by Steven J. Owens (unless otherwise attributed)
Today we're going to talk about the idea that you can own knowledge, and about why this is a bad thing. Specifically, for various reasons, we're going to talk about where one of the most common sorts of owning knowledge, copyrights, got its start, and why, and what happened, and what lessons we can learn from all of that.
[Note: I'm not saying that copyright is owning knowledge, at least not as it was originally intended and implemented, but that is what it has come to equate to today, through the abuse of copyright law by the media industry.]
Most modern copyright histories trace copyright from the British Statute of Anne in 1710. They tend to gloss over why and how the Statute of Anne happened, which takes us back to 1662.
Prior to this time, people certainly made occasional attempts to control what was done with intellectual creations, mostly through limiting access to the actual knowledge. But the first real copyright law didn't show up until the movable type press came on the scene, and suddenly printing became big business.
In that era, it was fairly common for the King to grant a monopoly to somebody in exchange for a large sum of money. Bribery, in a nutshell; legally allowed bribery, but still basically bribery. Eventually this got out of hand and the population, through parliament, put an end to this sort of abuse, but in essence, the first copyright law was procured via bribery.
In 1662 the King of Britain issued a decree creating the Licensing Act, what came to be known as "Stationer's Copyright", granting the London printer's guild (specifically "The Company of Stationers of London") a monopoly on works they printed. Note that's a monopoly on the works printed by the guild. It had nothing to do with the rights of the authors. An author couldn't get a copyright for a book, the book had to be printed to get a copyright.
Along with the monopoly came some policing powers. To make a long story short, the guild eventually abused its policing powers to the point where public outcry caused Parliament to pass the Statute of Anne in 1710. Even then, although the statute was initially written to be much more about protecting authors' rights, pressure from the printing industry weakened the final Statute.
So what do we learn from this history?
The first copyright law was created via corrupt means (bribery).
The first copyright law was spurred by technology. Specifically by businessmen trying to get a lock on potential profits resulting from new technology, just like today.
From the very start, from the first copyright law, it was never about protecting the author's rights. There were some attempts to make the Statute of Anne protect author's rights, though the printing industry got much of that removed from the final version of the Statute (and even then, 21 years later when the first Statute of Anne copyrights began to expire, the printers tried their damndest to regain control).
It has always been about commoditizing creative works for the benefit of business.
From the start, copyright law has been abused, and ultimately lead to reform.
And now I'll do a little IP infringing of my own, and steal a quote:
"The more things change, the more they stay the same."
Note: Despite all of the above, I am not some commie pinko scum (although I know some). The founding fathers didn't like copyright - they recognized it for the awkward kludge it was. But they knew we needed something, so they limited the damage it could do by including that "for a limited time" phrase. Creators need to be paid for their work (just like everybody else). Creation needs to encouraged for the good of society. However, the current situation is a mess; it enriches businessmen (who certainly deserve to be paid for their work, but just as certainly aren't entitled to a free ride to easy street) at the expense of the creative commonwealth.
The phrase "intellectual property" invites you to think of knowledge as something that can be owned and controlled like a physical thing, even though it is profoundly different.
It's hard to know where to begin. Almost anywhere you choose, you quickly get bogged down in sorting out the confusing and deceptive terminology. It's a messy situation. Maybe that's deliberate - the confusion certainly doesn't help anybody but the bullshit artists making a mint off abusing IP law. Fortunately, looking at the early history of owning knowledge gives you a lot of clues as to what's going on.
Somebody might argue that "owning knowledge" is also a deceptive phrase, because IP doesn't give you as much control over knowledge as legal ownership of a physical thing usually does. This is precisely the point of writing "owning knowledge" instead of "intellectual property." Both phrases really tend to mean the same thing; this is shown by the rhetoric and arguments used by IP proponents. This is show by the increasingly property-like treatment of knowledge that we're seeing in new IP laws. "Owning knowledge" is just a lot more honest and makes the absurdity easier to see.
Also, note that it's a relatively recent thing to lump several different approaches to owning knowledge together (copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade secrets) and discuss it under one category. They do have some common traits - the most glaring common trait is that they're all about owning various forms of knowledge; art, culture, science. Another very common trait is that most of these laws have been extensively mis-used and abused, in some senses far more other laws are mis-used and abused.
For the most part, we're going to talk about one of the most common - and hence most commonly abused - forms of owning knowledge, copyright.