Piracy, of the digital variety, is good. We should better understand why piracy is good. I have therefore written these essays on this matter. This first one is rather like a book report. I posted it to a literature forum a year ago, and they hated it.
How copyright warps thinking, as shown in art
Drama is the prime ingredient of stories. A fertile source of drama is loss. One of many things that can be lost is precious knowledge. Copyright thinking misleads artists into making too much of the difficulties in preserving knowledge. Many plots are flawed by supposing that precious knowledge is more fragile and more easily lost than it could be, if only we'd stop making it harder to preserve than need be. Copyright is particularly egregious in putting knowledge at risk of loss because it imposes a scarcity that is wholly artificial, and why? That artists might not suffer the imaginary loss of someone else getting some use or pleasure out of something they created, without having paid for a copy. We risk real loss, to prevent imaginary loss. By that logic, it might as well be criminal for public libraries to even exist. Instead, the strange thing is that private, for-profit bookstores exist. It's not that bookstores should be criminal, not at all, it's that there shouldn't be any scope for their business.
Once you know to look for this melodrama over lost knowledge, it is easy to spot all over the place in our art. It's present even in Science Fiction, the one genre more than any other whose authors ought to grasp that in the future, preserving and disseminating knowledge will be easier than ever.
Even at the basic level of language, this bias is present. We conflate the meaning of ownership when we use the possessives, "hers", "his", and the rest to mean both that a physical object is someone's property and that an idea came from a particular someone. Too easily we accept "his idea" to mean that a person owns an idea in the same way as owning a tool. We talk of "stealing ideas" as if the first to think of it loses out when someone else thinks of it no matter how independently. Though all understand "stealing" in this context is "copying", or perhaps plagiarizing, there are those who try to exploit this conflation to make a big stink as if copying an idea was indeed as reprehensible as stealing a valuable tool.
Some will argue that actually, knowledge is fairly easily lost. Certainly it's possible. The premier example is the fall of the Roman Empire and the descent of Europe into the Dark Ages. For centuries, "Lost Secrets of the Ancients" has been a popular theme in many stories. What were Cleopatra's beauty secrets? How were the Egyptian pyramids built? How was the Roman Colosseum built? The aqueducts? Europe especially was very conscious of this loss. The Indiana Jones stories tap into this. However, knowledge can be rediscovered. It is only in the past century or two that our current knowledge has advanced so far beyond the Romans that mopings about lost technology no longer possess an aura of plausibility. Today, we have lingering echos of that sense of lost knowledge that was much stronger as little as 2 centuries ago.
In the 20th century, copying rapidly grew easier. The seminal advance, however, was about 500 years prior, with the invention of the printing press. Each advance in the ability to copy more quickly, more variously, and in more quantity, was met with resistance from interests relying on artificial scarcity to make their holdings valuable. One of these interests that to their shame was not above such reactionary moves is the artists themselves. Artists have long had a reputation for progressivism in their art, but on this matter, they showed out. Not only did they fight this particular progress, they loaded their art with all kinds of propagandizing against it. So pervasive are the underlying assumptions that much of this propagandizing may be at an unconscious, unintentional level. One of these is the routine conflation of property rights with copy rights.
Here are some examples.
First up are highly popular fantasies. As fantasies are commonly set in a romanticized Middle Ages, with warriors equipped with swords and other weapons of those times, and there being no printing press, one perhaps could accept propositions that knowledge is easily lost, as indeed it was. Yet artists nevertheless take that notion too far. Tolkien fell pretty hard for it.
The Silmarillion presents us with the Two Trees, these very special and unique trees that shine so brightly they light up the entire world. The greatest craftsman of the stories crafts 3 special jewels, the eponymous Silmarils, to preserve samples of the Trees' light. The chief villain succeeds in his ambition to destroy the Two Trees, and this is of course an extremely tragic and epic disaster.
Or is it? This is the point, at one of the most dramatic moments, where the plot overreaches. The creator of the Two Trees declares that she can't make them again. Can't make more Trees. Supposedly, such a great work can only be done once. Why only once? Why? Are these things trees, living plants, that produce seeds, or aren't they? Well, it seems they do produce seeds, so why not plant some more? But that plan won't work because their offspring are not imbued with such immense power as the originals, because, well, just because.
