![]()
On July 25th, 2002, nineteen United States Senators sent a letter to United States Attorney General John Ashcroft asking that the U.S. Department Of Justice begin prosecuting file traders.
In response, Rafael Quezada has composed the following letter to be sent in response. If you support these views, please add your name to the list by submitting your information below.
You do not need to be a U.S. citizen to sign this letter. All citizens of the Internet would be affected by this action due to the borderless nature of the Internet.
Fight Back Now - Join in a Letter to Ashcroft
August 10, 2002
The Honorable John Ashcroft
Attorney General of the United States
Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530
Dear Attorney General Ashcroft:
We are writing to urge that the U.S. Department of Justice look through the transparent pleas of multinational entertainment conglomerates who beg you to "vigilantly enforce the institution of copyright". Please be conscious of the fact that copyright was conceived and written into the Constitution by the Founders for far different reasons than the protection of businesses, such as these multinational entertainment conglomerates who have seen fit to twist it into a thinly veiled, business protection shield.
As we're sure you are aware, through massive lobbying efforts and the "infusion" of several hundred millions of dollars into that process, this corporate elite has managed the wholesale buying of technologically challenged members of the congress and the senate, through which it has implemented their business protection policy. This policy is based on recent changes to the intellectual property laws such as the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act, ca. 1998 ) that they were able to push through at a time when technological innovation and its long term significance was little understood. Ostensibly legislated to control the Internet through punishment of online "theft" of copyrighted works, laws like the DMCA have resulted in only curtailing development of useful arts and sciences in this country, pushing the innovation into other countries at the expense of our leadership in the economies that naturally result.
The bottom line is that, although they speak in defense of our great nation's culture and economy, the entertainment oligarchy is actually the single greatest threat to our cultural economies. Strictly speaking, copyright was never intended to protect businesses from innovation and creativity, especially when that discovery results in improved channels for the vibrant distribution of society's cultural heritage.
Copyright was and is intended to "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries".
Yet, regularly articulating their protectionist stance in dramatically overwrought terms, leaders of the entertainment industries' business associations (RIAA and MPAA) pretend that it is they who are the "authors and inventors" in need of protection when, in fact, they are huge businesses whose goal is the monetary churning of authors and inventors for profit of multinational businesses first, the authors and scientists who actually create the works second.
Especially in this, our nation's darkest time of discovery related to the corporate greed that has devastated our economy, we are all aware of how labor, including authors and scientists, are abused and discarded while the corporate overlords enrich themselves.
We're sure that the Justice Department is well aware of the record with respect to entertainment businesses, replete as it is with examples of how these cultural machines focused on corporate profit maintain control over authors and inventors, engaging in shady accounting and contractual business practices designed to maximize their exploitation. Truly, the only protection the multinational entertainment businesses are interested in is in the protection of their corporate profits for the benefit of their corporate board members and their executive management. This is what policing of the Internet is all about. The artists, the authors, the scientists are actually far down the list of priorities.
The multinational entertainment conglomerates, whose antiquated production and distribution models have obviously expired their "limited times" of usefulness are seeking legislative protection from the disruptive effect of new digital technologies. They persist in fear of new distribution methods that have put the power of production and distribution into the hands of the people, instead of coming to terms with the notion that it is the people whose culture they trade upon that must ultimately be pleased. They fail to recognize that any successful media business must involve and integrate the "progress of science and useful arts" (technology) if it has any hope of surviving in the 3rd Millennium. Instead, they have come running to lawmakers whose experience in technology's innovation is marginal, in hopes of creating laws that essentially makes criminals out of consumers who seek, as is their right, to discover and utilize better means for communication and exchange of their beloved culture.
Naturally, that exchange takes the forms of music, art, cinema, and literature. Therefore, it is the businesses who trade in these artifacts that must come to terms with the modern consumer and not the other way around.
Over the past few years, we have witnessed a staggering increase in the communicative and collaborative power of the Internet through innovation of peer-to-peer systems. According to recent news reports, the six most popular peer-to-peer software programs have been downloaded by computer users over 140 million times. Research has also shown that at any one time there may be as many as 2 million users simultaneously utilizing any one of these services. The benefits to our society, able to think as a single, hugely effective super-computer on a never-before-imagined scale, should be apparent. It is the greatest instrument of Democracy ever devised and, yet, this great tool is said by the entertainment oligarchy to be an instrument of piracy.
How narrow is their perspective that only their interests should be considered in evaluating the meaning of the "useful arts and sciences".
The entertainment oligarchy would have us believe that, in order to stem a "growing tide of massive piracy on the Internet", the Department of Justice should utilize its powers to:
* Prosecute operators of peer-to-peer systems who intentionally facilitate "mass piracy" (ignoring that only the entertainment oligarchy views these powerful communications tools as piracy because their goal is to limit the distribution of cultural media in order to maximize the price charged for its exchange);
* Prosecute individuals who intentionally allow mass copying from their computer over peer-to-peer networks (ignoring that it is this very system that allows the Democracy to function better in the all-important exchange of ideas, opinions, and future-formative dialog); and
* Create more Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property (CHIPs) units around the country with expanded authority to prosecute Internet "piracy" (ignoring the fact that the Justice Department has far more important issues to deal with besides protecting multinational entertainment industries from the innovation of authors and scientists, such as... HOMELAND SECURITY and the threat of terrorism to American interests abroad).
The copyright industries, as the entertainment oligarchy thinks of itself, likes to say that they account for 5% of our gross domestic product. They would have us believe that their power to churn artists, authors, and scientists into the excess of celebrity culture should somehow be protected from the free competition that results from technological innovation which represents at least three times the value to the gross domestic product what the entertainment industries are worth. They are willing to let their "tail wag the dog", instead of facing up to the fact that they have failed miserably in integrating the Internet's powerful distribution capabilities into their antiquated and waning business models. They believe that increased criminal enforcement will ensure that their industries will remain a driving factor for economic growth, when in fact all that it will accomplish is stifling innovation, as well as the progress of science and the useful arts.
Please, sir, ignore their hollow pleas and turn your attentions to the matters that affect us all... the security of our homeland, our interests abroad, and the prosecution of corporate overlords who threaten our nation's security by their exploitation of the law through the purchase of lawmakers.
Sincerely,
Rafael Oliverio Quezada
cc: Daniel J. Bryant, Assistant Attorney General, Legislative Affairs Michael Chertoff, Assistant Attorney General, Criminal Division Martha Stensell-Gramm, Section Chief, Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, Criminal Division.
Fight Back Now - Join in a Letter to Ashcroft
Bill Evans
uerseya
GrooveTonic
leflaw
Remye
