Comments on: Creative destruction?

By: Common sense says collaborate « Peter Parkes

Common sense says collaborate « Peter Parkes — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 22:03:22 +0000

[...] wrote yesterday about ‘creative destruction’ — referring to the recent decision by Creative to threaten legal action against a [...]

By: Crosbie Fitch

Crosbie Fitch — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 15:37:24 +0000

For feminists, checking masculine language and the subliminal assumptions it engendered was necessary to help deprogram entrenched male chauvinism.

The same process needs to occur to help deprogram corporate chauvinism, i.e. to remove the assumption that a corporation is superior or even equal to a human being.

People need to be reminded of the fundamental difference between immortal corporations and human beings, and the unethical privileges of the former over the latter – as well to remind humans of their equality with each other, that none should enjoy a privilege of suspending the rightful liberty of another, including their cultural liberty.

We create privileges such as copyright to benefit corporations and pretend we’ve given them to citizens. Inevitably only corporations have the power to exert such privileges over each other, and in recent times, over citizens.

So, I’m not correcting your meaning, so much as attempting to decorrupt this insidious language of corporate rights that you’ve used.

Those who wish their privileges to be given a veneer of legitimacy and respectability have unsurprisingly preferred to use the term ‘legally created right’ or ‘legal right’ rather than privilege, and predictably, happily shortened it to ‘right’ for brevity.

And so, corporations and the people they represent pretend their mercantile privileges are as morally wholesome and self-evident as any rights a citizen could possibly have.

By: Adriana

Adriana — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 14:23:17 +0000

Crosbie, agreed. By ‘right’ I meant legal right as you can see in the paragraph quoted below that.

And this does fit in with the larger debate about copyright, IP and how they clash with the balance of power shifts online.

By: Crosbie Fitch

Crosbie Fitch — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 14:15:39 +0000

You say “The interesting aspect of this is that the company didn’t do anything that wasn’t their right to do.”

Yes they did.

It would be more accurate to say “The company didn’t do anything that wasn’t their privilege to do.”

Creative are enjoying their commercial privileges to control the use of their patented technology and copyrighted materials.

Such privileges necessarily trample over the rights of the public – a public that never agreed to the suspension of their rights (supposedly in their best interests according to their elected representatives several centuries ago).

A company may get away with enforcing its monopolistic privileges against other companies (because companies have no rights), however, they will come unstuck when enforcing them against human beings.