprits, in this case, are the anonymous pirates who put the film online and enabled millions of Internet users to view it. Because of widely available broadband access and a new wave of streaming sites, it has become surprisingly easy to watch pirated video online — a troubling development for entertainment executives and copyright lawyers.

Hollywood may at last be having its Napster moment — struggling against the video version of the digital looting that capsized the music business. Media companies say that piracy — some prefer to call it digital theft to emphasize the criminal nature of the act — is an increasingly mainstream pursuit. At the same time, DVD sales, a huge source of revenue for film studios, are sagging. In 2008, DVD shipments dropped to their lowest levels in five years. Executives worry that the economic downturn will persuade more users to watch stolen shows and movies.

Young people, in particular, conclude that if it’s so easy, it can’t be wrong, said Richard Cotton, the general counsel for NBC Universal.

People have swapped illegal copies of songs, television shows and movies on the Internet for years. The slow download process, often using a peer-to-peer technology called BitTorrent, required patience and a modicum of sophistication by users. Now, users do not even have to download. Using a search engine, anyone can find free copies of movies, still in theaters, in a matter of minutes. Classic TV, like every Seinfeld episode ever produced, is also free for the streaming. Some of these digital copies are derived from bootlegs, while others are replicas of the advance review videos that studios send out before a release.

TorrentFreak.com, a Web site based in Germany that tracks which shows are most downloaded, estimates that each episode of Heroes, a series on NBC, is downloaded five million times, representing a substantial loss for the network. (On TV, Heroes averages 10 million American viewers each week).

A wave of streaming sites, which allow people to start watching video immediately without transferring a full copy of the movie or show to their hard drive, are making it easier than ever to watch free Hollywood content online. Many of these sites are located in countries with lackluster piracy enforcement efforts, like China, and are hard to monitor, so media companies do not have a clear sense of how much content is being stolen.

— Brian Stelter and Brad Stone, New York Times (2009-02-04): Digital Pirates Winning Battle With Studios

Of course, the New York Times has mistaken this for a problem; but if you recognize that the Intellectual Protectionists’ restrictive business model is the real problem, what we’re now seeing is the solution. Not because the copyright laws have become even a little more liberal, but rather because they have become irrelevant to people’s daily lives. Even though everything Patry says about the legal situation is true, it becomes easier every day for me to find freely-shared copies of just about any song I could care to hear, or to find any number of supposedly copyrighted essays, available for free on the web, or to find any movie I could care to watch, whether it’s an old classic from the film-monopolist’s vaults, or a new release that just hit theaters. And because so much is so freely available, even officially-sanctified copies of copyrighted material are being dropped in price (typically below US $1.00 a pop) and DRM user-control schemes are being dropped one after another. Even though everything Patry says about the legal situation is true, the practical situation on the ground is remarkably good, and it’s getting better every day. Of course, things are far from perfect. Of course, lots of copyright-holders are still looking for a fight with people trying to exchange ideas without paying a premium for a license. And of course, the legal situation is such that they can get pretty nasty, if they scout you out come after you on the legal battlefield. But first they have to scout you out. First, they have to get you to fight them on the open ground. And every day, they are finding their efforts more and more impossible. No matter how many big guns they may bring to bear, when they try to fight us, they find that they are fighting a Myrmidon army that renders those weapons increasingly useless.

So why Bill Patry’s despair? If you want to see copyright restrictions liberalized, then it may be true that the words on a page in Washington are worse than they’ve ever been; but the facts on the ground are perhaps better than they’ve been at any other time in the history of the United States. And while there is no hope for revising those words for the better any time soon, the facts are changing for the better every day, all their lawyers and their lobbyists and their intergovernmental treaties notwithstanding — they are improving daily as technical problems are solved, as new sharing networks emerge, and as the problem of even identifying the competition, let alone shutting them down, becomes more and more overwhelming for the copyrightists’ rear-guard legal strategy.

Why despair, or even care about the legal situation at all, if the practical situation makes the law irrelevant? A law that cannot be enforced is as good as a a law that has been repealed, and that is where we’re headed, faster and faster every day, when it comes to the intellectual monopolists and their jealously guarded legal privileges.

