Break Down the Bars of Ignorance and Illiteracy
By Project Gutenberg
[as published by the essay contest of Wipout.net; formerly at http://www.wipout.net/essays.html, last access sometime in 2002]
<!--- Ed.Note: edited punctuation & appearence ---!>
0. Premise: the Public Domain is an "inalienable right"
You cannot sell it, lease it, or give it away...
Therefore, no one else may legally do this to/for you. Therefore, WIPO is illegal because WIPO interrupts the ongoing expiration periods and makes them even longer.
1. WIPO has only one major priority
Maximize copyright -- minimize the public domain.
WIPO officials want permanent copyright, WIPO officials want everything possible copyrighted.
The result, virtually nothing will be in the public domain; therefore we should wipout WIPO.
2. WIPO and copyright came into existence by very dubious means
So why enshrine them as permanent parts of our legal systems?
WIPO represents the media against the public, so why, and how did it become part of the United Nations?
Copyright only represented the stationers' guild, how and why did it become a permanent and ever-increasing statute of law?
3. This is the fourth "Information Age"
Each Information Age has been stifled by new copyright laws, that outlawed the technological revolutions that created them. The information age we occupy today is actually the fourth such information age... each one destroyed by reactionary copyright:
Year Revolutionary technology Year Reactionary Response
1455+| Gutenberg's Press | 1709 | Statute Of Anne
1860+| Steam/Electric Presses | 1909 | US Copyright Act
1965+| Xerox Machine | 1976 | US Copyright Act
1970 |
to | Internet/World Wide Web | 1998 | US Copyright Act
1990 |
As you can see, each one of these major elements of industrial revolution was responded to in exactly the same luddite manner:
Make it illegal to use new "information age" technologies in a manner that was a perfectly legal use for which they were created!
As you can see, it took hundreds of years to pass copyright law after the invention of Gutenberg's press, but it only took 50 years to outlaw the steam and electric powered "reprint houses" of 100 years ago, and it only took 11 years to respond to Xerox machines, and less than 10 years from the time the internet became a household word.
The responses came faster and faster because no original thought is required to pass a law against an invention it took geniuses years to bring about...
... You just pass a law against anything that brings too much information into the hands, and minds, of the public masses.
Before Gutenberg, It Was Legal To Copy Anything. Why?
Because only the very rich and powerful could copy... It took a salaried scribe a year to copy the average book before Gutenberg, the price of the average book was equal to the price of the average family farm.
After Gutenberg, books were so cheap you could buy them in any village marketplace, there were wagonloads... The salaried scribes did not like this!
Those salaried scribes belonged to the "Stationers' Guild". The Stationers' Guild lobbied like mad against Gutenberg presses.
They lobbied the "Henry's" until there were no more Henry's after Henry VIII: but for all his many faults, he supported the people's right to print over a monopoly by the Stationers' Guild... So then they lobbied his daughter, Elizabeth I, but she was more like Henry than anyone counted on, just ask Mary, Queen of Scots... so then they lobbied Mary's son, James I, of King James' Bible fame, but he was also unwilling to kill off the Gutenberg Revolution just to keep
the Stationers' Guild in business... So then they lobbied William and Mary... And finally, after the turn of two centuries of royal upheaval, they got their monopoly passed as:
"The Statute Of Anne" in 1709...
And then... Overnight!
The number of legal presses dropped to a dozen, all in London!
The number of legal books in print dropped from 6,000 to 600!
Copyright was also a weapon of censorship!
And that, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, was the first use of Copyright Law to stifle an "Information Age".
But it would not be the last... far from it!
These copyrights gave only The Stationers' Guild any rights for the first 14 years of publication; a 100% monopoly that was usually worthless after those first 14 years since most books only stayed in print a short time, and since authors' lifespans weren't all that long back then, and a copyright could only be renewed if the author was still alive...
By the way, The Stationers' Guild would usually publish an extremely inexpensive edition in massive quantities, just as their "copy-right" was about to expire, if the author had not
already expired... very effective at stifling competition from the very source of their publications.
This was the only purpose of this first of our copyright laws!
The 1700's were a century of turmoil, highlighed by revolutions in America and France, successfully challenging the aristocracy that had ruled both since the dawn of history.
Many of our readers may recall a mention of "The Pamphleteers" of the American Revolution, but they never really told us why they were so important!
