[ExI] intellectual property again

[Emlyn]

On 4 March 2010 03:37, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
> I will start it: I now think that society is justified in providing a legal
> means of protecting information as property; in most cases current
> intellectual property law is adequate and not overly restrictive.  I
> recognize there are absurdities with protocol patenting, but I don't see a
> better way.
>
> Your turn.
>
> spike

I'm firmly on the free side. I see that people have already made a lot
of the standard arguments against intellectual property, good work.

I want to offer a longer perspective, a perspective of the playing out
of the 21st century.

The short version:
We are increasingly and will eventually entirely *be* information. If
we allow ownership of information, we eventually lose ownership of
ourselves.

The long version:
I think we can probably more or less agree that information and
information systems aren't going to become any less important as the
century wears on. Particularly, more and more of the infrastructure of
our lives is going to be made out of information. We're not going to
become less dependent on the global network(s) (in fact clearly we
will become very much more dependent, very quickly). For individuals,
increasingly all our communications, our purchases, our
entertainments, are reliant on the extended internet, and will share
the fundamental properties of information; particularly, endless
reproduction in full fidelity for a price approaching zero. As time
wears on, the bricks & mortar world is going to be increasingly drawn
into this, as we gain the ability to "print out" physical objects (and
food? clothing? etc etc). And, we will become increasingly dependent
on technologies based in massive, ongoing data collection and
interpretation (eg: healthcare must go this way). Will we eventually
teleport via copying ourselves across the internet? Will we eventually
upload ourselves? Before that, our entire social identity will be
embedded firmly in the infosphere and at its mercy.

In that context, a regime of intellectual property ownership and
restriction is intensely political. What is at stake is our ability as
individuals to live freely in the world, nothing less than that.

Right now, we are seeing books begin their inexorable move into
virtual space, and what we see is massive restriction. If you're using
a Kindle, you can no longer resell your books, lend them to others, or
anything else that relies on the principle of first sale. Furthermore,
you cannot do the simple and clearly valuable things that should just
be a feature of the environment; transfer them to any other computing
device as determined by you, process and transform them as you like
(as you could a text file). Now this sucks, and drives a lot of people
crazy, but hey, we're not really losing anything that we could do
before.

However, as we become more dependent on technologies that render
everything into information, the ramifications of this kind of closed,
locked up approach to information (information as carefully managed
real-world object analogues) will begin to really cause serious issues
to individuals. What happens when your social network is based in a
closed, owned environment, and those with power decide to change
things to your detriment (eg: lock you out)? This already happens in
the social networking sphere, and for some people real damage (to
relationships) occurs. What happens when your health care is based in
massive (lifelong) ongoing data collection & mining, but the formats
and software used to store and work with that data (or even the data
itself) can be owned, and the people that own it decide to act against
your interests (eg: legally restricting you from taking that data
elsewhere, legally restricting you from using that data in a way that
they don't approve of)? What about if our material needs (food,
clothing, etc) become dependent on the information infrastructure,
closed and restricted, and people who own it decide to act against
your interests, so you find you can't eat?

What if you are physically and/or mentally augmented, but all your
augmentations are based in closed owned information controlled by
people who decide to act against your interests (do you want to have
to jail-break your metacortex)? What if your lifespan is now augmented
beyond what should have "naturally" occurred, but relies on ongoing
intervention (implants? monitoring? etc) which is entirely
proprietary, such that you cannot change provider? What if you are an
upload, and find that not only is the environment you live in
privately owned and controlled, not only is your personal data format
proprietary, but the data, the pattern which comprises you, is
entirely owned by someone else? What if stepping through that
teleporter renders you, as a side effect, property of a corporation?
This sounds far fetched, but you just have to look at the battle over
the ownership of genomic information to see that we are on that
trajectory.

Transhumanism, from a social individual point of view, to me, is about
morphological freedom. It is about establishing the freedom of all
individuals to proceed into the future under their own determination,
and the laws of the natural world be damned; we will be what we can
imagine and will to become. But, that project is clearly tied
inexorably and completely into a world where everything important is
essentially information. If that world of platonic information is
owned and fenced by powers who don't have to respect individual
freedoms, then we are moving ourselves into a future of inescapable
slavery of the many to the few, a catastrophe.

I honestly don't see how any extropian or transhumanist who is looking
at the future with an honest eye can countenance a future like this.
The copyfight happening now is not a mundane economic squabble, it is
a political fight for our futures, and one whose importance I think is
very difficult to overstate. Don't accept it!

-- 
Emlyn

http://www.songsofmiseryanddespair.com - My show, Fringe 2010
http://point7.wordpress.com - My blog