Henry George, an economist, said this a long long time ago:
“The copyright is not a right to the exclusive use of a fact, an idea, or a combination . . . . It does not prevent anyone from using for himself the facts, the knowledge, the laws or combinations for a similar production, but only using the identical form of a particular book.”
Copyright is, according to Henry George, “the natural, moral right of each one to enjoy the products of his own exertion, and involves no interference with the similar right of any one else to do likewise.”
But about patents, he had this to say:
“The patent, on the other hand, prohibits any one from doing a similar thing, and involves, usually for a specified time, an interference with the equal liberty on which the right of ownership rests . . . . It prohibits others from doing what has already been attempted.”
Food for thought.
Wikileaks is much ado about nothing, and in the end will harm the very cause that Assange claims to celebrate. The only thing Assange has accomplished with ‘Cablegate’ is to make the governments of the world hold their secrets closer to their chests. Those ‘classified’ documents were available to hundreds of thousands of people, not exactly top level secrets – but Assange wants the publicity for his ideological cause. In doing so, he has only empowered the right wing in his country and ours – people he should recognize as his enemy.
I don’t want to psychoanalyze the man himself too much because all I have to go on is interviews but he seems to me to have the kind of self centered importance and, really, paranoia that can come from viewing the world through the lens of a computer screen, and only a computer screen. Even if his heart is in the right place, if it can be separated out from his rapacious ego, in the end he’s no different than those on the right who can’t see farther than their own nose.
I am intimately familiar with the hacking subculture from which he sprang and that ethos, while very exciting on the surface, leads nowhere. I’d say he’s a geek first, an anarchist as an afterthought, and I tend to put the whole ‘free the information’ crowd there because, I speak from experience, the tendency with technicians is to think that all problems can be solved with technology, specifically computers, and given that, there is a group of them who think their particular ideology is the technological solution to everything under the sun. That faith in technology has gotten really extreme as global culture abandons it, and certain groups hang on to it even more tightly. They are wrong – in terms of real political reform, you have to address people’s hierarchy of needs, and land and bread come before ‘information’, not the other way around. Ownership of information, like any property, is as much a tool in the hands of reformers as it is in the hands of the elite. Robbing the people of that tool leaves them even more vulnerable to exploitation. And in the very real sense, it doesn’t matter if someone in Congo can look at ‘Mickey Mouse’ on a cell phone when their life is at risk and the damn thing is in English anyway. Politically, Assange and the Pirate Party etc. are just a sideshow, a dead end, a symptom of hoarded wealth and not a solution to the problem it creates.
I really can’t say anything about the date rape thing. Like everyone else I’ll just have to wait and see what the court says. And guessing which if any government has something to do with it would be only a guess. It seems like a government would be more apt to downplay the whole thing than to keep it in the media with a court room drama.
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