| Pit Schultz on Sun, 15 Mar 1998 12:06:01 +0100 (MET) |
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| <nettime> Roberto Verzola: Cyberlords |
[ The following is a must-read for all political net.economists hence it
probably looks like old school class analysis. As a materialist (e.g.
have-nots) counterpart of the 'econonmy of attention' it speaks out a
social critique of 'netizenship' and points at an global microeconomic
reality which has been quite unpopular in the enthusiastic times of
egalitarian cyberspace. In times of the financial crisis in Asia it makes
special sense questioning the expandibility of the idea of intellectual
property. This might end up in quite effective redistribution practises
like 'compulsory licensing' - think of China buying one single state
licence of Microsoft Windows for all Chineses. In other words this
manifesto from the periphery of the nets encourages dispute of the
economic foundations of the fancy term of 'info wars'. It adds context to
the recent criminalisation of fair use, brought trough congress by
lobbyists of the US software industry, based on some doubtful calculations
of a world wide loss of $11 billion in 1996 through software piracy.
http://www.bsa.org/piracy/96TABLES.HTM or http://www.dfc.org /p]
Cyberlords: The Rentier Class of the Information Sector
by Roberto Verzola
[ Roberto Verzola ([email protected]) is the coordinator of
Interdoc, a loose international network of non-government
organizations (NGOs) which is tracking the impact of the emerging
global information economy on developing countries and on social
movements. He is also the secretary-general of the Philippine Greens,
a political formation dedicated towards building self-sufficient
communities guided by the principles of ecology, social justice and
self-determination. He makes a living operating an electronic mail
service for NGOs, and is an electrical engineer by training
([email protected]) ]
The information sector of an economy is that sector whose products
consist principally of information goods.
Information goods are non-material goods.[1] They are most easily
distinguished by the fact that they can be stored in various media
and when stored in electronic media, their cost of reproduction
becomes negligibly low. Some examples of information goods include
software, music, video, databases, books, machine designs, genetic
information, and other copyrighted or patented goods.
When the information sector of an economy becomes more dominant
than either its industrial or ecology sector, then that economy
has become an information economy.[2] A good example of such an
economy is the U.S. economy.
Information: low reproduction cost
The basic production process in the information sector involves
the use of mental workers or intellectuals to produce information
goods. They are often aided in this process by additional
information processing tools, at the heart of which is usually a
computer. Once the first copy is created, an information product
can then be transformed for storage on various media. The most
flexible form of storage is electronic media. Once stored in this
form, the product becomes very easy to reproduce at very little
cost. If the information is stored in digital format, then perfect
reproductions of the original can be made over unlimited
generations of copies.
It is the recent electronic and digital revolution which has made
possible the emerging dominance of the information sector in some
countries.
The ease with which information, especially in its electronic
format, can now be reproduced leads to the basic conflict within
the information sector. On the one hand, information users tend to
share copies of information products freely. On the other hand,
information producers tend to hinder the free exchange of
information, so that they can maintain the extremely high profit
margins possible from the negligibly low reproduction costs.
The extra-high margins of a successful information-based company
are best seen in Microsoft, which grew to a billion-dollar firm
within a decade after it released its first software product. This
is a feat which probably has no equal among industrial firms.
The high profit margins among information firms likewise draw
finance capital from industrial and agricultural sectors. The
transformation of the U.S. from an industrial to an information
economy reflects this movement of investment capital towards the
information sector, confirming the observation that investment
capital tends to flow towards business prospects with the highest
rates of return.
Monopolistic information economies
The U.S. information economy is a monopolistic information
economy, because the propertied classes of the dominant
information sector assert their control over information through
monopolistic mechanisms called intellectual property rights (IPR).
The main forms of IPR are patents and copyrights, both of which
are statutory monopolies, i.e., monopolies acquired by virtue of
government statutes. These State-granted monopolies cover the
exclusive rights to use, manufacture, copy, modify, and sell the
product. Recently, under the GATT/WTO, these rights have been
expanded further to include the exclusive right to rent and to
import the products.
