Intelligence as capital

The debate between copyright and copyleft gets more absurd every day. In the eagerness to defend us from evil copyright, its mirror image has been created and promoted. In the end all polarization only creates more problems. That urge toward dualism in man, which we removed from our transcendent beliefs only to leave it in our mundane ones, leads us into these eternal struggles between good and evil.

Google alerts always surprises me with interesting articles, and this time I ran into this one, which I’ll reproduce here (I don’t think its author will mind). The original was found at this address: http://www.acam.es/noticias_detalle.php?id=1397.

Daniel Vicente’s piece is harsh and provocative, but illuminating for those of us who have our suspicions about copyleft, and who often feel lost amid so much verbiage.

So I leave you with Daniel Vicente’s article, Lone rangers of copyleft, engine drivers of morality

Lone rangers of copyleft, engine drivers of morality

I ended up going to the Copyfight seminar, in case Nacho and his troupe of illusionists could redeem me. Maybe tomorrow they’ll manage it, those yuppies. The great showgirl, added to the bill at the last minute, walked right past me and left shouting “the machine is unstoppable!”. Shortly before, another guru, Cervera, had said that software is a moral question. So is the siesta. Vagueness as big as your fist.

Even so, I dutifully and respectfully took some notes, which is supposedly what seminars are for, so that they can germinate. Even though I felt like an alien, unable to empathize despite my good will. In all there were some 40-50 people, counting the four speakers, among whom was a good-looking airhead with a clumsy tongue. There was a funny moment when the speaker acting as master of ceremonies, one José Luis, referred to the girl as someone who writes “a blog that needs no introduction”. Yet the audience members who mentioned her several times “in absentia” did so with expressions as unflattering as “that girl from before”. Which tells me a lot about the scant grasp of reality, and of their own prospects, that these deluded people have.

The subject of the debate requires some familiarity with the issues and the terminology. Its main lines: intellectual property and the decline of the current copyright model, and the great paradoxes it leads to after the technological revolution of the Internet (the unstoppable machine). Et alia.

Utopian revolutionaries, staunch liberals

The first thing that makes me suspicious about this commotion, and that should have set off alarms everywhere, is that the supposed utopian revolutionaries and the staunchest free-market liberals agree on almost every single point. I toss out several ideas:

1. When these quarters say that intellectual property is free, they are in fact subjugating it to the material property of third parties who are able to acquire it, reproduce it and even manipulate it without paying at the register. Freedom here has only the liberal sense of freedom of circulation, understood as an imperative as opposed to freedom of disposal. The luxury goods industry (and culture is one of them, possibly the most lucrative) then serves the purpose of keeping property from stagnating in the dead calm of savings and speculation.

2. Until now nobody had ever ordered: Buy or we expropriate you! But today you already begin to hear: Give it away or we expropriate you! At the same time the web of incentives takes shape, as virtual as the network that spawned them, meant to disguise the underlying command and make it friendly. That kind of giving away is selling at a loss, a risk with no return. It is the counterpart of the consumer’s blind impulse: blind production, now without profit, production for production’s sake that keeps the monster alive. Escolar’s unstoppable machine.

3. Deep disagreements aside, I already see cracks in the very presentation of the matter as far as its strategic side goes. Because if it is claimed that one is not against copyright, but against its suffocating exclusivity as opposed to the more open copyleft, adjustable and contractual in nature, which would be its simultaneous alternative, why is piracy justified with alibis like the right to culture, that is, the right to consume it but not to produce it with any guarantee of a return?

4. No right is unlimited. So if even copyright has time limits so as not to ruin social use, even if they are clearly insufficient, shouldn’t the so-called right to culture, read: to its free and universal distribution, have them too? Then I ask myself: Are copyleft licenses revocable? That is, can I reacquire the rights I gave up? If they are not, the system is no less draconian than copyright is today, except for the detail that the person once vilely swindled is now called a generous soul. And if they were, which is not the case, wouldn’t it have to be considered a copyright for the poor, advisable for the interval needed until better fortune arrives? What changes, and who are they trying to fool?

5. Against the make-believe socialism practiced by the anarchoid copyleftists and applauded by the liberals, I object: All private property is a small monopoly and is always, by definition, antisocial. Because if I can only do what others let me do, I am not being granted a right; what is being recorded here and now is a state of affairs that may change tomorrow regardless of what I want or agree to. To maintain that ideas cannot be private property when private property itself, the concept of it, is an idea that enjoys a thousand protections is terrifyingly cynical. But I have seen it and I have heard it. With my own eyes, with my own ears. This very afternoon.

