Even though copyright law has expanded far beyond the original scope given by the Constitution, it was at least partly humanized by the Fair Use provision. This blogger has already made the case that Peanutweeter is fair use, so I’ll just link to his post. I’m more concerned with how non-human life-forms have been given even more control. Used to be you’d hear about how “lawyers” from McDonalds, Disney, or Paramount were out suing the best customers of their products. It was bad–but lawyers are technically human. Iconix is a “Brand Group.” If you go to the site and click on either Management or Board of Directors under their “About Us,” you get a list of “people” (though long since soul-sucked) towards the bottom. But the image that loads first is one of those generic “Gap Kid” collections. Those aren’t people, and they are certainly not the board of directors.

Iconix is a version of the corporate life-form that we’ve inexplicably given human rights to for a couple centuries now. Soul-less though it may be, at least it had to act through humans. Until some group of idiots passed the digital millennium copyright act. With it’s automatic take-down provisions, and anti-circumvention provisions, the DMCA allows non-human lifeforms to crush human creativity automatically. No lawyer-to-lawyer arguments, just a letter to the service provider. Down comes fun, and the cost of fighting it is too high for mere humans to undertake. Victory to Iconix, without ever having to face a real person in a fair fight. Iconix (or Skynet, as it probably calls itself when it’s sitting around with other soul-less life-forms) can go back to stalking across the landscape “touching every segment of retail distribution from the luxury market to the mass market” and sucking the brains out of the crushed bodies that get stuck between its toes.

But the real problem is that some powerful alien force can introduce robots.  This article explains how scientists model Condorcet’s theorem among animal communities. But they don’t just watch the animals, they create convincing robots which infiltrate the bug communities and convince them to do something self-destructive:

José Halloy of the Free University of Brussels used robotic cockroaches to subvert the behaviour of living cockroaches and control their decision-making process. In his experiment, reported in an earlier issue of Science, the artificial bugs were introduced to the real ones and soon became sufficiently socially integrated that they were perceived as equals. By manipulating the robots, which were in the minority, he was able to persuade the cockroaches to choose an inappropriate shelter—even one which they had rejected before being infiltrated by machines.

Just imagine if some other power tried to do the same thing with us?  They could send robots into our world, disguised as humans, and convince us to make self-destructive choices, such as ignoring global warming, invading Iraq, and giving away our civil rights.  That would make a good story, wouldn’t it?