This is because the people who make our textbooks have an axe to grind, because they really do chop down all the cherry trees.
The reason the Pamphleteers were so important is Copyright!
Remember, it was illegal to print anything other than through an approved publishing house of the stationer's guild. How can you spread revolutionary thought if every word you publish must be printed by the most conservative of your enemies?
Get the point?
Nevertheless, both the United States And France adopted pretty much the same copyright laws after their revolutions. So publishing did not become revolutionary, as it had been in the days of the Gutenberg press.
Too bad...
The new Copyrights had the same term of years as the old, though more rights went from the publishers to the authors, at least in theory, though you can easily see from virtually any contract in publishing more than a few years ago. The Copyrights belonged to the publishers. Once signed, an author had to also sign an agreement that destroyed their rights to competitive publication.
Free competition? Hardly!
The next time competition would rear it's ugly misshapen head got settled by more copyright, exactly 200 years after the enactment of the first copyright, in 1909.
Interesting that none of the political and military revolutions of the first two centuries of copyright changed copyright at all. But the technological revolution of the new printing presses did!
From 1709 to 1909 nothing really changed in copyright, publishers still held all the cards, and authors were basically dealing with huge publishing monopolies, literally going hat in hand from one to another, collecting rejection letter after rejection letter, with not much alternative for any other manner of publication.
But the new steam and electric printing presses changed all that for one, they meant publishing houses could now spring up anywhere, not just in the most preferential mill towns, where all the water power had been "captured" or "harnessed" hundreds of years before.
Power shifts, after all... that is what we are talking about.
Well, actually we're talking about stopping power shifts.
The Olde Boye networks that had colonized the power supplies for the publishing industry during the past 200 years were threatened by the arrival of the new steam and electric printing presses.
Because these new presses were small, inexpensive, could go anywhere (hmm, sounds a little like the Computer Revolution of today... eh?), and they could turn out boxcarloads of books overnight, and there was a transcontinental train service ready to whisk them away...
Now, what do Ye Olde Boyes do when their networkes are threatened?
Instead of competing with the new boys and girls of the future, thus validating their new position, they retreat and retrench even further into reactionary conservatism.
The U.S. publishing industry lobbied the 1909 Copyright Act into law, doubling copyright terms without allowing the existing copyrights to expire as scheduled, thus bankrupting the new reprint houses, who soon had to wait 28 years for any copyrights to expire, and 56 years for a
best seller to expire, even though the authors had only been paid flat fees for copyrights that were supposed to expire in no more than 28!
If you can't beat them... don't join them... make their work illegal!
Once again a great industrial leap is dragged down by a ball and chain!
Why should Ye Olde Boyes do anything new when the same olde tactic from the Elizabethan age can be used again?
Once again copyright is used to destroy an information age.
In case you don't think there was an information age around 1900, just go to some used bookstores and ask about the various "Home Libraries" printed then. There were hundreds, and they were incredibly inexpensive, the "Harvard Classics" were just one example. Each one a set of books that would have cost hundreds of dollars previously. The same kind of paradigm shift you saw with the advent of the gutenberg press. With the same response!
Keep the power out of the hands of the masses!
You never know what they will do if they get educated!
It was illegal to teach blacks to read for the same reason. The rich have decided to make the common man into the nigger of the third millenium. Just read further to see how.
We have already seen two occasions when the masses were informed, each one leading to revolutionary upheavals, but I don't expect you to just believe me when I tell you just how revolutionary these were, so...
Here is one example from each of the first two informations ages:
1. Martin Luther
2. The Sears Catalog
Martin Luther is most famous for writing his "95 Theses". These revolutionized the entire western religious structure. He was protesting against certain entrenched powers of the Catholic Church, one of the most entrenched powers of the world.
He only sent these 95 ideas to a few friends with no idea of changing the world at large. It was his friends who took these to the local Kinko's De Jour.
Without the "revolutionary" Gutenberg Press, this "revolutionary" event could never have taken place. And that scares the "powers that be". Luther's protest was so successful that millions of people today are "Protestants".
Believe it or not, the Sears Catalog was just as "revolutionary", and it depended on technologies that were, for their time almost as "revolutionary" as the Gutenberg press.
