For those that believe in Proudhon’s famous dictum “property is theft”, nowhere is such thievery as blatant and repugnant today as when applied to what is colloquially termed “intellectual property.” Truly, the commodification of information is an offense against the human spirit and, indeed, the very notion of Darwinian evolution itself.
In today’s society, information is an indispensable form of corporate capital. Protected by an insidious network of patents and copyrights and a near-monopoly on methods of research and development, corporations employ the best minds of our generation in order to glean comparative advantage from the fruits of their labour. Any new “ideas” – this term can apply to anything from a medical or technological breakthrough to an Indy Rock album or an innovative marketing strategy – thus produced instantly become the “property” of the corporations that develop (or purchase) them. Instead of information being shared altruistically for the betterment of humanity as a whole, it is instead owned by corporations who go to great lengths to control which individuals can then have access to it – thereby ensuring that said access inevitably comes with a price tag attached. By doing this, corporations not only rob humanity of the immediate practical benefits of the information, but also impede the process of further development that comes with a free exchange of ideas; where would we be right now if our ancestors had chosen to patent fire?
Dr. Fredrick Banting, after developing insulin as a life-saving means of treating diabetes, donated his discovery to the University of Toronto - thereby ensuring its continual, affordable availability to all. Such charity is notably absent in the actions of today’s pharmaceutical giants, who would rather watch untold millions of Africans die from AIDS than share their recipes for life-saving retro-viral drugs. Corporations are not swayed by sentimental trappings such as empathy, compassion or decency - seeing these human weaknesses as nothing more than obstacles to profit.
And yet the means by which information is created and transmitted are changing.
With the advent of the Internet and the introduction of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) and Bit Torrent transfer technologies, we stand on the threshold of a communication revolution greater than anything seen since Guttenberg’s printing press. Our collective mental commons are being redrawn along more decentralized lines, while our corporate overlords struggle to adapt to the shifting realities of this strange new terrain.
New technologies will offer us the possibility to transform our society, currently configured as a system of passive information consumers, into a network of active information producers; may this be the Marxist dialectic of the digital age.
Together we must be vigilant. The current gatekeepers of knowledge – like the Catholic Church of Guttenberg’s era – will doubtless try to slow our society’s transformation. But like the Church before them, today’s corporations will fail… for the desire to communicate is inherent to the human spirit – and woe to those who seek to deny us our inalienable rights.
