Dansk version
Get rid of copyright

Once upon a time, ideas were the property of everyone.
Today, the struggle against copying in itself has become an
insult to the work of the creator


By Morten Skriver


I write to warn you against a dark and mechanical power that rules our societies. An almighty feelingless
force without face and name. Every day it increases its power. It offers us dreams that we do not need,
and services we have never asked for - but we cannot say no because this is the power that can manipulate
any part of our feelings and our mind. It changes everything into traded goods and makes us believe that
it is our own choice. It undermines all values and all meanings in a strife to reach its goal. It will grow at
any price and it needs the human being as a catalysator. For every day it changes us into more and more
passive consumers. We are caught in the mental death trap of copyright.

At the beginning it seemed as a good idea. Everybody recognised the first treaties that protected
intellectual property rights as progress, when the where ratified during the past two centuries. What could
be more logical than an author that got money for every copy of his book that the publisher sold. What
could be more just, that when an inventor received a fee when others earned money on his invention. The
protection of intellectual property rights could be seen as a necessary precondition for further cultural and
technological development. No one protested - and as time went by the protection of intellectual property -
trade marks, patents, copyright and so one - became so rooted in our societies that they are regarded as a
form of natural laws.
No one wonders how a human being can own the shape of a chair, the recipe on medicine or the
composition of tones in a love song. But once upon a time it was different. The oppression of the right to
copy freely has taken place during the past two centuries - at the same time when we have seen
industrialism, mass production and transnational companies. Before that time the world of ideas was the
world of everybody. Mozart made his music without caring about that anybody - in all future - could play
it for free and nobody patented the violin or the music paper.

As such the technological and cultural advancements of human beings, as we know it, is inseparably
connected with the free and unlimited right to copy. The old cultures were created by persistent copying
and imitation. In this way the most remarkable complex and wonderful cultural formations where created.
They understood intuitively that repetition, copying and reproduction is the foundation of life. Therefore it
is not hard to see that the limitation of the right to copy is not only an anti-nature-law - but an insult
against the very Creation.
We oversee the fact that everything in the Universe is given to us and that we are united by a cohesive
spirit in a collective room of consciousness.

The key to the problem is that the legislation protects objects without material substance. If you copy a
melody the composer to the melody does not loose anything at all - in contrast to the situation if you steal
his piano. There is a fundamental difference. When I hear a song it is in principle already mine. It exists
as an object in my head.
In this way copyright protects products done of the same matter that dreams are made of. They are purely
in the mind and totally volatile.

The anti-copyright laws have taken the market and the property rights from the world of physical products
into the world of the mind, and opened the collective mentally room for economic speculation in a way
that man have never seen before. In the beginning the consequences where minor and perhaps even
positive - but as the mass medias and the information technology have developed it is more and more clear
that this legislation contains an enormous force that will break down our cultures and our societies. We
have seen how the possibility of gaining economic control with copyrights of any form have created the
most comprehensive and powerful propaganda organisations the world have ever seen. We have seen
how fewer and fewer global media-companies dominate larger and larger spaces in the public and private
consciousness. We are occupied by companies that have the goal to conquer the human soul - and they
are difficult to rebel against.

The ban on free copying means that all communication is about money - not only the advertisements, but
also most of the literature, music and most films. The motive behind all types of cultural expressions is
alone to create economic wealth. The result is a self-sustaining commercial running amok, where the
marketing of trade marked goods is flowing together with the products of the entertainment industry, with
music, films and sport in a more and more intensified atmosphere of merchandise, logos and product
placement. It leaves us with consumption as the only fixed point in our lives.
Even more grotesque is the situation when it comes to medicine and genetically modified goods, where
the anti-copyright legislation really appears as a law of nature - but a law that is not even recognised by
nature. Monsanto may own the right to a specific genetically modified plant but the wild fellow plants do
not care and may incorporate the genes in themselves.

We are subject to a demonical power where the only motivation is a blind and furious desire after
economic growth and wealth. However, we have made the legislation ourselves - so we can free us from
its strangling impact. All we need to do is to get rid of these laws again. Think about the relief. We would
not be swamped by as many poisonous and superfluous products.
And the technological evolution would not stop.

Alexander Flemming did not even dream about patenting penicillin because he believed that such a
discovery must belong to mankind. Tim Beners-Lee did not patent the World Wide Web because he
recognised that the system would only be meaningful if it belonged to everybody. Microsoft has taken the
exact opposite position.
Without copyright the remote control of our desires and wishes would not longer be possible. Without the
remote control by the entertainment industry we would redisover unity of place and time and rediscover
local cultures.
The transnational companies would break down but most of the people who write music, poems and
books, who paint pictures and take photographs and have only marginal copyright revenues - they would
continue and we would get an enormous new demand after locally produced cultural expressions. We
would loose nothing, but win a more concrete and local presence of the organism.

We should be happy for private copying of any kin - because even the smallest act that undermines the
anti-copyright legislation will contribute to the most important and necessary cultural revolution in the
history of mankind: The liberation of the world of ideas.