Piracy as Direct Action

"[T]he patent monopoly, which consists in protecting inventors and authors against
competition for a period long enough to enable them to extort from the people a reward enormously
in excess of the labor measure of their services,—in other words, in giving certain people a right of
property for a term of years in laws and facts of Nature, and the power to exact tribute from others
for the use of this natural wealth, which should be open to all. The abolition of this monopoly
would fill its beneficiaries with a wholesome fear of competition which would cause them to be
satisfied with pay for their services equal to that which other laborers get for theirs, and to secure it
by placing their products and works on the market at the outset at prices so low that their lines of
business would be no more tempting to competitors than any other lines." -Benjamin Tucker

Longer and more comprehensive words have been written against intellectual property, or IP, but libertarian forefather Benjamin Tucker sums it up neatly- IP artificially inflates the bottom lines of those best able to utilize state power. The biggest corporations, with the most money and the most political influence, own the most IP and write most IP law. We are all familiar with the depredations of the RIAA and the MPAA and their most recent attempts, via SOPA, ACTA and other such nefarious acronyms, to smash with the state club what they could not destroy on the open market. But even the enemies of these laws don't make IP itself their enemy; in fact, one of SOPA's most vocal opponents, Google, is also one of the foremost IP litigants, perpetually engaged in a litigious menage a trois with its biggest rivals in the mobile phone market

IP "reform," at least that genus of reforms that stand any chance at all of being enacted, is typically written by one species of corporation to benefit it and/or hurt its rivals. No major parties or candidates are willing to do what needs to be done; against IP the ballot is, as against so many other things, useless. So what to do?


Direct action. Don't beg the state to give you the world you want. Create it, or even better, act as if it already exists. The IWW tells a story of lumberjacks in the Pacific Northwest struggling for an eight hour day and better working conditions. Rather than plead at the legislature, they simply stopped working after eight hours and set fire to the miserable bunkhouses their employers required them to use. They did not beg like slaves, they took like free men, and they won. Eventually the law caught up- legislators hate to feel left out.

If we want a world without IP, let's make one. Steal any IP that isn't nailed down. Only buy what you can't pirate, and immediately make available for piracy everything you buy. The state will inevitably flail about trying to stop us, but they cannot arrest all of us. The bosses in the Pacific Northwest eventually ran out of lumberjacks, and had to give in. Let's starve the IP beast of customers, of consent, of legitimacy.