The Case for Copyright Reform (9 page)

(This word,
fascist
, is loaded
with emotion today. Italy’s regime at this time were self-declared fascists. We
are using the word to describe them exactly as they described themselves.)

In 1933, the phonographic industry was invited to Rome by the
Confederazione Generale Fascista
dell’Industria Italiana
and under protection of the same. At this
conference, held on November 10-14, an international federation of the
phonographic industry was formed. It would later be better known under its
acronym, IFPI. It was agreed that IFPI would try to work within the Berne
Convention to establish producers’ rights similar to those of the musicians and
artists (which were always sold to publishers).

IFPI continued to meet in countries which welcomed their corporatist
agenda, so they met in Italy the next year too, in Stresa. 1935 and onwards
proved a bit turbulent for the world at large, but Italy still enacted
corporatist rights of the record industry in 1937.

Negotiations for a copyright-like monopoly, attached to Berne and
therefore international, was still too tempting for the record industry to
resist. So after the war, IFPI reconvened in
para-fascist
Portugal
in 1950. Italy wasn’t suitable anymore, and the conference
readied a draft text that would give them copyright-identical monopolies,
so-called “neighboring rights”, for producing and printing creative works such
as music. This monopoly would be practically identical to the commercial
copyright monopoly for fixations of a creative work.

The neighboring rights were ratified by BIRPI (today WIPO) in 1961 in
the so-called Rome Convention, giving the record industry copyright-identical
monopolies. At the same time, ILO’s attempt to give musicians similar rights
had flopped, waned, and failed.

Since 1961, the record industry has feverishly defended copyright,
despite the fact that it doesn’t enjoy any copyright monopoly, only the
copyright-identical monopoly known as “neighboring rights”.

One needs to remember two things at this point:

First, the record industry is confusing all these monopolies on purpose.
It keeps defending “its copyright”, which it doesn’t have, and talks nostalgically
about how this copyright monopoly was created in great wisdom during the dawn
of the Enlightenment [insert sunset and kittens here], referring to the Statute
of Anne in 1709, which wasn’t the first copyright anyway. In reality, the
neighboringrights monopolies were created in Europe as late as 1961. These
monopolies have been controversial and questioned from day one in 1961, and
were certainly not the product of any Enlightenment wisdom.

Second, we were but a hair’s breadth from still regarding record labels
as service bureaus for musicians, had ILO not failed, instead of the
stranglehold on musicians that they have been for the past decades. This would
have been the case if it had not been for two intervening fascist governments
– fascist in the literal sense of the word – supporting the record
industry in corporatizing society and becoming the copyright industry.

1980s: Hijacked Again – By Pfizer

Toyota struck at the heart of the American soul in the 1970s, and all
her politicians started carrying mental “The End Is Nigh” signs. The most
American things of all – cars! The American Cars! – weren’t good
enough for the American people. They all bought Toyota instead. This was an
apocalypse-grade sign that United States was approaching its end as an
industrial nation, unable to compete with Asia.

This is the final part in my series about the history of the copyright
monopoly. The period of 1960 to 2010 is marked by two things: one, the
record-label-driven creepage of the copyright monopoly into the noncommercial,
private domain where it was always a commercial-only monopoly before (“home
taping is illegal” and such nonsense) and the monopoly therefore threatening
fundamental human rights, and two, the corporate political expansion of the
copyright monopoly and other monopolies. As most people are aware of the former
development, we will focus on the latter.

When it was clear to politicians that the United States would no longer
be able to maintain its economic dominance by producing anything industrially
valuable or viable, many committees were formed and tasked to come up with the
answer to one crucial question: How can the US maintain its global dominance if
(or when) it is not producing anything competitively valuable?

The response came from an unexpected direction: Pfizer.

The President of Pfizer, Edmund Pratt, had a furious op-ed piece in a
New York Times on July 9, 1982 titled “Stealing from the Mind”. It fumed about
how third world countries were stealing from them. (By this, he referred to
countries making medicine from their own raw materials with their own factories
using their own knowledge in their own time for their own people, who were
frequently dying from horrible but curable third-world conditions.) Major
policymakers saw a glimpse of an answer in Pfizer’s and Pratt’s thinking, and
turned to Pratt’s involvement in another committee directly under the
President. This committee was the magic ACTN: Advisory Committee on Trade
Negotiations.

What the ACTN recommended, following Pfizer’s lead, was so daring and
provocative that nobody was really sure whether to try it out. The US would try
linking its trade negotiations and foreign policy. Any country who didn’t sign
lopsided “free trade” deals that heavily redefined value would be branded in a
myriad of bad ways, the most notable being the “Special 301 watchlist”. This
list is supposed to be a list of nations not respecting copyright enough. A
majority of the world’s population lives in countries that are on it, among
them Canada.