These statutory monopolies, which are gradually being strengthened
and extended as the political and economic power of the propertied
classes of the information sector grows, are in direct conflict
with the information freedoms sought by the vast majority of
information users. These freedoms include the freedoms to use, to
share with others, and to modify information. Information
monopolies are also in conflict with the basic nature of
information itself as a public good.
In the future, non-monopolistic information economies may emerge,
which will remunerate intellectual activity through means other
than monopolistic mechanisms such as patents, copyrights, and
other IPR. In such an economy, the nature of intellectual rewards
will be in much better harmony with the nature of information
itself.[3] This analysis covers monopolistic information
economies. For convenience, the shorter term 'information
economies' will be used for the rest of this article to refer to
monopolistic information economies.
Classes in the information sector
Just like the ecology and industrial sectors, the information
sector gives rise to various economic classes based on the
individuals' position in the production, distribution and use of
information. An analysis of these classes will give us useful
insights about the underlying economic interests and typical
attitudes of various social groups in the sector.[4] The following
major classes can be identified:
Cyberlords. The cyberlords are the propertied class of the
information sector. They control either a body of information, or
the material infrastructure for creating, distributing or using
information. Cyberlords are a rent-seeking capitalist class.[5]
The first category of cyberlords are the IPR holders, who have
staked their monopoly rights over a specific body of information,
and who earn their income by charging royalties, license fees, or
other forms of rent from those who want to use this body of
information. Cyberlords include the owners of software companies,
database companies, audio, video and film companies, genetic
engineering firms, pharmaceutical and seed firms, and similar
companies who earn most of their income from IPR rents.
The second category of cyberlords are the infrastructure owners.
They own or control the industrial infrastructure for creating,
reproducing, distributing, or using information. They earn their
income by charging rents for the use of these infrastructures.
This category includes the owners of communications lines and
equipment, radio and TV stations, Internet service providers,
theater distributors and owners, cable TV operators, and other
firms through which information controlled by the first category
is reproduced, distributed, or used. Strictly speaking, these
infrastructure owners are an industrial rather than an information
class, but are doubly-classed as cyberlords because they are a
rent-seeking class who play a key role in the distribution of
information.
However, these industrial cyberlords may not share the same rabid
advocacy for IPRs that characterize the IPR-holding cyberlords,
especially when IPRs impede the wider use of the infrastructure
from which they derive their own income. This category is
generally in alliance with the first; nonetheless, the distinction
between them may become important occasionally, in the struggle
against the cyberlords of the first type, who are the true
cyberlords of the information economy.[6]
We can also include in the cyberlord class those highly-paid
professionals who earn their living under the employ or in the
service of cyberlords. The best examples are the top-level
managers as well as the lawyers who serve cyberlords and who
derive their income mostly from payments by the cyberlords they
work for. Lawyers, in particular, are absolutely necessary for
copyrights and patents holders because these IPR instruments are
basically legal artifices which can only be implemented through
government action. These highly-paid hirelings acquire the class
status and the ideological outlook of the cyberlords they serve.
Information cyberlords can be classified into big cyberlords,
middle cyberlords and small cyberlords.
The big cyberlords earn most of their income from information
rents. The mark of the big cyberlord stratum is that it did not
create some or even most of the body of information protected by
its patent or copyrights. They were instead created by hired
staff, contracted out or bought from other companies. Big
cyberlords normally start out as a small or middle cyberlord. As
they acquire economic power, they find it more convenient to pay
others for existing information products than to create new ones
themselves from scratch. When they do so, they turn into a big
cyberlord. Big cyberlords often buy into or buy out smaller
cyberlords not only to acquire new products but also to suppress
potential or actual competition. The best example of a big
cyberlord is William Gates, the principal owner of Microsoft and
the richest person in the world.
Big cyberlords all over the world are scouring the public domain
for information products that they can privatize and monopolize
through IPRs. Some have already acquired the exclusive electronic
reproduction rights to the paintings and other cultural artifacts
in the world's best museums. Others are engaged in a race to
patent genetic information of all kinds, including parts of the
human genome. Still others are turning their eye on the vast
information outputs of governments, which are normally in the
public domain.