Statists constantly accuse anarchists of being naive, or utopian, or infantile, because we so often question the value of playing the game and working within the system. But if this is supposed to be a strategy based on the empirical prospects for success — and not just on some kind of felt need to come off as properly Serious and Grown Up to the right sort of people — then let’s look at the facts, and let’s see what kind of activity actually offers proven results, and realistic hope for success in the future.

If you put all your hope for social change in legal reform, and if you put all your faith for legal reform in maneuvering within the political system, then to be sure you will find yourself outmaneuvered at every turn by those who have the deepest pockets and the best media access and the tightest connections. There is no hope for turning this system against them; because, after all, the system was made for them and the system was made by them. Reformist political campaigns inevitably turn out to suck a lot of time and money into the politics–with just about none of the reform coming out on the other end. But if you put your faith for social change in methods that ignore or ridicule their parliamentary rules, and push forward through grassroots direct action — if your hopes for social change don’t depend on reforming tyrannical laws, and can just as easily be fulfilled by widespread success at bypassing those laws and making them irrelevant to your life — then there is every reason to hope that you will see more freedom and less coercion in your own lifetime. There is every reason to expect that you will see more freedom and less coercion tomorrow than you did today, no matter what the law-books may say.

Counter-economics gets the goods.

See also:

• GT 2008-01-26: In which I fail to be reassured
• GT 2008-02-25: I am shocked! shocked! to find that politics is going on in here

I haven’t yet had the chance to read Michele Boldrin and David Levine’s Against Intellectual Monopoly. Ideas may not be subject to economic scarcity, but my time to enjoy them — alas — is. But it looks really promising, and exciting, judging from some of the excerpts and commentary I’ve seen about it online. I look forward to digging in soon.

In the meantime, besides tantalizing discussions, the online commentary has also offered a perfect opportunity for students of economics to witness the ridiculous sight of self-proclaimed free marketeers dragging out all the crassest sorts of corporate protectionism to apologize for actually-existing forms of economic privilege. And for students of logic to enjoy a few choice specimens of the contra-sequitur in its natural habitat.

Thus, for example, consider the reader comments on Jesse Walker’s notice of the book at Hit and Run:

Fluffy | January 16, 2009, 5:11pm | #

Fine — but without the ability to file a patent and make money off it, would James Watt have even bothered to invent the condenser that everyone else’s steam engine used?

Wah wah wah we could introduce innovations faster without patents! Maybe, but who would bother? Owner/operators only.

We already experienced a time without intellectual property. It was called the Middle Ages. And while the Middle Ages were not a completely backward time as imagined by the public and were marked by the gradual introduction of many important technological innovations in agriculture, mining, metallurgy, transport and power generation, just about all innovation came from owner/operators or their equivalent, and the pace of innovation and adoption of new technologies was brutally slow, despite the really high marginal utility that even the smallest advance brought under those conditions.

Of course, whatever you may think of the Middle Ages, some other eras without anything remotely like modern copyright or patent law have been called classical Athens, Renaissance Italy, Shakespearean England, and the Scientific Revolution. But never you mind that. The important thing is this: if it weren’t for copyrights and patents, technological innovation might not be profitable for large corporations to pursue. Heaven forbid; some business might have to be carried on by somebody other than large for-profit corporations. Similarly:

Hazel Meade | January 16, 2009, 8:46pm | #

Episarch. I think the idea is more that with IP rights someone else couldn’t simply take your cold fusion device apart, figure out how it works, and start manufacturing knock-offs. Unless they altered the design in a way that improved it.

The problem is that development of new technologies often takes years of research. If others can copy your designs, it makes it unprofitable to bother.

Automobile factories take years of capital-intensive construction and immense amounts of labor. If other corporations can just push cars into the market willy-nilly, it makes it unprofitable to bother. Without a protective tariff, who in their right mind would invest in American automobiles? In a free market, who would be in charge of making all the shoes?