The next punch comes hard on the heels of this arbitrary declaration that the Trees can't be duplicated. The original Trees can be revived with a bit of untainted light, and hey, the greatest craftsman made these jewels that contain that light. But, the jewels have to be unmade! Why? The light can't be copied, it seems. Let's treat light as if it is a material object! By the power of magic, we can handle light as if it is material, including all the limitations! But why would we want to employ magic so? Why can't we make full use of magic to magically have it both ways, material when that is convenient, and immaterial when that is most convenient?
The craftsman declares that even as the great can't make their greatest work again, so also can't the lesser. He supposedly can't craft more Silmarils. It could be argued that the Silmarils are made of such rare materials that there isn't enough for more than 3, but then, why can't the existing material be reused? If instead, the reason is that it was so hard to learn how to make such jewels that figuring it out all over again would be impossible, an interpretation I favor based upon the author's evident proclivities, this shows a common weakness of a career author venturing away from what they know. Explorers of knowledge make notes. Have to, to avoid duplicating your work and repeating mistakes. Knowing how to make Silmarils should not be a problem.
There's more. This liking for plot elements that concentrate power is obviously to make their loss more dramatic and devastating. Why can't there be millions of trees all shining a little bit? Narrowing it down to just Two Trees in one tiny grove is the Single Point of Failure in spades. But that's epic fantasy for you. Epic fantasy warped by artificial scarcity thinking.
There are further examples in the Lord of the Rings. Granted, the entire work is full of decline and loss. Very declinist. We are treated to repeated assertions that everything was stronger, fresher, and all around better way back in the day, as in Theoden's assertion of the horse, Shadowfax, that "In him one of the mighty steeds of old has returned. None such shall return again." Huh? Why shan't that happen ever again? That's some serious deteriorationism. Improving on an original happens all the time.
The Mines of Moria are a particular problem with the plotting. Gandalf the wizard says he feared they'd be obliged to enter the mines, so why wasn't he better prepared, with the password that hasn't changed in a thousand years, and maps of the mines? They had just left one of the greatest refuges and repositories of lore in the world, inhabited by allies of the builders of the mines, and included in that collection ought to have been maps of Moria. Hand copying may be laborious, but not so laborious as to preclude Gandalf being able to provide himself with a copy of a map of Moria. It even says that Gandalf "pondered the storied and figured maps" there!
Yet the worst problem of all is the entire idea of Rings of Power. Worst, because the idea is core to the entire story. Why should such power be concentrated in just 20 finger rings? Why, once the elves figured out how to make such rings, didn't they make thousands? They did make many more rings of lesser power, just how many and what became of them is not mentioned. But it can't have been millions. Not Rings for everyone. Partly, we subconsciously accept that if everyone had a Ring, they wouldn't be at all Exclusive and Special, and what's the fun in that?
That's the thing, why do we like it so? If it is our culture and our values that have molded us to feel like that, to want things to be scarce, for purposes of scrambling to be the sole possessor, standing out and getting ahead, then this really has warped our thinking in a very bad way. A worse possibility is our desire to place ourselves at the feet of and under the protection of heroes, rather than rely upon ourselves. But to do that, heroes have to be identified, and sorted from all the liars and frauds who want to pose as heroes for the attention and rewards of such status. Consider sports such as American football, baseball, and soccer. Though these are team sports, there is only One Ball. One Ball to suck up our attention. No doubt the reasons for there being only one is that when these sports were developed, scarcity was more of a problem. But that is a minor feature of most team sports of the 20th century. The bigger issuse is the desire to in some fashion find the very best of the best, and anoint them as champions. We have gravitated towards a bracket, full of single elimination competitions as the means. For pro football (American), there is the Playoffs culminating in the annual Superbowl. As if to show that even the Superbowl doesn't do enough to single out the very best, they have a Most Valuable Player (MVP) award.
