Which brings up another point I wanted to make a while back, but completely forgot about until now.
The current situation that everything nowadays is copyrighted, trademarked and yes, even under patent, is a recent one. Patents date back 500 years, but they started out a beneficial contract between a craftsman coming up with a new design and being forced to disclose it publicly - meaning that coming up with new ideas was encouraged.
Today, these same forces (referred to here on as Intellectual Property, or IP) stifle creation and discourage people coming up with new things and ideas. Even the patent office is being abused to block people's creative impulses, or even worse, wrongly credit people for the designs/ideas that they stole, i.e. rewarding the thief.
I'll admit that I saw this in a TED talk (or possibly a precursor to the TED talks) but when IP was applied to musical records around the turn of the 20th century, people predicted (correctly) that it would signal the death of the music industry. Before that, there was little question about the author of a musical composition (unless the piece went uncredited to begin with) and the faculties existed that could tell when someone was trying to steal/borrow/replicate a piece of music from another source. But with the arrival of easy-to-make audio recordings, combined with the ensuing accessibility of music to the masses, clearly someone thought that something had to be done. Instead of people having to go outside to a concert hall to see a full-fledged band play a certain piece of music, people can now just buy a machine, a copy of a recording of the same music, and enjoy it at home at their leisure...and likewise making copies of that same music that the people footing the bill for the recording wouldn't be seeing. That wouldn't Do. The resulting action caged music into a box that slowly and surely squeezed the life out of it, to the point that it's utter garbage in this day and age*. This was presented in the talk as "a neccesary act of enforcing rights" for the betterment of all.
In contrast, a Supreme Court ruling in the early 20th century removed the ownership claim of landowners to the skies above their land - otherwise various flying machines would have had to pay a fee to every landowner whose land they flew over, which would have not only created an immense bureaucratic nightmare, but also stifled the progress of avionics in general. This was presented as a "necessary act of revoking of rights" for the betterment of all.
The point I'm making, is that the concepts of ownership (and the rights that go with them) can change and adapt depending on circumstances. Hopefully people will realize that having too strict IP laws will be death of creativity, but right now we have the exhausting battle that IP owners hold all the cards, and are constantly asking for more draws from the now-empty deck. Releasing a creation should net you some assurance and protection, but not for the length of two lifetimes! And they all forget the basic fact that once something you created is released, it no longer belongs to you, no matter how many times you plaster your name on it, or try to enforce your IP. Because at the end of the day all of those creations are little more than ideas, and the gargantuan efforts needed to stop an idea are only available to a select few, and they take decades to accomplish. Once unleashed, an idea will take on a life of its own, and quickly grow beyond the scope and vision of its creator. And yet, that's exactly what IP is trying to do - claim ownership of ideas. If an idea released to the public results in immediate accusations of theft by people that claim ownership to other ideas, people will be less inclined to come up with new ideas. Even worse, it creates this huge box around the very concept of ideas, and with every idea that gets IP slapped on it, the box grows fuller as it shrinks.
Which is probably the plan from the start: To control the creative output of Mankind. This is why I not only condone piracy/stealing in general, but view it as a necessary act of dissent. Because the current system is broken as fuck and works against its intended goals. Therefore, we must dissent in the hope that the system comes crashing down.
*In my opinion two things happened in the 20th century that delayed the inevitable death of the music industry: The Jazz scene and the Hip-Hop scene (and to an extent DJ'ing as well). Both scenes rely on the core concept of fusing two or more schools of music together to create something new, something that in most cases was improvised on the spot instead of following carefully written music sheets, and in both cases is better experienced live and in-person instead of perused from a recording. (The fact that both of these scenes were pioneered and cultivated by black people will probably lead to some interesting reactions from dindu-loving KKKodexers, but that's irrelevant to the discussion at hand.)
Gotta buy it off dlsite. Feels bad, man. Luckily it's 50% off.
