Intellectual property and freedom

A contact on Facebook quoted an article attacking filesharers as thieves.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/logan-lynn/file-sharing_b_1325973.html 
Par for the course. So I added the following comment: 

All the fuss about intellectual property isn't just to protect the profits of big music, media and print publishers (who are like translation agencies only much bigger and much much uglier), but to strangle public debate, imprison artistic growth (individual and collective), grind down our resistance to censorship and mind control, kill off ideas and progress in intellectual and scientific areas, further boost totalitarian intrusion and spying on citizens (every citizen a potential revolutionary), and kill poor people when they can't afford expensive life-saving patent medicines. 

Rewarding immediate producers of ideas and art (ie practising artists, musicians, writers, scientists, etc) is a matter for society. The current setup is a chaotic free-for-all benefiting the very rich and the very powerful and is sick and perverse. 

However much I support the need for individual cultural producers to get a good reward for their activities, this lawyer-ridden, profit-driven, anti-human, barbaric and brutal system is not the way to achieve it. And note that none of this is "back to the good old days" stuff, it's all brand new imperialist weaponry. Of course, artists were treated like vermin or fools in the old days (worms extruding silk), and still are. But the rich ones are not only getting richer, they are becoming corporations with their own security forces and legal teams themselves.

The forces of cultural production are expanding all the time, more and more people are in a position to be creative and to acquire the instruments that make a lot of creative activity (the material requisites) more effective and sometimes even basically possible.

Freedom of thought and freedom of (cultural) expression are prerequisites for civilized society and a free and fulfilled humanity. Patents and copyright in their present form are destroying these prerequisites and creating a mental concentration camp where people are crawling in the mud, eating rotten potatoes and living in constant fear of getting a jackboot in their backs.

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German Marxist critic and thinker Walter Benjamin's article from 1936, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" gives a good historical, social, technological and philosophical perspective on some of the key issues involved.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm