Abolitionist creativity

February 19, 2023 12:23 PM

How intellectual property can hack digital power
posted by sapagan (11 comments total)

Really interesting in theory to weaponize intellectual property law as a tool of resistance. In practice, the courts are a tool of the wealthy to oppress the working class and only exceptionally do they ever provide any sort of relief to people that aren't already powerful. If you find a way to use IP law to put the screws to the man, the man will simply change or ignore the law and suffer no consequences, is my cynical thought of the day.

That said, I fully support the idea and wish every success to folks who are trying to make the world better and wanna get out there and try new ways of doing that. Godspeed.
posted by signsofrain at 1:28 PM on February 19, 2023 [8 favorites]

I would have enjoyed some discussion of copyleft software licences and creative commons licenses and how they have not necessarily worked in intended ways, but have also very much altered business models and preserved some freedoms.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 2:04 PM on February 19, 2023 [5 favorites]

Here in NZ the copyright law carves out space for performance, essentially you must obtain a license BEFORE recording a performance.

A few years back in protest at police trialing face tracking surveillance cameras I publicly declared my entire life "performance art" ....
posted by mbo at 2:23 PM on February 19, 2023 [6 favorites]

In practice, the courts are a tool of the wealthy to oppress the working class and only exceptionally do they ever provide any sort of relief to people that aren't already powerful.

I feel like any given corporation will have more resources to waste time in an intellectual property dispute than activists will. You're basically gambling that the private military contractor doesn't have the ability to get good IP lawyers. By the time the court case resolves, the pipeline's already built.

While I'm sympathetic to the arguments that IP law has colonised indigenous knowledge, I feel like, in a globalised society, there's always going to be some blackguard waiting to rip ideas off. I don't know how you build an effective legal framework to guard against intellectual colonisation. It seems very difficult.
posted by Merus at 3:49 PM on February 19, 2023

1: Protest as copyrighted performance. Claim copyright and nobody can legally record you on surveillance cameras! A clever idea but I think there's a ton of precedent establishing that you have no expectation of privacy when you're in a public space, including being recorded? And what's the plan for dealing with the fact that the corporations doing this have much bigger legal budgets than you do?

2: Occupy employment contracts with IP morals clauses. Yeah good luck getting this added to the contract you're signing with BigCorp, even if you are a total star at the top of your profession. You'd need the power of a union behind you to change that, and America has shit all over the idea of unions from a great height for my entire lifetime.
posted by egypturnash at 4:10 PM on February 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

This is a confused mess. Just one example:

Imagine if protestors wore the © ‘all rights reserved’ on their bodies...

Makes no difference under the Berne Convention, which has been in force in the US since the eighties.

I could go on, and on.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 4:14 PM on February 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

Democracy: one dollar, one vote.

Twas ever thus.
posted by tspae at 4:29 PM on February 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

I work in an IP-driven field. I appreciate the authors’ effort to jump start a conversation about this large and obscure area of capitalist infrastructure.

It is true that these solutions sound unrealistic, at least to me as well as others here. However, I have understood that abolitionist spaces are focused on imagining what might be possible far beyond the boundaries of what we see right now.

I’m American, but I’ve been fascinated for a few years now with how the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has offered a path for transitioning English derived law from property rights to human rights. (It’s not perfect, they’re not perfect, etc. But still.) The recent FPP about encampments in Waterloo, Ontario shows how the ripple effects of the Charter are still working their way through the system, 40 years on. This FPP makes me wonder about what it would look like to have a more humanistic IP rights regime.

Anyway. This is a worthy topic for focus, debate, and dreaming. Thanks sapagan for posting!
posted by sockshaveholes at 4:48 PM on February 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

Was intrigued by the title but then got thrown by "50 years ago, 80% of the value of the world’s largest companies was in hard assets; now 90% is in intangibles. "

This is certainly not true, if by intangible assets they are using the standard definition. Even Alphabet has only ~10% of its total assets classified as "Goodwill or Intangible assets". Curiously enough, Walmart that kingdom of brick and mortar has a higher percentage at ~16%.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOG/balance-sheet?p=GOOG
posted by storybored at 9:24 PM on February 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

This tactic will not work; otherwise the authors would have actually done it themselves and written about the results.

This is the worst sort of pseudo-leftist writing: 4,200 words where they talk about everything from cyberlaw to biopiracy but said nothing.

I finally figured out their angle. They have a website abolishIP.org (registered five months ago, which as far as I can tell is three people, two of them the authors of this nonsense article) and their Abolish IP Art License (which looks like Creative Commons but with a laughably vague morals clause).

This is so painfully clueless and I have a dozen reasons why it won't work. First one: okay, so now the police declare they are public performers so filming them beating up people gives them legal grounds to sue protesters for monetary damages for "copyright infringement".

One of the authors is a co-founder of "Worldwide AI Hackathon", which is "Building IP-NFT ecosystem for WowDAO, the first AI decentralized autonomous organization, on a mission to democratize AI with global collaboration" and "Molecule AG", which is "Designing IP-NFT ecosystems."

Can we please not post the writings of NFT and AI buzzword grifters?
posted by AlSweigart at 9:18 AM on February 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

Ah, I figured out how to describe it:

The other people who are convinced they've found some legal loophole that can magically turn real world courts in their favor are sovereign citizens.

Good luck with that.
posted by AlSweigart at 10:56 AM on February 20, 2023 [2 favorites]