Like Microsoft, most corporations owned by big cyberlords operate
globally. These firms comprise a big portion of the hidden forces
driving the process of globalization. Because the social nature of
information keeps asserting itself and information products tend
to spread themselves globally as soon as they are released,
cyberlords need a global legal infrastructure for imposing their
information monopolies and extracting monopoly rents. Thus, they
push the globalization process incessantly to ensure that every
country, every nook and corner of the globe, is within the reach
of their mechanisms for extracting monopoly rents.[7]
The biggest information cyberlords are based mostly in the U.S.,
Europe, and, to a lesser extent, Japan. In these countries, the
highly-advanced industrial infrastructure, together with extremist
concepts of private property, have given their cyberlord class a
huge, commanding lead over cyberlords elsewhere.[8] Their presence
is felt globally, and because they tend to suppress local efforts
to acquire new technologies at the least cost, big cyberlords are
a major hindrance to the development efforts of most national
economies.
Like the big cyberlords, middle cyberlords earn most of their
income from information rents. However, the incomes of middle
cyberlords come principally from the rent income generated by the
body of information much of which they created themselves.
Successful authors, inventors, and songwriters, who live off the
royalties from their works, belong to this category.
Small cyberlords earn substantial income from information rents,
but their income is not sufficient to support themselves and their
family, so they have to supplement it with incomes from other
sources. Most local information cyberlords belong to this
category.
This stratum keeps trying to graduate to the middle cyberlord
status, because they have internalized the ideology of the
cyberlord class. This ideology arises from the basic dream of the
cyberlord class, which can be summed up as follows: "create a good
idea or 'expression of an idea', stake a monopoly claim over it
through a patent or a copyright, and then live off the rents for
the rest of your life." Small cyberlords are in perpetual pursuit
of this dream, and a few may manage to become middle cyberlords.
Compradors. They are the merchant capitalists of the information
sector. They earn their living by selling for profit patented or
copyrighted products. They very often come from the merchant
classes of the industrial and ecology sectors, and may retain
their businesses in these sectors. These merchant classes are
attracted to move into the information sector because the
extremely high profit margins enjoyed by successful cyberlords
gives resellers better margins too.
This class can be roughly divided into two. Monopolistic
compradors make money by paying cyberlords for the right to sell
patented or copyrighted goods. Thus, they derive their income from
information rents and are therefore supportive of cyberlord
interests.
Non-monopolistic compradors make money by reproducing and selling
patented or copyrighted material, without paying the monopoly
rents claimed by cyberlords. In a way, they help break the
information monopolies imposed by cyberlords.
Because of the political clout of cyberlords, the non-monopolistic
compradors are often harassed and suppressed, to discourage them
from their trade and to turn them into monopolistic compradors.
They are frequently the targets of surveillance, legal suits,
raids, and other forms of government and cyberlord harassment.
Yet, there is no lack of non-monopolistic compradors who trade in
copyrighted and patented materials, making these materials more
accessible to the public which would otherwise be unable to afford
them. Even under the worst forms of authoritarian rule,
non-monopolistic compradors will continue to ply their trade by
forming an underground network to break the cyberlord monopolies.
These compradors can be allies of information users against the
cyberlord class. Many of them, however, eventually surrender to
the power of cyberlords, arrive at a profit-sharing arrangement
with them, and turn into monopolistic compradors.
Intellectuals. Intellectuals are the main creators of information
in the information sector. They earn their living through mental
labor, creating new and useful information. The intellectual class
may be further subdivided into three strata.
The upper stratum earns some income from information rents but
this is not substantial. Most of their earnings are from business
contracts for information work, rather than IPR rents. This
stratum will often defend IPRs because its members already derive
income from information rents and hope to get more income from
such rents in the future.
The upper stratum's rent income from IPR distinguishes it from the
middle stratum, which has no such rent income.
The middle stratum gets its income from business contracts for
information work. Some members of this stratum may retain their
fixed-wage jobs, although the bigger portion of their income
already comes from their contractual work. This can be common
especially among intellectuals in government.
