Gary Gibson, Minneapolis, Minnesota…

SOPA is dead. Long live SOPA.

Or at least SOPA’s intentions. All the horrors that SOPA was supposed to bring? They’re already here. Have been for a while. And it looks as if the federal government means to use those horrors to bring progress to hell.

The result? Entire companies may remove their Web presence from the U.S. entirely. While Chinese government may be open about its reasons for Internet censorship, the U.S. government still cloaks it as the vital enforcement of the dangerous fiction of intellectual property.

Jeffrey Tucker takes a look at this — along with the growing war against file sharing — in today’s feature article.

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Whiskey & Gunpowder
by Jeffrey Tucker
January 27, 2012
Auburn, Alabama, U.S.A.

The Death of File Sharing

Last week’s violent government attack on the hugely popular site Megaupload — the U.S. government arresting Belgian citizens in New Zealand, of all places, and stealing at gunpoint servers bank accounts and property — has sent shock waves through the entire digital world.

The first shock was the realization that the gigantic protest against legislative moves (SOPA and PIPA) that would smash the Internet turned out to be superfluous. The thing everyone wanted to prevent is already here. SOPA turns out not to be the unwelcome snake in the garden of free information. The snakes have already taken over the garden and are hanging from every tree.

The second shock took a few days to sink in. It could mean that the whole way in which the digital age has functioned is in danger, or even doomed. This is not a forecast. This doom is all around us right now.

The problem is this: Megaupload was accused of violating copyright through its file-sharing technology. This permits users to upload their own content and permit other users into their space. If anything that one person uploads is of uncertain copyright status — it could be anything, really — sharing it would then seem to amount to a crime.

For some years, the feds have unnecessarily harassed people for nonviolently streaming or sharing content. This has had something of a chilling effect and increased the use of IP-scrambling proxies to keep online habits from being traced. College kids know this all too well. Masking IPs is just the way they live and work.

The attack on Megaupload takes all of this to a different level. This was not some wholly surreptitious, sketchy institution that was trying to get around the law. It was already becoming a legitimate service for launching careers in music and art generally. It seemed to be doing exactly what we expect in the digital age. It was reinventing an old model for new times through innovation in production, delivery and profit sharing.

As I wrote before, this was most likely why the old-line industry came after them. It was not the illegal activities, but their legal ones that made them a target. The moguls do not want change. They crushed the competition.

At the same time, the actual legal rationale that the feds used to blast these people away was their supposed violation of intellectual property through file sharing.

Which raises the question: Is every site that makes file sharing possible in danger? Consider Dropbox, the hugely popular service that allows you to put your files in the cloud and create special folders that share them with others. This allows people to work on shared folders in a collaborative way, and prevents the inevitable problem of version control that comes with emailing back and forth.

How exactly is Dropbox different from Megaupload? It is not that different. It is staid and scholarly, rather than flashy and jazzy. It’s interface is plain and neat, rather than colorful and upbeat. Otherwise, it is hard to qualitatively distinguish one from another.

Dropbox is hardly alone. As TechCrunch puts it:

“Several digital locker services operate like Megaupload. RapidShare and MediaFire are two of the larger services. But these sites have undergone a face-lift recently and at least appear to be much less nefarious than they once were. Other services like Dropbox, iCloud, and Amazon S3 are open to hosting any file type a user uploads. They also make sharing easy, but in a way, that’s a lot more private than Megaupload. Still yet, there are sites like Zoho in which users can easily share content, content that could be copyrightable. But the prime goal of all these sites is open file sharing — just like Megaupload.”

It is hard to see how any file-sharing site can pass muster under the new regime. There are plenty more like SugarSync and FileSonic. As Ghacks points out, users of the latter were greeted with the following ominous message just this week:

Question: What value is a file-sharing site if it doesn’t permit the sharing of files? It becomes a thumb drive in the cloud. Maybe that is a bit of convenience, but it is not highly marketable or useful.

