> I wish people could frame arguments without implied/covert vilification of the presumed opponents of your position I agree. I wish capitalists didn't call pe

> I wish people could frame arguments without implied/covert vilification of the presumed opponents of your position I agree. I wish capitalists didn't call people who make a copy of things, pirates. Professor Rigi is pushing back against capitalist logic that tells us "You Wouldn't Steal a Car. Piracy, it's a crime" when workers make a copy of something that's an artificially scarce good (by the capitalist property system) / non-rival good. Here's another quote you might enjoy: “During the 1980s and 1990s I worked in many countries in eastern and southern Africa, and then for four years at the South Centre—2005–09. I can say from my experience that the industrialised countries of the North have been trying systematically to block all efforts by the countries of the South to industrialise. Their mega-corporations have tried—and, alas, succeeded—in privatising knowledge, and using it to promote corporate profits over the lives of people." [...] “It is the seeds and pharmaceutical companies of the West that have pirated the knowledge of seeds and medicinal products from the South. But whereas in the South this knowledge was shared as a public asset, the Western companies, having learnt from the South, proceeded to claim it as their private property. They are guilty—morally guilty—for the avoidable deaths of millions of people in the South who cannot afford their ‘patented’ medicines against, for example, AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and other killer diseases. It is a sordid story. But it is not all doom and gloom. Those who control the system (the global corporations and the international organisations that the West controls) do not get their own way entirely. Wars do not always end in the victory of the militarily or ‘intellectually’ powerful.” [...] “The common heritage of humanity—including medical knowledge and the seeds for food—is turned into property under capitalism, to be bought and sold as ‘IP.’ [...] It has been a well-recognized fact throughout written history that knowledge shared is knowledge multiplied. A physical commodity that is consumed becomes extinct. I consume an apple and it is no more. But knowledge is metaphysical. It is enriched when it is ‘consumed’ by an ever-expanding circle of consumers. [...] The notion that without IP protection, innovation would be stifled is an ideological position created and propagated by those that benefit from the privatization of knowledge. I came to a diametrically opposite conclusion over two decades of work with farming communities in Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Botswana, and much of eastern and southern Africa. Ordinary peasants and workers are amazingly innovative and productive, until their resources and knowledge are appropriated and corporatized, and the people enslaved to earn profits for corporations.” - Professor Yash Tandon, Trade is War