The New Jersey Alliance of the Libertarian Left website recently underwent an overhaul. It still needs a little work, but I’ve deemed it acceptable for public consumption. Of particularly global relevance is the resource page, which is full of downloadable left libertarian and market anarchist propaganda, some of which would be of interest to folks of other anti-authoritarian persuasions.
My readers might be interested in LibertyActivism.info, a site that “exists to provide resources for those who wish to promote liberty.” It is a budding wiki on all sorts of subversive info.
First of all, Monday is usually Metal Monday. Jag Panzer is a pretty rockin power metal band. It was difficult to find a decent video of them, but there are some out there.
I also came across a source of Alliance of the Libertarian Left gear today. It’s a Cafe Press store called Praxeology FTW!
And I’m excited for Porc Fest ‘09, a summer celebration of liberty hosted by the Free State Project. If you attend, I warn you that you might not want to go home.
Via leftlibertarian.org, I’ve come across an article by Jeffrey Tucker that describes how copyrights are frequently used to enrich corporations at the expense of the actual producers of work. I figured it was time to get personal with this issue here.
What often seems to happen to writers is that work is theoretically “copyrighted” in their name, but rights are handed over to the publisher as a condition of service. As a result, control of a work passes from a creator to people who likely care about it only as a commodity for sale on the unfree market.
As a self-published author, I affixed a circle-c to the title page of my book with the byline “All rights reserved.” But what rights have I reserved? Does the fact that I put an idea out into the public mean that nobody else has the right to profit from it? True, it is a unique combination of characters that are highly unlikely to be exactly reproduced by anyone working independently, but what rights do I have to prevent anybody else from “taking” my work? The fact is, creators usually want to be credited, and often want to be paid, for their work, and creating stories and art is very labor-intensive. But does anyone have the right to violate these desires?
I would say that taking credit for a work that is not yours would be an act of fraud, which would be pursued by any free-market justice organization worth the name. But does someone else have the right to copy and distribute Bring a Gun to School Day without my permission? I can see no legitimate reason to answer no. This leads us to the question of how authors can be credited for their work. Yes, the urges to create and communicate are the real reasons people get into story-making, but you can’t eat artistic satisfaction.
Roderick T. Long provides examples in The Libertarian Case
Against Intellectual Property Rights, which I suggest you read in its entirety.
Violating someone’s rights is not the only way one can do something wrong; justice is not the only virtue.
But justice is the only virtue that can be legitimately enforced. If I profit from pirating your work, you have a legitimate moral claim against me, but that claim is not a right. Thus, it cannot legitimately use coercion to secure compliance. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be enforced through other, voluntary methods.
A good deal of protection for the creators of intellectual products may be achieved through voluntary compliance alone. Consider the phenomenon of shareware, in which creators of software provide their products free to all comers, but with the request that those who find the program useful send along a nominal fee to the author. Presumably, only a small percentage of shareware users ever pay up; still, that percentage must be large enough to keep the shareware phenomenon going.
There are more organized and effective ways of securing voluntary compliance, however. I have in mind the strategy of boycotting those who fail to respect the legitimate claims of the producers. Research conducted by libertarian scholar Tom Palmer has turned up numerous successful instances of such organized boycotts. In the 1930’s, for example, the Guild of Fashion Originators managed to protect dress styles and the like from piracy by other designers, without any help from the coercive power of government…
…In the late Middle Ages a voluntary court system was created by merchants frustrated with the inadequacies of governmentally-provided commercial law. This system, known as the Law Merchant (“law” being the noun and “merchant” the adjective), enforced its decisions solely by means of boycott, and yet it was enormously effective. Suppose producers of intellectual products — authors, artists, inventors, software designers, etc. — were to set up an analogous court system for protecting copyrights and patent rights — or rather, copyclaims and patent claims (since the moral claims in question, though often legitimate, are not rights in the libertarian sense). Individuals and organizations accused of piracy would have a chance to plead their case at a voluntary court, but if found guilty they would be required to cease and desist, and to compensate the victims of their piracy, on pain of boycott.
He also notes the case of Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings of America:
The first edition of The Lord of the Rings to be published in the United States was a pirated edition from Ace Books. For reasons which I now forget, Tolkien could not take legal action against Ace. But when Ballantine came out with its own official author-approved American edition of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien started a campaign against the Ace edition. The Ballantine edition was released with a notice from Tolkien in a green box on the back cover stating that this was the only authorized edition, and urging any reader with respect for living authors to purchase no other. Moreover, every time he answered a fan letter from an American reader, Tolkien appended a footnote explaining the situation and requesting that the recipient spread the word among Tolkien fans that the Ace edition should be boycotted.
Although the Ace edition was cheaper than the Ballantine, it quickly lost readers and went out of print. The boycott was successful.
