The discussion around people’s banished right to unlock their own cellphones has been framed as an unexpected and unanticipated effect of the copyright monopoly. To the contrary, it shows the heart of the monopoly’s philosophy: killing ownership as a concept.

There is a weak copyright monopoly reform bill happening in the United States Congress at the moment.

This bill is not about the copyright monopoly at all, and at the same time, about everything that the monopoly actually is. It is the Unlocking Technology Act of 2013.

The bill, which was presented to the U.S. Congress three days ago, makes it legal to unlock devices such as phones that you own, and do what you like with them. Let’s take that again, because it is jaw-dropping: the bill reforms the copyright monopoly to make it legal to tinker with objects that you own. It has nothing to do with BitTorrent, MKVs, streaming, or what we normally associate with the activity of sharing culture outside of the copyright monopoly distributions.

The bill is about your ability to take your phone to a different wireless operator. Your own phone, that you bought and paid for. Your legal ability to bring your own property wherever you like, without breaching criminal law and risking jail. How on Odin’s green Earth did this come to have to do with the copyright monopoly?

Few contemporary discussions put the spotlight like this one on how the copyright monopoly is not about rewarding artists, but is a political war on property – on our ability to own the things we paid for. (I won’t say “bought”, as that implies we actually own them.) The copyright monopoly is dividing the population into a corporate class who gets to control what objects may be used for what purpose, and a subservient consumer class that don’t get to buy or own anything – they just get to think they own things that can only be used in a predefined way, for a steep, monopolized, fixed price, or risk having the police sent after them.

This is not a free market. This is the opposite of a free market. The copyright monopoly stands in opposition to a free market, and in opposite to property as a concept.

Some people insist on deceptively calling the copyright monopoly “property”, which is categorical nonsense every bit of the way. Two people can’t both own an object in full; this is part of the very definition of property. Obviously, the idea that you could own the jacket you’re wearing while I could own its color is both asinine and nonsensical, just like the idea that you can own a CD but I can own the laser-etched pattern of grooves carved into it.

Yet, the copyright monopoly maximalists insist on calling their monopoly “property” in continued and deliberate deception. When you press them on how this goes counter to every known definition of property, they usually fall back to a stupid statement along the lines of “property is whatever we define it to be”, which avoids basic statements of fact on the nature of property, and goes to reveal the true intent – redefining property to something that creates two new classes in society: the corporate masters who own property, and the citizen serfs who get to use things they pay for in ways that are strictly defined and constrained.

To illustrate the absurdity of this, imagine a carpenter that had the legal right to send you to jail if you used his chairs in ways he disapproved of, after your having bought those chairs.

This is what the copyright monopoly was always about. The phone-unlocking issue is not an oddity or an outlier; it lies at the very heart of the monopoly’s philosophy. The copyright monopoly was always about control over other people’s property, and always about preventing creativity and innovation that could threaten the incumbents.

The copyright monopoly hurts creativity, hurts our economy, hurts our entrepreneurs – and most importantly, it is an affront to the most foundational concepts in society, such as the right to tinker with your own property. It needs to be questioned, dismantled, and abolished.

As a general rule we tend to cover digital piracy issues here on TorrentFreak, but every now and again a copyright-related story appears in the physical realm that makes us sit up and listen.

The news comes from the United States and involves Patrick Lashun King, a man who was involved in the selling of counterfeit movies and music.

According to police, King was arrested at his business in Hazlehurst after an undercover reporter from the Attorney General’s Intellectual Property Theft Task Force managed to buy a total of five copied movies and one music CD from the 37-year-old.

Subsequent searches at King’s work and home addresses turned up computer equipment for copying and a total of 10,500 pirated discs. Police also confiscated weapons although they do not reveal whether they were legally held or not.

The case, which was investigated by the Attorney General’s office and Hazlehurst Police Department, eventually saw King plead guilty to the sale of the five DVDs and one CD. But despite his apparent cooperation, King received the harshest sentence for a copyright infringement offense that we’ve ever seen.

Judge Lamar Pickard in Copiah County Circuit Court ordered King to serve a total of 15 years in jail to be followed by three years supervised release.

“This sentencing demonstrates that theft of intellectual property is treated as a serious crime in Mississippi and highlights the fact that the individuals engaging in these activities are frequently serial criminals for whom IP theft is simply the most convenient and profitable way they could steal from others,” said Brad Buckles, Executive Vice President, Anti-Piracy, at the Recording Industry Association of America.

“We extend our thanks and appreciation to Attorney General Hood for his leadership in IP enforcement and to the dedicated law enforcement officers and prosecutors who worked on the case.”

At this point we should mention that 17 years ago King was sentenced to five years for assaulting a police officer and in 2003 he did serve a year under house arrest for CD piracy. Nevertheless, 15 years seems like a sentence one might associate with particularly serious violent crime, not the copying of digital media.

And when it comes to tough sentences, King is apparently not on his own. Two weeks ago another man, Antwun Sharell Jones, was sentenced to two years in a Mississippi jail for selling a single pirate movie.

Piracy may not technically be theft, but the signs are that judges in the United States believe it’s a worthy equivalent – and then some.

Source: RIAA Celebrates 15 Year Jail Sentence For Movie and Music Pirate

This is a great example of the difference between stealing from a fellow citizen and stealing from government or their biggest lobbyists (the RIAA, MPAA, etc)

You could molest a bunch of children and only get 30 years. You’d get half that for selling pirated media.

Politicians had been condescending for years over net liberties. They received instructions on just how evil the net and everything around it was from their civil servants, who in turn were fed the state of the world by lobbyists who were walking the state department halls like children in the house.

At the same time, the debate on net liberties raged on everywhere else. In Sweden, we had the Piratbyrån (Pirate Bureau), which had been very successful in providing a counterpoint to the corporate spew-outs since 2003. They were also the people initially starting The Pirate Bay, which has survived its parent – the Pirate Bureau was decommissioned a couple of years back.

When the summer of 2005 came around, the Swedish politicians railroaded through yet another harshening of the copyright monopoly where downloading was criminalized (not just uploading), in what was seen as an attempt to safeguard old distribution channels against indie artists, all hell broke loose. This was discussed over family dinners, over coffee at work, at universities, between friends. And yet, politicians appeared to not even notice this was important to people.

This was utterly infuriating. How could the politicians so thoroughly miss that this discussion was happening everywhere? They’re usually the first to do the flip-waffle-and-flop dance over any issue that the public starts even whispering about.

The answer was twofold: lobbyism is powerful, and that people of the public had talked about the politicians, but not to the politicians. Specifically, and crucially, nobody had talked to the politicians in a way that threatened their job over the issue.

The key to seeing the route ahead was to realize that the politicians weren’t necessarily evil, but just didn’t have the time and energy to learn a completely new perspective to them. You had to motivate them.

Threatening their job over not understanding the issue turned out to be a most effective motivator in this aspect – one that was needed in parallel with activism that allowed the politicians to learn about the issues quickly.

Techdirt also addresses exactly this in a recent article, as they describe how lobbyists win over the public only if the public leaves walkover, but if the public does choose to engage, how votes beat lobbying every single time.

So the end conclusion is this: activism is necessary, because it drives discussion and learning, but it does not drive policy: on its own, it is not sufficient. At the end of the day, politicians must risk losing votes in order to care.

That’s why running for office and starting to just nibble at those votes has a tremendous effect in changing the world very quickly. You don’t need to be a politician – you can be a civil liberties activist running for office. In fact, that’s often even better.

Preamble