Meadow's Blog

This has been happening all month with little to no international media attention. Here are a few organizations you can check out for resources or to support:

ActionAid India

SEEDS India

GlobalGiving

Okay, so copyright protects a likeness. You can copyright a poem or an image. You cannot copyright an orange. Every orange looks like every other orange. Some might taste better than others but that's a matter of random chance and two oranges off the same tree might not taste the same.

Patents protect inventions. If you invented a new drug that eats cancer, you wouldn't get it copyrighted, you'd get it patented. Now, I'm not an expert in patent law, but if the technique for creating an orange is "plant seed from old orange" in the ground I can't see how the hell a patent is meant to protect that. About all you can do is irradiate the thing to stop seeds making it to market.

There are patented plants out in the wild though. There are crops where the farmer literally isn't allowed to keep seeds because of patent bullshit. They are legally obligated to buy fresh seed from the company each time. And if this sounds like grade A bullshit, you'd be right. The American GMO industry is fucking unhinged. If I were japan I'd be trying to keep this ROT as far away from my borders as humanly possible. I do not want a world where you need to pay fucking Syngenta every time you seed your crops.

However, there is a third type of IP law that can protect the farmers in this case and SHOULD protect the farmers stolen saplings be damned. Trademark law. Lets take the drug acetaminophen. Under the brand name Panadol it costs 43 cents per gram. Under the less prestigious brand name Rowalief it costs 17 cents per gram. Exact same amount of exact same active ingredient. But everybody knows and trusts Panadol, so Panadol gets to charge more than twice as much.

You don't need to copyright or trademark the damn fruit idiot. Your brand name is responsible for that. As long as everyone knows they invented the fruit and not the Chinese knockoffs, they'll make back their investment from the sort of sad loser who's phone needs that apple with the bite taken out of it on the back.

Oh, and to the loser in the comments who said "it's a fruit not an OC", I hope your OC gets fed into the ocean guzzling plagerism machine. As much as I think its stupid and evil to copyright or patent a fruit, at least the fruit is a physical thing. People who make physical things, even the ones on the backend doing the science lab shit are making something of greater value than any novel or movie. The lowliest farm laborer stands above Shakesphere. Know your fucking place.

(I've heard that intellecutals/innovators tend to get unfairly valued above the people actually growing the oranges they invented and I agree. The underpaid chinese laborers who grew those oranges should be considered the real heros, not the people who designed them.

If it should be beyond the protections of a patent then the orange isn't special and ergo why would the chinese growers go out of their way to steal it? Why not just sell regular oranges and tell everyone they're from stolen saplings of the three dollar orange? If it is special then the company should have temporary exclusivity on the sales of the orange in order to recoup their investment. R&D is expensive. Got a problem with that? Then don't buy the silly overpriced orange. Nobody's making you. They probably don't even taste that good.

There's no capitalism without it. Its not technically a part of it in the same way that getting sexually abused isn't a part of being transgender. Technically true but it is depressingly difficult to find a trans person who hasn't been

"capitalism is when anyone wants anything to be cheaper"

Wanting things to be cheaper feeds capitalism. Amazon, Uber, Netflix, big box stores. The life cycle of these monopolies begins with undercutting. It used to be illegal in the states for wholesalers to sell at a lower per unit price if you buy more units. This meant a tin of beans in a mom and pop corner shop which provided jobs to the community cost the same as in that big ugly warehouse in the middle of bum fuck nowhere. Three guesses what happened next. And now the mom and pop shop is dying because Walmart and Amazon can undercut them while their employees live on fucking food stamps. There is a causal link in that chain that needs to be acknowledged. This is the world your thriftyness has wrought.

"people stealing IP from an imperial core nation is just like if they stole it from a colonized nation"

Yes, theft is wrong. There's definitely some inequalities in who goes to jail for it I have some objections to but until you have a solid plan to implement UBI, we're keeping the property rights because society collapses without them

I don't think it needs to be directly said atp, but you don't know what you're talking about at all

As I've been reading, I've given a lot of thought to the historical conditions surrounding the rise of the Black Panther Party, and comparing and contrasting them with the present day. The reason I'm writing a post now is because the section titled Bootlickers felt especially relevant to conversations I've seen on this website, and surrounding marginalized (particularly queer) spaces in general, at least in the US:

As the Party began to take more seriously its goal of becoming the vanguard of the black revolution, it came into increasing conflict with more moderate black political organizations. In July 1967, CORE held a conference in Oakland, bringing together representatives from a range of black political organizations[...]. CORE asked the Black Panthers to serve as bodyguards for the event but refused to allow Newton to speak or to list the Black Panther Party in the program as a conference participant. The organization took the further step of asking the sheriff of San Mateo County to telephone Newton and Seal to inform them that they could carry guns for that day only as body guards at the event.