I would hope that people who value literature would be interested in seeing more of it created and hence try to support writers who could use it. Supporting writers is not something that large publishing companies place a priority on. The idea of profit for many of them is strictly monetary; there appears to be little value placed in actually making life richer in ways not immediately measurable in federal reserve notes. Agents are theoretically supposed to advocate for authors, but I’ve heard more than one author complain about agents not helping them with publishers who were giving them a raw deal.
It struck me a while ago that the notice on my downloadable short stories left much to be desired from an anti-intellectual property point of view, and probably ought to be changed:
Permission is granted to reproduce and distribute this work only if original title page is retained and no profit is made from the work without first consulting the author.
Of course, if your view is that you need no permission to reproduce anything, this should not stop you. In truth, I was mainly hoping that those parasitic corporate types whom every respectable artist is healthily paranoid about wouldn’t make a dime off me and that someone who did want to sell my work would let me in on it. I am thinking of better wording to update this notice with. Perhaps something along the lines of:
This work is the property of anyone who produces a copy and may be freely distributed under the following conditions:
1. Falsely claiming authorship of the work will constitute an act of fraud.
2. Commercial retail should be undertaken only with the financial interests of the author satisfied, under pain of severe market action.
In the future it would be great if some kind of agency (call it a guild, union, or firm if you wish) or agencies certified copies of work as supporting the creators. Should work be found being sold commercially without certification it could be brought to the attention of the agency, who could organize some kind of economic retaliation. Such agencies would not likely find profit in predatory activity, as they would operate on publicity and reputation, and compliance would be up to consumers. Should a homeless person be found selling uncertified copies of a work, it is less likely that they will be shunned than if a large store did.
And I certainly wouldn’t mind if nothing-backed money wasn’t the only respectable means of exchange either.
We also have self-publishing presenting authors a means of profit. Professionally-produced offset-press books still require a sizable investment, but what’s wrong with reading from heavy paper booklets produced with a regular computer, printer, and stapler? The labor and money put into producing them would likely be minimal and well-invested by the author, who would have a unique physical product to sell until someone copied it. Means of author-compensating electronic distribution could be devised as well.
On a related personal note, Bring a Gun to School Day originally had about 5-15 lines each from two songs in the text. When I decided to publish the work myself, one of my tasks was making sure that quoting someone without their permission wouldn’t be a problem. It would, and ridiculous as it sounds I sent emails to webmasters, then a record company and a lawyer to attempt to secure permission to quote another person. Neither returned my emails within a few weeks, and since I was in a hurry I rewrote the sections.
Clearly, free-market alternatives are in order. Let’s build them. Maybe we can even write stories about fearless tradespeople defeating their transgressors with economic pressure, and then distribute them freely.
Via Strike the Root:
Washington’s homeless told to move along for inauguration
“We are showing our priorities as a nation: throwing a multi-million dollar party while trying to shovel our poor and our homeless under the carpet,”
I’m very excited that two folky metal tours will be rampaging in my area this spring.
First it’s Pagan Knights 2009 featuring Tyr, Alestorm, and Suidakra.
Tyr – Regin Smidur
Then it’s Paganfest 2. I’m very excited to see Korpiklaani for the first time, and happy that Eluveite will be back.
Eluveite – Inis Mona
The fact that a black man will tomorrow swear on the Bible to officially become emperor of the world says much about how far America has come, and how far we have yet to go.
Dismantle the empire in ‘09! Downfall to all who would rule us, and death to all the structures they build to do so!
When people rely on themselves and their friends for protection, there will be less use for the protection racket known as the state. The dissemination of weapons and combat information is one way to peaceably bring about this change.
Surplus Rifle and Pistol Information
Firearms Disassembly Videos
Sheldon Richman takes economic cargo-cultism to task in a recent article:
Saving and paying off debt are generally seen as wise for individuals, so it makes no sense that they are bad for society as a whole. Yet that is what we our “leaders” expect us to believe.
Ask yourself: can you consume your way to prosperity? Of course not. So how can a society do so? Greater consumption is the effect not the cause of economic growth, yet this is so contrary to conventional wisdom that you can read newspapers and watch news programs for months without seeing this truth expressed.
Vader has been one of my favorite death metal bands since I saw them assault Philadelphia in 2003.
Choices
You are someone
You would not like to be
Wandering the way to illumination
Sinking in bizzare rituals
Whole life studying lines and signs
You take pains to chase
Shadows of yourself…
Shadows of yourself
Things you are thinking are right
Just must have imagined as that
Myths of all systems
And never written book
Or book written thousands of times
No matter where and how
Your move is your start…
Like freely river of perceptions
Consciousness, private library
Of everything anti and pro
Life, choice, death
Despite of circumstances
There is always your way