So the solution to not producing anything of value in international
trade was to redefine “producing”, “anything”, and “value” in an international
political context, and to do so by bullying. It worked. The ACTN blueprints
were set in motion by US Trade Representatives, using unilateral bullying to
push foreign governments into enacting legislation that favored American
industry interests, bilateral “free trade” agreements that did the same, and
multilateral agreements that raised the bar worldwide in protection of American
interests.

In this way, the United States was able to create an exchange of values
where they would rent out blueprints and get finished products from those
blueprints in return. This would be considered as a fair deal under the “free
trade” agreements which redefined value artificially.

The entire US monopolized industry was behind this push: the copyright
industries, the patent industries, all of them. They went forum shopping and
tried to go to WIPO — repeating the hijack of the record industry in 1961
— to seek legitimacy and hostship for a new trade agreement that would be
marketed as “Berne Plus”.

At this point, it became politically necessary for the US to join the
Berne Convention for credibility reasons, as WIPO is the overseer of Berne.

However, WIPO saw right through this scheme and more or less kicked them
right out the door. WIPO was not created to give any country that kind of
advantage over the rest of the world. They were outraged at the shameless
attempt to hijack the copyright and patent monopolies.

So, another forum was needed. The US monopoly industry consortium
approached GATT — the
General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
— and managed to get influence
there. A major process was initiated whereby about half of the participating
countries in GATT were tricked, coerced or bullied into agreeing with a new
agreement under GATT, an agreement which would lock in the Berne Convention and
strengthen the US industry considerably on top of that by redefining
“producing”, “thing” and “value”. This agreement was called TRIPs. Upon
ratification of the TRIPs agreement, the GATT body was renamed WTO, the World
Trade Organization. The 52 GATT countries choosing to stay out of the WTO would
soon find themselves in an economic position where it became economically
impossible not to sign the colonizing terms. Only one country out of the
original 129 has not rejoined.

TRIPs has been under considerable fire for how it is constructed to
enrich the rich at the expense of the poor, and when they can’t pay with money,
they pay with their health and sometimes their lives. It forbids third world
countries from making medicine in their own factories from their own raw
materials with their own knowledge to their own people. After several
near-revolts, some concessions were made in TRIPs to “allow” for this.

But perhaps the most telling story of how important the artificial
monopolies are to the United States’ dominance came when Russia sought
admission into the WTO (for incomprehensible reasons). To allow Russia
admission, the United States demanded that the Russia-legal music shop
AllofMP3
should be closed.
This shop sold copies of MP3 files and was classified as a radio station in
Russia, paying appropriate license fees and was fully legal.

Now, let’s go back a bit to review what was going on. This was the
United States and Russia sitting at the negotiating table. Former enemies who
kept each other at nuclear gunpoint 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, through
sandstorm and blizzard. The United States could have demanded and gotten
anything. Absolutely anything.

So what did the United States demand?

It asked for Russia to
close a
bloody record store
.

That’s when you realize how much power these monopolies have.

Copyright As A Fundamentalist Religion

What is happening now with the copyright industry vs. the people is
practically identical to what happened when the printing press was introduced
and the Catholic Church declared war on self-educated people. In both cases, it
is not really about religion or law, but about the very simple principle that
people are people and that powerful people will use their power to keep their
power.

What is interesting here is that copyright defenders are acting like
religious fundamentalists. They aren’t religious in the actual sense of the
word, of course. But they are acting and reacting as if they were religious
about copyright, as if it was something that wasn’t allowed to be questioned.

Enrique Dans
observes
that they are attacking not just copyright reformists, but
anybody who even questions copyright, with an emotional and aggressive fervor:
calling the reformists pirates, thieves, freetards et cetera. In another time
and place, heretics would have been the word of choice.

Facts and figures that shed light on the situation and could help find a
solution to the problem are never welcomed, but are aggressively rejected and
ignored by the copyright fundamentalists.

There are a couple of observations to be made from this.

First
, people are people and
will be people; there’s nothing new under the sun. All of this has happened
before and will happen again.

The printing press was a disruptive technology that threatened the
control over information that the Catholic Church had enjoyed so far. When the
old power structures saw the risk of their power slipping away or being eroded,
they fought back in every way they could. And although technology won in the
end, the former information monopolists managed to create quite a lot of
collateral damage to society before they had to accept the inevitable defeat.

The Internet is a disruptive technology that threatens the control over
information that the entertainment industry has enjoyed so far. When the old
power structures see the risk of their power slipping away or being eroded,
they fight back in every way they can. And although technology will win in the
end, the former information monopolists are creating quite a lot of collateral
damage to society right now.

Our job is to put an end to this damage as quickly as possible, so that
society can take full advantage of the new opportunities that technology has
opened up. The region of the world that is the first one to achieve this will
be among the economic winners of this century.