Freedom of Expression is More than a Basic Human Right

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech

The following are unedited excerpts from wikipedia on the subject of freedom of speech.

“The First Amendment was adopted on December 15, 1791. The Amendment states:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

The right to freedom of speech is recognized as a human right under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and recognized in international human rights law in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). The ICCPR recognizes the right to freedom of speech as “the right to hold opinions without interference. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression. Furthermore freedom of speech is recognized in European, inter-American and African regional human rights law.”

Freedom of speech, or the freedom of expression, is recognized in international and regional human rights law. The right is enshrined in Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, Article 13 of the American Convention on Human Rights and Article 9 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights.

One of the earliest Western defences of freedom of expression is Areopagitica (1644) by English poet and political writer John Milton. Milton also argued that if the facts are laid bare, truth will defeat falsehood in open competition, but this cannot be left for a single individual to determine. According to Milton, it is up to each individual to uncover their own truth; no one is wise enough to act as a censor for all individuals

It should be clear to all therefore that plagiarism is an evil of relative magnitude that militates not just against a basic human right but against the very heart of democracy itself. The public at large are duped by perpetrators as to the severity of the crime. Perpetrators either succeed in buying their way out by offering the victim a minimal share in their ill-gotten gains or get the law to do their dirty work for them by allowing courts to adjudicate on the basis of draconian laws of proof that are clearly in the criminal’s favour. The crime itself can only be fully comprehended by its many victims. What is needed are new laws whereby reason, plausibility and expert testimonies are given added weight in the assessment process and in which a competent and fool-proof lie-detection technology can be used to find the truth or falsehood of conflicting statements.

The Satanic Windmills of Plagiarism.

Plagiarism. What is its nature? The will to win by possessing is its impetus; a will that cannot climb its selected mountain under its own steam: it needs help; and it forages for that help in the honest labours of another. And if you consider Rousseau’s definition of morality as “self-restraint”  plagiarism is totally redundant in that respect. Whatever it needs it takes. To win at any cost is the motivation and in that there is simply no room for morals, no room for compassion, no room for humanity. To my mind it manifests the heartless soul of imperialism. It must have what it needs irrespective of the cost to others. It is violence. It invades foreign territory at will. It’s primary self-deception is that it already owns what it seeks to possess. Rape therefore is its true nature; the rights of  the defenceless ‘other’ negated absolutely.
                                  The philosophy of the plagiarist  if he/ she can be said to have one is ALL ART IS MADE OF IDEAS. IDEAS BELONG TO US ALL. THERE IS NO COPYRIGHT ON IDEAS. The latter statement is only partly true but the real fallacy lies in the first statement, viz, ALL ART IS MADE OF IDEAS. It is true and it is false all at once. The introjected object is the idea. Reality is subsumed and managed by us under the forms of ideas. But, the creative spirit itself is consciousness, i.e, the subject that experiences. Consciousness is not an object. The eye cannot see its own capacity to see any more than a river can flow backwards to find out  from whence it came. The violence done to the work of another is  violence done to the creative presenter of ideas, violence perpetrated against the subject. It is personal  in other words and cannot be other. Only the victim knows how personal it actually is.

                                 Without the individual presenter the ideas delivered by creative endeavour COULD NOT EXIST  in the particular forms chosen and moulded by the presenter. This is easy enough to understand. You can pilfer the style and method of pictorial representation of a Rembrandt self-portrait for instance on the false premise that the great work is composed of nothing but ideas but you cannot present your finished copy as a portrait of  YOU however radical and imaginative your changes may be if you preserve the actual essential features of Rembrandt’s features, what makes Rembrandt’s portrait unique.  The simulation can never be the truth and the TRUE origin of your facsimile is Rembrandt’s portrait without which yours could not exist. In literature, the definitive statement that Mr. Smith invented certain things is in no way invalidated by digging up ’similiarities’ in books long since forgotten. And if you subscribe to the fact that there are only 36 possible plots available to us in the whole of literature you may take it that your plot, however ingenious, is among them. Theft can never be lawful and this fact of happenstance-similiarity cannot and should not be presented as a defence of it. The fact that an author has invented something without directly copying known precedents should pass as proof positive as to original creation in view of the fact that plagiarism by definition is the exact opposite, i.e,  deliberately and intentionally and without acknowledgement copying directly from known sources in an attempt to claim ‘original creation’ for yourself. It is for the publisher to determine if the level of precedential similarities are acceptable or not or whether the ignorance of the writer in regard to them can be taken on trust. It follows then, as night doth the day, that if a writer is found guilty of plagiarism so too is their publisher and their agent as neither of these can claim professional integrity and total ignorance of existing precedents at one and the same time. For either to cite such precedents in support of their client’s copyright claim to ‘original creation’ is imbecility  at best and skullduggery at worst.

