Copyright Law would turn Millions into Criminals
canada.com — There are at least 400 movies and an uncountable number of television shows on about 200 VHS tapes stored in my den. I will apparently be branded a thief for keeping these tapes and will have made Brigitte into a criminal -- the receiver of "stolen" goods.
Let's remember that protecting copyright law is not motivated solely (or even mostly) to protect the rights of artists. While in principle an artist is free to market their art independently, they would be going up against a massive print, television, radio and street advertising industry that is competing for the attention of the citizenry (commonly re-branded as "the market"). I submit that not only are we, as people, better served to be understood as citizens than as a market, but that this notion that our economy and its "market forces" are red herrings, notions that cheat us of our own rights to produce work and not consume it, but share it and take part in it with others. This produce-consume notion drives the engine of the economy, which we all understand as a good thing because it provides us with jobs. The economy is not a thing. People provide themselves with jobs, as long as they are not restricted from doing so by concentration of ownership. A man can farm a field as long as all the fields are not owned. But once all the fields are owned, this man has to sell his labour rather than produce crops and sell those.
Similar to the ownership of land and material goods, we are now in an era of increasing encroachment on the field of ideas. Instead of ideas belonging to all, they are now the province of a few. And those few are not the artists. A new author does not have the right to make a movie of her book, or to use the characters in that book to sell candy to children, as odious as that is, without negotiating with the rights owners - i.e. her publisher. Even though she wrote the book, she does not own the ideas. She sold those ideas to the publisher, so that the publisher could sell her book to people. This is problematic, because it is obvious that the author is in a losing situation here. I'm not talking about J.K. Rowling or Stephen King. I'm talking about the other 99% of authors.
If you understand copyright as a means of protecting the rights of the publishers (Time Warner, GE, Vivendi, etc) then you can see that a law that criminalizes the citizenry for reproducing art, reproducing information - without even making a profit on it - is an unjust law. If we want to protect the rights of artists, we should address the most fundamental injustices in the distribution and ownership of art through the studio and publishing system. This law is only meant to try to bolster industry control over their stolen property.
An unjust law is no law at all.
