If you’re busily looking around at what political parties propose to do about the world we live in, you’ll notice that it’s very hard to get them to come clean and tell you their whole programme. They will say that is because you can’t explain a whole political programme in a sentence. I say that if you can’t explain your objective in a sentence it's because you haven’t got one. The Socialist Party objective is highly controversial, but it's very straightforward: the abolition of private property. It’s not that we oppose capitalism and would like to have some other arrangement of the property laws. It’s not that we hate money and prefer direct bartering of property. We oppose the concept of property ownership itself, and everything it entails.
Now why should property be such a problem, you might ask. Surely all our problems derive from not having enough of it in the first place? Don't we spend all our lives dreaming of the Pools? How does getting rid of all money and private property solve anything? We want more of these things, not less.
In answer allow me to refer you to interesting developments in the computer industry by way of analogy. In the world of computers, information can be privately owned, and therefore bought and sold, just like tins of spaghetti. Now I must point out that unlike other commodities such as spaghetti it is possible to steal information without its owner being aware of the theft — the shelf stocks don’t shrink from pilfering because you don’t actually physically take anything. You simply copy it. And if you’re copying it, you're not buying it. So the information tycoons get ripped off (shame) by invisible tealeaves who hardly ever get caught. Question: What can they do? Answer: Take you to the cleaners if they do catch you, otherwise not much.
Software piracy is now a criminal offence and is covered by the copyright laws. So if your boss at work asks you to copy an unlicensed program for the company, or use a program that you know has been copied without a license, you personally can also get prosecuted. So tell the boss to fuck off, unless he's going to make it worth your while to break the law. And incidentally, disgruntled ex-employees reading this will be interested in the potential for dropping their old employers in the shit. The fines can be ginormous. Not that I would encourage fellow workers to be spiteful, you understand . . .
But all that only applies to direct bit for bit mechanical copying. Alternatively, suppose you rewrote a program in your own code, in such a way that it did exactly the same thing as the original commercial program, and you then sold the finished item as your own program? In other words, you haven't copied it, but you have created an exactly similar replica. Maybe it sounds improbable to have to reinvent the wheel like that but it’s called reverse engineering and it goes on all the time. Only the twisted logic of a money-driven society could come up with anything quite as stupid as this, but there you go. Much of what passes for research in many different industries is simply company scientists being paid to reverse engineer other companies’ ideas. You wouldn't be breaching copyright, but you would still have pinched someone else’s idea and used it to make a profit. So how do you stop that? In theory, by holding a patent. However, you can’t rely on them.
In a recent patent dispute Intel the chipmakers tried to sue a rival company, AMD, for reverse engineering the 80386 and 80486 series of chips. AMD were of course guilty as hell. In fact they didn’t deny it. They won the case on the basis that reverse engineering didn’t breach Intel’s patent restrictions and that besides you can't copyright a number. So they effectively stole the whole thing, name and all, and got away with it. Intel retired sulking over their lost case, eventually emerging to retaliate with dash and brilliance by calling the new 80586 the 'Pentium'. On a different note, we can no doubt look forward to the Sextium, or maybe they’ll change its name to 'Esprit' or perhaps just 'Roger’. You think I jest? I make schoolboy joke? Let me tell you, an industry that calls a binary number an item of 'underwear' is capable of anything.
I digress. Now it happens that once upon a time the Patent Office didn't grant patents for computer algorithms at all, arguing amongst other things that it wasn't possible to call a string of numbers in a file (all that a program really is) an invention. In the 1950s through to the 1970s, unhampered by patent restrictions, research borrowed freely from research, and computer software developed very rapidly during this period as a result. It was an exciting period to be involved in computers, and all the real landmarks in computer technology were established at this time: spreadsheets, word-processing and DTP, computer aided design, networking, real-time simulation and virtual reality. The only thing that looked more exciting than the present was the near future.
However, things changed. During the 1980s patents started to be granted, sometimes for ridiculous things which were not original at all. The Patent Office arguably couldn’t keep abreast of fast-moving changes in this sunrise industry and tended to believe what it was told. And then the problems began.
If you can gull the Patent Office into granting a patent for your code, then whenever anyone writes any program that uses the same idea, they have to pay you royalties. So what big software houses are doing now is buying up buckets of patents and using them to sue the arses off all their competitors as a way of slowing them down — because it ends up being impossible to write any code at all without being in breach of somebody’s patent. As one observer puts it, in today’s information superhighway the Patent is what gets you pulled over for speeding (New Scientist, April 23).
The problem is, ownership of ideas slows down development of new ideas across the board, and in every field of computer science, and by extension in every field of human endeavour. Research is now hag-ridden with lawsuits. Nobody dares do anything innovative for fear of being stomped on by the big bullyboy patent owners. The result is that progress grinds to a halt, or shifts phase into that monumental waste of effort known as "lateral" or "sideways development", which is a process of designing the same thing over and over again in different fashion shades. You see what I'm getting at here? Private ownership has avalanched into the vale of ideas and dammed up the river. So the computer world is fiercely divided now between the rich software houses with their libraries of patents and their conservative views, and the rest who are clamouring to abolish the patent system. In other words, abolish the right to "own" an idea by patent, and you can at one stroke emancipate computer research and people can once again start to do really interesting things with the technology.
Anyone familiar with the Socialist case will see the similarity between the two arguments immediately. They are saying that ownership of ideas halts the progress of ideas. We are saying that ownership itself halts human progress of almost any sort. The scientists complain that they can’t have free access to ideas. We complain that humans can’t have free access to even basic necessities like food and shelter. The upshot of both arguments is the same — how are we supposed to progress as a civilisation under such restrictions?
In actuality the progressive scientists are not being as revolutionary as all that. Even if the state agreed to abolish the patent system — perhaps in order to stimulate the sagging computer economy — that doesn’t mean that suddenly information would become free. Those scientists would still be happy to make us pay for their ideas — they just wouldn't have to pay themselves. But the probability is that they won’t get their way. The reason that you can "own" an idea is that capitalism is a system of "ownership". It tends to commodify whatever can be made into a commodity, however unlikely. If you can figure out some way to stop everybody getting at it, then you can force them to buy it from you as a commodity, on a market established for that purpose, and at a massive rate of profit.
Example: why isn’t air a commodity while water is? Because they haven’t figured out how to restrict our access to air yet, but god help us all when they do. You see, the money system depends on stopping you from getting what you want. Now you see we are having to pay for metered water, even though it rains for eleven months of the bloody year, because they "own" the purification plants. A thing doesn’t have to be rare or scarce to be a commodity. It just has to be rendered unavailable by careful containment.
So all that’s happened in the computer industry is that information has been commodified. There should be no surprise about that, and no real expectation of being able to return to earlier times. You can’t seriously expect owners of a commodity like information to allow you to decommodify it from under them. Not unless you were actually challenging the concept of property ownership itself, the whole basis of capitalism, in which case we’d be talking world socialist revolution.
So hard cheese to the computer scientists. And anyway, what makes them think progress is on the agenda in the first place, or that "pure" research is or ought to be somehow exempt from the property system? They really do become insufferably pious and moral at times. There’s only one item on the agenda of anyone who owns anything in this world, and it begins with 'M'and rhymes with funny. Ingenious though I think computer researchers frequently are, I just can’t figure out where they get this idea from. Too much staring at the screen makes you go blind, perhaps.
Paddy Shannon
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