This stratum earns no income from information rents, but members
of this stratum sometimes successfully negotiate to retain
ownership over their body of work, to prevent the other
contracting party from making commercial use of their work. This
represents an incipient cyberlord thinking that is strengthened or
suppressed depending on their success or failure in retaining full
ownership over their work in these negotiations and in extracting
rent income from their body of works. In the main, however, this
stratum does not closely identify with the interests of
monopolistic cyberlords.
The middle stratum differs from the lower stratum in that it is
profit-making rather than wage-earning, and that a member of this
stratum may have other intellectuals under its employ.
The lower stratum consists of the wage-earning intellectuals, who
earn most of their income from fixed-rate payments such as wages
and salaries. They may occasionally get additional remunerations
such as bonuses for especially useful intellectual work, or side
contracts from which they may earn considerable sums. But they
earn the bulk of their income as wage-earners.
Should their work result in patentable or copyrightable materials,
their hiring contracts normally specify that such materials become
the property of the company they work for. Because they are
usually in no position to negotiate when looking for a job, they
accept such contracts as a matter of course. The majority of
intellectuals belong to this stratum of the intellectual class.
Information users. Members of this group use information but are
not generally involved in the creation of information products.
Whatever information they generate are either automatically shared
with others, or kept confidential. The idea of staking a monopoly
on a body of information so that they can make money out of it is
quite alien to this group. Because they generally earn their
income from elsewhere, information users are actually not a single
class nor a monolithic group, but a cluster of classes in the
ecology, industrial and information sectors. In so far as they are
all information users, however, they actively seek the information
freedoms of using, sharing, and modifying information. Information
users are therefore the main force in the struggle to free
information from cyberlord monopolies.
The basic conflict
The key issue that separates classes in a monopolistic information
economy is the issue of IPR, which reflects their class roles in
the production, distribution and use of information. IPRs are a
highly monopolistic form of controlling information flow, and are
therefore totally incompatible with the nature of information as
well as the desire of information users to use, share and modify
information freely.
Cyberlords are very strong advocates for expanding these monopoly
rights, while information users want to limit these rights as much
as possible. In so far as IPR infringements impinge on their
profit margins, compradors will take the side of cyberlords. But
in so far as monopoly rents themselves impinge on their profit
margins, other compradors will oppose IPRs. Intellectuals may
dream of owning some body of information in the future, from which
they can themselves extract information rents, but in the main
realize that this cannot be their main source of income, and that
they themselves need access to many bodies of information which
are currently monopolized through patents or copyrights.
The key to the transformation of a monopolistic information
economy towards a non-monopolistic information economy is to
replace monopolistic IPRs with other means of rewarding
intellectual activity. This transformation will of course be
opposed to the very end by the cyberlord class, which furthermore
is politically and economically very strong. As the privatization
process subsumes under cyberlord monopolies more and more of what
is now public domain information, the public of information users
will acquire a higher level of political consciousness, and this
struggle will eventually express itself as the main conflict in a
monopolistic information economy. As such, it will increasingly
manifest itself in cultural, economic as well as political fronts.
A class strategy against monopolies
The class strategy that can defeat the powerful cyberlord class,
involves advancing a set of demands that will isolate the big
cyberlords and their closest comprador allies, neutralize or win
over the middle and small cyberlords, and to win over and mobilize
the entire intellectual class with special attention to its middle
and lower strata, to unite with the vast majority of information
users. This united front should also involve other classes and
social groups in the industrial and ecology sectors who are
themselves information users or whose thinking and orientation are
in conflict with some aspects of IPRs. The latter group include
indigenous peoples, farmers, women, and the religious sector.
Without such a united front, it will be extremely difficult to
defeat the information monopolies of the big cyberlords, and the
latter would be able to use their increasing economic and
political power to consolidate, codify and further expand their
statutory monopolies.
With a well-formulated set of demands, the powerful cyberlord
class can be politically isolated, and existing laws can be
restructured to liberalize access to monopolistically-owned
information. The long-term goal is to dismantle monopolistic forms
of information ownership and to replace them with non-monopolistic
forms which are more in harmony with the nature of information
itself. This will eventually enable users to enjoy the full
information freedoms that will unleash creativity not only among
the intellectuals but among information users themselves.