                                 To mask your theft what you have to do is change the form. You have to change it to the extent that nobody can recognize it’s origins. With regards to literature, you can for example steal the character of Hamlet. You can give him black hair instead of blond, make him fat instead of slender, etc, etc, etc but if you have derived your ‘original’  character from Shakespeare’s Hamlet you have changed the true into the false and have tried to pass off your false attempt as your unique creation. What you have taken from Hamlet is what makes Hamlet “Hamlet”, however cleverly you have cleared your tracks.  His essential character must remain intact else your pilfering was in vain. Indeed, a production of Hamlet in Hong Kong could well portray Hamlet with all the aforementioned traits with oriental eyes added as mandatory. But he would still be Hamlet, speaking his lines and acting out his part. Your facsimile may be original in its falseness, especially if you do not dislcose your source, but sooner or later you will have to get rid of your self-delusions and confront the fact that you are no Shakespeare, that Hamlet was never yours to begin with and that there is more to artistic creation that the take-over of original ideas that do not belong to you exclusively as an individual even if they do belong to humanity at large. That is on a par with claiming E=mc ² as your own discovery when you cannot add up your grocery bill without a calculator. The world belongs to us all but no individual is entitled to take possession of it in his/her own name. What compounds your felony to those who have but a minor grasp of dialectics is this often forgotten element in the balance.  The times one lives in calls forth from the imagination the ideal and inevitable  response to those times in art form. Without Napoleon there is no Eroica. The man who, in the honest pursuit of his craft, answers that calling is the true orginator of the work. The one who copies that man’s work and attempts to pass it off as their own is an imposter and a cheat of the lowest possible calibre. In brief; the copy however attractively presented is not the truth and can never be the truth.

                                            FORBES On Potter.

                   Forbes is America’s business think-tank mag.

Below is a quote from an early article (2001) article on the Potter phenomenon.

Seemingly the writer has no difficulty in accepting that a woman who never had a brother has suddenly become an expert in juvenile male psychology nor has even doubted for a second her claims to orginal creation. What he does do however is shed light on how and why a fantasy is manicured, tailored and marketed for mass consumption. Worth reading for all sorts of reasons. Here is the link to the complete article.  Forbes  on Potter.

“The ironic part is that Harry Potter doesn’t need the help. The young wizard himself is the greatest British hero since James Bond. Rowling is a worthy successor to Ian Fleming, who, incidentally was a pretty fair children’s book writer, too, having penned Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The books are so popular that the movie would have been wildly anticipated, no matter how it was released. Harry Potter is such a skilled wizard, he might be allowed to work his own magic. He could hit his home runs even without a juiced ball or a corked bat. “

Flattering stuff don’t you think? from someone wrestling with the ‘given’ but expressing not a single doubt as to its origin. The timely creation of a hero for the age does not seemingly even merit the simple question of how this inevitability could possibly have found expression in an “idea” if you please that popped into a woman’s head during a train journey. Interestingly, it is the whole train idea itself that the Adrian Jacobs litigants are sueing over. Indeed, you could be forgiven for thinking that the shennanigans of Rowling’s script writers reflect the obsessive determination of shysters trying to prove righful ownership to something that never did and never could havc belonged to any of them, covering their tracks, as it were,  even before they have made them, to be certain of winning a case should it ever come to court as theyare most assuredly afraid it some day will.  Deplorable stuff in our view…. we who have taken great pains to set the record straight as the plumb- line we use for our murals … for all to see. Clearly, the architects of this “phenomenon” ( and that would include the alleged ’creator’) were smugly convinced from the start that once the product called Potter was accepted and enjoyed by countless kids queries as to its authenticity would be readily snuffed out by means of tacit support from the guard dogs of the  media (especially the British media bloated as ever with their imperial delusions), - brutally  aggressive legal tactics protecting alleged copyright and on-going relentless self-fortification against any form of scrutiny from any source.

 This shamelessly amoral  game has been going on for quite some time and will only end when every single penny that can be extracted from Potter has made it loyal way to the coffers of the coporations and their subsidiaries both sides of the Atlantic who have been feeding off the commercial brew  for well  over a decade. The truth is Harry Potter was hijacked from a previous creation. End of story. And his true origins lie in the purgatory of  political conflict in Northern Ireland not in a silly daydream. From the battle front of collective tragedies, let us repeat ….. not from an “idea”.

It is atonishing to us that ‘intelligent’ people, writers and journalists would you believe?, men with degrees as long as your stupidity, teachers of literature etc, etc, have bought into this cock-and-bull crap with scarcely a one asking a single serious question as to the authenticity of Rowling’s claims when it is glaringly obvious to anybody who is not a congenital retard that the source must clearly be elsewhere. This blog is to make it clear to you where that ELSEWHERE actually is and indeed why Potter exists at all.