By Crispin Sartwell

The people who have a stake in the concept of copyright are, of course, those who think their often huge incomes would be compromised by its surcease: pre-eminently the high end of the recording and publishing business. It's easy to follow the argument, which in the most sympathetic reading is this: we and the artists we deal with devote a great deal of time and resources to producing these important cultural artifacts. We couldn't take the risk if we were not assured of getting the return, if there is a return. And so copyright protects the creativity and artistic integrity of our culture.

This argument would be more convincing than it is - though it would still not be convincing - if it was not put forward by the chumps who have made our recording and publishing worlds such sad places. Give this argument a moment's credulity only if you are impressed by the artistic quality of the objects produced and promoted by the American publishing or recording industries.

The sad fact is that these industries are stuffed like sausage with sycophants and numskulls. The stuff they emit is for the most part bilge which they reproduce hundreds of thousands of times.

Let's take the New York publishing industry. The occasional nice little book aside, it produces unbelievable quantities of completely worthless crap, and then expends untold resources to promote it. It's dominated entirely by mega-corporations. And it's a world where the single most important thing is pecking-order. Who are you lunching with? What clothes are you wearing? Whose huge ass are you kissing? The claim of these chumps to be interested in the written word is laughable.

They are interested in power and money, in the way that toadies are interested in power and money: obsessively and to the exclusion of all decency, much less integrity or truth. Above all, NYpub is a world devoted to that mysterious, sacred essence prestige, a kind of perfect self-fulfilling circularity that is strictly meaningless.

If you haven't made the pecking order, you are excluded, usually viciously, usually forever. The New York publishing houses are fundamentally in the business of preventing interesting or eccentric material from coming to the attention of the public; they are in the business merely of traversing their circle infinitely. The idea that the money this annihilation produces must be defended by law is absurd on its face: the disintegration of the publishing industry is obviously entirely desirable and should be hastened by all available means.

Let's not even talk about the recording industry. American music is rich and fascinating, and virtually none of that is happening on major labels, who are devoted only to sheer mindless schlock. Metallica whining about Napster is a reductio ad absurdum of copyright.

As to, let's say, the video or software industries: please. If you wanted to develop good software, you'd open source. If you wanted movies that weren't simply made by, for, and about money, you'd start again.

About the concept of intellectual property there is, let us admit, a whiff of hocus-pocus. I can understand what it means to buy and sell a bundle of paper, but what is it to own "a book" in the sense of a certain "text"? It's here; it's there; it's nowhere; it's everywhere. What it is to own an abstract object is not, after all, perfectly clear: I wonder whether you could own a certain sequence of integers, for example, or a geometrical figure: why not copyright the triangle? And of course the "persons" who own these things have also been mistified, so that, astonishinhly, I own my books after my death: both they and they person who "made" them are supra-sensible something-or-others, little chunks of metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. OK: I own a copy of "The Thirteen Gun Salute." I can heft it, gesture toward it, toss it at you. Hey Norton: if you can show me what it is you claim to own, or even state clearly what it is or where it is, I might recognize your ownership of it. Deal with ontology; then we'll talk about property.

I am not saying that the general cultural climate is due primarily to the operation of copyright. All I am saying is: if people tell you that copyright is necessary for our vibrant publishing or recording industries, just laugh in their faces. If there were less money at stake, these segments of culture would be better. And if the current megaliths dissolved, that could not possibly be a devolution.

And let me say this to you, the world's content providers: good luck enforcing your copyrights in the era of digital information, bitches.

You know, people were making music and writing books before this copyright thing, and they'll be making music and writing books after it all goes to hell. So let's help it along.