The formulation of such a comprehensive set of demands, which in
effect becomes the basis of political strategy and tactics in the
emerging class conflicts within the information sector, deserves a
separate piece. However, several demands can be identified now,
because they have emerged historically and must necessarily become
part of the overall set of demands against information monopolies.
Compulsory licensing. The most important demand for breaking the
information monopolies of cyberlords is the retention of
compulsory licensing and the expansion of its coverage.
Compulsory licensing works as follows: Somebody who wants to
use/commercialize patented or copyrighted material approaches NOT
the patent or copyright holder, but the government for a license
to do so. The government grants the license, whether the original
patent or copyright holder agrees or not, but compels the licensee
to pay the patent/copyright holder a royalty rate that is fixed by
the government (or by law). Many countries in the world have used
and continue to use compulsory licensing for important products
like pharmaceuticals and books.[9]
Compulsory licensing (also called mandatory licensing in some
countries) is a demand of many countries who want to access
technologies but cannot afford the price set by patent/copyright
holders. While this internationally-recognized mechanism was meant
for the benefit of poorer countries, even the U.S. and many
European countries use it.
Most small cyberlords, because they often have neither the capital
nor the production facilities to commercialize their creations
themselves, welcome compulsory licensing, although they will try
to negotiate for higher royalty rates. They welcome it because
compulsory licensing will ensure them of some income from their
creations. Compulsory licensing is the demand that can split the
cyberlord class and win over or neutralize the small cyberlords
and some of the middle cyberlords. The big cyberlords, who have
the capability to commercialize products themselves, are violently
opposed to the idea of compulsory licensing, because it is a
powerful threat to their monopoly over information. It is an
indication of the political power and influence of cyberlords that
they managed to thoroughly emasculate the concept of compulsory
licensing in the GATT/WTO agreement.
Non-monopolistic compradors welcome compulsory licensing because
it legalizes their anti-monopolistic trading activities,
protecting them from legal harassments, raids, and other attacks
initiated by big cyberlords.
No patenting of life forms. This demand emerged out of the popular
campaigns against genetic engineering and recombinant DNA
technologies. It has become a major global issue, as biotechnology
in general and genetic engineering in particular continue to take
that slippery slope leading corporations towards the direct
manipulation and commercialization of human genetic material. True
to their cyberlord nature, owners of biotech firms are racing
against each other in patenting DNA sequences, microorganisms,
plants, animal, human genetic matter and all other kinds of
biological material. Cyberlord representatives have already
managed to insert in the GATT/WTO agreement protection for patents
on microorganisms and microbiological processes.
This is a very powerful demand because biotech cyberlords impinge
on religious and moral issues as well as on indigenous community
knowledge. Genetic engineering also threatens to give rise to a
whole new class of harmful viruses, germs, microorganisms and
higher life forms which have no natural enemies. This demand can
unite a wide range of sectors against the cyberlord ideology.
Expanding the fair-use policy. This has been the historical
struggle waged by librarians, particularly of public libraries,
who see themselves as guardians of the world's storehouse of
knowledge. Most librarians want to see this storehouse of
knowledge freely accessible to the public, and they have fought
long battles and firmly held their ground on the issue of
"fair-use", which allows students and researchers access to
copyrighted or patented materials without paying IPR rents.
Recently, this ground has been suffering from slow erosion due to
the increasing political power of cyberlords. The expansion of the
fair-use policy can be a minor victory against the overwhelming
advances of cyberlords in various fronts to expand the scope and
coverage of their monopolies.
Support for non-monopolistic mechanisms. Various concepts in
software development and/or distribution have recently emerged.
Some, such as shareware, are less monopolistic than IPR. Others,
such as "copyleft" and the GNU General Public License (GPL), are
completely non-monopolistic.
Shareware works under various schemes, such as free trial periods,
free distribution, voluntary payments, etc. These concepts have in
effect abandoned the legal artifice of asserting one's exclusive
monopoly over copying one's work, in favor of granting users
limited rights to use, copy and distribute the material. While
shareware authors have shed considerably the monopolistic ideology
of cyberlords, they still balk at releasing their source code, and
therefore continue to keep their users captive and unable to
modify the software on their own.
