The New Freedom

Saturday, August 11th, 2007...12:14 pm

The Morality of Intellectual Property

I was reading a Slashdot article about Chinese iPhone knock-offs (I want one) when I noticed a comment about a new type of license called MORALip. It has been created by Adam Dada, an anarcho-capitalist cat freak from Chicago. His blog, Unanimocracy currently serves, not surprisingly, to give Ron Paul a handjob. moralip

The MORALip License is badly designed, badly named, preachy, unenforceable and generally worthless. However, it does raise an interesting point. The idea is that using the power of the state to enforce IP law is drawing the focus away from the real reason we should be respecting intellectual property. From the website:

Do you refrain from murdering other people because the law says not to, or do you refrain from committing murder because you know it is wrong? Do you stop yourself from walking over to your neighbor’s yard and stealing their garden hose because the law tells you not to, or because you know it is wrong? The law might be there supposedly to protect individuals, but in most cases the law is unable to be utilized by the average individual. If your house is stolen, the enforcers of the law generally come afterwards, file some paperwork, and you never hear from them again. The same is true in many murders. The law is not the provider of morality, and should never be. For many people, the law works against them.

It comes in two flavors, red and green. The red flavor means totally fair use with attribution. The green flavor means totally fair use without attribution. Which seems to be the exact same thing as the public domain. From the site:

This is similar to releasing a creation to the Public Domain, but using MORALip Green for your Public Domain content created is a way to promote the idea of MORALip.

So yeah, it’s the public domain, but more preachy. Great.

The way I see it from a ‘moral’ point of view, Intellectual Property doesn’t actually exist. It is a bizarre, abstract, counter-intuitive idea created by bastard lawyers for greedy purposes. Copying clearly isn’t stealing. If you have the ability to improve your life without directly harming somebody else, you’d be a fool not to do it. This is sheer common sense, far more simple than any silly human concepts like ‘morality’. The big issue for IP is commercial use, people and corporations trying to profit off of the works of other people. This is the nasty battleground which causes the need for copyright laws and IP lawyers. It’s also the exact reason that soft licensing that appeals to morality will never work. Although they (unfortunately) have the legal rights of human beings, corporations do not have morality or compassion. They are massive, unwieldy beasts which will exploit any immediate resource, without any thought as to the long term consequences, in the interest of financial profit. And they are perhaps the largest force in most of our lives. They control a huge amount of the global mindshare through mass media, and directly influence all western nations to the point that they can manipulate policies enough to start unnecessary wars.

No American political candidates have seriously addressed this since Dwight Eisenhower.

Anyway, a few quick links to send you off with:

Good news in the Boston University student v the RIAA case. Azer Bestavros, the chairman of BU’s CS department, has stepped up as an expert witness to protect the student. This is the first time a BU employee has done something in the interest of a student (0wn3d, Jim Stone). I hope I get to meet with an interview Azer sometime during this school year.

Free Culture party at Jimbo’s house! Wikipedia nerds know how to get dowwwn.

I heard a rumor that there are bots crawling the internet for polls trying to vote for Ron Paul, so below is a poll to test this hypothesis. Vote for whichever you’d like.