§ The Beautiful Idea ^
Picture, if you will, a world full of magical devices that allow anyone, rich or poor, to read, watch, or listen to any book, film, or album ever made, for free, instantly, with only the press of a button. Imagine a library where every book is always available. Imagine being able to read all the research in the world without membership at an elite university. Imagine Netflix and Spotify, but instead of a tiny selection they have everything you could ever think of, it costs nothing, and there are no ads.
Who would want to stop such a thing? Wouldn't life be vastly better? Does your heart not ache for this world without boundaries?
It already exists. It's just that it's illegal.
An exemplar here is Anna's Archive, a pirate archivist project with two goals: to back up all of humanity's knowledge and culture and to make it available to anyone in the world. As ambitious as that sounds, they estimate they have already saved a whopping 16% of the world's books. Anna's Archive is one of the greatest projects in human history, yet if the people behind it are ever caught they will likely be thrown in a cage for the rest of their lives.
Anna may be the most ambitious and successful so far, but they're far from the first. Vast, stunning Libraries of Alexandria have been built up and burned to the ground repeatedly in internet history, their curators hunted by police, sued or prosecuted to death, their patrons threatened, maps to their locations destroyed.
Utopia is a small island in a large sea, beset on all sides by ships of war. As a wise man once said: the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.
§ The Hideous Bargain ^
Copyright law is incompatible with utopia.
One would need an awfully compelling reason to justify depriving the world of such a wonderful thing. Copyright supporters offer up the same defenses for ownership of intangible, non-scarce (infinitely duplicable) resources as capitalists do for tangible, naturally scarce physical resources. Prominently:
- The owner is entitled to earn money from their property.
- Without ownership, everything will go to hell in a handbasket.
The first justification seems awfully weak when weighed against the benefits a utopia of piracy brings to all humankind, and it's not as though it's impossible to make any money just because you can't set an arbitrary price at gunpoint (lawpoint).
This supposed right to profit being effectively secured by copyright is mythical, too. Independent artists are often invoked as though they're making a ton of money thanks only to our wonderful copyright laws. But it's primarily large "rightsholding" corporations who profit by monopolizing and litigating their "property". Is it really worth keeping utopia from our grasp just because an artist might occasionally manage to make some money as a side effect?
Then objection #2 kicks in: without copyright law, there would be no profit --- and hence no incentive to do anything! nobody would make anything ever again! art would die! Even if copyright effectively kept artists fed --- which it clearly doesn't --- art is more often made in spite of money than because of it, and I think it's safe to say that more commercial art is unlikely to be better art. Would we really trade in utopia in exchange for the continued production of Minions and Marvel movies?
And wouldn't it be good for artists if they could freely make use of existing "property" without the threat of being ruined for their creative expression? Copyright law has enabled Nintendo, a company worth over SIXTY BILLION DOLLARS, to bully countless broke independent artists into deleting their work. Disney is worth another HUNDRED BILLION FUCKING DOLLARS and has our entire media ecosystem clutched in a strangehold with its cute mousey paws. If you do anything these corporate behemoths don't like, they can squish you like a bug. Seems like a really fucking bad deal for artists --- and human beings in general!
§ Pie in the Sky ^
There's a slice of utopia right there for us to take whenever we want it, yet we're told to wait, that it would be improper to reach out and take it before we can get the entire thing, that these ideas might sound nice in theory, but in reality, people need money and copyright helps them get it; only once we abolish poverty can we think about reforming copyright.
Talk about letting the perfect be the enemy of the good! If we invent a replicator that can infinitely duplicate food, are we supposed to lock it in a safe underground until we can make sure no farmers' lives will be affected in any way?
We may never achieve an entirely stateless and mutualistic society, but you can visit a virtual one any time you want. There's no need to wait. We're building a pirate utopia in the shell of our old world. It's straining to break free.
§ Addendum ^
For the polar opposite of pirate utopia, see The Right to Read.