By Angelo McCollum
Special to YNOT
MONTREAL, Ohio – Throughout Earth’s history, there have been tyrants. Some have conquered countries, others have ravaged entire continents. Some have marched under the banner of war, others have cloaked their tyranny in the trappings of law.
As evidenced by a vicious assault on the cyber-rights of every living human being, a new tyrant has emerged recently — more brutal and indiscriminate than any Hun, more rapacious than any Vandal and more lawyerly than any K Street power firm.
I’m speaking, of course, of HBO, which has unleashed a torrent of digital oppression ostensibly designed to prevent so-called “intellectual property violations” of the company’s long-running pornographic, violent, misogynist nightmare of a show, Real Time With Bill Maher.
Wait, wait… Sorry. I meant the company’s long-running pornographic, violent, misogynist nightmare Game of Thrones. Obviously, nobody watches Real Time anymore, much less pirates that sorry-ass excuse for a show.
Evidently, HBO hasn’t received the memo that we’re in the 21st Century now. Anything recorded, published, broadcast, archived or displayed is required to be freely available on the internet. While the requirement is not a matter of law yet, if my organization, the Cyber Rights Activism Project (“CRAP”), is successful in its lobbying efforts, such legislation might be right around the constitutional corner.
At present, making and giving away expensive-to-produce television shows and not-so-expensive-to-produce pornography a legal requirement, but the practice is an ethical, moral and human imperative. Offering all content for free is absolutely crucial to maintaining the forward march of social progress, global economic development and future revenue generation by companies with business models that will be entirely unfeasible if we unfairly and tyrannically force those companies to jump through arbitrary hoops like following the law.
If we allow the ogres of Big Content — the HBOs, MPAAs, RIAAs and Bruce Springsteens of the world — to make websites take down content published by “premium” television channels, we will choke off innovation, eliminate jobs and leave my 27-year-old son with nothing to do but play FIFA 16 all day. As things stand now, he plays the game only six hours a day, after which he surfs SmutNucleus looking for the latest clips of naked celebrities ripped from shows like Spartacus.
Some might argue companies like MindGunk (one of HBO’s victims in its overreaching intellectual property offensive) are not actually innovative at all, that they offer nothing new or beneficial to the market except the ability to watch pirated content interspersed with legitimate amateur porn which looks like it was shot inside a double-wide trailer (because it was).
This dismissive attitude ignores all the amazing, inventive ways so called tube sites collect and measure user data, thereby enabling columnists and journalists all over the world to write at least one article a week about really important things like the red state gay porn habit or what kind of porn turns on French people. All of us need to know that sort of information so we can avoid accidentally arousing the snooty Francophile waiters while ordering breakfast at Republique.
HBO, on the other hand, offers nothing of value to anyone – except all the fine, expensive-to-produce programs everyone has a right to watch for free. It would irreparably harm humanity as a whole if rank-and-file citizen were not to be able to watch portions of shows like Game of Thrones in compilation clips posted to internet porn sites.
While we can’t stop HBO from issuing DMCA take-down notices, we can stand up HBO and other tyrants in court, in the streets, on the web and in our living rooms. We can call them out for greedily expecting viewers to pay in order to watch their programs. We can write our congressmen and implore them to free us from the oppression of intellectual property law.
One thing we cannot do, even as we totally eliminate intellectual property law, is totally eliminate the existence of intellectual property lawsuits, as well.
After all, just like everyone else (except those who produce and publish entertainment content) we lawyers do have the right to earn a living.
Angelo McCollum is a senior staff attorney with the Cyber Rights Activism Project (CRAP), a group that argues the only sensible approach to copyright reform is to abolish intellectual property rights altogether. So, should you find any text on the organization’s site you think would look nice on your site, go ahead and take it and don’t bother crediting, or even referencing at all, the lawyer from CRAP who wrote the original piece, because, you know, “information wants to be free” and all that other cyber-hippie freetard bullshit.
