Free The Case for Copyright Reform by Christian Engström, Rick Falkvinge

bilateral “free trade” agreements that did the same, and
multilateral agreements that raised the bar worldwide in protection of American
interests.
     
    In this way, the United States was able to create an exchange of values
where they would rent out blueprints and get finished products from those
blueprints in return. This would be considered as a fair deal under the “free
trade” agreements which redefined value artificially.
     
    The entire US monopolized industry was behind this push: the copyright
industries, the patent industries, all of them. They went forum shopping and
tried to go to WIPO — repeating the hijack of the record industry in 1961
— to seek legitimacy and hostship for a new trade agreement that would be
marketed as “Berne Plus”.
     
    At this point, it became politically necessary for the US to join the
Berne Convention for credibility reasons, as WIPO is the overseer of Berne.
     
    However, WIPO saw right through this scheme and more or less kicked them
right out the door. WIPO was not created to give any country that kind of
advantage over the rest of the world. They were outraged at the shameless
attempt to hijack the copyright and patent monopolies.
     
    So, another forum was needed. The US monopoly industry consortium
approached GATT — the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade — and managed to get influence
there. A major process was initiated whereby about half of the participating
countries in GATT were tricked, coerced or bullied into agreeing with a new
agreement under GATT, an agreement which would lock in the Berne Convention and
strengthen the US industry considerably on top of that by redefining
“producing”, “thing” and “value”. This agreement was called TRIPs. Upon
ratification of the TRIPs agreement, the GATT body was renamed WTO, the World
Trade Organization. The 52 GATT countries choosing to stay out of the WTO would
soon find themselves in an economic position where it became economically
impossible not to sign the colonizing terms. Only one country out of the
original 129 has not rejoined.
     
    TRIPs has been under considerable fire for how it is constructed to
enrich the rich at the expense of the poor, and when they can’t pay with money,
they pay with their health and sometimes their lives. It forbids third world
countries from making medicine in their own factories from their own raw
materials with their own knowledge to their own people. After several
near-revolts, some concessions were made in TRIPs to “allow” for this.
     
    But perhaps the most telling story of how important the artificial
monopolies are to the United States’ dominance came when Russia sought
admission into the WTO (for incomprehensible reasons). To allow Russia
admission, the United States demanded that the Russia-legal music shop AllofMP3 should be closed.
This shop sold copies of MP3 files and was classified as a radio station in
Russia, paying appropriate license fees and was fully legal.
     
    Now, let’s go back a bit to review what was going on. This was the
United States and Russia sitting at the negotiating table. Former enemies who
kept each other at nuclear gunpoint 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, through
sandstorm and blizzard. The United States could have demanded and gotten
anything. Absolutely anything.
     
    So what did the United States demand?
     
    It asked for Russia to close a
bloody record store .
     
    That’s when you realize how much power these monopolies have.
     
    Copyright As A Fundamentalist Religion
    What is happening now with the copyright industry vs. the people is
practically identical to what happened when the printing press was introduced
and the Catholic Church declared war on self-educated people. In both cases, it
is not really about religion or law, but about the very simple principle that
people are people and that powerful people will use their power to keep their
power.
     
    What is interesting here is that copyright defenders are acting