Question their morals. Question their skills. Question their tactics. But you can't question their style!
A recent post on behalf of Anonymous, in response to the SOPA/PIPA blackout protests, contains a list of concrete civil demands, largely related to copyright and patent law, and citing many particular institutions, bills, and practices.
“As we watch the web go dark today in protest against the SOPA/PIPA censorship bills, let’s take a moment and reflect on why this fight is so important. We may have learned that free speech is what makes America great, or instinctively resist attempts at silencing our voices. But these are abstract principles, divorced from the real world and our daily lives.”
We all have our opinions of Anonymous and the notorious infosec tactics they use to draw attention to their cause; regardless of the ethical and moral view points on their actions, it’s worth evaluating this list and pondering the implications in their own light.
Anonymous’ list contains several strong points. While many may see them as “radical”, most of Western history’s (and beyond) forward-thinking minds, who shaped the modern ideas of freedom we now celebrate, were considered radical and outrageous in their time. Martin Luther, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Thomas Payne, Copernicus, Leonardo da Vinci, Pythagoras…
Protecting rights-holders is important, but there is a lack of much needed balance in our modern society’s implementations of such protection. As Anonymous points out, most of the media giants, who not surprisingly support legislation like SOPA and PIPA and so forth, steadily rake in the profits of a multi-billion dollar industry. While some lucky artists and marketable personalities benefit from the profits, most artists, particularly the independent ones, do not. This was a huge issue back in the Napster days, where many artists found that the Internet and distributed file sharing (like P2P) enabled them to reach new audiences never before possible – not only because “the word” spread faster, but also because it did not require them to have access to expensive publishing equipment and physical distribution channels, or large amounts of bandwidth and powerful servers, to massively deliver their content to anyone in world.
Another point Anonymous makes is that charges for infringement are, quite frankly, ridiculous. If one downloads 10 cd’s worth of music illegally, perhaps he did something unethical, and perhaps it deserves punishment. But should that punishment, at the very most, exceed the initial cost of the 10 cd’s one downloaded without purchase? Absolutely not. It didn’t truly cost the artist anything, because in all honesty, the purchase never would have happened, even if the content was not illegally made freely available. The current laws do not consider that without having a means to acquire it for free, most people would just go without. Cases of college students and young kids being sued for hundreds of thousands of dollars or imprisoned or expelled for downloading or sharing bits over the wire is absurd. If one deletes the material obtained, he should not be held financially liable. If one wants to keep the material, he should not have to pay more than it’s face value. By today’s laws, one is given neither choice. Now, you might say that doesn’t seem reasonable, because someone could download the material, transfer it to another storage, and then delete it from the computer or device on which the material was found by authorities, making the claim that it was removed while still keeping it secretly elsewhere – in my opinion, this ease of duplication demonstrates how obsolete the current ownership model is. Perhaps people distributing material should be charging media companies for the marketing and promotional service being provided!!
This leads right into another important argument raised by Anonymous – that our notion of ownership is fundamentally erroneous and incompatible with the digital age. When European settlers first arrived in America, the natives willingly (and perhaps even a bit deviously) traded large portions of land for cheap commodities like clothing, jewelry, guns, and liquor. The concept of owning land was preposterous in their eyes. Fast forward to today, where man claims ownership of land, water, air space, air waves, frequency bands, mathematical formula, technical processes, chemical compounds, species, coded functions, phrases, images, names, ideas… it’s hard to make anything without somehow infringing copyright or patent ownership in some way. The space of ownership has become too crowded. Just look at .com domain names. Our civil legal system is bogged down and tied up with thousands upon thousands of endless patent violation and copyright infringement cases. Competition has ceased to imply striving for better quality and innovation, being better at marketing and selling, or building brand loyalty; instead competition means courtroom battles and patent warfare, as has recently plagued the mobile phone industry.
When you start to investigate these issues and form a high-level picture, it becomes clear that in any given market, the majority of patents or copyrights related to that market, and the lawsuits and enforcement around them, fall into the hands of a few massive, very profitable companies, such as media ownership and the “big 5″ media giants: Disney, AOL-TimeWarner, Viacomm, Bertelsmann, and News Corp. So who is really being protected? Without going too far off on a tangent, it’s worth mentioning that the reach, influence, power and practices of said companies is nothing short of scary. Their desire to control and dictate what information (including artistic media) is spread and how it is spread, and who profits from it is, without question, out of line.
Being myself an artist, my own opinion is that the worth of any artistic expression is beyond and outside the scope of dollar value. Saying my music or my writing or my image or my creative anything is worth X amount of money is an insult – it’s worth something that all the money in the world does not amount to. Digital formats can be shared without a physical medium that has costs. The cost comes in bandwidth and electrical usage, which is incurred by the ISP and electrical companies, and paid for by the subscriber.
That’s not to say artists don’t deserve compensation for their hard work and their ability to bring value to peoples lives through their art – but there are other ways to do so, and many successful independent artists make a living off those alternative means – merchandising, tickets for events, donations and pay-what-you-can downloads, scaled pricing & allowing purchase of individual songs, subscription-based services, short-run collectibles, memorabilia, and so on and so forth.. . The days of needing a nation-wide publisher and physical distribution network with chains of retailers are over… businesses of all kinds have to embrace the change and find new models to do business effectively and fairly, without demanding ownership of everything short of the sun.
Unfortunately the laws and rules are often set by the people least qualified to make them. People with expertise go into their own fields, and many make an effort to dissociate from politics all together. Perhaps our model of representative democracy, focused around typically otherwise useless bureaucrats having exclusive meetings and fundraising dinners, while lobbyists representing private interests hang around making donations to campaign finance, is simply a model that doesn’t work for the public interest. Perhaps all of these issues hint at a broader issue beyond media copyrights and software patents. Perhaps the business model of multimedia giants is not the only thing obsolete and due for change…
Is it possible to run a fair democratic government in which subject matter experts have the stronger voice of influence and politicians do not? Would Americans ever embrace, or even accept, a true governmental reform? History asserts that it’s very possible, but people have to desensitize themselves from fear-inspiring, hype-pushing, nonsense buzz-word jargon that is forced down through the mass media channels in an effort to silence the cries of outrage; we all have to be open minded and willing to accept the challenge of re-visioning our system. It is ridiculous that non-violent activists are arrested as trespassers and public menaces, or detained indefinitely without due process, labeled as “terrorists”, when they gather to make peaceful demonstrations or use unconventional, but non-violent, tactics to expose the issues and flaws. We have to stop judging or criticizing activists in terms of the legality of their action, and instead look at the moral and ethical viewpoint independently from the notions of law, because the laws are the very thing being drawn into question. I’m not advocating doing anything unethical or harmful, but remember that during the civil rights movement, unjust laws were broken in an effort to point out their fundamental injustice, from sitting in the front of the bus, to sitting in public restaurants, libraries, and schools, from using public water fountains, to lining up at voting booths. All of those acts were illegal and most prolific civil rights leaders were arrested numerous times for breaking those kinds of laws.. Yet, there is no moral or ethical fault in their “criminal” actions.
Our founding fathers themselves outspokenly believed that a good government is one which is routinely reformed and modified to meet the changes of society, and even expected revolutions to occur periodically. This doesn’t mean violence or chaos, it simply means civil demand for change – so much demand that it amounts to something.
The past couple of generations in the United States are, in comparison to those before, politically quite complacent, but it does seem that momentum is starting to grow among the the uniting populace. Whatever happens, it will be interesting to see the dynamic between the public, the government, and the particular corporations that exhibit strong influence in the political, legal, economic and social spectrum.
