On SOPA/PIPA protest day (there has been at least one call to name it Netizens Day), the supreme court of the USA decided that since they had cover, they could rule that the public domain could be taken from the public.
The public domain is owned by the public. What we have seen is a group of power hungry, greedy individuals successfully get permission to claw back some of the profitable and popular parts of the public domain. This is not a victimless crime. The entirety of the USA owned these works and they are being taken away.
And to do this, the supreme court used the cover of SOPA/PIPA protests. These are other copyright issues being brought about by other lawyer based professions.
Copyright lawyering, politicking and judging have all been going through boom times. These lawyer based professions know that copyright is a huge make work project for all these professions. If you didn’t know it before, many, many politicians come from a lawyer background and judges very often begin their careers as lawyers.
These professions know how valuable it is to other lawyers to keep copyright law changing. So the judges and the politicians (who are also making money out of copyright) keep trying to shape the law according to the wet dreams of big copyright holders. The unending greed of Hollywood copyright holders and music copyright holders (the MPAA and RIAA respectively) has fuelled this. The greed of the copyright holders has been well documented, I want to focus on the lawyer based professions.
Maybe these professions said to the MPAA and RIAA, name your wettest dream for rights and power. Make it so extreme, the politicians might have said, that if we compromise you still win. And that’s what we’ve been getting – only extreme copyright maximalization has been fought for by politicians ushering in an era of bad laws. But when they saw little organized resistance, politicians and lawyers started imagining a life of extreme wealth and extreme power. So they pushed hard for SOPA and PIPA till some powers on the Internet finally objected in strong terms and getting the word out by the black outs the other day and other means.
The blackouts didn’t require lawyers. Seeing a possible end to the boom years, the supreme court judges reacted in a way to show the MPAA and RIAA that their money still carried weight despite the popular outcry. I expect the copyright wars to continue with the lawyer based professions keeping up the attack, still financed by the MPAA and RIAA.
There is nothing funny about all this. But let me try to lighten the scene with an observation.
I am told that people are so enamoured by the familiarity of their names that, in a totally disproportionate way, people named Dennis are more likely to be dentists and people named Lawrence are more likely to be lawyers.
[Personally I always tell people my full first name is Larry – I’m not a Lawrence. Thus I’m more likely to bury people or work in a dairy along with Mary, Terry and Gary.]
With Dennis the Dentist and Lawrence the Lawyer being a disproportionate human connection, wouldn’t a career lawyer make a connection to a certain accent of their title as ligh-yer. In fact why not go even softer on the ‘y’ and say liar. I believe the connection has been made many times by all the lawyer based professionals. And judging from results, the liar part does indeed seem to attract them.
So next time you see stats for things there are no stats for (like the underground economy), you can bet that a liar made these up.
