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USA
11 april 2007
David Pena*

Pierre Joseph Proudhon, the great French anarchist, famously declared that “Property is Theft!” As if picking up where Proudhon left off, the authors of The Copy/South Dossier argue that an enormous crime is being committed against humankind: its intellectual legacy, for centuries held in common, is being stolen in the name of that baneful old concept of private property. It’s been happening ever since the first copyright laws were codified in the 18th century, in effect turning information, knowledge, music, and literary discourse into privatized commodities. The modern day perpetrators of this crime are transnational media corporations which privatize information and knowledge under the guise of “intellectual property” and its legal justification, the concept of “copyright,” in order to sell these works for a profit to whomever can pay. The whole sordid arrangement is enforced by the United States and other powerful, imperialist countries that force weaker, poorer countries in the "global South" to accept the Berne Convention and other copyright agreements as conditions for receiving the benefits of trade and aid. This enriches the big publishers, media conglomerates, software makers, and other information manufacturers based in the rich countries of the "global North" while forcing poor people in the impoverished countries of the South to pay—if they can pay at all—exorbitant prices for this privatized knowledge: the books, periodicals, software and other media they need to lift themselves out of ignorance and poverty.

The Copy/South Dossier does a commendable job of deconstructing the ideology of copyright. Proponents of copyright claim that it provides an incentive for creativity by allowing authors to claim ownership of their work and thereby reap the financial rewards of their labor; without this incentive, so we are told, no one would create anything. The Dossier fires back at this specious argument by pointing out the obvious but frequently overlooked fact that most creators don't even own the copyrights to their work; publishers require authors to transfer copyright as a condition of publication, so if you want your name in print, be prepared to surrender your rights. Besides, everyone knows that most creative people aren't in it for the money, which is made abundantly clear by the fact that most of them never make any. The Dossier shows up the "if-it-weren't-for-copyright-nobody-would-create-anything" argument as a smoke screen hiding the corporations' real worry: that if copyright laws are weakened, big business won't be able to make money off other people's creativity and humanity's need for knowledge.

The Dossier is the best work on the copyright controversy this reviewer has ever read, because it digs beneath establishment ideology and legalistic mumbo-jumbo to show us how the international copyright system developed, who copyright helps, who it hurts, and which international institutions work together to uphold it. This reviewer has just one bone to pick, but it's an important one. Copyright isn't just a problem with the economic relationship between the global South and the global North; it's a class issue pitting the propertied against the propertyless. Class exploitation does not line up along geographical boundaries. If you're not a big media corporation, then you are being exploited by the copyright system regardless of the hemisphere in which you happen to live. It's just that people in poorer countries feel this exploitation much more acutely than denizens
of richer countries.

True to their convictions, the Copy/South Research Group declares the Dossier unrestricted by copyright, and they will even mail you up to five free copies of the work.

* dpena@mdc.edu

First published as review in Counterpoise http://www.counterpoise.info/