Real-Life Bad Companies: America's Universities! or, Aaron Swartz and the Great Intellectual Property Heist of 2010

The article: Feds Charge Activist as Hacker for Downloading Millions of Academic Articles (Wired)

Online activist Aaron Swartz, a near-founder of Reddit, has been charged with the federal crime of "hacking" for downloading ostensibly public-domain academic papers. "Hacking" is a term borrowed from the same media panic as "cyberporn". What's he really charged with?

1. Copyright piracy.
2. Theft of trade secrets.

You see, these ostensibly "public domain" academic papers are not public domain at all. They are owned by the universities that publish them, under the strictest copyright license of all: not the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that protects corporate entertainment product from the likes of those heinous pirates, namely people who rip their CDs to their hard drive, but the Uniform Trade Secrets Act and Economic Espionage Act which put corporate trade secrets under the same "top secret" protection as military secrets. In this case, the intellectual property protections on the journals the papers are published in are among the strictest in the entire intellectual property field: the licenses are restricted to a select few, namely select researchers at the copyright-holding universities, plus researchers at other universities and research institutes that have paid the sky-high licensing fees. The reason? So that the science can be patented, and the patents licensed to corporations, for a lucrative payoff to the already ultra-rich corporate trustees.

And you wonder why America is falling behind China and India so rapidly in science.

Basically, Aaron Swartz is being accused of bank robbery. The bank pulled the heist on is called JSTOR. It is ostensibly nonprofit. Its real purpose is to keep academic research away from the prying eyes of the unwashed rabble so that it can be lucratively licensed to corporations. Swartz, fired by the hacker ideal of "information wants to be free", was trying to pull a Robin Hood: his goal was to take this proprietary research and put it into the public domain. This makes him the Bradley Manning of academe.

The issue, of course, is Intellectual Property. Now, go to the bottom of this post and look at the copyright notice. You'll see that it bears a Creative Commons Attribution, Noncommercial, Share Alike license. Creative Commons was created as a way for individual creators to get around the draconian protections imposed by the likes of DMCA for the benefit of giant corporations with large IP portfolios. It's for us peons who aren't conglomerate executives and their IP lawyer hired guns.

America's universities do not believe in Creative Commons or in open-source research. They protect their scientific research with corporate intellectual property laws so they can license their intellectual property to corporations. Like their agent corporation JSTOR, they are nonprofit institutions in name only, for-profit corporations in actual fact. And that's why Swartz, like Manning, is doomed: he robbed giant corporations of their precious intellectual property the same way bank robbers rob banks of their gold. Which, legally, is the same thing. Except an intellectual property robber can't flee to South America: the banks aren't everywhere, but the IP administrators are.

Bradley Manning will be executed for treason for certain. And Robin Hood, remember, was caught and executed by order of the tyrannical King John of England. Due process? What due process? When corporations are raped — and, as Manning found out to his horror, the federal government is the most merciless of intellectual property trolls — there is no such thing as due process. In this respect, MIT, and American universities in general, are no different from such predatory corporations as Carter-Ruck, News Corporation, the RIAA cartel of record companies, and any bank that's "too big to fail".

Copyright © 2011 Dennis Jernberg. Some rights reserved.

Real-Life Bad Companies: NEWS CORPORATION, full stop. #msmfail

According to the prevailing journalistic ideology, news organizations are supposed to be dedicated to finding and reporting the truth. As Jack Webb's most famous detective character insisted: "Just the facts, ma'am."

Rupert Murdoch does not believe in objectivity, truth, or responsibility. All he believes in is power, and he wants as much of it as possible. He will go to any lengths to get it. For one thing, he invented the TEA Party alongside the brothers Koch for that purpose. In Britain, his publication News of the World has been hacking the phones and email accounts of murdered girls, slain soldiers, and victims of the 7/7 London terror bombings (which happened six years ago today), leading their bereaved families to believe their loved ones were still actually alive. If that weren't enough, that most infamous of tabloids has been spying on Murdoch's critics, from muckraking journalists to liberal political opponents. In America, Fox News has the comparable James O'Keefe scandal.