6. The conflict, consequently, is the following: The few create, the many reproduce. Can the latter impose their will on the former “de facto”, depriving them of all rights or reducing them to the symbolic just because they are in the minority? In other words: Can the right of reproduction override the right of creation? And the latter is not just the freedom to create, since it also includes the freedom to live off what is created, to invest time seriously so that a given work has competitive, worthy and lasting qualities.

The error of copyleft

7. In my opinion, copyleft starts from a basic error, which is to protect itself against other people’s hunger for profit, understood as direct exploitation, while leaving unguarded the flank of the indirect, negative exploitation that indefinite free use amounts to.

8. It is also argued that while copyright regulated scarcity when there was scarcity, now, in times of abundance and technological fat cows, what it wants is to use artificial restrictions to generate the shortages needed to maintain the privileges of those who live off rents. That is, there used to be a scarcity of means for spreading ideas and now there isn’t, because the reach of the Internet is potentially worldwide and immediate. But careful: that ideas can be transmitted with the greatest of ease does not mean the same is true when it comes to generating them. If ideas were not scarce at their genesis, if we reserve that quality only for material goods, not convertible into bytes, we are privileging the market position of those who hold the tangible resources to the detriment of those who, on the basis of their personal and intellectual competence, retain only expectations of a right. And all to shelter the consumer, “id est”, the businessman (and his contractual rod). Because there is no one without the other, Cervera dixit.

9. We agree that whatever is not tradition is plagiarism, but that is not the point. Whether what I write or compose is original or not is the least of it. It doesn’t have to be, and it is enough for it to be novel to some significant degree, to add usefulness with respect to what precedes it, to add value. Creation, by the way, is whatever is not natural, whatever has human ends and a particular embodiment in a language. But, I insist, that is not the point. What is at stake here is whether we regard intelligence as capital or as a service. To me it is capital, without a doubt. Capital is the set of goods whose nature it is to generate returns on a regular basis for whoever holds it in whole or in part; whereas a service normally generates them just once for whoever provides it; that is: for whoever parts with it or with its conditions of possibility (time, resources, etc.). But nobody parts with their intelligence. It is therefore, by nature, capital, but by convention of the strongest, that is, of those in a position to make it profitable, it is treated as a service, charged for with surplus value while the creator is kept in a precarious state.

10. Today it was said: “The culture industry doesn’t want to sell you its products, it wants to rent them to you”. I answer: the function of capital is neither to be sold nor to be rented, but to yield without being consumed. Note that when they sell us a product they are selling us only its material make, the part of it we consume, not its form or conception. The latter depends on intelligence, which is capital. And one cannot claim full disposal, or partial disposal either, over someone else’s capital that has not been transferred to us.

11. I also heard: “We need filters”, filters to sift the overabundance of information. And then: “We should pay those filters instead of persecuting them”. But, I say, aren’t those “filters” the very middlemen we wanted to do without in order to make the product cheaper? And now we have to pay them! You can glimpse the new bureaucracy, the new vested interests.

12. The only tolerable progress, from my point of view, would be to achieve the recognition of intelligence as capital through its binding redefinition in a law of the State. In which cases? When that intelligence, as creativity, constitutes an essential part of the final product sold, for example, in any artistic work or performance.

13. Finally, to make clear that I am not in favor of an expansive application of copyright. It is enough that whoever uses something I created once pays for it once, as long as he doesn’t profit from it on later occasions. Current copyright is abusive because it sets itself no limits and, naturally, ends in an absurdity. What am I saying! In two absurdities: copyright (this copyright) and copyleft.

In conclusion, I would like to comment on the following phrase, which has been brandished like a fetish and is nothing more than a truism: “Culture does not exist without a spectator”. I agree, but then comes the added drivel: “Culture is not one-sided”, as if to suggest that the spectator is also an artist in one and the same indissoluble process. This fallacy is answered like so: If we are all artists, there is no culture, since it has been agreed that for culture to occur a spectator is required. And if we are all spectators, obviously there isn’t any either, because there is nothing to see. Now then, if we are both things, it is a platitude to posit that culture needs the spectator, since it is impossible to escape him.

Copyfight, Elástico, mountebanks, longhairs, pinkos the lot of them. And me left empty-handed, but with my candles still lit, fleeing the discursive toxicity that hung in the air. Another bronze maxim: “culture is a verb, not a noun”. Verbose and insubstantial culture, I thought.”

Daniel Vicente is a lawyer.