The GNU GPL enables users to enjoy the fullest set of information
freedoms, including the freedom to use, the freedom to share with
others, and the freedom to modify information. The GPL shows how
current copyright concepts may be used in the transition away from
monopolistic arrangements, and points the way towards future
non-monopolistic software development.[10] Software as well as
books which fall under the GPL copyright may be used freely by
anybody who may find them useful. They may also be shared freely
with others. Finally, the software may be freely modified because
the source code is included in the distribution.
Software source code is the equivalent of architectural plans in
case of buildings, schematic diagrams in case of electronic
equipment, or technical drawings in case of machinery. To improve
software, a building, electronic equipment, or machinery, you must
have these original plans to do the modifications properly.
Otherwise, the original plans must be reconstructed before major
modifications can proceed.
The extremes which cyberlords resort to, in order to strengthen
their monopolies, can be seen from their persistent and
increasingly successful demand that countries outlaw the
decompilation of software.[11] Decompilation is the reconstruction
of software source code. It is equivalent to reconstructing
architectural plans, schematic diagrams, or technical drawings,
because the original designers refused to release them to the
user. By prohibiting the reconstruction of these original plans,
cyberlords make it extremely difficult if not impossible for users
to independently modify copyrighted or patented materials, denying
users their freedom to modify the materials and enabling
cyberlords to extract even more monopoly rents from users.
General wage increases. In a way, salaries and wages are a
specific form of non-monopolistic remuneration for intellectual
activity. This is the most relevant demand for the big majority of
intellectuals, who will stay on the side of information users as
long as they are assured of some reasonable remuneration for their
work as information creators. In this respect, the big majority of
intellectuals can unite with other wage-earning classes to raise
common demands.
The list above is not complete. A comprehensive set of demands for
transforming monopolistic information economies can only emerge
when the various classes ranged against the cyberlords acquire an
economic and political consciousness that will make clear-cut
where their interests lie.[12]
Towards a new social order
These demands in the information sector must also be linked with
the demands of other change-oriented classes and groups in the
ecology and industrial sectors, such as farmers, fisherfolk,
workers, women and indigenous peoples. The key is to bring
together the widest range of people, whose unity and joint action
can bring about a political structure for evolving new forms of
rewarding intellectual activity. Such forms will lead in the
future to a non-monopolistic information sector. The rethinking of
property concepts that this will bring about will then reinforce
demands for restructuring the industrial and agriculture sectors
as well.
From such a confluence of social movements, enough social forces
for change can emerge to bring forth a society where knowledge and
culture are freely shared, where industrial machinery are
carefully designed for genuine human and community needs, and
where agriculture is an ecological and not an industrial
undertaking.
*****
Notes:
1. Information goods. Information, in the most general sense, is
anything that can be represented and stored as a digital series of
bits (ie, one's and zero's). In the information sciences,
information is defined in terms of resolving uncertainty about a
set of possible outcomes. The basic unit of information is the
bit, which resolves the uncertainty between two equally-possible
outcomes. To acquire information means to reduce or to completely
resolve the uncertainty. This clearly makes information a
non-material entity. For a more detailed discussion of information
products, please see my earlier article "Towards A Political
Economy of Information"
2. Information, industrial, and ecology sectors. I am referring
here to the sectors of the economy that engage in the production
of goods. I use the ecology sector to cover both agriculture and
hunting/gathering. Fishing, for example, is a hunting/gathering
activity, which is part of the ecology sector. A more complete set
of economic sectors would include the personal and the financial
services sectors (both which involve services more than goods).
For a more detailed discussion of these three sectors of
production, please see my earlier article "Redefining Our Vision
For The Future."
3. Non-monopolistic forms of remuneration. These include salaries
and wages, bonuses, prizes, awards, grants and other means of
remunerating intellectual activity which don't give intellectuals
the exclusive right to use or copy their creation.
