YOU'RE WRONG 

An Irregular Column

by Mykel Board

"Property is theft." --P.J. Proudhon

"Intellectual property is mind theft." --Mykel Board

It was weirder than bailing Ian MacKaye out of the drunk tank. I walk into the medical building where my doctor has her office. I've got an appointment for a prostate check. Pissing every 45 minutes, I figure something's wrong.

When I enter the building, this fat little man with a walrus-style mustache sidles up to me. He's wearing a green uniform with a matching officer's hat. On the hat is a picture of something that looks like a brain. There's a red circle around it and a diagonal line through the middle.

"That'll be twenty-five cents, please." he says, holding out his hand.

"For what?" I ask, "you don't even know where I'm going."

"It doesn't matter," he answers, "I'm collecting royalties... For the architect. You use the building. He gets paid."

The urge to argue is less than the urge, so I fork over the quarter. Inside the doctor's office, I check in with the anorexia-thin receptionist and go to take a seat.

"Hang on there," she says, "you've got to pay the seat tax. Ten cents, please."

I reach in my pocket, taking the opportunity to stroke my problem area a few times.

"What's this one for?" I ask.

"Five cents goes to the carpenter and the other five goes to the guy who designed the chair."

I sit down and wait until the doctor calls me.

When I'm in her office, she asks me to strip and lie on the table face down. Out of the corner of my eye, I see her reach into a box of latex gloves. She puts one on. Then she goes for the KY.

"After I finish," she says, "in addition to my regular fee, you'll have to pay a dollar in royalties."

"Royalt..." I start to ask before the finger penetrates.

"That's twenty cents to the guy who invented latex gloves," she explains," another twenty to the inventor of KY Jelly, thirty to the guy who discovered the manufacturing process and another thirty to the family of the first doctor who ever stuck a finger up someone's ass."

***********************************

Of course, none of this really happened. But it's the logical extension of our system of "intellectual property." Normally, when you do a job, you get paid for it. When you want more money, you do another job.

I'm not a fan of work. I'd like to see a pay system for doing nothing you don't want to. 100% unemployment, that's my goal. But if we're gonna have a bad system, lets have an equally bad one. A book-writer or a musician does a job. Instead of getting paid for it and going on to the next one, she continues to get paid, though the work is long finished.

Not only musicians and writers, but publishers, labels and hundreds of others. That's not all. Anyone who patents a medicine or an invention or trademarks a brand name, puts in their claim. You've got a lot of "intellectual property" there. You've also got a lot of folks manning intellectual shotguns to protect it.

Denise Dingbat writes a song and records it. The Hairy Balls sing a new version of it. The Hairy Balls pay to record their version. The Hairy Balls pay for the record pressing. The Hairy Balls sell the records. The Hairy Balls put Denise's name under the song, so everybody knows she wrote it. The Hairy Balls still have to pay Denise Dingbat! For what? What work did Denise Dingbat do for The Hairy Balls? None! It doesn't make sense.

It gets even dumber. Take t-shirts. Please.

What is a band t-shirt? It's an ad! It's a commercial for an entertainment entity. Wearing a T-shirt with Earth Crisis on it is no less commercial than wearing one with Calvin Klein on it.

How logical is it that a person PAYS to advertise something? A t-shirt says "I like this band. I want you to know." How logical is it that a person CANNOT advertise what they like.

But that's the law-- and the policy of most bands. Your t-shirts must be licensed. That is, you have to pay the band to advertise them. What work did the band do in making that t-shirt? How did they participate? Yet they get paid for it. The idea is somehow theirs. That idea has a copyright. It's lucky no one can read your thoughts. Otherwise they'd charge you every time you THINK a band's name.

If the copyright/patent/royalty system were only stupid, I wouldn't object to it. Tamagochi, day-glow condoms, and The X- Files are stupid. BFD. But the evil goes deeper than just stupidity.

The scene: a street market in Thailand. It's Pat Pong during the day. Too early for the sex clubs, bootleg Levis, Doc Martins and Gucci bags are the attraction now.

Tables filled with cassette copies of big-selling albums cater to both the traveling tramps and the local Thais.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEE AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW EEEEEEEEEEEEEE AWWWWWWWWWWW

Sirens howl down the street. A small white police car screeches to a halt in front of the Pat Pong gate. The door opens. Three cops get out, followed by an American. The American, dressed in a black suit, with polished shoes and very dark sunglasses, passes the cops. He walks through the gate and down the street. The cops follow.

At the first stand, the American reaches into the jeans piled in front of him. The Thai stand-owner and his wife strain to cover the look of horror on their faces. The American picks at the clothes, examining the seams. He throws them back onto the cart, motioning to the cops like you might call a dog.

The cops pull the jeans off the table and stuff them into a huge burlap sack. Tears well up in the owner's eyes. The cops say nothing to them.