More "believe it or not": the Sears Catalogue was the first book owned by millions of americans, and due to the advances in publishing and transportation mentioned above, as well as rural free delivery by the U.S. Postal Service, this "book" was delivered absolutely free to most united states mailboxes.
768 pages, lavishly illustrated, delivered free of charge, right to your door. Yes, it was "revolutionary"! And it scared the hell out of the "Powers That Be"! And you have seen just how (un)responsive they can be.
It all happened for the third time with the Xerox machine.
Another revolutionary invention, another increase in "publishing for the masses"... And the major increase in "publishing by the masses"!
Since this is so recent, I can hopefully presume you have actually seen the Xerox machine's effects directly, and that you only need to hear one thing more about it: the response by the Olde Boyes publishing network?
Yep! You guessed it! Yet another copyright extension!
Why change a good thing? It stifled the Gutenberg press, it stifled both the steam and electric presses... Let's just use it again to stifle the Xerox machine.
Copyrights were extended from 28 years with a possible 28 year extension (which hardly anyone ever extended, by the freakin' way) were now extended to 75 years, and (a drumroll please) no renewals were required!
Now even items that went out of print immediately would receive 75 years of copyright monopoly, another one of those hidden censorship controls. "Thought Police".
Today we are living in the middle of the Computer Revolution.
The average new computer is coming down towards $500, and it comes with enough gigabytes that you could put 10,000 of the 20,000 free ebooks on the internet in it and only take about
half the space, and that's not even with .zip files that would take up only about 1/4 of the space.
The average new computer is coming down towards $500, and it comes with enough gigabytes to hold all 20,000 ebooks in the Internet Public Library.
Can you imagine being able to own 20,000 computerized eBooks?
At a price that is literally about a penny each!
This is at least as scary to the "Stationers' Guilds" as were Gutenberg presses, the steam and electric presses and Xeroxes. And the response has been the same, only this time there has
been more publicity.
You probably didn't hear much about the 1976 Copyright changes. And there was even less mention of copyright around 1900. But today WIPO is accusing everyone of piracy, when they are the ones who stole your right to eBooks.
eBooks are the most accessible repository of the public domain.
When you steal something worth a quadrillion dollars, you need the biggest possible coverup.
This is another example of the "BIG LIE"!
[as published by the essay contest of Wipout.net; formerly at http://www.wipout.net/essays.html, last access sometime in 2002]
<!--- Ed.Note: edited punctuation & appearence ---!>
0. Premise: the Public Domain is an "inalienable right"
You cannot sell it, lease it, or give it away...
Therefore, no one else may legally do this to/for you. Therefore, WIPO is illegal because WIPO interrupts the ongoing expiration periods and makes them even longer.
1. WIPO has only one major priority
Maximize copyright -- minimize the public domain.
WIPO officials want permanent copyright, WIPO officials want everything possible copyrighted.
The result, virtually nothing will be in the public domain; therefore we should wipout WIPO.
2. WIPO and copyright came into existence by very dubious means
So why enshrine them as permanent parts of our legal systems?
WIPO represents the media against the public, so why, and how did it become part of the United Nations?
Copyright only represented the stationers' guild, how and why did it become a permanent and ever-increasing statute of law?
3. This is the fourth "Information Age"
Each Information Age has been stifled by new copyright laws, that outlawed the technological revolutions that created them. The information age we occupy today is actually the fourth such information age... each one destroyed by reactionary copyright:
Year Revolutionary technology Year Reactionary Response
1455+| Gutenberg's Press | 1709 | Statute Of Anne
1860+| Steam/Electric Presses | 1909 | US Copyright Act
1965+| Xerox Machine | 1976 | US Copyright Act
1970 |
to | Internet/World Wide Web | 1998 | US Copyright Act
1990 |
As you can see, each one of these major elements of industrial revolution was responded to in exactly the same luddite manner:
Make it illegal to use new "information age" technologies in a manner that was a perfectly legal use for which they were created!
As you can see, it took hundreds of years to pass copyright law after the invention of Gutenberg's press, but it only took 50 years to outlaw the steam and electric powered "reprint houses" of 100 years ago, and it only took 11 years to respond to Xerox machines, and less than 10 years from the time the internet became a household word.
The responses came faster and faster because no original thought is required to pass a law against an invention it took geniuses years to bring about...
... You just pass a law against anything that brings too much information into the hands, and minds, of the public masses.