As the phone-hacking scandal become ever more gruesome and intolerable, Murdoch decided to sacrifice the News of the World. This turns out to be suspiciously convenient: he gets to destroy the record of his crimes, and he also gets to turn his other sleazy British tabloid, the Sun, into a full daily publication by converting NOTW into the Sun Sunday edition.

The real problem is that Murdoch has infiltrated his agents into the highest reaches of the British, American, and Australian governments. He has bought thousands of British police. His control of the Conservative and Labour parties is so complete that one could almost call the UK itself a division of News Corporation, the same way his friends the Koch brothers are trying to turn the US government into a division of Koch Industries. And so the NOTW hacking scandal now threatens to bring down the entire British government.

Corruption has become News Corp's biggest business.

News Corporation is the company, and Rupert Murdoch is the man, hellbent on monopolizing the entire news business. His publications and "news" channels are the Corporatist version of Stalin's Pravda and Izvestiya. It is good to see the chief propagandist of corporate socialism and his empire fall at last. Hell, he could even go to jail. Millions would cheer him on.

We'll have to see if the scandal that destroyed the News of the World metastasizes and brings down the Sun, and maybe even Murdoch's British flagship paper, the London Times. For all we know, it could spread across the Pond to his big American propaganda outfit, Fox News.

You can't lose by short selling News Corp. Wall Street and the City of London sure are.

Our Cyberpunk World: Robot Waiters

It's not just in Star Wars or cyberpunk anime anymore. There's an actual restaurant in China with a mechanical wait staff. Just think of it: no wages to pay, no need for tips, no surly human employees. Sure, the restaurant in question may be robot-themed. But knowing American business types, it won't be long till it catches on big time...

Our Cyberpunk World: Financial Theocracy and the Coming Fall of the Corporate Empire

The article: "Is There a Global War Between Financial Theocracy and Democracy?" by Les Leopold, Alternet

Read this entry's linked article, and then you'll better understand my answer to Leopold's question: as a matter of fact, the financial industry is waging a never-ending war against government as such and the people in general. He calls it "financial theocracy"; I call it Corporatism and define it in blunt terms as the synarchy of the banksters. By nuking all the national currencies they can, they're not just trying to bend governments to their will, they're trying to destroy government altogether. It's like in the cyberpunk science fiction canon of 1980-92, in which predatory corporations have entirely replaced government. But the first-generation cyberpunk writers were being either pessimistic or cynical. I consider this hoary cyberpunk convention to be a mistake, and in Spanner I intend to correct it.

Real Life Bad Companies: Trafigura and Carter-Ruck

While reading my Twitter stream late at night, I came upon the mysterious hashtags #trafigura and #carterruck in a tweet about censorship by someone I follow. Turns out that there's this British counterpart to the infamous Enron called Trafigura has been caught dumping toxic waste in the Ivory Coast. So to suppress any and all media coverage of the scandal, the company hires an equally nasty law firm called Carter-Ruck, which specializes in suing the media in order to censor them. The tag team of Trafigura and Carter-Ruck has succeeded in imposing a gag order so comprehensive that the media in Britain are now forbidden to cover Parliament at all, period. The Spectator defied the gag order to post this article.

Trafigura and Carter-Ruck have, in essence, repealed the 1689 Bill of Rights in the UK. This may have been the ultimate goal of the firm's founder, Peter Carter-Ruck, who had been highly impressed by Hitler in the 1930s. Criminal American corporations and their legal defenders can't even dream of repealing the First Amendment of the US Constitution through anything short of a military coup. Sure enough, their censorship strategy has backfired: the blogosphere has declared war. Just click the Twitter search terms above (except "#NaNoWriMo") and you'll get an idea of the fury Trafigura's censorship has unleashed.