People talk about a world where there's no such thing as copyright because they think that's a winnable battle -- there's very large and wealthy corporations that will take their side on it because they'd benefit from it Nobody says that about abolishing title in fee simple
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The idea of a world where there's no such thing as owning a house is far, far more relevant to homelessness and hunger and poverty and so on than a world where there's no such thing as owning a manuscript But that's not the current struggle, right, that gets put off till later
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My take on this is just that "real property" is -- well, it's *real property* That's what actually matters Acting like the primary thing oppressing you is IP is part of the damn game It's how they trick you into thinking cyberspace matters more than meatspace, which is crap
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You'd have to look pretty far to find a handful of people you can say are actually more oppressed by paying "rents" for the books they read or the software they use than actual literal rent to the actual literal landlord for the space their body physically occupies
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(But Arthur, homeowners are relatively common in the US -- Yeah that's another part of this fucking game If you're a middle-class homeowner and you're not rich then your mortgage is an "imputed rent" you're paying to the previous homeowner and the bank)
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Anyway, without getting into the weeds on this -- Most of the forms of oppression in our society today STILL have way more to do with real property than intellectual property
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The fact that FOSS advocates can get right-leaning libertarians onside by saying "You can still start a very profitable business operating on FOSS" *is evidence that FOSS isn't that big a fucking deal* If FOSS were the revolution, they couldn't say that
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Facebook isn't powerful because of Facebook's fucking CODE They don't have some magic secret software sauce that made them successful -- the idea that Mark Zuckerberg woke up one day in his dorm and banged out a few hundred lines of PHP that contained The Secret is absurd
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Facebook is powerful because of Facebook's SERVERS This basic fact people seem to forget (because it's intentionally obscured) that running a website *costs real, physical resources out here in the meat world* A datacenter takes up space and costs massive amounts of electricity
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And in our society paying for that space and for the machines in it means you have the legal right to restrict access to those machines and dictate what happens on them That's all you actually need to hold monopoly power, thanks to the network effect of how websites get popular
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Going through and making all websites have to be GNU-licensed and open up their *code* has nothing to do with this, at all It is easy to imagine the centralized Web 2.0 ecosystem looking exactly as it does now running on FOSS, which is something FOSS evangelists openly tout
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You know what would actually make monopoly power impossible, eliminating *property*, not "intellectual property" If there was no such thing as "owning a server" or "owning a datacenter" If all big computers everywhere were public property
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All websites would be government/community websites and anyone could upload anything or download anything and permissions to those physical machines were controlled by a democratic process THEN you couldn't have a Facebook or a Google or a Twitter wielding monopoly power
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Can you actually imagine that world? Is that ANYWHERE on the horizon? You can imagine Congress someday saying "Copyright isn't a thing anymore" but can you imagine Congress saying to Peter Thiel "Uh, excuse me, you can't OWN a server rack, all server racks belong to the people"
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No, of course not Making that the rule would *actually be* communism It would *actually overturn* most of how we think property works in the US, it would probably be impossible without a massive shift in our constitutional order So nobody talks about it
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We talk about abolition of IP as the best we can do, even though as long as *real* property still exists then we still live in a fundamentally capitalist, monopolist society and IP abolition just shuffles tokens around (in many cases, toward people with a ton of existing power)
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