Before Gutenberg, It Was Legal To Copy Anything. Why?
Because only the very rich and powerful could copy... It took a salaried scribe a year to copy the average book before Gutenberg, the price of the average book was equal to the price of the average family farm.
After Gutenberg, books were so cheap you could buy them in any village marketplace, there were wagonloads... The salaried scribes did not like this!
Those salaried scribes belonged to the "Stationers' Guild". The Stationers' Guild lobbied like mad against Gutenberg presses.
They lobbied the "Henry's" until there were no more Henry's after Henry VIII: but for all his many faults, he supported the people's right to print over a monopoly by the Stationers' Guild... So then they lobbied his daughter, Elizabeth I, but she was more like Henry than anyone counted on, just ask Mary, Queen of Scots... so then they lobbied Mary's son, James I, of King James' Bible fame, but he was also unwilling to kill off the Gutenberg Revolution just to keep
the Stationers' Guild in business... So then they lobbied William and Mary... And finally, after the turn of two centuries of royal upheaval, they got their monopoly passed as:
"The Statute Of Anne" in 1709...
And then... Overnight!
The number of legal presses dropped to a dozen, all in London!
The number of legal books in print dropped from 6,000 to 600!
Copyright was also a weapon of censorship!
And that, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, was the first use of Copyright Law to stifle an "Information Age".
But it would not be the last... far from it!
These copyrights gave only The Stationers' Guild any rights for the first 14 years of publication; a 100% monopoly that was usually worthless after those first 14 years since most books only stayed in print a short time, and since authors' lifespans weren't all that long back then, and a copyright could only be renewed if the author was still alive...
By the way, The Stationers' Guild would usually publish an extremely inexpensive edition in massive quantities, just as their "copy-right" was about to expire, if the author had not
already expired... very effective at stifling competition from the very source of their publications.
This was the only purpose of this first of our copyright laws!
The 1700's were a century of turmoil, highlighed by revolutions in America and France, successfully challenging the aristocracy that had ruled both since the dawn of history.
Many of our readers may recall a mention of "The Pamphleteers" of the American Revolution, but they never really told us why they were so important!
This is because the people who make our textbooks have an axe to grind, because they really do chop down all the cherry trees.
The reason the Pamphleteers were so important is Copyright!
Remember, it was illegal to print anything other than through an approved publishing house of the stationer's guild. How can you spread revolutionary thought if every word you publish must be printed by the most conservative of your enemies?
Get the point?
Nevertheless, both the United States And France adopted pretty much the same copyright laws after their revolutions. So publishing did not become revolutionary, as it had been in the days of the Gutenberg press.
Too bad...
The new Copyrights had the same term of years as the old, though more rights went from the publishers to the authors, at least in theory, though you can easily see from virtually any contract in publishing more than a few years ago. The Copyrights belonged to the publishers. Once signed, an author had to also sign an agreement that destroyed their rights to competitive publication.
Free competition? Hardly!
The next time competition would rear it's ugly misshapen head got settled by more copyright, exactly 200 years after the enactment of the first copyright, in 1909.
Interesting that none of the political and military revolutions of the first two centuries of copyright changed copyright at all. But the technological revolution of the new printing presses did!
From 1709 to 1909 nothing really changed in copyright, publishers still held all the cards, and authors were basically dealing with huge publishing monopolies, literally going hat in hand from one to another, collecting rejection letter after rejection letter, with not much alternative for any other manner of publication.
But the new steam and electric printing presses changed all that for one, they meant publishing houses could now spring up anywhere, not just in the most preferential mill towns, where all the water power had been "captured" or "harnessed" hundreds of years before.
Power shifts, after all... that is what we are talking about.
Well, actually we're talking about stopping power shifts.
The Olde Boye networks that had colonized the power supplies for the publishing industry during the past 200 years were threatened by the arrival of the new steam and electric printing presses.
Because these new presses were small, inexpensive, could go anywhere (hmm, sounds a little like the Computer Revolution of today... eh?), and they could turn out boxcarloads of books overnight, and there was a transcontinental train service ready to whisk them away...
Now, what do Ye Olde Boyes do when their networkes are threatened?
Instead of competing with the new boys and girls of the future, thus validating their new position, they retreat and retrench even further into reactionary conservatism.
