Aaron Swartz and the great Intellectual Property bamboozle

Aaron Swartz is gone now. Someone of a different temperament might have handled things differently.

But that's beside the point. He's still gone and it's still true it wouldn't have happened if not for his campaign against so-called intellectual property rights.

Central to Swartz's campaign was the belief that knowledge is a common good. He was absolutely right. He was however fighting against the spirit of the times. We are still in an era of privatizing the common good. He was a generation or two ahead of us, bringing a common good that had been privatized back into the commons.

This is one of the foundational myths of the American university system, that knowledge professionals create knowledge, which is their property to keep, sell, barter, mortgage, etc.

It is theirs.

These knowledge professionals are the tenured faculty. They take credit for the research their interns and assistants do and the academic papers they write. They get the contracts to write the textbooks. They sit on the hiring committees and decide who from the multitude of supplicants will be the next to join their elite club.

There is a vast underemployed ghetto of teaching assistants and sessionals from which to choose.

The cult of privilege has spread far beyond the academy, as evidenced by court cases brought by multi-millionaire "musicians" whose claim to fame owes everything to their amplifier technology. Once again, they are after an imaginary due they are owed because they have a copyright on a particular three chord progression.

Nobody owns music.

Nobody owns ideas.