[P2P-F] the last chance for copyright

[Kevin Carson]

On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 8:09 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:

> institutions and laws have a very long latency factor ...
>
> consider that now the overall majority of all citizens, all age groups and democrats/republicans alike, are in favour of the legalization of marihuana .. yet it could still take decades before that happens
>
> without willingness to accompany ignoring the law with an active struggle against it, the same will happen for copyright ..
>

I think ignoring the law and developing countermeasures against
enforcement are a much more cost-effective use of resources than
political action to repeal it.  As far as I know, nobody ever repealed
the Code of Hammurabi.  An unenforceable law is as good as no law at
all.

http://radgeek.com/gt/2009/02/07/countereconomic_optimism/
"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enforced is as good as a a law that has been repealed, and that is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."

I argued here <http://c4ss.org/content/5845> that, in John Robb's
terminology, enforcement is state capitalism's Systempunkt.  Actually
contesting the plutocrats and big business for control of the state
would be enormously costly, a sisyphean task of endless procedural
steps in which we're outspent 100-to-1 by the plutes and the rules are
rigged in their favor at every single step.  But enforcement is the
weakest link, and devoting a hundredth the resources to disabling that
node can have the same effect in terms of rendering the system
inoperable that capturing the system would have.  Just as, by way of
analogy, Al Qaeda can shut down an entire oil distribution system by
disabling a few key nodes, achieving for a few hundred dollars worth
of explosives the same result that would require thousands of
strategic bombing sorties to destroy the entire physical pipeline
infrastructure.  Why waste resources in the moral equivalent of
house-to-house fighting to secure control of the state when we can
simply throw sand in its gears?

--
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
The Homebrew Industrial Revolution:  A Low-Overhead Manifesto
http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html