Copyright Monopoly DisintegrationInevitable As It Only Takes A Single Country

[HTchead]

The emergence of experimental legally autonomous

startup zones in Honduras and other places is one of

the most exciting developments in a long time, and

forebodes the collapse of the copyright industrys

tyranny over culture and knowledge.

I believe in competition. I believe in experimentation to

see what works best and what can be predictably

repeated call it the scientific method applied to

society, if you like. This has been a problem

geopolitically, as the United States has guaranteed its

global rent-seeking by bullying other countries into so-

called free trade agreements that are, in the best kind

of newspeak, the exact opposite: they are agreements to

prevent free trade in favor of incumbent monopoly

holders.

But a monopoly only lasts as long as all involved

countries respect it. In particular, a monopoly that

touches the Internet one such as the copyright

monopoly requires the cooperation of every single

country connected to the Internet to live yet another

day. The first country to defect from this oppressive

monopoly construct will cause the floodgates of culture

and knowledge to open imagine The Pirate Bay

located in a country where it is declared 100% legal, and

where it is rightly illegal to harass its enormous library.

Three geopolitical zones stand to threaten the US

dominance on this rent-seeking and the monopolies we

know as the copyright and patent monopolies:

We have Europe, which has strength in its civil liberties

tradition and its sheer economic strength it is the

worlds largest economic power, and so, any monopoly

Europe doesnt like just ceases to exist for all intents

and purposes. Regrettably, European political leaders are

perennially starstruck by anything the United States

does, and wont be challenging them any time soon,

unless challenged in turn on the matter by something

like the Pirate Party. (When it happens anyway, like with

the ACTA defeat last year, it is due to citizen outrage

not because of any kind of political will.)

We have China, which has a different cultural and

idealistic tradition than Europe and the Americas Asia

works on a timescale of generations and centuries,

rather than one of weeks and months. There is patience

to a degree unheard of in the West. The Chinese have

economic clout comparable to the US and Europe, and

are anything but stupid. They are copying the

Intellectual Protectionism (IP) regimes of the United

States, seeing how they can benefit the Chinese once

China has taken the lead: protectionism works to

preserve incumbence, and the Chinese understand this

perfectly. So while the mechanisms may be preserved,

their initial purpose may be subverted to a new

geopolitical power than the one they were constructed

to maintain.

Lastly, there is Latin America, which holds no love for

the United States on any level after the interventionism

of the past 50 years. Economically, they have half the

GDP of the US or Europe, and so, they cant compete on

brute strength. However, they can compete with raw

competition of the framework, and this appears to be

one of the most exciting geopolitical developments in a

long time.

Yesterday, it became clear that legally autonomous

startup zones (plural) will be established in Honduras

and other locations, with Panama and Guatemala

watching the developments with great interest. A legally

autonomous zone is a small location that gets to write

its own experimental laws, in order to compete on a

small-scale with country-level laws to find out at a

laboratory scale if something works immensely better.

As many of these are planned in Latin America, and

Latin America is rightly and royally sick of the copyright

monopoly, Im hopeful that one, just one, of them will

ditch that monopoly concept in favor of real free trade

and actual ownership rights. On an international

network, it only takes one single country to declare the

copyright monopoly obsolete for the entire planet to lose

any and all copyright monopoly function. Now, weve

arrived at the point where it only takes a single

autonomous Internet-friendly startup zone to do so.

To illustrate, the book 1984 by George Orwell is still

under copyright monopoly in the United States and

Europe, but not in Australia, where it is published as

public domain. This is something that is thoroughly

illegal to distribute in Europe and the United States, but

you can access it from there just fine, because it is legal

to distribute in Australia, and Australia is connected to

this thing we know as the Internet.

Now, imagine if one country or one autonomous zone

desired to do this for all of humanitys knowledge and

culture, as part of free trade and free judicial

competition.

The future looks immensely bright, and there is no

copyright monopoly there at all. It only takes one single

jurisdiction to topple the entire oppressive construct worldwide