Wednesday, March 08, 2006

brought to you by the small letter c

Well, I tell ya. You wanna fight the power, first thing to start ignoring is intellectual property law. It's not that the state can't impose a sanction against "stolen" information, it's just that it can't enforce it.

Luckily there are a lot of holes in copyrighted information as it is. The reason I call the copyright symbol the magic mystic secret rune of the small letter c contained in the sacred holy circle, or whatever, is because the whole idea is pure hoodoo. In theory you can keep a person from stealing your property because they have to come and get it, but the only way you can keep someone else from "possessing" your ideas is to not communicate them. As soon as you do they became public domain. I mean, where did all words come from? Someone invented them, guided by a logic, a reasoning, a paradigm we can't imagine, because it was worldless, and we are never far from words. Less, these days, and shorter ones, and accompanied by a whole lot more pretty pictures. But always there.

So I say, just blow off copyright laws. They can't really do dick to you anyway as long as you don't exchange the information for money. Use corporations names without capitalizing them, most of them are just words anyway. Name your product after some other famous product. Hand pages of Dostoyevsky ripped out of cheap paperback editions in as your final composition essay. If we let all the ideas out then we'll finally see what they're really there for.

I wrote this a long time ago, and it's only prudent to point out that the "they can't really do dick to you anyway" theory has failed the reality test a number of times in recent memory. So consider all the above the ranting of a lunatic to be assiduously avoided and don't come crying to me when you get sued for downloading bootleg MP3s or Bittorrents of your favorite teevee snack

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

No comments: