autonomous alternatives to the statist quo
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New York Times
INTERNATIONAL ANARCHIST MOVEMENT-GREECE:MORE NEWS FROM GREECE:Neither escalating nor de-escalating the anti-government protests in Greece continue to simmer against a backdrop of fiscal crisis and the need of the ruling ’socialist’ party PASAC to reneg…
Here’s a snippet from a recent New York Times profile on Henry Louis Gates, the renowned Harvard professor of African-American studies, and Sergeant James Crowley, the stupid, belligerent, and violent Cambridge cop who stupidly arrested Gates on his own front porch, allegedly for committing disorderly conduct
in the foyer and front porch of his own home.
From 2 Cambridge Worlds Collide in Unlikely Meeting, in the New York Times, 26 July 2009:
Friends say he has a large circle of friends in Natick and in Cambridge, where he grew up. Sergeant Crowley plays on a men’s softball team and coaches his daughters’ softball and basketball teams.
I have always thought of him as the most noncop person that I know,said Andy Meyer, a friend who plays softball with him on a team named the Black Mariahs. Mr. Meyer’s wife, Betsy Rigby, said:When he has the uniform on, Jim has an expectation of deference. But when he’s not in uniform, he’s just a regular guy.
Yes. Exactly. And therein lies the problem.
Sergeant James Crowley believes that putting on a uniform and a badge puts him above just-folks like you and me and Henry Louis Gates, and so that it entitles him to special treatment — to deference,
that is, willing subordination — that he would never think of demanding from his friends, his neighbors, or any other of his equals when he’s living life out of uniform, like any other just-a-regular-guy.
And that’s why, when he is in uniform, he’s willing to bully, browbeat, and physically coerce you into handcuffs and jail, just to violently punish you if you should dare to tell him off in your own foyer — because he stupidly believes that his work clothes entitle him to command, and to expect obedience from, people he doesn’t even know. That’s stupid. But typical: stupidity, violence and petty tyranny are in fact his line of work as he has been led to understand it. And when he showed up at Ware St., he was indeed just doing his job.
(Via Jacob Sullum @ reason 2009-07-29.)
So this week we learned that Vice President Dick Cheney created a CIA hit squad taking orders directly from his office — a little factoid which he happened to keep secret throughout the remainder of the Bush Administration. From Reuters:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The CIA withheld information from the U.S. Congress about a secret counterterrorism program on orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, a senator said on Sunday as Democrats called for an investigation. … The still-secret program, which The New York Times said never became operational, began after the September 11 attacks on the United States in 2001.
The Wall Street Journal said the secret initiative terminated by Panetta was an effort to carry out a 2001 authorization by then Republican President George W. Bush to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives.
—Reuters (2009-07-12): Cheney hid CIA program from Congress: senator
Let’s get some reactions from arch-liberal power-brokers Patrick Leahy and Diane Feinstein:
Feinstein and Democrat Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, insisted no one should go outside the law.
Asked about Cheney’s alleged involvement, Leahy told the CBS program
Face the Nation:I’d like to know if it’s true or not. I mean, nobody in this country is above the law … You can’t have somebody say, well, if you’re vice president, you don’t have to obey the law.Feinstein said Congress
should have been told.
This is a big problem, because the law is very clear. And I understand the need of the day, which was when America was in shockafter September 11, she said on Fox.But … I think you weaken your case when you go outside of the law.—Reuters (2009-07-12): Cheney hid CIA program from Congress: senator
Oh, well. It was wrong because it wasn’t The Law.
So, just so we’re clear, if Cheney and Bush had gotten Congress to change the federal laws so that it would be perfectly legal for the Vice President of the United States to create unaccountable secret international death squads that take orders from, and report only to the highest levels of, Executive power, would that have somehow made it alright?
Really?
… but the streets belong to the people! Jesse Walker, Hit & Run (2009-06-10): The People’s Stop Sign. In which people in an Ottawa neighborhood take nonviolent direct action to slow down the traffic flying down their neighborhood streets — by putting up their own stop signs at a key intersection. The city government, of course, is now busy with a Criminal Investigation of the public’s heinous contribution to public safety.
Abolitionism is the radical notion that other people are not your property. Darian Worden (2009-06-09): The New Abolitionists The point is that the principles of abolitionism, which held that regardless of popular justifications no human is worthy to be master and no human can be owned by another, when carried to their logical conclusion require this: that no human is worthy of authority over another, and that no person is owed allegiance simply because of political status. When reason disassembles the popular justifications of statism, as advances in political philosophy since the 1850’s have assisted in doing, the consistent abolitionist cannot oppose the voluntaryist principles of the Keene radicals.
Mr. Obama, Speak For Yourself. Thomas L. Knapp, Center for a Stateless Society (2009-09-09): Speaking of the State
A campaign of isolated incidents. Ellen Goodman, Houston Chronicle (2009-06-08): Sorry, but the doctor’s killer did not act alone
Let’s screw all the little guys. Just to be fair. (Or, pay me to advertise my product on your station.) Jesse Walker, Reason (2009-06-09): The Man Can’t Tax Our Music: The music industry wants to impose an onerous new fee on broadcasters.
Some dare call it torture.
Just not the cops. Or the judges. Wendy McElroy, WendyMcElroy.com (2009-06-08): N.Y. Judge Rules that Police Can Taser Torture
in order to coerce compliance with any arbitrary court order. I think that Wendy is right to call pain compliance
for what it is — torture (as I have called it here before) — and that it is important to insist on this point as much as possible whenever the topic comes up.
On criminalizing compassion. Macon D., stuff white people do (2009-06-05), on the conviction of Walt Staton for knowingly littering
water jugs in a wildlife refuge, in order to keep undocumented immigrants from dying in the desert.
Freed markets vs. deforesters. Keith Goetzman, Utne Reader Environment (2009-06-04): Do You Know Where Your Shoes Have Been?, on the leather industry and the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Utne does a good job of pointing out (by quoting Grist’s Tom Philpott) that the problem is deeply rooted in multi-statist neoliberalism: because of the way in which the Brazilian government and the World Bank act together to subsidize the cattle barons and ‘roid up Brazilian cattle ranching, the report is really about the perils of using state policy to prop up global, corporate-dominated trade.
Well, Thank God. (Cont’d.) Thanks to the Lord Justice, we now know that Pringles are, in fact, officially potato chips, not mere savory snacks
, in spite of the fact that only about 40% of a Pringles crisp is actually potato flour. Language Log takes this case to demonstrate the quasi-Wittgensteinian point that, fundamentalist legal philosophy to one side, there’s actually no such thing as a self-applying law. (Quoting Adam Cohen’s New York Times Op-Ed, Conservatives like to insist that their judges are strict constructionists, giving the Constitution and statutes their precise meaning and no more [linguists groan here], while judges like [Sonia] Sotermayor are activists. But there is no magic way to interpret terms like
) I think the main moral of the story has to do with the absurdity of a political system in which whether or not you can keep $160,000,000 of your own damn money rides on whether or not you can prove to a judge that your free speech
or due process
— or potato chip.savory snack
hasn’t got the requisite potatoness
to count as a potato crisp
for the purposes of law and justice.
Small riots will get small attention, no riots get no attention, make a big riot, and it will be handled immediately.
Loretta Chao, Wall Street Journal (2009-05-30): In China, a New Breed of Dissidents. The story makes it seem as though the most remarkable thing about the emerging dissident movement is that they are safe
enough for the State to tolerate
them, rather than launching all out assaults as they did against the Tienanmen dissidents in 1989. Actually, I think that that misses the point entirely; and that the most interesting thing is that they have adopted such flexible and adaptive networking, both tactically and strategically, and that they now so often rise up from the very social classes that the Chinese Communist Party claims to speak for (not just easily-demonized students and intelligentsia, but ordinary farmers, factory workers, and retirees) — that the regime isn’t tolerating
them; it just no longer knows what to do with them.
Counter-Cooking and Mutual Meals. Julia Levitt, Worldchanging: Bright Green (2009-06-03): Community Kitchens (Via Kevin Carson’s Shared Items.) If I may recommend, if you’re going to work on any kind of community cooking like this, particularly if you’re interested in it partly for reasons of resiliency
and building community alternatives, you should do what you can to make sure that it is strongly connected with the local grey-market solidarity economy, through close cooperation with your local Food Not Bombs (as both a source and a destination for food) and other local alternatives to the state-subsidized corporate-consumer model for food distribution.
Looking Forward. Shawn Wilbur, In the Libertarian Labyrinth (009-06-06): Clement M. Hammond on Police Insurance
. An excerpt on policing in a freed society, from individualist anarchist Clement M. Hammond’s futurist utopian novel, Then and Now which originally appeared in serialized form in Tucker’s Liberty in 1884 and 1885. (Thus predating Bellamy’s dreary Nationalist potboiler by 4 years.) Hammond’s novel is now available in print through Shawn’s Corvus Distribution. The good news is that, while Bellamy’s date of 2000 has already mercifully passed us by without any such society emerging, we still have almost 80 years to get it together in time for Hammond’s future.
Here at Reason we never pass up a chance to have some fun at the expense of Pete Seeger.
Jesse Walker, Hit & Run (2009-06-09): They Wanna Hear Some American Music. On brilliant fakery, the invention of Country and Western music, the cult of authenticity, and the manufacture of Americana.
For the long, full treatment see Barry Mazor, No Depression (2009-02-23): Americana, by any other name…
Anarchy on the Big Screen. Colin Firth and Kevin Spacey have signed on for a big-screen film adaptation of Homage to Catalonia. The film is supposed to enter production during the first half of 2010.
Freezers are awesome. J.D., Get Rich Slowly (2009-06-06): 3 Easy and Delicious Ways to Preserve Your Berry Harvest. My plan is to make some freezer jam.
Toward usable e-mail. Leah Chaney, OtherInbox (2009-06-05): Organizer By OtherInbox now available with Yahoo! Mail apps!. Even where technological civilization is not yet awesome enough, it soon will be.
IMPACT! Strategies for Social Change Forum, Thursday, June 18, Sonoma County, California. Infoshop News (2009-06-08): Strategies for Social Change
Forum on June 18th in Sonoma County IMPACT!, an independent and radical youth organization in Petaluma is turning one year old this month. Part 1 of the celebration is a forum, entitled
Strategies for Social Change,
where organizers from labor, immigrants’ rights, and anti-police brutality groups will be discussing their projects and strategies for achieving radical social change locally. This event will be bilingual and free. … As one part of the celebration of IMPACT!’s one-year anniversary, we are excited to announce a forum on Thursday, June 18th at 7pm at the Peace and Justice Center in Santa Rosa (467 Sebastopol Ave) … After hearing from all the different organizations, we hope to have an open dialogue about how we can build real people power in our communities and what methods, strategies, tactics, we can implement to achieve long-lasting and radical social change.
Tasered While Black
Internet Radio Show. Tasered While Black @ Blog Talk Radio. (Via Electrocuted While Black 2009-06-09.)
Anarchist Movement 09, East London, England. Anarchist Movement Conference 09 was held last Saturday at Queen Mary, University of London. About 300 attended. Some reportbacks from Anonymous @ Infoshop News (2009-06-09), Nestor Makhno
@ indymedia london (2009-06-07), Paul Stott (2009-06-08), and No Pretence (2009-06-07). One of the major events at the conference was anarcha-feminist group No Pretence’s appearance at the closing plenary to deliver a statement and project a video presentation calling out sexism in the U.K. movement:
SPEAK! Listening Party. Sunday, June 14th, 2-5pm. Long Beach, California. Julie, feministe (2009-06-05): SPEAK! Listening Party in Long Beach, CA! Remember that awesome CD that’s out right now? The spoken word collection that features the work of BFP, Black Amazon, Little Light, and so many others? The one that combines personal history and movement making in truly inspiring ways? If you live in or around Long Beach, CA and haven’t heard it yet, now’s your chance!
(Via bfp, flip flopping joy 2009-06-05.)
New subscriptions. Served & Protected, @InjusticeNews, No Pretence
In logic, a non sequitur is the fallacy of asserting a conclusion which simply does not follow from the given premises. The world being what it is, I noted a while back that that isn’t a strong enough criticism for some popular arguments; we need a new category, the contrarium sequitur (or contra-sequitur for short), which is the fallacy of asserting a conclusion which is exactly the opposite of the conclusion that you should draw from the given premises.
As an example, take Mark C. Taylor’s April Op-Ed from the New York Times, on restructuring the American University. Taylor argues that American Universities have become timid, rigid, insular, and sclerotic. He believes that curricula and institutions must be fundamentally restructured in order to make higher learning more agile, adaptive and imaginative.
And he reckons that if you want to make an institution more agile, adaptive, and imaginative, then the best thing to do is to abolish existing organs of self-management and bring American Universities under the control of a politically-appointed regulatory bureaucracy since colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated.
Oh, yeah. Of course. Because when I think of restructuring for agility,
innovation,
and imagination
the first thing I think of is quick! let’s get a micromanaging politically-appointed regulatory bureaucracy set up to create a one-size-fits-all solution!
The world is awesome.
People are awesome. You don’t need plans, or politics, or power. Put them up against people, and people will win every time. People came up with that video. Also, other people came up with this.
Technological civilization is awesome. (In case you’re wondering, it’s awesome because it’s made of people.)
Books are awesome. Verlyn Klinkenborg, New York Times (2009-05-29): Some Thoughts on the Pleasures of Being a Re-Reader
To-day is awesome. It’s an anniversary. My love and I were married three years ago today. If the normal online rounds are held up for a while, well, that’s why.
In memory of George Tiller. feministe (2009-05-31): In honor of Dr. Tiller (if you would like to donate in memory and in honor of Dr. Tiller’s work). Among others, the National Network of Abortion Funds has established a George Tiller Memorial Abortion Fund.
IQSN, L.A. I.M.C. (2009-05-27): Solidarity with Queer Bulgaria on 27 June 2009. A day of international actions in solidarity with the LGBTQ Pride march in Sofia, Bulgaria. Last year’s march was attacked by neo-Nazi groups who decided to Keep Our Children Safe with a campaign of roving basher gangs and by slinging molotov cocktails and small explosives at the marchers. International Queer Solidarity Network calls for a European mobilization, with support from the United States, that will stand in solidarity with Queer Bulgaria
for this year’s march.
Underground abortion networks in Chile. Feminist Daily News Wire (2009-05-29): Abortion Hotline Launched in Chile. The Chilean government inflicted a categorical abortion ban in 1989. A coalition of pro-choice feminist groups has now launched a phone hotline which gives women information about how to use Misopristol (usually used in the U.S. together with Mifepristone; in Chile it’s legally available to treat ulcers) to give themselves safe DIY medical abortions in defiance of the law.
Shoot an unarmed old man, get a four-month paid vacation. Vickie Welborn, Shreveport Times (2009-05-24): NAACP questions Homer officers’ leave status
The question is who is to be the master — that’s all. The Status of Forces Agreement requires all U.S. troops to be withdrawn from Iraqi cities by the end of June. A Senior U.S. Commander [considers] the security agreement a living document,
so he intends to comply with the deadlines by withdrawing the political boundaries of Baghdad from his occupation patrol forces
On knowledge problems and management make-work. quasibill, The Bell Tower (2009-05-28): Scene 3
On free-market mutualism and open source solutions to the social question. Jesse Walker, Hit & Run (2009-05-27): Mutual Aid: A Factor in Cyberspace. (As for whether the word socialism
is the best tag for the kind of mutualist projects under discussion, I reckon that it depends on your intended audience. I use it happily, but then, my intent in doing so is deliberately provocative, as is my use of freed market
language around anti-authoritarian Leftists: given the right audience, you can pull some philosophical aikido by using a term’s very unpopularity in order to provoke a conversation about some fundamental premises.)
The State is male in the political sense. (Cont’d.) Alderson Warm-Fork, Directionless Bones (2009-05-26): The State is Incapable of Submissiveness. (This particular article deals mainly with the external relations among many states; for discussion of the male State in the context of the internal relations between the government and the country that it occupies, cf. GT 2006-05-11: Quidditative essence.)
The George Tiller I Knew. loree920, Daily Kos (2009-05-31): The George Tiller I Knew
A Loatian American teen protested No Child Left Behind and Won. Mandy Van Deven, ColorLines: She Said No To The Test. In which a second-generation Laotian-American who speaks, reads, and writes fluent English and graduated 7th in her class was declared illiterate
by school officials for refusing to retake a basic English-proficiency test that she’d already aced — and how she and her fellow students protested and won.
Yes, Virginia, government roads really are government subsidized, and no, they don’t approximate freed-market outcomes. (Cont’d.) Chris Bradford, Austin Contrarian (2006-05-16): Do roads pay for themseles? (Cf. GT 2008-12-01: Yes, Virginia, government roads really are government subsidized, and no, they don’t approximate freed-market outcomes.
On public space and the microphysics of male power. Norma, Happy bodies. (2009-05-25): Fighting Unwanted Attention
On neuro-jargon as modern mumbo-jumbo. Crispin Sartwell, eye of the storm (2009-05-31) […] the problem is that these approaches work backwards from social categories to neurology and enshrine momentary social formations, which are essentially created by power, as inescapable bio-destinies. the entire scientificness of the thing is usually presented in a few phrases - ‘medial prefrontal cortex,’ say - which function essentially as authorities: they’re supposed to show you that you’re too ignorant to assess what’s being said, to put the actual ethical/political/economic conclusions beyond the realm of disagreement, to flummox you into nodding vaguely along. if you don’t, you must be a dolt. they function like phrases from the koran or something. they actually do no work except to assert a kind of prestige. […]
Against psychiatric coercion and psychiatric contempt. anarchafemme (2009-05-11): I Am Crazy, Yet I Am Human
On standing up for the marginalized and the enemies of the State. Wendy McElroy, WendyMcElroy.com (2009-05-31): The strategic wisdom of defending prostitutes
The Conservative (Hive) Mind. Will Wilkinson’s cite class=”article”>The rise of collectivist conservativs is right-on in almost every respect, particularly in emphasizing how belligerent nationalism (I’d add sadistic law-n-orderism and anti-immigrationism) poison any attempt by the pseudopopulist Right to come out with a consistently individualistic position. Towards the end, Will asks Conservatism must stand for something. But here’s the big question: Can a politics of individual freedom be revived? Can it win elections?
As you may know, I’m an optimist about the first question, a pessimist about the second, and mainly concerned that people realize that the two are importantly distinct. If you want to know why the substance of Beck’s politics is so much like the substance of Brooks’s politics, underneath the pseudoindividualist rhetoric, well, part of the answer is the structural limitations that you necessarily accept when you start out hitching the success of your political philosophy to victory in government elections.
Jourdon Anderson authenticity update. Laster Hunt, E pur si muove!
(2009-05-14): Jourdon Anderson’s Letter to His Former Master. (Cf. GT 2009-05-06: Wednesday Lazy Linking for my reprinting of the original letter.)
We apologize for the fault in the historicity debate. Those responsible have been sacked. Roderick Long, Austro-Athenian Empire (2009-05-31): Dragonquest; or, A Voyage to Arcturus
ALLiance Issue #2 (Beltaine 2009) is now available. Thanks to awesome editor Chris Lempa. This issue features articles by Chris, Darian Worden, Fred Foldvary, Kevin Carson, Michael Kleen, Sharon Presley and Lynn Kinsky.
Portland Anarchist Bookfair, June 6-7 at Liberty Hall, 311 N. Ivy in Portland, Oregon. The event is free to attend; childcare will be provided. Also, keep an eye out for Northwest ALLy Shawn Wilbur, who will be there to promote his new radical publishing project, Corvus Distribution.
The Cop Watch LA Radio program is looking for volunteers interested in recording, producing, interviewing and researching material for the Cop Watch LA radio program which airs every evening on the Raise the Fist Radio Network.
An IRC network for liberty builders: agora.anarplex.net:14716. The time for waiting for others to do things is over. … Learn, create, cooperate, advance.
(Via Wendy McElroy.)
And no - I don’t mean that someone dripped water into the eyes of the editorial staff until they squealed. I mean they referred to torture - committed by the Chinese - and they did it without using quotes, their standard practice when referring to American torture. The reference was in an obituary for Colonel [...]
From Nina Bernstein and Margot Williams, The New York Times (2009-04-02): Immigrant Detainee Dies, and a Life Is Buried, Too:
The hand-scrawled letter from a New Jersey jail was urgent. An immigration detainee had died that day, Sept. 9, 2005, a fellow inmate wrote in broken English, describing chest pains and pleas for medical [...]
Though the systematic detention and deportation of people born outside this island without the correct documentation is a somewhat recent development, the use of migration control as a political implement by the British state has a long history.
In 1921 Emma Goldman the most famous female political radical of her generation moved to Britain, where she was virtually alone [...]
Several months ago, Bill Patry created quite a stir when he shuttered his blog, where he’d spent four years promoting copyright law reform. One of his two chief reasons for the shut-down was despair at the state of copyright law:
2. The Current State of Copyright Law is too depressing
This leads me to my final reason for closing the blog which is independent of the first reason: my fear that the blog was becoming too negative in tone. I regard myself as a centrist. I believe very much that in proper doses copyright is essential for certain classes of works, especially commercial movies, commercial sound recordings, and commercial books, the core copyright industries. I accept that the level of proper doses will vary from person to person and that my recommended dose may be lower (or higher) than others. But in my view, and that of my cherished brother Sir Hugh Laddie, we are well past the healthy dose stage and into the serious illness stage. Much like the U.S. economy, things are getting worse, not better. Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like Humpty-Dumpty, the copyright law we used to know can never be put back together again: multilateral and trade agreements have ensured that, and quite deliberately.
It is profoundly depressing, after 26 years full-time in a field I love, to be a constant voice of dissent. I have tried various ways to leaven this state of affairs with positive postings, much like television news shows that experiment with
happy features.I have blogged about great articles others have written, or highlighted scholars who have not gotten the attention they deserve; I tried to find cases, even inconsequential ones, that I can fawn over. But after awhile, this wore thin, because the most important stories are too often ones that involve initiatives that are, in my opinion, seriously harmful to the public interest. I cannot continue to be so negative, so often. Being so negative, while deserved on the merits, gives a distorted perspective of my centrist views, and is emotionally a downer.—Bill Patry, The Patry Copyright Blog (2008-08-01): End of the Blog
In one sense, it’s hard not to sympathize. Existing copyright law has been more or less fully transformed into an openly wielded tool of perpetual corporate monopoly. The horizons of allowable debate over copyright policy, within the Beltway, stretch from one end of Disney’s boardroom to the other. Neither political party questions that the primary purpose of copyright law is to protect copyright-holders’ monopoly profit margins, and no serious politician would ever consider spending a dime of political capital on a suggestion that perhaps we should contain — let alone roll back — the hyperaggressive efforts of copyright monopolists to protect their broken business models, by using litigation and legal coercion to cripple every advance in digital technology, and locking down every last decibel of free speech in a corporate copyright containment field. Even if a politician did choose to stand up for the freedom to peacefully exchange, adapt, and redistribute ideas, it could hardly matter; she would be immediately drowned out by a chorus of Endangered Capitalist preservationists on both sides of the aisle. And even if she could be heard, any attempt she might make at a run towards reform would be promptly tripped up by the knotted tangle of multilateral trade agreements (NAFTA, CAFTA, the WTO), which (in the name of free trade
and private property rights—ha, ha) actually lock all the participating governments into a relentless commitment to granting and defending effectively perpetual government-granted monopolies, as part of their treaty obligations. There is no real hope of extricating U.S. government copyright law from this situation in any significant way; the pols and the Intellectual Protectionist lobby crossed that bridge a long time ago, and they made sure to burn it once they got to the other side.
Like I said: it’s hard not to sympathize. In fact, since my own views about copyright restrictions are far more radical than the ones Patry advances — I want them abolished immediately and completely; I think that any dose
of intellectual monopoly is a dose of poison — you think I’d be far more depressed than he is about the state of affairs. But the truth is that I’m not pessimistic at all about copyright. One of the main things that struck me, back when I first read Patry’s farewell post, is how much of a disconnect I felt between his picture of the legal scene, and the actual situation on the ground when it comes to copyright restrictions. In fact, even though everything Patry says about the legal situation is true, there’s never been a better time for being able to freely access the art and literature of the world. As a recent New York Times feature points out:
On the day last July when
The Dark Knightarrived in theaters, Warner Brothers was ready with an ambitious antipiracy campaign that involved months of planning and steps to monitor each physical copy of the film.The campaign failed miserably. By the end of the year, illegal copies of the Batman movie had been downloaded more than seven million times around the world, according to the media measurement firm BigChampagne, turning it into a visible symbol of Hollywood’s helplessness against the growing problem of online video piracy.
The culprits, in this case, are the anonymous pirates who put the film online and enabled millions of Internet users to view it. Because of widely available broadband access and a new wave of streaming sites, it has become surprisingly easy to watch pirated video online — a troubling development for entertainment executives and copyright lawyers.
Hollywood may at last be having its Napster moment — struggling against the video version of the digital looting that capsized the music business. Media companies say that piracy — some prefer to call it
digital theftto emphasize the criminal nature of the act — is an increasingly mainstream pursuit. At the same time, DVD sales, a huge source of revenue for film studios, are sagging. In 2008, DVD shipments dropped to their lowest levels in five years. Executives worry that the economic downturn will persuade more users to watch stolen shows and movies.
