Media Boycott by P2P Users Starts April 24th

A Week Against the Intellectual Property industries


The international boycott of the media industry begins tomorrow April 24th and continues until the 30th. The event is being promoted by p2p software developers and their business interests (who have borne the brunt of the industry assault) but supported by many consumer and user groups.

More than 7000 investigations of users have been initiated in the United States, thousands of others in Canada, Australia, Korea, almost every state in the European Union and elsewhere. Notwithstanding this repressive machinery, the legal offensive is having no noticeable effect on the numbers actively sharing files (an estimated 6 million at any given moment). In fact it is functionally impossible for industry to police even a minority of data transactions. This legal action is principally devised so as to bully and intimidate, instilling fear by victimising individuals who are to serve as exemplary victims, maoist style - hit one and educate a hundred! Except that, as the maoists discovered, it doesn't work.

The media industry is currently awaiting the outcome of its most recent legal adventure, the attempt to overturn a line of legal cases epitomized by Sony Betamax in 1984 which provide protection for machines (physical or virtual) which can be used for the production of copies. This case, MGM v Grokster, was heard in the US Supreme Court in March and a decision is expected in the early summer. Irrespective of the result file-sharing will hardly be impeded: there are now so many different tools, diverse networks, public and secret communities in all the interstices of the net that the chimera of industry control is now disappearing back over the horizon. As the use of personal data storage devices proliferates (think iPod beyond its fetichistic hipster overtones) media sharing is set to enjoy a quantitative explosion. The new law attempts to render illegal a business model -- if your tool's ability to generate revenue is based on copyright violations by third parties then it is illegal -- yet much of the p2p software out there is produced without any intent to monetize it directly (consider for example the writer of Bit Torrent, Bram Cohen, or Gnucleuswhich has now been moulded so as to allow users develop their own customised p2p app!

If it is the case that the project to kill promiscuous sharing is baseless, we should be careful of how we resist its authors. In short, giving too much prominence to the anti-piracy campaigns risks placing us in a position where we provide the fuel for the drive to change norms, by generating visibility and "audience penetration".

Better then to emphasise the opportunities for emancipation and self-organization offered by the social models -- eg decentralized, commons-based production and sharing -- emerging through human use of new technology, and underline the absurdity of the artificial maintenance of scarcity.

Intellectual Property Day/WIPO/WTO/Bilaterals

Tuesday April 26th is World Intellectual Property day, sponsored by the World Intellectual Property organization (WIPO) based in Geneva, and currently at the centre of a storm over its mission. An alliance composed of NGO civil society (warning bells!), academics and countries such as brazil, India and Argentina is contesting the assumption that WIPO should exist merely to promote the extension of private property rights rather than prioritizing the production of innovation and culture, by means also of mechanism,s other than the monpolies which patents and copyrights provide. These conflicts orbit around the drafting of a "development Agenda" which is in fact a hostile takeover of a UN organization that has always shilled for the US, Canada, Europe and Japan.

Yet questions must be posed about whether the blows aimed at WIPO are well aimed. Defeat of neo-liberal interests in Cancun (WTO) and Miami (FTAA) mean that multilateral treaties are no longer the priveliged catwalk for displaying trade muscles, a shakedown which now occurs largely in the context of bilateral trade agreements and small regional agreements. The activity around WIPO has generated a lot of enthusiasm and is probably productive at least in terms of educating people about what were hitherto esoteric and mystified issues, but it is difficult to see how it can concretely invert the expansionist tendency that has been ascendant for twenty years.

The most recent factual confirmation of this trend lies in the new patent law which India was obluiged to introduce at the start of the year. As a developing country it benefitted from a transition period under the WTO's Trade Related Apectrs of Intellectual property Rights Agreement (TRIPS)_ which required all WTO members to legislate for intellectual property protection according to standards set out in the Berne (copyright) and Paris (patents) treaties which reflect the needs and development arc of western (post) industrial societies. Indian generics manufacturers, such as Cipla, have been a vital tactical element in the struggle for access to essential medicines as they have developed by research expertise and the capital necessary to establish high standards of production. Thus Cipla manufactured retrovirals and AIDS treatments for South Africa for example. Indian patent law formerly protected only processes, not substances, and this encouraged competition at the level of production methods. under the new law pharmaceuticals are entitled to "protection" although fortunately the possibility to issue compulsory licenses - where the patent can be broken and made by an unauthorised manufacturer in return for some level of compensation not necessarily tied to business's market evaluation of the value - remains.

Software Patents - the Fight Continues


Given the technical complexity of the subject it seems incredible that the campaign to stop the introduction of software patents has been so vigorous and successful. The European Commission has been determined for years (at least since 1999) to introduce patent coverage from software that is already protected under copyright laws, following the tendency in the United States. Patents are preferred by commercial interests over copyright because they offer a much higher level of control: no reverse engineering, no interoperability, no 'fair use'. Working a patent without a license is a violation of the law and can be immediately injuncted.

The stakes are high in the battle over software patents because of the integration of computers in hundreds of everyday items and processes; software must be understood as a virtual machine, and code as the means of producing machines in general. The struggle against patents is part of a wider fight to protect and expand the pool of resources available to all under free software licenses and public knowledge.
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A Permanent Festival of Sharing?

For all these reasons this last week before Mayday seems an appropriate time to postulate a practice opf driect refusal of the constraint of intellectual property laws, and a viral communication of this culture to those around us. The fight for the free circulation of digital goods is part of the struggle for a new wave of rights: technological change and community development have brought us to the point whereby you can get almost anything you want data-wise to consume. But whilst consumption is transformed, productionm has been left intact, and its supercession will require but the design of new instruments of collective rights (such as a GPL for film and music, something which creative commons unfortunately is not succeeding in supplying...so far). And wehat better time than that of Mayday to pose the question than Mayday: one cannot talk about rights today without talking about control over the means of information. The exercise of any social rights against power today is contingent on being able to resist spin, disinformation and a cultural envrionment almost entirely dedicated to hawking commodities, and the political class favourable to the same objective.