Plutocracy Hypocrisy

Our society has been totally coopted by the plutocracy, a small group of the wealthy who control the entirety of society for the rest of us. This control is rarely clearer than in the area of intellectual property and the euphemistically named Digital Rights Management.

In the first place, the plutocracy is able to more or less openly purchase new intellectual property legislation for its own purposes. In America, as well as almost everywhere else in the world, we have a concept known as the public domain. The public domain is the whole body of intellectual works which do not belong to anyone; they are owned by the public. Take, for example, The Canterbury Tales. It was written by Geoffrey Chaucer, but Geoffrey Chaucer doesn’t own it; his descendants don’t own it; the crown doesn’t own it, and the British government doesn’t own it. Nobody owns it; or more properly, everybody owns it. It’s in the public domain; a Thomist would say that it’s become a common good. Anyone who wants to can print a new edition, without permission from anyone; can take the stories and modify them to produce a new work; or do anything else he wants to with them.

Intellectual property laws prevent things from falling into the public domain; that is, they offer private ownership of what would otherwise be a public good. Chaucer had never heard of such a concept and probably would have found it risible if he had, but centuries later it became a common notion that providing the creator of some intellectual good with an exclusive right to reproduce his work for a limited period would probably increase his monetary profit and thereby give him an incentive to produce more artistic work. Prior to this notion, of course, some of history’s greatest literature was somehow produced without any restrictions on copying whatsoever, but that was the original idea: give people an incentive to produce more. As is expressed in the American Constitution of 1787, Congress has the power

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

The whole point, though, was simply to ensure that science would see more advancements and arts would see more creation. In other words, it was to protect the public domain. The exclusive right to copying was for a limited time precisely because those works which that right encouraged would then fall into the public domain and be available for the enrichment and use of everyone thereafter. The first American copyright and patent act, for example, granted such rights for fourteen years, with an optional additional period of fourteen years. After that, the works would become common goods, available for everyone.

Now, of course, that justification and arrangement is nothing but a cruel joke; intellectual property law doesn’t exist for the enrichment of the public domain, but for the enrichment of content owners and publishers. Not for content producers, who typically sell their rights to a rich corporation in order to secure its wide distribution (for which they often have little other choice), and who typically see only a fraction of the income generated by their work. Since the Mickey Mouse Protection Act of 1998, copyright now extends for the entire life of the author plus seventy years; for all practical purposes, works published during our lifetimes will never enter the public domain, and our grandchildren will likely be the first to see it do so, even assuming that Congress does not, under pressure from the plutocracy, extend the term of protection yet again.

Why is it called the Mickey Mouse Protection Act? Why is this an example of the workings of the plutocracy? Because Mickey Mouse was originally created in 1928, in the famous Steamboat Willy cartoon. This meant that its copyright was due to expire in 2003, and that, of course, would not do. So Disney left no stone unturned in ensuring that it purchased appropriate legislation for extending the terms of copyright to allow them to keep Mickey Mouse under their exclusive control.

Not to mention, of course, that the first Winnie-the-Pooh book was published in 1926, and would have entered the public domain in 2001 but for this extension. Who owns the rights to Winnie-the-Pooh? Three guesses; the first two don’t count.

Nor was this the first time that copyrights had been extended in order to ensure that Disney wouldn’t lose its grip on cartoon characters created before la Grosse Misére. Under the Copyright Act of 1909, the term of any copyright—like that on Mickey Mouse—was a maximum of fifty-six years. Add fifty-six to twenty-eight; Disney’s copyright was set to expire in 1984. Disney saw that coming and successfully lobbied for the Copyright Extension Act of 1976, which extended the period of copyright for them to the 2003 date which they later found so unreasonably close. This extension was, and is, often sold as merely conforming to the Berne Convention, but the United States wasn’t even a party to the Berne Convention until 1988. The extension was, like its 1998 successor, the plutocracy protecting its assets, nothing more. Disney is only the most egregious and obvious of the examples; more than one member of our ruling plutocracy was involved in purchasing these bits of legislation.

But the constant extension of copyright, blatant as it is, isn’t even most outrageous of the plutocracy’s abuse of intellectual property laws. “Digital Rights Management” has to take that cake all for its own. Take, as an example, the region codes which are present on DVDs. The large content distributors were concerned that illegal copies of their DVDs would be made cheaply in foreign countries and then sold in America, thus depriving them of their profit. Consequently, they successfully lobbied Congress for the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), which in part made it illegal to attempt to circumvent “region codes” placed on DVD media. These region codes make it impossible to play a DVD on a player that was not specifically produced for a given region. So, for example, if I bring my American DVD to Europe and attempt to play it there, it won’t work, despite my having paid perfectly good money for it; if I attempt to circumvent that restriction, I’m in violation of the DMCA and subject to civil and criminal penalties.

Simply put, the content distributors are taking advantage of the “global market” in order to cheaply produce their DVDs in foreign sweatshops and sell them for extremely high prices in the Western world. We, the customers, might also be tempted to take advantage of the global market and order our DVDs from places where they are produced and sold more cheaply. But we can’t do that, because DVDs produced for sale in these countries won’t play on our American DVD players thanks to the region codes, which we are prevented by law from circumventing. The content distributors set prices in America at whatever they want, and we are forced to pay those prices rather than pay cheaper prices in another region because the region codes which prevent us from using those cheaper products are legally enforced. So, to sum up: the plutocracy is permitted to take advantage of the global market to reduce their costs, while we are legally prevented from doing the same thing.

Note that this has nothing to do with so-called “piracy” of DVDs; we can’t do this even with legitimately purchased DVDs that were produced for a different region. For example, Return to Treasure Island is only sold for European players, not for American players; those interested in getting it in North America are out of luck, because it cannot be legally played here.

Our laws are built to favor the wealthy and the powerful at the expense of the poorer and the weaker; welcome to the plutocracy.

Praise be to Christ the King!