Piracy Free Write 2

8/8/2019 Piracy Free Write 2

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A. ZhangFREEWRITE THE QUESTION OF PIRACY

We are entering a glorious age of communications. It is an epoch where communication time is as

fast as the speed of light itself, and the problem of macroscopic distances is no more. The individuals

world is no longer limited to a few hundred people, but the universal world itself, and no less; nothing

proclaimed this more loudly than the World Wide Web, whose namesake proudly displays this fact. For

the first time in history, the human voice can be recorded and broadcasted to billions of people; it can be

played over and over again, as can a picture or a video. This is an age that shines with hope and greatness

- thanks to technology.

Yet it is not technology, but human stubbornness and conservative values that prevents this era of

human greatness from truly flourishing. Some of the greatest treasures of human achievement and culture

are locked away and labeled the Intellectual Property of imposing corporations. These treasures, among

them the songs of the English band The Beatles, or the Italian film The Godfather are not, as one would

righteously expect, the publics property, nor are they not even the artists property, but the property of

the sponsoring recording labels or film studios. This is an injustice to common sense as much as it is an

injustice to the 3000 years of human advancement and technology that have brought us here to this grand

era of communications.

However, years gone by, this folly of intellectual property did not exist. The first great collections

of intellectual progress came into existence around the 1 7th century; they were often located in

monasteries and contained thousands of volumes of musty leather-bound books filled with archaic

knowledge of science, God, history, and culture. These structures were known as libraries, and they

safeguarded knowledge that otherwise would have been lost in oral culture or the sands of time. It was not

long ago when a dynastys power and opulence was judged by the comprehensiveness of their royal

library.

There is no doubt to the greatness and absolute essentiality of libraries.Yet, as the age of the

digital and the computer rolled in, there were no new libraries created to adapt and take advantage of this


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new opportunity. No government came forth and established a vast library online in the World Wide Web

filled with humanitys greatest and immortal cultural achievements. No, this did not happen at all, but

quite the opposite. When brave individuals saw that the governments would not create the promised land

of libraries on the internets, they set forth and created their own. This, however, is not the conclusion to a

happy story.Anew word was formed in response to a new epoch. Unfortunately, this word was the vile

word intellectual property, and its proponents claimed that they could lay claim to a certain sequence of

events shown in a video, an idea, a spoken phrase itself.

The coining of this term, intellectual property, is absurd. Prior to 1970, one would think that

intellectual property was something of a dystopian future, something like Orwells 1984, where ideas and

ones own mind can be owned. For truly, are not videos, pictures, and music ideas creations of the mind?

It is audacious and vile to any sane person that a board of investors should be able to lay claim to the

treasures of the mind, and it can safely lay claim to the title of the most outrageous acts of greed in the

20th and 21st centuries.

Perhaps the most appalling to lovers of liberty and freedom was that the governments of the

world conceded and put this term into legislation. It made it illegal to store an idea, a spoken phrase, and

a video on ones computer without invoking the wrath of the business, and therefore, their slaves, the

government. No longer were the libraries on the internet treasured, instead they were branded cesspools

of piracy.

The word piracy is outrageous and a misnomer in itself; it brings up images of the great 18th

century swashbucklers of the sea who swore, stole, and killed. But internet piracy is far from this image

that the public has branded it. Piracy involves no stealing whatsoever; one cannot steal an idea or a digital

entity. It is not as if by downloading an artists song, the singer would wake up the next morning without a

voice; the librarians and legislators of the past clearly knew this when they created the libraries if they

allowed people to share books, the authors would still continue writing.And that is what piracy is, at its

core. It is the sharing of ideas and thoughts. There is no stealing, and there is no animosity that is, if it

were not for the filth of greed, which has marred capitalistic America. There is no question that morally,

the pirates are just and the corporations are the evil.


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It is not the assuaging of a pirates soul when I say that piracy is a faceless crime, if it is a crime.

For that is wholly true, as the videos, movies, and pictures that we share belong to faceless corporations.

It is a nave dream to believe that ones work is his own, but this is not so in the entertainment industry

these works of art and culture, these public treasures, do not belong to the artists but they belong to the

recording labels, the film produces that had no hand in its creation. These cultural landmarks have been

ripped from the people and placed into the hands of businesses that have no right claiming it.

With that said, piracy is a human right. It is guaranteed by the First Amendment, which states the

freedom of speech and thought; no frills or exceptions.Certainly, this claiming of ideas and thoughts to be

illegal without purchase is certainly an egregious violation of natural human rights. It is the hypocrisy of

the government to allow the establishment of one form of sharing, the public libraries, and forbid another,

internet sharing, or piracy. Piracy is a right of the people that should be vigorously exercised in contempt

of this government failure in the face of corporate lobbyists. We, the people, must show the world that we

are people with inviolable human rights, and we must display our resistance and break free of the chains

that hold us as sheep.

I propose an abolishment and throwing off of the chains of intellectual property, or at least

loosening them. Let the rights and the wills of the people be restored to the people. Let the intellectual

treasures and genius of the past to be relinquished to the people, as they should be.Although the piracy

movement is underground and illegal, so were the abolitionist movements in the American South and the

human rights movements in Soviet Russia.And one day, perhaps, these chains will be thrown off and this

period of digital globalization shall come to true fruition. The piracy movement will prevail, as liberty

always has!

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Piracy Free Write 2