If there is one thing that government can and ought to do, it is to make sure that no large business ever has to fundamentally rethink their business model, ever. I mean, sure, consumers and investors may have a different idea of how much art or R&D is enough art or R&D for them; they may decide they want to pay for other things on the margin — for example, they may want to put more efforts into derivative, marginal improvements rather than fundamental redesigns; or they may just want to spend some of that money on little fripperies, like food, clothing, or shelter. But if government isn’t there to force the prices of everything upward, then that may mean that corporate investment in some highly visible, culturally prestigious set of goods and services (like literary works, or mechanical devices, or Kenny G. albums) might possibly falter or fail when people want to pay for other, different things. Good lord, if nobody can make a profit from selling the easily-reproducible products of their creativity and thought, then thinking and creating might even be left to academics. Or to a bunch of rank amateurs.

Before I continue to the next argument, I want to mention, in all earnestness, that there is a common problem with all of these arguments. The problem is that they attempt to support intellectual enclosure on explicitly protectionistic grounds: they begin from the premise that there is some level of innovation or artistic production which, somehow or another, they presume to know perfectly well to be the right amount. Then they offer a pseudo-economic argument intended to show that absolutely free exchanges in products that depend on intellectual discovery or creativity would fail to funnel enough money into the purses of discoverers or creators to produce the level of production that they’ve deemed the right level. Thus, they conclude, you ought to institute government restrictions on free exchanges just in order to make sure that enough money is pried from out of buyers’ hands to encourage the level of production that the protectionists have deemed the right one. The problem with all this is, first, that the Intellectual Protectionists are ignoring the invisible cost of this visible subsidy; whatever extra money buyers are forced at bayonet-point to spend on nifty inventions or works of art is extra money that would have gone to other productive purposes — like living our lives, or working on projects of our own, or gaining the leisure to put some of our own thought and creativity to work. Like all forms of protectionism, Intellectual Protectionism engages the force of the State in subsidizing some politically-favored goods (or, rather, politically-favored producers) at the expense of other goods or producers, which happen to be economically popular but looked down on by politicians. And this form of inequity and privilege — enforced through government coercion — is in fact utterly arbitrary — arbitrary because Intellectual Protectionists never offer any non-arbitrary basis whatever for their judgment of what the right levels of their favored goods would be. Non-protectionists have a perfectly good standard: we figure that the right level is the level that free people would freely choose to get for themselves, if left alone to make their own decisions. But Intellectual Protectionists cannot appeal to anything of the sort, since the whole idea is to override the normal processes of free exchange. They just know, by some kind of revelation, which they more or less never spell out in any detail, that the right level is something more than that, and thus the need for a command economy, controlled by the legally-privileged copyright- or patent-holders — usually, as a matter of fact, giant, bureaucratic corporations (Apple, GE, AOL Time Warner, Pfizer, and the like) that can sustain big-time R&D departments and, just as importantly, can pay for the small army of lawyers needed to effectively manage their politically-fabricated portfolio.

I took the time out to say all that, with my face as straight as I could make it, because most of this post has involved an argument wrapped up in a lot of ridicule and facile sarcasm. But sometimes people say things that make ridicule and sarcasm simply beyond the point. Like this:

TallDave | January 16, 2009, 11:31pm | #

IP should expire (we don’t need Michael Jackson owning the Beatles’ albums 30 years late), but we need some kind of IP rights or there will be nothing but monopolies exploiting their entry barriers and stealing ideas. Yes, it’s less efficient in some ways, but that’s true of most any private property (public transportation vs. owning your own car, etc.).

Want to know what a world without IP looks like? It’s Microsoft. Wordperfect, Lotus 1-2-3, Netscape… all reverse-engineered and shoved down the OS marketing channel.

Some things you can reply to. Some things you can ridicule. Other things you can only repeat.

See also:

• GT 2008-11-18: Contrarium sequitur
• GT 2006-01-29: Libertarians for Protectionism, Appendix A
• GT 2005-07-06: Libertarians for Protectionism

Here’s the profile picture from Kal’s blog, Two, Three, Many…; Kal gets an award from the Ministry of Culture of this secessionist republic of one, for the most awesome cultural mash-up of the past month, at least:

See also:

• GT 2008-07-26: On chutzpah