4. Class analysis. It is sometimes considered unfair to lump
individual cyberlords into a single class, as if these people had
no conscience, moral values, or social ethics. It is true that
individual cyberlords, perhaps due to personal belief, religion,
or political inclination, may act against their own economic
interests. If they do so consistently, however, they probably will
not remain a cyberlord for long. Also, most of the big and middle
cyberlords run their business affairs through corporations.
Obviously, corporations have neither heart, conscience nor soul.
These are invariably run by managers whose pay and job security
depend on how well they maximize corporate profits. Thus, it
remains valid to look at the economic interests of classes, to
acquire some useful insights into their most probable economic,
political and social behavior.
5. Cyberlord. The word is constructed from "cyberspace" and
"landlord". The information space created by all the storage and
transmission media connected to the Internet is often called
cyberspace. Landlords, ie, landowners who charge rent for the use
of their land, are the classical example of a rent-seeking class.
6. Conflict of interest between the industrial and the information
cyberlord. For instance, a lot of commercial software are freely
exchanged among online users. Online providers like Compuserve or
America Online either turn a blind eye on these activities or
claim that they are impossible to police. Since most online
providers charge their subscribers per minute of usage, it is also
obvious that the more such exchanges occur, the more money they
make.
7. Globalization. The Internet, the international media, the
continuing pressure on countries to open up their economies to
global corporations, and the GATT/WTO are examples of mechanisms
that facilitate the globalization process.
8. Extremist private property concepts. A good example is the
claim of scientists that if they discover a particular human DNA
sequence, they can stake an ownership claim over this sequence
through a patent. Such a claim means that they will have the
exclusive right to use, copy, commercial, rent, import, etc. such
DNA sequence. Another example is the claim of scientists, who
splice a strand of DNA from one life form to another, that they
have created a new life form, and thus can patent it. Such a
patent represents a monopoly ownership claim not only on the
particular result of such a genetic experiment, but on all
subsequent life deriving from it, such as its offsprings and
descendants. Still another example is the ownership by some
companies of the exclusive electronic reproduction rights to some
of the world's most famous art works. Such ownership claim means
that they, alone, can reproduce electronically these art works.
9. In the Philippines, we have a Book Reprinting Law, which
authorizes local publishers to reprint foreign textbooks for the
use of the local educational system. Philippine law also provides
for compulsory licensing by local companies of pharmaceutical
products. Both laws are currently under heavy attack by cyberlord
lobbyists. Moves are now afoot to repeal them in order to align
Philippine laws with the GATT/WTO agreement.
10. GNU GPL. GNU is a project of the Free Software Foundation
(FSF), under the leadership of Richard Stallman. Its General
Public License (GPL) was carefully crafted to make use of existing
copyright concepts to pave the way for a non-monopolistic form of
copyright. The increasing popularity among Unix users of the Linux
kernel by Linus Torvalds, the GNU operating system of the FSF, and
free alternatives to MS-DOS and Windows -- all distributed under
the GPL -- shows the way for future non-monopolistic software
development. Please check the Web page
http://www.gnu.ai.mit.edu/philosophy/categories.html for details
about the GNU GPL.
11. Decompilation. The Business Software Alliance (BSA), which
represents the interests of cyberlords worldwide, has launched an
aggressive lobby within the Philippine legislature to ban
decompilation.
12. An effort to formulate the response of social movements to the
emerging information economy was made by Interdoc, an
international network of non-government organizations, in a
workshop last November 1996 in Silang, Cavite, Philippines. One
formulation which emerged from the workshop is as follows: "Build,
improve and expand the body of public domain information
infrastructures, tools and content."
July 27, 1997
[
sources:
http://www.tao.ca/earth/lk97/archive/0174.html
http://www.corpwatch.org/trac/internet/corpspeech/cyberlords.html
other articles by the same author:
"It's only piracy if you are poor"
http://www.news.com/Perspectives/Soapbox/rv11_18_96a.html
"Colonialism to Globalization, five centuries after Vasco da Gama"
http://x3.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=321398692.1&CONTEXT=889949462.576847881
"towards a political economy of information"
http://www.solinet.org/THIRDWORLD/obet1.htm
"Labour and the Internet"
http://www.corpwatch.org/trac/internet/globalabor/seminar.html
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