Another tactic that file-sharing sites are using after the Mega attack is to outright ban U.S. users in hopes that this will somehow immunize them from the terror attacks being used by the U.S. government. Thus were American users greeted with the following:

Americans look at China with shock that the government doesn’t allow access to a huge amount of the World Wide Web. But look: It is happening right now in the United States, but in an indirect way. This has been called a “virtual Iron Curtain” that is being thrown up around U.S. borders. It has already happened to banking. We are seeing the first signs of this on Internet access.

Another site called uploadbox.com has decided that it will no longer deal with the risk of these kinds of terror tactics and plans to shut down completely at month’s end.

What else? Google Docs allows file sharing and has solved so many problems as a result. This has been a great advantage of this innovation. I use it every day. It is essential. But it is in danger. What about Facebook? I could post a copyrighted image there right now and share it with thousands. Facebook thereby becomes an accessory to the same crimes that Mega is alleged to have abetted.

For that matter, what about email? When I send a file, it doesn’t remove it from my machine. A copy is made and made and made again. Who and what is to say whether what is sent or received is proprietary and made it through all the legal hoops? In the last several weeks, I’ve actually received emails expressing fear of sharing links to public sites!

All these changes go beyond the traditional “chilling effect” of random attacks on free speech and free association. This is a sudden and outright freeze, one that is devastating for the whole way in which the Internet has come to exist. What is called “file sharing” is the unique service that the Internet provides. Without that, the Internet becomes an efficient post office or another means of delivering television-style content.

The reason that the Internet has been the driving forced behind economic growth, political change, social progress and the general uplift of humanity is its capacity for taking scarce goods and converting them into nonscarce goods of infinite duplicability and availability. Information, media, data and images that were once captive of the physical world — paper and ink, film and bankers boxes — have been freed into another realm so that they can serve and enlighten the whole of humanity.

This has happened because of the miracle of duplicating digital goods that are driving economies in the digital age. To ban duplication and file sharing today is no different from banning flight in the 1920s, banning steel in the 1880s, banning the telegraph in the 1830s, banning the printer in the 1430s and banning the wheel and sail at the beginning of mankind’s advance out of the cave.

It will set humanity back. It violates liberty. It attacks everything that constitutes and defines the times in which we live. It replaces a world of sharing and thriving with a world of violence and technological regression. The Internet will continue to exist, but it will take a different form. Large sectors will have to thrive behind very secure pay walls and only within private digital communities.

And who is doing this? The U.S. government. Government in league with old-line corporate elites.

And what is the official reason? To enforce “intellectual property.” It has really come down to this: Either the whole basis of copyright, trademark and patent are scrapped or we could see the death of the digital age as we know it. So long as IP is enforced, the U.S. world empire can continue to roam the world seeking whom it may devour.

Regards,

Jeffrey Tucker,
Executive editor, Laissez-Faire Books

In the interest of reinforcing the point, we are copying a recent email written and shared by fellow Agora Financial managing editor Joel Bowman. And also because we couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

After you read what Mr. Bowman has to say, we’re sure you’ll agree he won’t mind that we copied and pasted his email here. (He probably wouldn’t have even cared if we hadn’t given him credit.)

1. Copying is not stealing. That intelligent people believe it is reveals a brilliant public relations victory for the state (which benefits directly by disallowing people to share ideas openly and without let or hindrance).

Let’s start with some basic definitions:

Stealing involves the forced removal of a tangible, finite object from the rightful owner’s possession. Those who do not advocate the initiation of force logically reject this activity.

Copying involves the reproduction of an entity — tangible or intangible — without forcibly removing any actual, realized, tangible property from any other person. No force.

