Yesterday, I wrote a letter to Attorney General Ashcroft, soliciting signatures from anyone who shares my opinions.
Here's the letter:
August 10, 2002
The Honorable John Ashcroft Attorney General of the United States Department
of Justice 950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20530
Dear Attorney General Ashcroft:
We are writing to urge that the U.S. Department of Justice look
through the transparent pleas of multinational entertainment conglomerates
who beg you to "vigilantly enforce the institution of copyright". Please be
conscious of the fact that copyright was conceived and written into the
Constitution by the Founders for far different reasons than the protection
of businesses, such as these multinational entertainment conglomerates who
have seen fit to twist it into a thinly veiled, business protection shield.
As we're sure you are aware, through massive lobbying efforts and
the "infusion" of several hundred millions of dollars into that process,
this corporate elite has managed the wholesale buying of technologically
challenged members of the congress and the senate, through which it has
implemented their business protection policy. This policy is based on recent
changes to the intellectual property laws such as the DMCA (Digital
Millennium Copyright Act, ca. 199
that they were able to push through at a
time when technological innovation and its long term significance was little
understood. Ostensibly legislated to control the Internet through punishment
of online "theft" of copyrighted works, laws like the DMCA have resulted in
only curtailing development of useful arts and sciences in this country,
pushing the innovation into other countries at the expense of our leadership
in the economies that naturally result.
The bottom line is that, although they speak in defense of our great
nation's culture and economy, the entertainment oligarchy is actually the
single greatest threat to our cultural economies. Strictly speaking,
copyright was never intended to protect businesses from innovation and
creativity, especially when that discovery results in improved channels for
the vibrant distribution of society's cultural heritage.
Copyright was and is intended to "promote the progress of science
and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the
exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries".
Yet, regularly articulating their protectionist stance in
dramatically overwrought terms, leaders of the entertainment industries'
business associations (RIAA and MPAA) pretend that it is they who are the
"authors and inventors" in need of protection when, in fact, they are huge
businesses whose goal is the monetary churning of authors and inventors for
profit of multinational businesses first, the authors and scientists who
actually create the works second.
Especially in this, our nation's darkest time of discovery related
to the corporate greed that has devastated our economy, we are all aware of
how labor, including authors and scientists, are abused and discarded while
the corporate overlords enrich themselves.
We're sure that the Justice Department is well aware of the record
with respect to entertainment businesses, replete as it is with examples of
how these cultural machines focused on corporate profit maintain control
over authors and inventors, engaging in shady accounting and contractual
business practices designed to maximize their exploitation. Truly, the only
protection the multinational entertainment businesses are interested in is
in the protection of their corporate profits for the benefit of their
corporate board members and their executive management. This is what
policing of the Internet is all about. The artists, the authors, the
scientists are actually far down the list of priorities.
The multinational entertainment conglomerates, whose antiquated
production and distribution models have obviously expired their "limited
times" of usefulness are seeking legislative protection from the disruptive
effect of new digital technologies. They persist in fear of new distribution
methods that have put the power of production and distribution into the
hands of the people, instead of coming to terms with the notion that it is
the people whose culture they trade upon that must ultimately be pleased.
They fail to recognize that any successful media business must involve and
integrate the "progress of science and useful arts" (technology) if it has
any hope of surviving in the 2nd Millennium. Instead, they have come running
to lawmakers whose experience in technology's innovation is marginal, in
hopes of creating laws that essentially makes criminals out of consumers who
seek, as is their right, to discover and utilize better means for
communication and exchange of their beloved culture.
Naturally, that exchange takes the forms of music, art, cinema, and
literature. Therefore, it is the businesses who trade in these artifacts
that must come to terms with the modern consumer and not the other way
around.
Over the past few years, we have witnessed a staggering increase in
the communicative and collaborative power of the Internet through innovation
of peer-to-peer systems. According to recent news reports, the six most
popular peer-to-peer software programs have been downloaded by computer
users over 140 million times. Research has also shown that at any one time
there may be as many as 2 million users simultaneously utilizing any one of
these services. The benefits to our society, able to think as a single,
hugely effective super-computer on a never-before-imagined scale, should be
apparent. It is the greatest instrument of Democracy ever devised and, yet,
this great tool is said by the entertainment oligarchy to be an instrument
of piracy.
How narrow is their perspective that only their interests should be
considered in evaluating the meaning of the "useful arts and sciences".
The entertainment oligarchy would have us believe that, in order to
stem a "growing tide of massive piracy on the Internet", the Department of
Justice should utilize its powers to:
? Prosecute operators of peer-to-peer systems who intentionally facilitate
"mass piracy" (ignoring that only the entertainment oligarchy views these
powerful communications tools as piracy because their goal is to limit the
distribution of cultural media in order to maximize the price charged for
its exchange);
? Prosecute individuals who intentionally allow mass copying from their
computer over peer-to-peer networks (ignoring that it is this very system
that allows the Democracy to function better in the all-important exchange
of ideas, opinions, and future-formative dialog); and
? Create more Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property (CHIPs) units
around the country with expanded authority to prosecute Internet "piracy"
(ignoring the fact that the Justice Department has far more important issues
to deal with besides protecting multinational entertainment industries from
the innovation of authors and scientists, such as... HOMELAND SECURITY and
the threat of terrorism to American interests abroad).
The copyright industries, as the entertainment oligarchy thinks of
itself, likes to say that they account for 5% of our gross domestic product.
They would have us believe that their power to churn artists, authors, and
scientists into the excess of celebrity culture should somehow be protected
from the free competition that results from technological innovation which
represents at least three times the value to the gross domestic product what
the entertainment industries are worth. They are willing to let their "tail
wag the dog", instead of facing up to the fact that they have failed
miserably in integrating the Internet's powerful distribution capabilities
into their antiquated and waning business models. They believe that
increased criminal enforcement will ensure that their industries will remain
a driving factor for economic growth, when in fact all that it will
accomplish is stifling innovation, as well as the progress of science and
the useful arts.
Please, sir, ignore their hollow pleas and turn your attentions to
the matters that affect us all... the security of our homeland, our
interests abroad, and the prosecution of corporate overlords who threaten
our nation's security by their exploitation of the law through the purchase
of lawmakers.
Sincerely,
Rafael Oliverio Quezada
