Forum Post: root
Posted 6 years ago on March 1, 2018, 11:45 a.m. EST by agkaiser
(2555)
from Fredericksburg, TX
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
Intellectual property rights are grown to the point that they don't merely stifle innovation and progress. Today they actively threaten the well being of communities that support human life on planet Earth. And then there's parasitic investment at the root of the problems.
TRIPS: The Story of How Intellectual Property Became Linked to Trade (1/7)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpFjqwCfif4&feature=youtu.be
there's investment. then there's investment. "...The words used by neoliberalism often conceal more than they elucidate. 'The market' sounds like a natural system that might bear upon us equally, like gravity or atmospheric pressure. But it is fraught with power relations. What 'the market wants' tends to mean what corporations and their bosses want. 'Investment', as Sayer notes, means two quite different things. One is the funding of productive and socially useful activities, the other is the purchase of existing assets to milk them for rent, interest, dividends and capital gains. Using the same word for different activities 'camouflages the sources of wealth', leading us to confuse wealth extraction with wealth creation.
"A century ago, the nouveau riche were disparaged by those who had inherited their money. Entrepreneurs sought social acceptance by passing themselves off as rentiers. Today, the relationship has been reversed: the rentiers and inheritors style themselves entre preneurs. They claim to have earned their unearned income...."
How do runaway Intprop rights threaten?
When they patent our genes and start charging life royalties it'll become apparent to more than just the few who can actually think. Today it's the exaggerated cost of things like medicine and pharmaceuticals that get the attention of thinking people.
FIRE sector parasitism, the high cost of energy, communications and mass transportation also inspire fear in the wise. All of the real producers benefit from monopoly patents and copyrights.
Even the FIRE sector's purely parasitic operations are seizing control of algorithms that are inherently of the public domain. But they want to claim proprietary rights to thoughts that can occur spontaneously in any capable brain.