On the subject of genocidal rage

[Triple Zero]

Found on a blog. A rant against the idea of intellectual property. It's deliciously over-the-top and I didn't want to keep it from you guys

from https://humaniterations.wordpress.com/2011/07/20/on-the-subject-of-genocidal-rage/

On The Subject Of Genocidal Rage

The moment someone brings up "intellectual property" or the like my mind instantly goes to a place with terms like "cordwood" and "open graves", and it always has.  It's a struggle to reign myself back from that blood fury, made worse by my total incomprehension of why that would be the wrong response.  If someone tries to censor you you kill them until they can't censor you any more.  There's no other sensible response.

To govern the information one has access to or can send is to imprison one in the most fundamental way.  It claims dominion over one's contact with all external reality.  To rip away one's capacity to say, torrent books is akin to ripping away one's sense of smell or touch.  A massive branch of one's capacity to register and act.  It's viscerally heinous in a way that passing violations like brutality, betrayal and coercion pale before.  You can starve, beat or rape a person, you can enslave them at gunpoint towards some task, but chopping off their hands lest they write illicit 1s and 0s or ripping out their nose lest they discern your proprietary ingredients is its own realm of abomination.  No deeper hell is fathomable for an active mind than isolation from stimuli.  And no branch of interaction with the external universe is comparably critical to civilized society than communication.  Without the capacity to communicate, wholly and fully, there is no reason to respect the lives of others, no hope of resolution of conflict or domination save bloodshed.

When they can take your voice — when they can carve away what you can say and how you can say it — you've no recourse left but to take their lives.  Forget enlightened reasoning, even threats require a voice to speak them.  All that remains to be won is the victory of animals: elimination of the other.

If there's anything worse than sensory deprivation it would be the sort of domination intended not just to determine your actions but to reshape your thoughts.  "Intellectual Property" doesn't just attempt to sever the content and reach of 21st century communication, it decrees that merely having certain memories will be punished by brutal force.  The particular medium of course does not matter.  Hardly anyone uses our precious grey matter to store facts, experiences or detailed arguments anymore.  From paper journals and sketchpads we've moved to cybernetic augments.  Laptops and phones have become as critical and fundamental to our near-singularity minds as any other bodily organ.  But eidetic memory is now forbidden.  The moment we leave a movie theater the experience must be ripped from our minds by gunpoint leaving only the hollowest of impressions and afterimages, lest an .avi file in our silicon lobes deter them from potential profits.  This is considered "fair" because it only reduces us to the level of prehistoric primates.  When we leave a company they have the capacity to slice away our plans and ideas.  Our neural structures are not our own.  Those in power have begun a campaign whereby armed soldiers bust in our doors and murder us if we resist.

I try — I really do — to think of responses that don't involve the bodies of these most evil of men piled in the streets.  I want to believe that mathematics will simply leave the proponents of IP no more than shrill would-be-tyrants screeching about their "right" to profit.  But they control the cables.  And at the end of the day all our strategies are no more than chance and hope.  When communication itself is confined, whittled away at, it would be foolish to assume nonviolent possibilities reliant on communication will work.

I know our culture's priorities view violent resistance to censorship as 'disproportionate' rather than rational and inevitable.  I encounter their horrifyingly alien perspectives all the time ("but how will I have a middle-class lifestyle if I can't use a gang of thugs to beat up people who don't give me money every time they have or share thoughts similar to mine?").  I recognize that my outrage, if voiced, will place me outside the pale of most conversations.  And so, even though it makes no sense, I try to scale my rhetoric back to something far more tame than my actual feelings.

But all throughout these debates I remain snarling inside, straining at these pretenses, ready to slip outside the realm of communication they're laying siege to and start slitting throats.  Sometimes the most rational response is to stop pretending rational persuasion is a worthwhile frame of mind.  Anyone with an active mind who's ever been imprisoned or significantly abused knows the score.  Sometimes "thinking your way out" is a trap.  Sometimes the best approach is to simply kick, bite and scratch as much as you can on the off chance they die instead of you.