The U.S. publishing industry lobbied the 1909 Copyright Act into law, doubling copyright terms without allowing the existing copyrights to expire as scheduled, thus bankrupting the new reprint houses, who soon had to wait 28 years for any copyrights to expire, and 56 years for a
best seller to expire, even though the authors had only been paid flat fees for copyrights that were supposed to expire in no more than 28!
If you can't beat them... don't join them... make their work illegal!
Once again a great industrial leap is dragged down by a ball and chain!
Why should Ye Olde Boyes do anything new when the same olde tactic from the Elizabethan age can be used again?
Once again copyright is used to destroy an information age.
In case you don't think there was an information age around 1900, just go to some used bookstores and ask about the various "Home Libraries" printed then. There were hundreds, and they were incredibly inexpensive, the "Harvard Classics" were just one example. Each one a set of books that would have cost hundreds of dollars previously. The same kind of paradigm shift you saw with the advent of the gutenberg press. With the same response!
Keep the power out of the hands of the masses!
You never know what they will do if they get educated!
It was illegal to teach blacks to read for the same reason. The rich have decided to make the common man into the nigger of the third millenium. Just read further to see how.
We have already seen two occasions when the masses were informed, each one leading to revolutionary upheavals, but I don't expect you to just believe me when I tell you just how revolutionary these were, so...
Here is one example from each of the first two informations ages:
1. Martin Luther
2. The Sears Catalog
Martin Luther is most famous for writing his "95 Theses". These revolutionized the entire western religious structure. He was protesting against certain entrenched powers of the Catholic Church, one of the most entrenched powers of the world.
He only sent these 95 ideas to a few friends with no idea of changing the world at large. It was his friends who took these to the local Kinko's De Jour.
Without the "revolutionary" Gutenberg Press, this "revolutionary" event could never have taken place. And that scares the "powers that be". Luther's protest was so successful that millions of people today are "Protestants".
Believe it or not, the Sears Catalog was just as "revolutionary", and it depended on technologies that were, for their time almost as "revolutionary" as the Gutenberg press.
More "believe it or not": the Sears Catalogue was the first book owned by millions of americans, and due to the advances in publishing and transportation mentioned above, as well as rural free delivery by the U.S. Postal Service, this "book" was delivered absolutely free to most united states mailboxes.
768 pages, lavishly illustrated, delivered free of charge, right to your door. Yes, it was "revolutionary"! And it scared the hell out of the "Powers That Be"! And you have seen just how (un)responsive they can be.
It all happened for the third time with the Xerox machine.
Another revolutionary invention, another increase in "publishing for the masses"... And the major increase in "publishing by the masses"!
Since this is so recent, I can hopefully presume you have actually seen the Xerox machine's effects directly, and that you only need to hear one thing more about it: the response by the Olde Boyes publishing network?
Yep! You guessed it! Yet another copyright extension!
Why change a good thing? It stifled the Gutenberg press, it stifled both the steam and electric presses... Let's just use it again to stifle the Xerox machine.
Copyrights were extended from 28 years with a possible 28 year extension (which hardly anyone ever extended, by the freakin' way) were now extended to 75 years, and (a drumroll please) no renewals were required!
Now even items that went out of print immediately would receive 75 years of copyright monopoly, another one of those hidden censorship controls. "Thought Police".
Today we are living in the middle of the Computer Revolution.
The average new computer is coming down towards $500, and it comes with enough gigabytes that you could put 10,000 of the 20,000 free ebooks on the internet in it and only take about
half the space, and that's not even with .zip files that would take up only about 1/4 of the space.
The average new computer is coming down towards $500, and it comes with enough gigabytes to hold all 20,000 ebooks in the Internet Public Library.
Can you imagine being able to own 20,000 computerized eBooks?
At a price that is literally about a penny each!
This is at least as scary to the "Stationers' Guilds" as were Gutenberg presses, the steam and electric presses and Xeroxes. And the response has been the same, only this time there has
been more publicity.
You probably didn't hear much about the 1976 Copyright changes. And there was even less mention of copyright around 1900. But today WIPO is accusing everyone of piracy, when they are the ones who stole your right to eBooks.
eBooks are the most accessible repository of the public domain.
When you steal something worth a quadrillion dollars, you need the biggest possible coverup.
This is another example of the "BIG LIE"!
