2024-10-18

How to claim the intellectual commons

Workers have the leverage of union to compel the employer to satisfy their demands. In modern economic system there is a limit to these demands. If the workers demand beyond the limit, the company will come to ruin. Unions can protect workers against abuses of power and overexploitation. They help workers to get what is due under existing conditions. But they cannot bring about radically new working conditions.

Media piracy for the public is like a strike for the workers. It threatens safe operation of patent monopolies, corporate secrets, black box designs - safe reign of intellectual property. Usually, copyright infringement is settled among two economic agents competing with each other. But there can be another kind of copyright infringement. If the public engages in noncommercial violation of intellectual property, it can disrupt existing mode of business and compel studios and authors guilds to change the rules.

The problem is that the public is much bigger than a group of coworkers. Coworkers can share directly their discontent about issues with each other. People suffer great damage from the unmatched reign of intellectual property, yet it hard to gather experiences and agree on a common set of actions. A lot of people with big audiences talk about the enormous power Amazon exercises over ecommerce. Some people recommend using Bookshop.org, but nobody suggests to boycott Amazon, to pirate bestsellers.

Because piracy is ostracized as a threat to the well-being of authors. Just as strikes are demonized as a threat to economy. But strikes have a historic legitimacy as effective tool in class struggle. Piracy is very recent and sporadic practice. It taken down the CD industry, but it only brought about another form of corporate control - streaming. Piracy is not yet perceived as a leverage to get what is due. There is a limit that can be set upon copyright without impoverishing the publishing industry. First of all, it’s a shortening of copyright duration. From 70 to at least 10 years. So most recent cultural achievements can get out of the dark of corporate databases and see the light. Secondly, it’s a digitization of libraries’ collections to make them easily available to anyone with internet connection.

Today piracy tries to exist in the shadow. I think it’s time for piracy to present its demands and get what is due. Without the leverage of piracy, concerns about the enourmous power of technofeudalists will remain a mere talk. If there are enough of enthusiasts scanning and sharing books via Library Genesis or 1337x, people with power will acknowledge the demands.