A particular passage to highlight shows a different way in which too much is made of property rights. When Gandalf is asked why he didn't and won't take the One Ring in order to stop it from corrupting the hobbits, he says that he fears it would corrupt him, that he couldn't without doing more harm, and that "I had no right to do so anyway."* How strange that respect for Property Rights should play such a large role in helping Gandalf resist that temptation! Note that the respect for Property Rights is highly selective. That is, most are very aware that the rightful owner of the One Ring is Sauron, the Dark Lord. But that right, they have blithely set aside. We are left to gather that the Dark Lord, by all the evil he has done, has forfeited all respect of others for his property rights. Several chapters later in the story is another bit of dialogue concerning who has property rights to the One Ring, when Frodo, the Ring Bearer, hears the history and realizes that because Isildur took the One Ring, his companion Strider, the Heir of Isildur, could be considered the rightful owner. Strider at least acknowledges that it belongs to neither him nor Frodo. In any case, the One Ring is of such great public interest that caviling over who has property rights to it is silly at best, and at worst an excuse to fight over it.
- I will tell you exactly where that quote can be found. It is in Fellowship of the Ring, book 1, chapter 2, The Shadow of the Past, page 78, lines 3 and 4, in the Ballantine Books paperback edition. It has long been customary to cite references in this manner, down to the page, if not the lines. However, with digital editions, providing such a detailed, human readable map to quoted text is not necessary. A search can quickly turn up that line. Such searches can be and should be work for a brainless machine, not people. No more of this hunting through the stacks of a library to find a printed copy that may have been checked out or even vandalized, the pages with the quote of interest removed by some other visitor who knows how long ago? Even better, this text could have been a hypertext, with links leading directly to the quoted material, the details of the addressing left to a computer. As of 2023, it has been 50 years since Tolkien passed; his works ought to be public domain by now, freely available online. I mention all this as another example of how artifical scarcity has hobbled the free exchange of information, by burdening students with excessive requirements in order to do a proper citation. Students have even been required to add publication information to their citations. Ostensibly this is to make sure interested readers can trace the cited text, but perhaps in reality it is to further enshrine in young minds Great Respect for Published Works.
The greater hindrance however is that there should be a readily available digital edition of the source material online, freely accessable to all, at an address of some permanence, for links to point at. That there is not is a testament to the damaging restrictions of copyright. Project Gutenberg does not as of 2025 have copies of Tolkien's works, and if copyright terms are not changed, it will be at earliest the year 2043 (1973 + 70 years) before it will enter the public domain, though some jurisdictions still adhere to life + 50 years, which means Tolkien's works should have become public domain in 2023. The closest we have is archive.org, which is under constant threat of being sued for copyright infringement, and may at any time be ordered by a court to remove or block access to a work on their website. Archive.org is also vulnerable to financial problems. Here is the link: https://archive.org/details/j-r-r-tolkien-lord-of-the-rings-01-the-fellowship-of-the-ring-retail-pdf/page/63/mode/2up
Note also how thick it can get. On the very same page of Fellowship of the Ring is the phrase "lost secrets of their making".
The Harry Potter stories have several plot elements that suppose copying is difficult. There is the effort to keep knowledge of the dark arts from wizard children, by removing from the school library all material concerning one of the darkest arts, "horcruxes". The library has a restricted section, but that evidently wasn't good enough.
Horcruxes, however, cause lots of problems with the plot. We are given to understand that a soul is something that can be split, but not copied. Why?? Well, in fantasy magic, we are treated over and over to utterly ridiculous limitations. Magic can do all this fantastic stuff, and yet, there are many rather simple things it supposedly can't do. Can't create real love between 2 people, can only create a powerful infatuation. I take that particular limitation to be a rather shabby and naked concession to our vanity and desire to be in mastery, not in thrall. As to horcruxes, we are further informed that splitting a soul does really bad things to that soul. Renders the person less capable of empathy, and more easily able to commit atrocities, uncaring of the suffering inflicted. As if the act required to split the soul, murder, wasn't itself a gateway to becoming a psychopathic, remorseless killer. And thus, was the villainy of the main antagonist of the story explained.