The Panthers were insulted and offended. Refusing to participate on these terms, they published a response in their newspaper that articulated their developing role and distinguished this role from that of CORE and its allies. The Panthers argued that black people "must develop the concept of a Foreign and Domestic Policy for Afro-America. . . . We have to start viewing reactionary black leaders as BLACK AGENTS OF THE WHITE MOTHER COUNTRY. And reactionary black organizations can be viewed as BLACK FRONTS FOR THE WHITE MOTHER COUNTRY."

The Panthers were in the right. Standing in support of organizations and leaders whose methods and goals were incompatible with their own, who refused to support them in turn, would do nothing to advance their cause, and would actively subvert it. Giving in to that kind of treatment, even just once, would establish a precedent that would run counter to the Panthers' tactics. A precedent of letting moderate leaders and organizations walk over them and ask for their support without offering any in turn, leaving the Panthers powerless to advocate for themselves.

I see people regularly demand a kind of "unity' in queer circles that would have much the same result, in practice. A "unity" that demands that multiply-marginalized queer people (racialized, (trans)misogynized, disabled, etc) disregard toxicity and bigotry within queer spaces for the sake of mutual allyship, but never offers meaningful support in turn. But unlike the Panthers, these multiply-marginalized queer people seldom have any kind of organization amongst ourselves, and there are several rifts between subgroups who often perpetuate bigotry towards each other as well. Fractured, isolated, and powerless, there often isn't a choice but to take that "unity". So many people are stuck with a "community" that's subtly or overtly hostile towards them, because if they ever speak up they risk losing that and being left with nothing.

Apparently the deadline is tomorrow. (See the Bluesky posting over here for useful URLs.)

...Just doublechecked my entries in their database. They scraped essentially everything I've ever written. And confused Diane Wynne Jones with me, ffs. ...FUCKERS.

If you are US-based, get yourself on that list. Here's its URL:

libgen? library genesis? the largest free library in the world that’s been circulating on tumblr for decades because of how valuable of a resource it is?

the same site that powers education in third world countries and for working class students worldwide who can’t legally buy textbooks?

the same site that’s a community-maintained archive of as many written works as possible to ensure written works of art will be available no matter who tries to destroy or restrict them?

the same site that allows valuable scientific research be available to the whole world, to those can’t afford to pay hundreds for publisher access?

The Authors Guild has collaborated with publishers and the federal government to combat major piracy websites that cost authors millions in lost sales. We took down Z-Library and more than 250 mirror sites, successfully sued Kiss Library, and assisted publishers in actions against LibGen, resulting in blocked U.S. domains and multi-million-dollar fines.

This is the crusade you’re joining. And you’re a hypocrite of the highest order if you pirate stuff yourself or complain about torrents or open access sites going down while signal boosting stuff like this.

‘But AI!’ The lawsuit isn’t about AI.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled that AI company Anthropic didn’t break the law by training its chatbot Claude on millions of copyrighted books, but the company must still go to trial for illicitly acquiring those books from pirate websites instead of buying them.

It’s strictly about digital piracy. The AI training part was dismissed. For the umpteenth time.

She told me "you can be a lesbian", words I think some small part of me that knew I was a woman had been wanting to hear from another woman for years. I was confused as I was hopeful, and asked what she meant.

She said "men can be lesbians". And went on to explain how if trans men can be lesbians then cis men should be allowed to "identify as lesbians" as well. Reaffirming my manhood even as she comforted me and twisting a rhetoric of bioessentialism and male entitlement into simply pure male entitlement.

Like, I am just at a loss for words. I don't know how to explain to these people that marginalized white people and men are not oppressed or neglected on the basis of being white/men, so it's quite silly (and that's being generous) to assert that there is any type of intersection between their marginalized identity and their identity as a white person/man that makes them uniquely oppressed. In fact, in positing such notions you lend credence to fascist concepts such as "anti-white racism" or "anti-male sexism." And when I try to explain this, they will ignore me, hurl misogynistic and racist slurs at me, or most bewildering of all bring up white people and men with additional marginalized identities as a "gotcha!" of... sorts. Either you fundamentally do not understand what I'm trying to explain to you or you're being willfully obtuse, but either way you are twisting the writings of black feminists so that they can fit into your incredibly reactionary worldview and I refuse to engage with you ghouls any further on that basis.