Under American direction, the police clear most of the clothing stands and all the cassette tables. Everything, packed into a sack. The merchants try to save their livelihood. At a pocketbook stand, an old lady grabs the American by the sleeve. She cries, pulls on him, begs.

He turns to her and removes his sunglasses. His small eyes squint in the bright light.

"I'm sorry," he says, aware that she can't understand his words, "but my job is to enforce the law."

The next day, the newspapers print a picture of a giant bulldozer grinding cassettes into plastic dust. The newly jobless are gathering paper cups to beg on the street.

Let's hop on a private jet with the American inspector. We watch Thailand disappear from beneath us as we head for Delhi. When our plane lands, we follow the inspector into town to the local drug store.

Inside, we see the American inspector looking at the local brands, made by Indian drug companies. These drugs are cheap and readily available to the poor Indians. This time, a single Indian cop moseys in behind him. The cop, a young man with a thin mustache, wears a curiously calm look.

"They're copies," says the American. "These are drugs invented by the world's great pharmaceutical companies, made without license, here in India. They are frauds. Confiscate them."

"No," says the Indian cop, "our people need these drugs. The drug companies who invented them are already rich. We are not."

"Fine," says the American, "then you don't get any more drugs."

He storms out alone. We can follow him as he walks to his satellite-modem connected computer. We'll watch as he e-mails World Patent Central.

"India refuses to respect intellectual property laws." he types. "In violation of international agreements, it is removing legitimate profits from international pharmaceutical companies. I suggest it be put on the `non-cooperative' list. It's no longer a `most favored nation.' We need to subject its goods to the same high tariffs and international boycotts as other non-cooperating nations. We can bring India to its knees."

Clicking SEND, our inspector huffs back to his plane and takes off for Africa.

These are not fictional incidents, buckaroos, they really happen. Intellectual property laws cause poverty and death as well as simple annoyance. Remember, Clinton threatened sanctions against China, not for human rights violations, but for bootleg CDs.

There's another reason that intellectual property is evil. That is, it prevents innovation-- or building on past ideas. Suppose the inventor of the typewriter took out a patent on the keyboard. Every other make of typewriter would need to pay to use the layout-- or come up with one of it's own.

You'd have as many keyboard layouts as you have companies. People wouldn't be able to move from one machine to another without relearning the typing process on a new keyboard. Someone comes up with an improvement on the old keyboard. They electrify it, or attach it to a computer. Whoops, no good, gotta switch the letters around again.

Well, you ask, don't writers, authors, inventors, and other creative people deserve to get paid for their efforts?

The simple answer is NO ONE deserves to get paid for their efforts. We should do things for results, not pay. Given our social system, however, people NEED to get paid for their efforts. But they don't need to get paid differently from anyone else.

When a record label signs a band, they're hiring them to make a record. They should pay the band for making the record and that's it. Some bands will sell more records, make more money for the label, and therefore should be paid more. But once paid, that's the end. If you want more money, you make another record-- or perform and get paid for that.

If a drug company makes a drug, they should sell it, like any other product. If someone copies that product, then the company has to compete with the copier. Maybe they can improve their product, make it more attractive, sell it at a cheaper price. Whatever the case, only the THINGS they create are theirs to sell, not the IDEA of the creation.

The same goes for you musicians, writers, and performers. When you perform for others, that performance is THEIRS, not yours. The audience should have the right to do what they want with it, including copying it, pressing it and selling it at Bleecker Bobs. They paid for a ticket to see you. You gave them something for that payment. How can you own something after you sell it? Especially an idea: a song, a logo, a band name. How can you own these anyway? Ideas need to remain free if we are to do the same. ENDNOTES:

--> Missing the point dept: MRR printed a couple of letters in response to my bike column. In that column, I parody the anti-smoking hysteria. The letter writers missed the parody, but that's not the point. They also challenged the statistics: deaths and sexual disfunction. They're real. I checked them myself. I didn't make them up.

Personally, I've had three bikes since I've been in NYC. I've kept each for an average of a year and a half. All of them were stolen. I've owned one car in my life, for a total of 6 months. I've never seen a cyclist given a ticket, though one letter writer has. Maybe he was lucky.

--> And it's not even California dept: "Thursday, Dec. 4, at 6:30: There will be a panel discussion and open forum on flirting. There will be no charge to attend."

Yow! I'll be there, wearing my pheremones. It's the Society for Human Sexuality. They seem to have a good attitude, except for "anyone over the age of 18 is welcome to attend." More info comes from http://weber.u.washington.edu/~humsex/.

--> Gotta match? dept. The National Environmental Trust reports that between 1988 and 1992, there were more than 34,000 toxic chemical accidents in the US. Corporate accidents, they were. The same organization also reports that microwaving food in plastic containers releases a carcinogen called DEHP into the food. There is no plan to inform consumers.