Young people, in particular, conclude that if it’s so easy, it can’t be wrong,said Richard Cotton, the general counsel for NBC Universal.People have swapped illegal copies of songs, television shows and movies on the Internet for years. The slow download process, often using a peer-to-peer technology called BitTorrent, required patience and a modicum of sophistication by users. Now, users do not even have to download. Using a search engine, anyone can find free copies of movies, still in theaters, in a matter of minutes. Classic TV, like every
Seinfeldepisode ever produced, is also free for the streaming. Some of these digital copies are derived from bootlegs, while others are replicas of the advance review videos that studios send out before a release.TorrentFreak.com, a Web site based in Germany that tracks which shows are most downloaded, estimates that each episode of
Heroes,a series on NBC, is downloaded five million times, representing a substantial loss for the network. (On TV,Heroesaverages 10 million American viewers each week).A wave of streaming sites, which allow people to start watching video immediately without transferring a full copy of the movie or show to their hard drive, are making it easier than ever to watch free Hollywood content online. Many of these sites are located in countries with lackluster piracy enforcement efforts, like China, and are hard to monitor, so media companies do not have a clear sense of how much content is being stolen.
Of course, the New York Times has mistaken this fr a problem;
but if you recognize that the Intellectual Protectionists’ restrictive business model is the real problem, what we’re now seeing is the solution. Not because the copyright laws have become even a little more liberal, but rather because they have become irrelevant to people’s daily lives. Even though everything Patry says about the legal situation is true, it becomes easier every day for me to find freely-shared copies of just about any song I could care to hear, or to find any number of supposedly copyrighted essays, available for free on the web, or to find any movie I could care to watch, whether it’s an old classic from the film-monopolist’s vaults, or a new release that just hit theaters. And because so much is so freely available, even officially-sanctified copies of copyrighted material are being dropped in price (typically below US $1.00 a pop) and DRM user-control schemes are being dropped one after another. Even though everything Patry says about the legal situation is true, the practical situation on the ground is remarkably, and it’s getting better every day. Of course, things are far from perfect. Of course, lots of copyright-holders are still looking for a fight with people trying to exchange ideas without paying a premium for a license. And of course, the legal situation is such that they can get pretty nasty, if they scout you out come after you on the legal battlefield. But first they have to scout you out. First, they have to get you to fight them on the open ground. And every day, they are finding their efforts more and more impossible. No matter how many big guns they may bring to bear, when they try to fight us, they find that they are fighting a Myrmidon army that renders those weapons increasingly useless.
So why Bill Patry’s despair? If you want to see copyright restrictions liberalized, then it may be true that the words on a page in Washington are worse than they’ve ever been; but the facts on the ground are perhaps better than they’ve been at any other time in the history of the United States. And while there is no hope for revising those words for the better any time soon, the facts are changing for the better every day, all their lawyers and their lobbyists and their intergovernmental treaties notwithstanding — they are improving daily as technical problems are solved, as new sharing networks emerge, and as the problem of even identifying the competition, let alone shutting them down, becomes more and more overwhelming for the copyrightists’ rear-guard legal strategy.
Why despair, or even care about the legal situation at all, if the practical situation makes the law irrelevant? A law that cannot be enforced is as good as a a law that has been repealed, and that is where we’re headed, faster and faster every day, when it comes to the intellectual monopolists and their jealously guarded legal privileges.
Statists constantly accuse anarchists of being naive, or utopian, or infantile, because we so often question the value of playing the game
and working within the system.
But if this is supposed to be a strategy based on the empirical prospects for success — and not just on some kind of felt need to come off as properly Serious and Grown Up to the right sort of people — then let’s look at the facts, and let’s see what kind of activity actually offers proven results, and realistic hope for success in the future.
If you put all your hope for social change in legal reform, and if you put all your faith for legal reform in maneuvering within the political system, then to be sure you will find yourself outmaneuvered at every turn by those who have the deepest pockets and the best media access and the tightest connections. There is no hope for turning this system against them; because, after all, the system was made for them and the system was made by them. Reformist political campaigns inevitably turn out to suck a lot of time and money into the politics—with just about none of the reform coming out on the other end. But if you put your faith for social change in methods that ignore or ridicule their parliamentary rules, and push forward through grassroots direct action — if your hopes for social change don’t depend on reforming tyrannical laws, and can just as easily be fulfilled by widespread success at bypassing those laws and making them irrelevant to your life — then there is every reason to hope that you will see more freedom and less coercion in your own lifetime. There is every reason to expect that you will see more freedom and less coercion tomorrow than you did today, no matter what the law-books may say.
Counter-economics gets the goods.
