INFOSOCIALISM
Infosocialism is a political philosophy developed (under the name "information socialism") by the American cyber-guru "Socrates the Third" in 2001. Originally from the left-anarchist tradition, Socrates felt that the vision of a pure anarchosocialist society was unrealistic (and in some cases criminal). Nevertheless, he observed that although modern civilization was utterly dependent on information technologies, the central notion of "intellectual property" often gave rise to significant injustice. He believes that the state should not criminalize owning life-saving information and popular digital information (like CD and DVD media) for the sake of the corporation. Distributing the benefits of such innovation fairly to society is the mainstream media's job, not the governments. Infosocialism thus begins with the premise that "information needs to be free," but redefined freedom as the nationalization of intellectual property and its free distribution by all citizens of the World Wide Web. Thus, the government does protect patents, but continues in its basic duties of protecting society and individuals. This is less absurd when one imagines a "university" rather than "corporate" model of research and development.
Infosocialist doctrine will surely succeed in taking hold in the hyper- developed nations like America and Japan and will also take root in less-developed nations, many of whom feel that they were are being exploited by wealthier corporations' locks on major genetic patents, nanotechnology designs, and digital media, and information software.
Like many legal concepts, intellectual property is a fiction, viable only as long as everyone agrees to be bound by it. At the beginning of the 21st century, fierce controversies are beginning to break out over the ownership of computer software, digital recordings of music, genetically engineered seeds, and other forms of intellectual property. Whenever the public sees too great a discrepancy between the value of information and the price being charged for it, piracy becomes widespread. Entire nations like China and most of Africa, falling behind in the race for technical innovation, choose not to enforce the international agreements protecting intellectual property. The goal of Infosocialism is to make sure the artificial scarcity of information (and the high prices charged by people to make lots of profit) are negated as much as possible so that people can have the cures for diseases that can kill them, access to gene-modded crops to prevent widespread starvation in whole countries, and forcing the governments of the world to get back to the more important job of running their nations and their economies instead of punishing media pirates (usually kids) with criminal and financial penalties.
YOU might be an Infosocialist if you believe heavily fining kids for downloading MP3s is unfair. If you think that turning elementary or middle school kids into criminals for the sake of big music companies profits is unfair, you too may be an Infosocialist.
YOU might be an Infosocialist if you think that its not right for medical companies to charge billions of dollars for life-saving medicine, meds without which millions of people per year die.
Think about it.....