Copyright Monopoly

Copyright Monopoly: Enforcement of copyright is fundamentally, conceptually incompatible with privacy of correspondence. You can't have the sealed and private letter in existence at the same time as you enforce copyright, once communications have gone digital. This is the reason you see VPN companies and other privacy advocates fight copyright enforcement and copyright law: because society has to choose between privacy and copyright, and basic civil liberties are considered more important than one particular entertainment business model.

Copyright Monopoly: When the copyright monopoly was reinstated in 1710, the justification was that of publishing being many orders of magnitude more expensive than authoring, and so without it, nothing would get published. But the Internet has reversed this assumption completely: publishing is now many orders of magnitude cheaper than writing the piece you want to publish.

Copyright Monopoly: A Hamburg court has ruled that certain links were illegal when they were pointing at photos that were posted in violation of copyright. This ruling follows the worst fears of a previous ruling by the European Court of Justice, and creates many problems for the future.

Copyright Monopoly: There’s consistent disinformation from the copyright industry that even if a national parliament wanted to legalize file-sharing, it is not permitted to do so because of international treaties. This disinformational notion is hogwash, and I’m going to show exactly how it’s possible to legalize the private sharing of music, movies, and other culture while complying with all international treaties.

On February 13, 2014, the European Court of Justice – the Supreme Court of the European Union – appears to have ruled that anything published on the web may be re-published freely by anybody else. The case concerned linking, but the court went beyond linking in its ruling. This case has not really been noticed, nor have its effects been absorbed by the community at large.

In a fuming blog article, David Newhoff claims that non-infringing, legal uses of copyrighted works – that is, of people’s own property – are like “aggravated rape” when made without unneeded consent of the monopoly holder.