[LMNO]

Now there's a guy who really, really wants free stuff.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Now there's a guy who really, really wants free stuff.

Not just free stuff.... free entertainment. I have to assume that anyone who feels that strongly about their entitlement to free entertainment has never suffered any significant hardship, and produces little of intellectual value themselves. In other words, a spoiled baby; a freeloader who contributes nothing but feels entitled to everything. Someone who has little to no understanding of what "Intellectual Property" actually means.

Part of The Problem.

[LMNO]

I don't know, Nigel... I think you should honor his polemics, and send him all the beads you made last week (postage included).

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Speaking of which,  Bijijoo is suing NBC over a 30 Rock episode in which Tina Fey appeared holding a ham in a top hat.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I don't know, Nigel... I think you should honor his polemics, and send him all the beads you made last week (postage included).

Also maybe I should send him a dozen or so stories and essays to publish under his own name. It's only fair.

[Don Coyote]

I don't know, Nigel... I think you should honor his polemics, and send him all the beads you made last week (postage included).

Also maybe I should send him a dozen or so stories and essays to publish under his own name. It's only fair.

If I sudenly became a sculpture artist that worked in fecal matter, would it right or wrong to mail him all of my portfolio?

[Cramulus]

I fucking love it 

[Freeky]

Speaking of which,  Bijijoo is suing NBC over a 30 Rock episode in which Tina Fey appeared holding a ham in a top hat.

I hope he wins.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Speaking of which,  Bijijoo is suing NBC over a 30 Rock episode in which Tina Fey appeared holding a ham in a top hat.

I hope he wins.

Me too! His settlement offer was to send them this painting:



They refused. Here's the correspondence so far: http://personagesholdinghams.com/

I think they assumed that he was just a crank, but conveniently, he works for an intellectual property law firm and his colleagues are delighted by this turn of events.  

[Triple Zero]

I don't know, Nigel... I think you should honor his polemics, and send him all the beads you made last week (postage included).

Also maybe I should send him a dozen or so stories and essays to publish under his own name. It's only fair.

If I sudenly became a sculpture artist that worked in fecal matter, would it right or wrong to mail him all of my portfolio?

Neither beads nor sculptures are intellectual property, they are physical goods.

Look, I know this is over-the-top, and I don't really want to defend what this guy is saying, I just thought it was hilarious.

But if you need to, there are so many points on which to completely shoot down this article, why you pick two examples that completely miss the point??

I'm pretty sure all of you do know the basics of copyright law and intellectual property. Whatever

[LMNO]

Aw, we're just having fun with it.

But I still contend that a book is representative of a person's time and effort, as much as a bead or sculpture would be.  Just because you can digitize it doesn't mean the author shouldn't be able to turn a profit off his work.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I don't know, Nigel... I think you should honor his polemics, and send him all the beads you made last week (postage included).

Also maybe I should send him a dozen or so stories and essays to publish under his own name. It's only fair.

If I sudenly became a sculpture artist that worked in fecal matter, would it right or wrong to mail him all of my portfolio?

Neither beads nor sculptures are intellectual property, they are physical goods.

Look, I know this is over-the-top, and I don't really want to defend what this guy is saying, I just thought it was hilarious.

But if you need to, there are so many points on which to completely shoot down this article, why you pick two examples that completely miss the point??

I'm pretty sure all of you do know the basics of copyright law and intellectual property. Whatever

Like I said

Also maybe I should send him a dozen or so stories and essays to publish under his own name. It's only fair.

The gist of dude's tantrum seems to be that once a creative endeavor is created and released, it should be free for anyone to reproduce, share, alter, or republish in any way they see fit. So, by his entitlement reasoning, if I were to write a book of tutorials on making my beads, it then becomes his right to alter and distribute it at his whim, with his own or any name on it that he desires.

[Cain]

The guy is hilariously over the top, and I say that as someone sympathetic to IP reform (more in the area of medicine than anything else).

I mean, as you get to the lower paragraphs, it starts sounding like some PKD nightmare world.  Ripping memories out of brains?  I lol'd.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Yeah, it was funny, much in the same way that Rush Limbaugh is funny.