Harry Potter and Disney share an excessive reverence for print media, AKA books. Many Disney classic movies start with what is perhaps best called "book porn", that is, an animation of a book being slowly opened in a very glitzy and ostentatious manner, to reveal The Story in very ornate lettering. Why? Seems clear Disney is trying to emphasize that books are special and precious, and fun, too, the better to serve their own interests, of course. Their interests they see as directly connected to stories, but also this serves to subtly propagandize in favor of more copyright. That's why they emphasize not just knowledge, but specifically, print. Star Wars at least skips the book porn, and at the start of that movie, just scrolls print without any hint of paper being involved.
A few other fantasies to mention briefly are the Elfstones of Shannara and the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, in which these powerful magical artifacts, the elfstones and the white gold ring respectively, in addition to being tools of great power, also somehow have this magical sense of property rights. In order to gain the use of these tools for themselves, the baddies can't just steal or forcibly take the magical tools, the tools have to be given willingly. Also imbued with a magical sense of rightful ownership are the Palantirs, magical items in Lord of the Rings, and the wands, particularly the Elder Wand, of the Harry Potter stories, though the wands are willing to let conquest determine who owns them.
What of Science Fiction? Yes, artificial scarcity rears its head there too. One of the most blatant examples comes from the Star Trek episode "I, Mudd", in which the comical villain Mudd relates that on a particular planet the penalty for intellectual property infringement is death. Yeah, Hollywood wishes! That one is not in the least hidden or subtle.
Another such blatant propagandizing can be found in Robert Asprin's Mythadventures series, book 7, M.Y.T.H Inc. Link, in which the hero's organization guards print copies of valuable comic books that in chapter 5 they figure out must be forged.
In the Hugo winner Hyperion, we have all kinds of fantastic futuristic technology such as instant, seamless teleportation across many light years, no need for a booth or even a few seconds of standing still to give the device time to work, yet copyright still exists essentially unchanged from the 20th century, to the detriment of one of the main characters, a poet. In part because copyright stinks so bad at forcing those who don't want to honor it, the poet is successfully entrapped in great debt that must be paid off, by writing great quantities of schlock.
A giant of science fiction is Asimov's Foundation series. Great though it is, it too suffers from one of the big problems with science fiction: not aging well. The plot at the start has all these scholars working to preserve human knowledge against an anticipated fall of the Galactic Empire that is very obviously (the author doesn't bother insulting everyone's intelligence by trying to hide this) a close parallel to the fall of Rome. Yeah, the Fall of Rome. Again. The Fall of Rome with an SF skin. The quip that history doesn't repeat but sometimes it rhymes seems applicable here.
So at the start of the Foundation stories, they are compiling a great encyclopedia of all human knowledge, to preserve it through the fall. Okay. But how plausible is this, really? Today, any person with a broadband Internet connection and a few terabytes of digital storage could download the whole damned online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, in less than one day. If we throw in all the research oriented academic publications, it would take a bit longer, if, that is, it's possible at all thanks to all the paywalls and other obstacles arising from both need, and greed spurred by the artificial scarcity that copyright imposes on knowledge. Supposing that people hadn't erected these barriers, the effort it would to take to make a copy of all the research is still relatively small. The plot takes for granted that assembling a new encyclopedia is a massive undertaking requiring many people and many years. In the 1950s when these stories were created, it could be. But today in the 2020s? No. Yes, assembling it is a lot of work, but the genius of Wikipedia is that, enabled by the technology of digital networking, that work has been distributed to all and spread across all the time we have. There isn't any more assembly to add to the constant, ongoing assembly. Copying that is trivial next to the work that went into creating it.
The biggest example of all is various fictional means of teleporting, such as the Star Trek transporter. The teleportation booths of Buck Rogers are often credited as the first instance of science fictional teleportation. Larry Niven's Ringworld works feature "transfer booths" on Earth, and "stepping disks" on the Puppeteer worlds and ships. I mentioned Hyperion having 20th century copyright and only touched on the teleportation tech in that story, which is called "Farcasting". Another Hugo winner is Lord of Light, in which elements of Indian religion are realized through technology. Specifically, the people can transfer their spirit (atman) from an old body into a fresh new body, and by that means achieve immortality. Fantasy too has much magical teleportation. It's a staple of many MMORPGs that wizards can, by means of spellcasting, do intercontinental travels in an instant.