(We can see here that it is impossible to steal someone’s “potential future profits” by simply offering a customer a copied, alternative choice on a particular, intangible idea or the manifestation of said idea in tangible form. For one thing, there is no force involved. Customers buy what they want…and from whom they want. They buy the original, or they buy the copy. It’s their choice. Secondly, nobody has been forcibly denied either a tangible good or the opportunity to compete in the marketplace for a consumer’s vote. That’s competition…and a market without it would be very drab indeed. History is regrettably rich with examples in which market competition has been arbitrarily diminished at the hand of the state. We should not wish to provide posterity with yet another.)

2. It is important to remember that contract binds only those party to the contract. (Copyright and patent, on the other hand, seek to bind the whole of society…even those not party to the contract. In this way, they are concurrent with the very definition of force. Rousseau’s “social contract” is easily debunked using this same logical process.)

3. Far from being anathema to innovation, copying provides the very basis for all innovation. Every enhancement to human life, every invention, has relied on first copying some previous method/idea/insight/process/knowledge…and then building on and improving it. Innovation, as they say, occurs at the margin.

We can only have this discussion, for example, because people copied the written language. In this way, copying is crucial to progress. When copying stops, so does progress.

Imagine if the patent office existed when, say, the wheel was invented. Imagine how progress would have stalled as people busily raced around litigating against others who wanted to copy the design of the wheel to integrate into their own machines and inventions. Imagine another “inventor” files a patent for the process used to bake bread…to wrap wax around a wick…to boil water…

Because intangibles — like ideas, methods, processes, etc. — are infinitely reproducible, it remains absurd to think that they can or should be policed. Imagine someone says to you…

“I just had an idea…copy it and I’ll sue.”

Or moreover…

“Even though your using the idea in no way deprives me from using it, I claim the right to employ the state (which only “exists” because it has violated actual property rights) to come to your house and arrest you.”

4. It remains no coincidence in my mind that the realm in which the state enjoys the least ability to enforce IP also happens to be the most-innovative space on earth. Nowhere does copying happen with greater frequency than it does on the Internet. And yet more startup businesses take to the online world today (voluntarily) than ever before…and this number grows exponentially by the day. The Internet — this bastion of copying hedonism in which one might think innovation would whither and die — is where the vast majority of innovation is happening.

Is this a coincidence? Or is it exactly what we would expect given that copying (as opposed to stealing) nurtures innovation as its crucial and key ingredient?

5. Of course, all the ideas expressed above I have learned from reading other people’s works. I doubt there is a single original thought in there. Either knowingly or not, I copied everything.

It should further be noted that I asked no person’s permission to share the ideas with you…I hope you don’t mind. It goes without saying that you are free to copy them if you so wish.

6. I challenge anyone to respond without copying at least one process or idea they themselves did not personally invent. (That rules out language, by the way.)

It occurs to us that people think that methods do indeed become “tangible property” at some level of complexity and invested effort.

A design for a working missile or spaceship or a drug that reverses balding…complex ideas like this — even though they are, in fact, infinitely reproducible — must be protected by the force of the state! They came about through great effort, and the profits must go to the developer of the idea…even if it requires a state-enforced monopoly on the idea’s use!

But is this true? We’re not denying that there isn’t a pretty penny to be made from such a monopoly. We just argue that the profit itself isn’t natural.

There’s plenty to be made by coming up with something first, marketing it first and establishing a brand with a loyal following that sticks with you despite cheaper imitators.

There’s a truckload more to be made by getting the state to prevent anyone from infringing on your design or methods for some arbitrary period of time and thereby legally halting copying and competitive pricing.

We feel those greater gains made possible by state-backed monopoly are tainted. They stink of the coercion and market-tampering, backdoor price fixing we deplore.

Before you dash off your responses, consider that the Internet — driven as it is by free human interaction (for now) — is already creating new markets for knowledge…adapting to what the technology makes possible.

Creative Commons…Open Source…a growing number of today’s artists and innovators realize that they have more to gain from freely swapping ideas, borrowing, improving…instead of locking those new ideas up behind the great state-approved fiction that ideas can be owned. Or scarce.

Regards,

Gary Gibson
Managing editor, Whiskey & Gunpowder