Cancer rates are skyrocketing. What is industry going to do? Now that you're not allowed to smoke anywhere, who are they going to blame the deaths on? Fear not. If there's one thing industrial PR men DON'T lack, it's creativity.

BARBECUES! Yes, now they say barbecues are responsible for air pollution and increased cancer rates. Not only are your lungs held hostage to second hand smoke, but they also suffer from spare ribs!

Like the smoking smokescreen, it's all lies, of course. NET says "all 97 million American households would have to barbecue 14 hours a day-- every day-- just to match the pollution from industrial and transportation sources."

Pass the beans, please.

-->Good deed dept: A West PA promoter jumps out of a plane with a parachute that doesn't work. OK, what else is new? The guy splatters. No surprise. What IS the surprise, though, is that he asked people to establish a music fund for kids after his death.

Instead of turning people into junkies or Christians, this guy wants to die to turn 'em into musicians (an overlapping, but not congruous category). Strange thoughtfulness from a promoter!

The guy's name is Mickey Chalick. You can email jrogan@voicenet.com for information about the fund. It's worth a couple of bucks.

--> Q. If there's a punk and a skinhead in the back of a car, who's in the front? A. A cop

That is among the punk jokes in Atrophy Zine where their motto is "Motto's Are For Sissies!" It's a fun little punkzine. You can get a copy for a dollar from Atrophy Zine. POB C-11, New Rochelle NY 10804.

--> Christians on the rampage dept: Dave Price, who does a music zine (he didn't tell me the name) sent me a copy of a Christian rant-poem he got in the mail. It's about how "all shall be laid to rest, for the lion of Judah shall open his mouth and roar." The poem was hand-written in alternating red and black pen. As a postscript it says "Read the Bible, The Proof is all There. Come to the Cross. Do it Now! Mykel Board IS WRONG. Christ Jesus is Right PERIOD! LOVE PAUL" (capitalization is the authors)

This would be weird enough, but Dave never sent Paul his zine. It was only listed in the "other zines" section in the MRR reviews. Did EVERYBODY get a hand-written copy of this. Yow! This guy is dedicated. Ah well, idle hands are the devils work... Reminds me, I'd better jerk-off.

Thanks to Scott, Vic and Mels who're maintaining these sites. My own fledgling homepage is at: http://www.freeyellow.com/members2/seidboard/

-->Speaking of the web dept: There an interesting site at: http://www.freedomforum.org/first/resources.asp It's THE FREEDOM FORUM, a first amendment group made up of Gannett/USA Today formers and presents. It has some good reporting and presents lots of information about first amendment issues. It's interestingly one-sided though.

When The Dallas Morning News printed lawyer-client information in the Timothy McVeigh case, they supported the newspaper, favoring Freedom of the Press over the guarantee of a fair trial. There are other cases there where they claim a "public right to know" overshadows any other rights, like privacy or presumed innocence. In a way, it's an unintentional wake-up call, reminding us there is more than one amendment to the constitution.

--> I know most MRR readers don't get what you deserve-- and boy are you lucky! But on the insurance front, it's another matter. I have no health insurance. But folks going to school or suffering the horrors of employment might. I also know that many readers here are more comfortable with natural medical therapies, saving their drugs for recreation.

Enter Insurance Reimbursement for Alternative Therapies Equity (2 Executive Blvd., Suite 404, Suffern NY 10901, 914-368- 9797). Aptly named IRATE, this group will fight for you if your insurance turns down payment because your doctor is 'alternative.' Information is free, but they take donations.

My doctor listens to Smashing Pumpkins, is she alternative?

-->Spam o' the month dept: I don't know why there's so much complaint about unsolicited email. If you don't like it, delete. At least it doesn't kill trees. Besides, there's always so much interesting stuff.

I just got an email message about a new phone card that will put me in God's graces. You see, 5% of their profits go to anti- abortion groups. You might be interested in the details. You can call them directly and toll free at: 1-800-636-6773 ext 4492. You don't have to tell 'em I sent you.

-->Sucker for Parodies dept: I love bands that make fun. THE TUBES, ALBERTO & LOST TRIOS, you name it. The new kid on the block is a metal parody band called: Heavy Flo. See 'em! They're funnier than a burning church!

-->Ad of the month dept: This one's from Opportunity World, a magazine aimed at suckers who fall for chain-letter and related scams. This is from the Classified Personal Ads:

$1,000 WEEKLY- GIRLS pay you for your Intimate Services. (Your area) Money never stops!!! Details $2.00. Brandies, 5187 Island Club Dr., Tamarac FL 33319.

OK, who's got the two bucks to check it out? Let me know what happens... sucker. --Mykel (mykelB@ix.netcom.com)

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