Many have commented on the huge holes that such capability blows in so many of the plots and operations. For instance, why do we need medical doctors when this transporter device can reassemble a person? Surely it would be trivial for such a device to throw in some bodily repair as it "beams" a person. Catch a cold? Have the transporter beam the sick person and leave behind the virii causing the illness. Heck, maybe it does that as a matter of course.
So, what does teleportation have to do with copyright? A lot, actually. At heart, all such devices are a means of copying a person. We are given to understand that teleportation is going on, but actually, it is far more plausible to implement this capability through copying followed by destruction of the original. We of course prefer not to think of it in that way, don't want to believe that murder is the most expedient way of producing the effect of having teleported.
Lord of Light clearly means to follow the expectations of Indian culture and religion, but the fact is that copying an atman would be easier than transferring an atman. (Interesting that similar possessiveness is also present in Indian culture.) In the story, it is implied that the old bodies are rendered unoccupied, and it is not clear whether the process leaves the old bodies vegetative or dead. Whichever, they are routinely disposed of, without a blush.
So, why aren't teleporters copiers? In some science fiction such as Kiln People, there are copy machines. Kiln People shies away from many of the implications by positing that the copies are inferior to the original. Several Star Trek episodes touch on this. There's "The Enemy Within" in which thanks to a transporter malfunction, two Captain Kirks are running about the Enterprise. And there's "Second Chances" in which Riker learns there is a clone of him, and that the transporter did it. But it's pretty easy to see that the ability to copy people is distasteful. We wouldn't be unique individuals if such technology existed. No one would ever again by necessity be "the one and only". Another episode, "Up the Long Ladder", features a society of human clones, but this society is presented as suffering and dying from over-reliance on cloning. It seems cloning makes imperfect copies. Why the heck didn't they just use transporter buffers, as Scotty did in the episode "Relics", to do their cloning?
In another Hugo winning SF work, Joan Vinge's The Snow Queen (not the Hans Christian Anderson story), there is human cloning, but it is taboo. America, the most individualistic nation in the world, finds such possibilities most upsetting. And yet, what if it had been possible to duplicate Elvis Presley or any other popular star? And not just duplicate them, but improve them by, for instance, making the duplicate's body years younger?
I wonder that some would find murder more acceptable than copying, should such technological ability ever be reached. That's the most extreme way individualism has warped our art. Kill rather than permit copying. Kid ourselves that it isn't murder.
That artists are among the most prominent and loud proponents of artistic freedom, that they are often placed on metaphoric pedestals as shining examples of the best of us, and that they so often use, indeed are practically required to use, their art to make Statements, makes their failure in this matter all the more poignantly disappointing. Here is a matter that impacts them directly, and do they take a principled stand? Scruple? No! So all their high minded writing they show is false, something they don't really believe themselves, when confronted with an issue that would seem to strike directly at their livelihoods. Every artist I have managed to query about this issue opposes the abolishment of copyright. It's unanimous. In a few cases, so strong was their opposition, so high the emotions, that in addition to being called an idiot by none other than Mercedes Lackey when I encountered her at a convention, I was not permitted even to make mention of this issue. I was censored. Authors, frequent victims of censorship, hastening to resort to censorship themselves when confronted on the matter of the many problems with copyright. Shame! Shame!
Many talk as if it's inconceivable that there is any other way than copyright to earn a living through art. Another complaint that confuses the issue, perhaps deliberately, is that without copyright, what's to stop plagiarists? This is a red herring. Copying is good and desirable, plagiarism is not. Plagiarism most certainly can be detected and prevented, or punished and redress made, without need of copyright at all.
And there are ways, WITHOUT COPYRIGHT, to provide the means to live in exchange for the production of art. How does AM radio work? Broadcast TV? Netflix? YouTube? Copyright is routinely claimed, of course, but those platforms don't depend on it. Boiling it down to one word, I would pick either "patronage" or "crowdfunding" as the means by which art shall be funded in the future. That should be as soon as possible.
