No Safe Harbor. Essays About Pirate Politics.

century ago were often used to record live events, and were not a good technology with which to deliver popular music to the masses.

There is the real political dimension in this issue. Music distribution companies, and the mass media in general, exploit people through advertising that uses many tricks to get them to buy culturally inferior products. Teenage children, physically exhausted working class families, and people who are socially isolated from the local musical culture, learn to gobble up the latest recordings by celebrities. In general, we should seek the decommercialization of the arts, even as we seek new ways to reward very large numbers of artists in their local communities.

This brings us back to devolution, and to new technology-based forms of democracy. On the one hand, we can simply abolish copyrights and watch the music distribution industry wither away, as already seems to be happening with respect to magazines and newspapers. Or, we could create such attractive free sources of music, that the masses liberated themselves from their current cultural thralldom, and simply stopped buying recorded music, but gave the money instead to their local singer-songwriter. More likely, several things will happen at once, and a variety of collective decisions will need to be made by governments, guilds of performers, and segments of the general public. The online devolved decision-processes described above will then come in handy for music and the many subcultures within it, as it will for the art arts and many other dimensions of life.

Conclusion

Fluid democracy can be considered a high-tech approach for improving existing government institutions, or it can be considered a revolutionary approach that would entirely replace them. Indeed, one of the adjustment mechanisms that can be built into the new system could be how revolutionary it is in practice. For example, if fluid democracy completely replaces the old system, then all of the financial obligations incurred under the old system become void. If investors see fluid democracy rising in political significance, they would be well advised to sell any government bonds they hold, because these “securities” very well could become worthless if the new system in fact took power. Once fluid democracy was in place, the new system could avoid government debt by allocating funding across government departments in terms of a percentage of tax revenues, rather than as defined dollar amounts. That allocation could be decided annually as voters told the government database what fraction of their own taxes they wanted to go to each department, or which political party they wanted to make that decision for them.

Clearly, we have a long road to travel before fluid democracy can be a reality. In addition to political activism, much research and technology development will be required. A large number of pieces must be assembled to complete the puzzle. Yet it is clear that traditional political structures are failing, so the opportunity for healthy but radical change has now arrived, with the maturity of Internet, at this particular point in human history.

Privatizing Life Kembrew Mcleod

Because of a landmark Supreme Court case and congressional legislation, 1980 was a pivotal year for genetic research. In the Diamond v. Chakrabarty decision, a five-to-four majority ruled that a living, genetically altered microorganism could be patented under U.S. law. Previous to this ruling, it was the policy of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) that living organisms — in the case of Diamond v. Chakrabarty , a bacterium that helped clean oil spills — could not be patented. But the Supreme Court ruled otherwise, stating that “anything under the sun that is made by the hand of man” is patentable subject matter. That same year, Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act to encourage the commercialization of inventions produced by universities and other recipients of federal funding. An influx of private money poured into university science departments, and since the act’s passing, the private funding of university biomedical research has increased by a factor of 20.

This growth in subsidies provided the legal justification for researchers to exploit human genes. And when I use the word “exploit,” I’m not using it in an ideological way — I'm simply using the terminology of a patent lawyer. During an interview with a New York Times reporter, Todd Dickinson, the former U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s commissioner, took exception to the idea that patents allow a “government sponsored monopoly,” a phrase he found imprecise. Instead, Commissioner Dickinson corrected the reporter, saying candidly and without irony, “We like to say ‘right to exploit.’ ”Today, private pharmaceutical companies (many of which are partnered with universities) are engaged in a manic — maniacal, even — race to patent every imaginable human gene, protein, and cell line that might be profitable.

The BRCA-1 and BRCA-2 genes are linked to breast cancer and are owned by Myriad Genetics, whose literature reports, “Women with a BRCA mutation have a 33 to 50 percent risk of developing cancer by age 50 and a 56 to 87 percent risk by age 70.”Myriad has a monopoly right over the use of the gene in diagnostic tests or therapies, which means that every time a woman is tested to find out if she carries those mutated genes, a hefty royalty has to be paid to Myriad. Also, if a researcher discovers a therapy that prevents cancerous mutations in these genes, he or she is obligated under the law to secure a license from Myriad, and the company has used its patent to block research on the gene. This is one of the ways that these kinds of gene patents contribute to the skyrocketing costs of drugs and medical care in the United States and throughout the world.

Helena Chaye, like many I’ve spoken with in the business of drugs and science, feels uncomfortable about these kinds of situations. As the director of Business Development at the biotech corporation MediGene, she secures and sells gene patent licenses for the company. Chaye finds herself in an uneasy position. She has both a Ph.D. in molecular genetics and a degree in law, and is intimately familiar with both areas. “From a private company’s perspective,” she tells me, “you want everything to be protected. You want the ability to block other people, and you want the ability to monopolize a certain sector or a certain product and block others from entering, even though you may not be the one [who’s] actually developing it.” For many commercial entities, it simply makes no business sense to put anything in the public domain.

“I personally don’t believe in that,” Chaye says. “From what I do for a living, it’s a struggle, philosophically, that I’m having to patent everything.” She continues: “If genetic sequencing was publicly available for diagnostics, for example, you wouldn’t have to go through Myriad and pay four thousand dollars for a breast cancer test. If that was available to other parties, then you could have somebody else develop it at a much cheaper rate and be available for everyone.” She pauses. “I mean, the flip side of that is they say, ‘Well, we’re not going to be able to develop something so expensive unless there’s some sort of monopoly that protects us in the future.’ But I think there’s a reasonable level at which certain things should be protected, and certain things should be left to the public domain.”

My favorite patent request was submitted by a British waitress and poet who protested the gobbling up of the genetic commons by filing patent application GB0000180.0. She wanted to patent herself.

“It has taken 30 years of hard labor for me to discover and invent myself,” Donna MacLean drily wrote in the application, “and now I wish to protect my invention from unauthorized exploitation, genetic or otherwise. I am new. I have led a private existence and I have not made the invention of myself public.” MacLean added, “I am not obvious.” The provocateur poet didn’t receive her patent, but she made her point.

Patents as Stumbling Blocks

While many are still happily riding the moneymaking bandwagon, there are a growing number of scientists, medical researchers, and even companies that believe certain gene patents can inhibit research. The chief scientific officer at Bristol-Myers Squibb, Peter Ringrose — hardly a radical anti-capitalist Luddite — said that there were “more than fifty proteins possibly involved in cancer that the company was not working on because the patent holders either would not allow it or were demanding unreasonable royalties.” Dr. Gareth Evans, a consultant in medical genetics, also believes that the economic value of genetic patents make research more secretive and restrictive, and therefore lessens the chances of scientists finding cures.

The hoarding of these kinds of patents threatens to create a “tragedy of the anti-commons,” as Rebecca Eisenberg, a National Institutes of Hea l th-affiliated law professor at the University of Michigan, calls it. The phrase “tragedy of the commons” was coined by Garrett Hardin in his classic essay of the same name, and its primary argument goes like this: If anyone can use common property — a pasture where farm animals can freely graze, for instance — then it can be overused and trashed. While this can happen to physical resources, a patented gene won’t suffer the same fate, but as Eisenberg points out by inverting the phrase, tragedies