To require citizens to give the government their fingerprints for
ordinary life activities is unjust even for people that do have
fingers. National ID cards give the government too much power and
should be abolished.

From Born in Tibet by Chögyam Trungpa, foreword by Marco Pallis:

It is not only such obvious means of intimidation as machine guns and
concentration camps that count; such a petty product of the printing
press as an identity card, by making it easy for the authorities to
keep constant watch on everybody's movements, represents in the long
run a more effective curb on liberty. In Tibet, for instance, the
introduction of such a system by the Chinese Communists, following the
abortive rising of 1959, and its application to food rationing has been
one of the principal means of keeping the whole population in
subjection and compelling them to do the work decreed by their foreign
overlords.

I fully support your campaign to invalidate this patent, and therefore
I have a couple of suggestions for how to write about this and
other issues concerning plant variety patents.

One issue is to avoid the term "intellectual property". Describing
patents as "intellectual property" does not illuminate them; on the
contrary, it spreads confusion, because it conflates patents with
other unrelated legal practices (including copyrights and trademarks)
which work in a totally different way. For the sake of clear thinking
about any of these laws, we need first of all to teach people not
to generalize about more than one of them at a time.

See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html for more explanation
of why this term should never be used.

In this article, avoiding the term would have been easy. I find it is
never very difficult. Since I learned to recognize it as a misleading
overgeneralization, I do not group these laws together in my mind, so
I never have an occasion to wish for a term to talk about them all at
once. If I have a reason to mention an organization, activity or
publication that has "intellectual property" in its name, I briefly
identify that term as propaganda and make a link to the explanation.

The article uses another propaganda term of our adversaries:
"protection". To speak of "protection" for something, such as a plant
variety, implies preventing it from being destroyed or damaged. To
speak of a government-imposed monopoly as "protection" in effect says
that wider planting of it would destroy or damage it. That falsehood
serves people like Mr Proctor, especially when its implications are
not analyzed.

Resisting propaganda is a long-term issue, and it may be irrelevant to
winning any one case. However, these terms affect the way people
frame their thought, and in the long term nothing is more influential
than that. We have to work at the long-term level as well as the
short-term, so would you please join me in rejecting these propaganda
terms?

I also noted this statement, which is subtly ambiguous:

"We understand that individuals and companies have a right to patent
what are clearly novel agriculture innovations," said Hawtin.

If we interpret "have a right" as making a statement about current law
in many countries, this statement is accurate. But the same statement
can be read, equally well, as a political statement about justice,
endorsing the system of plant patents. That statement is
controversial; many farmers consider that system oppressive even when
applied to varieties that are new, since it denies them their
traditional freedom to save and trade their seeds. Is it your
intention to take a stand in support of that system?

What is really happening, to a large fraction of the US population, is
that they have to work such long hours that they have little free time
-- and in the little they have, want to zone out, or else, pay someone
to manage it for them. See the book, The Overworked American, by
Judith Shor.

Despite that, the article's overall point may be valid.

I hope that people starting new collaborative new projects avoid
making them add-ons to databases that we can access only under private
control. For instance Furtado's crime data base should be based on
OpenStreetMap. Can people transplant it there, without losing what
has already been entered?

Perhaps for this particular project starting over would only mean
waiting a little while for it to build up to enough data. In fact, it
might be good to start afresh each year just so that past patterns
don't exert a continuing influence even if the situation has changed.

If Universal were to make this claim stand, it would be able to
ruin anybody simply by mailing him so many promotional CDs that he
could not afford to rent space to house them. Perhaps it could
establish a musical group called "White Elephant" for the purpose.

But I'm sure Universal does not expect to establish this claim, and I
doubt it even really wants to. (The question isn't actually relevant
to the case anyway.) Rather, it has a more subtle plan. Universal is
presenting absurdly extreme copyright demands so as to make its real
extreme copyright demands seem moderate by comparison. Thus, this
absurd claim can do harm even if it is sure to be rejected.

This campaign of confusion goes with the other propaganda campaigns
used by the copyright industry, such as calling sharers "pirates",
describing copyright's effect as "protection", and confusing copyright
with other laws through the term "intellectual property".
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html

The system proposed by this article has several major flaws.

The worst flaw is the failure to establish the freedom to share. You
would be allowed to share some music and not other music. How would
you know which CDs are legal to share? Obviously you wouldn't.

The plan says it is "voluntary for artists", but the word "artists" is
misleading. In most cases a record company has the exclusive rights,
because they had the clout to make the artists give them that. So
"voluntary for artists" really means "voluntary for record companies".

Involving collecting societies in the scheme will cause the money to
be allocated badly. They will surely claim that they collect money
because we "owe" it for the music we shared. That idea (which we
should reject on general principles anyway) implies distributing the
money in linear proportion to the popularity of each work. That means
most of the money will be designated for superstars, leaving a small
fraction to be nominally designated for all the other musicians.

But those other musicians will never receive the money that is
nominally designated for them. The plan talks about "rights holders",
which implies that the record companies, following the exploitative
contracts they have signed with most musicians, will take that money
from them. That's what they do with the fraction of the price of a CD
that nominally is "for the musicians" (except when those are
long-established superstars) -- the record company keeps it, and the
musicians get nothing.

This scheme would collect money for superstars, and for those
predatory dinosaurs the record companies, but it wouldn't support the
musicians who could really use support.

Despite those flaws, the scheme would be an improvement over the nasty
copyright system we have now. If it is offered to us as a compromise,
perhaps we should accept it, provided we would not thereby forfeit the
possibility of further improvement of the system.

But we should never adopt such a small change as our demand. It is
easy to design a system that respects the freedom to share, and that
effectively supports the musicians that aren't rich. The only
obstacle is the power of those who shouldn't have any. We should keep
demanding that system until we get it.

I'm not surprised that Edwin Smith's letter used the term
"intellectual property", because intimidation is what that term was
designed for. Whoever uses that term is nearly always either confused
or trying to confuse the public. In this case, it is probably the
latter.

See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html for more
about this issue.

Charlie Angus's article is blistering, but not strong. It speaks
repeatedly about "obligations" under the WIPO Copyright Treaty; but
there is no need to fulfull any such "obligations", because Canada
should not sign this treaty in the first place. No country should.

It's true that the treaty doesn't go as far as the DMCA, but it is
nonetheless bad. (One must expect this from the organization which
popularized the propaganda term "intellectual property"; see
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html.) Where the DMCA forbids
all distribution of free software to break DRM (Digital Restrictions
Management), the treaty forbids only commercial distribution. That is
still wrong.

DRM is typically imposed on the public by a conspiracy of companies
intended to restrict the technology available to the public. Instead
of supporting these conspiracies with the WIPO Copyright Treaty, it
should make such conspiracy a crime.

If the idea of this interception is that they would install
it in the computer of an identified suspect, under court order,
that seems as legitimate as any other legal wiretap.

But Skype is a bad thing all around, because it is proprietary
(non-free, non-libre, non-freedom-respecting) software. (See
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html for the definition of free
software.) In fact, you don't know that Skype's developers haven't
put in a back door to intercept your calls. All you know is that, if
there is one, the Bavarian police don't know about it. Maybe only the
NSA knows about it.

Ethically speaking, putting a Skype number in your email
is the same sort of thing as saying "Use Windows".

-Richard Stallman