Finally, copyright thinking warps more than art. It warps our civilization. It triggers our fears of loss, even as it needlessly puts knowledge at risk of loss! It also triggers possessiveness. And greed. And hoarding. Gatekeeping and rent seeking. It caters entirely too well to American's excessive love of individuality, by implicitly enshrining several wrong ideas about how progress comes about: genius lone wolf inventors. Note that the primary way of presenting the credit for a story is to focus it all on one individual, The Author. Sometimes two authors collaborate and both get credit. There are also collections, but these are again for the most part solo efforts, loosely connected by being part of some agreed upon framework, setting, or what have you. Often going unmentioned are editors, proofreaders, ghostwriters, and everyone else involved in the making of a story. Many Americans want so much to elevate individuals, to be under the protection of heroes, any kind of heroes. Even more, some want to be that individual who is so elevated. But could it be that the best fiction has yet to be created, because we have not settled how best for many people to collaborate on a story?
Some of the uses of the technology to secure communications have been incredibly stupid. First was "copy protection" which evolved into Digital Rights Management, very accurately and righteously skewered as Digital Restrictions Management. Most recently has been Non-Fungible Tokens, an utterly backwards and idiotic use of the technology behind cryptocurrencies, to turn the abundant into the scarce. NFTs are one of those scams that enjoys considerable success because it looks genteel. Maybe, had copyright thinking not bamboozled the majority of the public, people would not have fallen for the NFT scam. At least, some if only a few who did fall for it would not have, had they been better trained to spot and avoid ownership thinking.
A real example of this warped thinking in current times is the collectible card game genre. The first of these was perhaps Magic the Gathering (MtG). Just try to use copies of Magic cards in a game, and see what kind of reaction it provokes: anger and hostility, and accusations of cheating. Some players will demand that you show them that you possess originals. Why should they care? They want their holdings to be of value, and if they allow the use of copies, that destroys the value. These players actively work to uphold the chains that the makers of MtG, Wizards of the Coast, have suckered them into wearing! Of course, the whole game could be digitized, and has been computerized, no need for print.
Another example is the furor over former President Trump's retention of sensitive documents. The reporting takes for granted that we are talking about print. And so there is this demand that these printed documents be returned. The implication contained in that demand is that if the papers were returned, Trump would no longer have the info on them. However, he could easily have copies. He has had these papers in his possession for more than a year, plenty of time to have made many copies. Do the reporters not appreciate how easy copying is? Didn't occur to them? Likely it did, but they have wilfully blinded themselves to it, or are refusing to acknowledge it in their reporting. The Xerox copier has existed for over 50 years now, time enough for people to have grown accustomed to the possibilities. Are people so deeply indoctrinated with copyright thinking and the limitations of print media that they could credibly think paper is what's important here? That the info and the papers that contain that info are one and the same?
Reporters believe their self-interest is in play, and maybe this is them making much out of a trivial side issue, to bolster the public's belief in the value of writings, and therefore the value of their work and themselves. It's subtle. The supposed high value of paper is a side issue, which they are working into the reporting on the main issue, that Trump is keeping information that he shouldn't have. Certainly, the reporting on anything that touches upon copyright has very often been highly biased. In the 1970s, it was the "Pentagon Papers", not the "Pentagon docs". Possibly the alliteration alone is why that name, but "Paper" in the name sure fits this unsaid agenda. Nearly every night, PBS NewsHour has debates in which they rustle up experts who hold opposing points of view. One of these circa 2007, was on copyright. The two "sides" were strong copyright vs even stronger copyright. There was no expert present to advocate for the abolishment of copyright. Disappointing that even PBS stoops to the promotion of this propaganda that copyright is beyond question a good thing.
Copyright and patent law, far from encouraging more science, hinders the collaboration and interchange of ideas so important to the advancement of science. Scientists are beginning to fight back against academic publishers with movements such as Plan S. Currently, our civilization is facing some big problems: Climate Change. Overpopulation. Nuclear weapons. It would indeed be a tremendous tragedy if we had the capacity to discover and work our way out of these problems but failed to do so because we were fighting over the ownership of ideas, and we didn't come to our senses in time, dooming our civilization to collapse. Perhaps an even worse way to stumble into this doom is that copyright and ownership thinking so blinds us that we don't even think to share info that is readily shared.
(Matrix)
(Mastodon)
