On The Establishment Of The Techno-economic Caste By Int. Prop. Holders, Brown University Admissions Essay Options

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The following text is licensed by A. Bradley under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Since the inception of England's Licensing Order of 1643, the proliferation of knowledge and access to knowledge by the public have been restricted by law. This particular act regulated the licensing of printers prior to publication and prescribed the censorship of content as seen fit by the government. These restrictions paved the way for the later Licensing of the Press Act of 1662, which in turn set a precedent for the first law establishing true "copyright," the Statute of Anne of 1709. This statute granted authors (instead of printers or publishers) complete control over distribution of their works. Thus began a reprehensible legacy of the capitalization and confinement of human knowledge.

Similarly to the knowledge contained in mass print (and now other) media, the knowledge underlying technologies and (industrial) processes has been restricted under law. In England, the first such monopolization of a technology was issued by Henry VI in 1449, to a Flemish man, for a period of 20 years. The official declaration of monopoly was first referred to as a "letter patent," which laid the foundation for modern patent law.

Together with their ornamental "trademarks," copyright and patents constitute a phenomenon referred to under the heading of "intellectual property." The sole purpose of this phenomenon is to guarantee to the holders (mostly large corporations and/or wealthy entrepreneurs) a legal entitlement to economic exploitation in the form of a private-sector tax referred to as a "royalty" or a "licensing fee" (akin to ancient imperial "tribute") and an economic entitlement to legal exploitation in the form of exclusive control over the proliferation of the respective information, knowledge or technology. Social, legal, economic and political justifications are offered for the existence and enforcement of intellectual property law, but these arguments inevitably fail to conceal or explain away the inherently malignant nature of such a system.

"Intellectual property" is a plutocratic wet dream, the perfect legalistic tool for the sequestration of proletarian upheaval and the propagation of ignorance via the economic entrenchment of the social hierarchy. Through granting exclusive legal rights to information, copyright and patent law in particular hinder the free flow and evolution of knowledge in legal and economic terms. Innovators cannot derive from existing works without paying the fee forward, and that happens if and only if the rights-holder(s) of the works in question will grant permission. Audiences are limited to consuming only what content providers will allow, under the (usually extremely restrictive) terms of their licenses. Consumers are forced to pay ever-escalating prices for products which are subject to ever-more patents and copyright restrictions. Computer users are entangled by a web of various licenses and copy-protections so dense that following the letter of the law becomes infeasible, if not impossible. All of this restricts the freedom of people to understand, be inspired, be educated, to create and to innovate, and consequentially retards and misdirects the growth and development of human societies everywhere.

The laws which enforce "intellectual property rights" have established and continue to reinforce a techno-economic hierarchy which forms what is essentially a global caste. The advantages of technological development are out of the reach of the world's poor, often entire nations, because of the prohibitive costs associated with royalty and licensing fees demanded by applicable copyrights and patents. Computers are just beginning to reach the masses of many countries, but their deployment is limited by the oppressive costs of restrictive proprietary software licenses. For example, a licensed copy of the de facto standard operating system, Microsoft Windows Vista, ranges in cost from approximately 89 USD to 278 USD across its range of user-categorized versions. In comparison, the per capita income of Afghanistan for 2007 was 277 USD (CIA World Factbook). Capitalists and globalists, by the real-world implications of their beliefs and policies, find it acceptable that a licensed copy of Microsoft Windows Vista Business costs more than a statistically-average Afghan earned in the year 2007. Still more egregious examples abound. Music is a driving, inspirational force in billions of lives, and in the 21st century, the mode of production is, at least in some phase, electronic. Propellerhead Software develops the Reason software studio, an effectively-complete self-contained (electronic) music production platform. A licensed copy of Propellerhead's Reason 4.0 costs 499 USD direct from its developers. Compare this price tag to the per capita income of Guinea, 493 USD in 2007 (CIA World Factbook), or, in more stark terms, 180% of the per capita income of Afghanistan for the same year.

There are not only stunning economic ramifications of "intellectual property", but also devastating legal hindrances on the flow of information and the derivation of knowledge. The example of software is also useful in demonstrating this phenomenon. Software forms the backbone of global infrastructure and is the most prominent contemporary tool for information processing. Most of the software deployed today is distributed under non-free proprietary licenses which restrict or prohibit access to source code and the distribution of the software itself. Software such as the above examples, Vista and Reason, require users to obtain and enter cryptographic keys to render the product usable. Such keys are usually bundled with installation media or documentation and are paid for by the licensing fee, which comprises most of the cost of any proprietary software media. Software vendors are careful not to indicate just how much of such fees cover costs of labor and production versus pure profit. Fees are not the only cost to proprietary software, however. Intellectual property encumbrances limit the development of free and open-source alternatives to proprietary software by posing a legal threat to their very existence. "There was a report out this summer by an open source group that highlighted that Linux violates over 228 patents," said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer (Ars Technica). The Redmond monstrosity towers over even the largest open-source software vendors and as such threatens the existence of any significant free alternatives to its software monopoly. Companies such as Red Hat attempt to provide some buffer from the proprietary enemies of free software by staking their own software patent claims, licensing these patents for free to open-source developers. Even so, the opportunities to push back the tide of "intellectual property" law to protect free software and freedom of information are limited, and their effectiveness even more so.

The prohibitive costs of technology seem almost justifiable in comparison to the heinous actions of the Associated Press. AP has instituted new guidelines for use of its text which controvert even the draconian U.S. copyright "fair use" guidelines: "If you excerpt 5-25 words, the fee is $12.50. If you excerpt 26-50 words, that will be $17.50. More than 251 words will cost you $100." (OnTheCommons.org) Quotation of one paragraph of text could cost 179% (100 USD) of the 2007 per capita income of Zimbabwe, a figure of 56 USD. It is clear that priorities are completely out of order in the "global marketplace" when one paragraph of quoted text is valued at almost double the annual income of a Zimbabwean. Human welfare and the spread of knowledge are subordinate to corporate revenues and the portfolios of the wealthy.

Earth and her people face a burgeoning crisis. Non-material "goods" in the form of information and technological methodology carry a greater capital worth than a year's hard work for a great share of the world's people. This discrepancy threatens to leave global development at a standstill, or worse yet, send it into a backslide. Until the policymakers of this planet see to it that development and welfare are of greater legal and economic priority than monopolism, protectionism and profit margins, quality of life for billions of people will continue to stagnate or deteriorate. With respect to the unacceptable truths of "intellectual property" and those laws which govern it, we must undertake measures to abolish once and for all this method of socioeconomic control and level out the informatic/technological hierarchy which it served to establish and reinforce. The techno-economic caste which defines the gross economic disparities of the global and local economies must be undone, and this can only happen through the redistribution of knowledge and technology that can come about only after the disbanding of copyright and patent law. Authors and creators deserve credit and compensation for their works, but not at the expense of human lives. So many have suffered and died in destitution because their hard work could not earn them enough to buy medicine, food or shelter whose costs have skyrocketed due to the patents on pharmaceuticals, the unethical inception of genetically-modified foods and bio-patents, and the rising costs of (electrical) energy and the vital technologies which require it, as examples. These facts are so easily ignored by the peoples of the developed world that one must speculate whether any conscience remains in them at all. One thing is certain: the present economic order of our world persists only to the detriment of us all.

- A. Bradley

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