Imagineer: Moving on to another kind of piracy, one that is much more domestic: How do you believe the United States and other industrialized nations should handle intellectual property, with specific regards to online piracy and what is called illegal online downloading? If I go to my computer and download the latest U2 album "illegally", is that justified?
Chomsky: Well, again, depending on how broadly we cast the net, in a very narrow sense I think a case can be made saying it's illegal - here's a creative artist who created a song and wants to survive, and he can't survive if people just steal. So in a very narrow sense, yes [copyright laws are] justified. As a broader question, however, why do we have copyright laws? Is that the moral way or even the economically efficient way to support the creative arts? I don't think so; there are better ways. For example, it should be, in a free democratic society, a sort of responsibility arrived at by democratic decision to maintain adequate support for creative arts as we do for science. If that were done, the artists wouldn't need copyrights to survive. That's economically more efficient, I believe, and morally more justified.
Download piracy on the internet is a very small part of the whole intellectual properties issue. The main aspect of it is the highly protectionist rules which are written into the World Trade Organization vastly beyond anything that preceded them, guaranteeing patent rights to major corporations like pharmaceutical corporations. Now, there's a lot to say about that. If that patent regime had existed in the 18th and 19th centuries and even through the early 20th century, the United States and England would not be rich, developed countries. They developed substantially by what we now call piracy. So take, say, England, which goes back farther. A large part of English wealth which helped initiate the early Industrial Revolution was derived from straight piracy. Sir Francis Drake, who provided huge sums to England, was a pirate. He was robbing Spanish ships on the high seas. He became a great hero. He contributed substantially to English economic development. Now beyond that, England did not pioneer modern industrial technology. It stole a lot of it from Ireland. They had an advanced weaving industry, and England conquered and destroyed it. It stole a lot from India. When India was conquered, it had, by the standards of the day, an advanced economy. England imposed free market principles on India, but it itself had an extremely high protection to protect early British textile industry. It also took highly skilled technicians from the Low Countries - Belgium and the Netherlands - to England to teach them technology, and the US did the same. The US, as soon as it became an independent country, imposed extremely high tariffs - this was under Alexander Hamilton's economic development program. It imposed very high tariffs to protect early American industry from superior British goods. It went through personal business textiles; then later it was steel, so Andrew Carnegie made the first billion dollar corporation. That went right up to the Second World War. Then, through the period of its major growth, the US was by far the most protectionist country. In fact, in many ways, it remains so, although it's not called protectionism. A great deal of the advanced American economy, like in other countries but strikingly here, comes straight out of the state sector: computers, internet, information technology, and so on. A lot of it is a radical violation of free trade rules which we enforce on the poor.
To get back to the intellectual property rights, as I said, if those had been placed during the period of the growth of the contemporary rich countries, they wouldn't have developed. Now we call it piracy, but then we called it development when it was for ourselves. There's a name for this in economic history. It's called "kicking away the ladder". First you use certain bits of development, and then you kick away the ladder so others can't follow you. That's what's called international economic policy in the World Trade Organization and so on. So, if there's any justification for thatÉ again, it's how broadly you cast the net. The pharmaceutical corporations, for example, insist that they need high protection in the World Trade Organization, because they need it for research and development. However, they are only responsible for a minority of their own research and development, and that part is largely more oriented toward the marketing end. A lot of risky work is done through public funds and foundations. In fact, it's in a few estimates that if the research and development budgets of the pharmaceuticals were 100 percent taken over by the public, and the corporations were compelled to function in a market society to sell for market prices, the saving to consumers would just be colossal. But, they have enough power so that they can sustain that system, and there are a lot of other examples like it. So, as always, it depends on how broadly you cast the net, and how broadly you look at the issue. From a very narrow point of view, going back to your original question, you can say yes, the creative artist is being harmed. From a broader point of view, there are a lot of other things to say.
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Examenstress ofzo?