The late Apple Inc CEO Steve Jobs

This article will appear in the November issue of The Spark

In Marxist theory, commodity fetishism describes the mystification of social relations between people to objectified relations between things. While the actual value of a product is equivalent to the amount of labour that went into it, products are seen to have a greater value than they actually do. Its because of this that products can be sold at a price much higher than they cost to produce, the difference between the actual use value of a product and its price is surplus value, value that is expropriated by the owners of the means of production.

Marx took the term fetishism from the concept of objects being seen to have some mystical proprieties, such as those objects used in religious ceremonies. There are situations where commodities seem to embody both these types of fetishism; “These products have significant emotional value, they have sentimental value, they’re connected, if you will, to the bloodstream of the person who’s likely to be the purchaser,” those were the words of Michael Bernacchi, a marketing professor at the University of Detroit Mercy commenting on Apple products after the death of CEO Steve Jobs.

One wonders if the workers who assemble Apple products feel that emotional connection. Two years ago it was revealed that as many as 137 workers at Wintek, a Chinese factory that manufactures products for Apple, had been poisoned by n-hexane, a toxic chemical used in touch screens that that can cause muscular degeneration and blur eyesight. The workers wrote to Jobs but received no response from him or anyone else at Apple. “Steve Jobs was indifferent to our poisoning and evaded his responsibility,” said one of the workers, Jia Jingchuan, in a statement released by the Hong Kong labor group Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM).

In the time since the Wintek workers were poisoned, Foxconn, the factory that makes the majority of Apple products, has seen a spate of worker suicides, 17 deaths and other attempts that have been prevented by co-workers. Foxconn now requires new employees to sign a pledge saying they wont attempt suicide, and nets have been installed around buildings to catch employees jumping from the roofs. SACOM found that at Foxconn excessive overtime was rife- One payslip showed a worker did 98 hours of overtime in one month- and during peak periods of demand for Apples iPad, workers were made to take only one day off in 13. Badly performing workers were humiliated in front of colleagues and workers were banned from talking and are made to stand up for their 12-hour shifts.

When Jobs died there was little in the media making reference to him as a sweatshop baron, instead words like “visionary” and “creative genius” were splayed across the pages of major news websites and technology blogs, TechCrunchTV even went so far as to call him “one of the greatest Americans in history”. Steve Jobs was one of the few people who can be pointed too as proof of the American Dream, an ‘everyman’ who built a computer in his garage and three decades later was one of the worlds richest individuals. The reality of course is different. While Steve Jobs was no doubt talented he was at best the equal of the anonymous engineers and developers who work in large firms and universities. Similar technology to that of the early Apple Computer was being developed at the Palto Alto Research Center (PARC), an institution that received funding from NASA and DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (so much for the free market) and a number of former PARC engineers took jobs at Apple in the early days.

The myth that surrounds Jobs and the mystification of products prefixed by a lower case I might explain why Apple hasn’t been taken to task by their own consumers. Recently Greenpeace led a successful campaign to get major retailers to stop stocking toilet paper that couldn’t be traced to a sustainable source, and in 2009 students at the University of Canterbury achieved the status of a ‘fair trade’ campus, requiring all coffee to be sourced from sources with better labour and environmental practices. These are local examples of global campaigns. It seems society sets higher standards for cafes and supermarkets than it does for a corporation that is both the worlds largest consumer electronics company and the worlds largest music retailer. If we are going to have a more just society for the international working class, or even just the small reforms offered by ideas like ‘fair trade’ we need to stop thinking of commodities as mystical objects, and CEO’s as prophets.

This article by guest writer Lindsay Breach will appear in the June issue of The Spark

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) is a trade agreement between New Zealand, eight other nations, and the United States. Of particular concern to this article, is that the agreement promises to introduce a strongly U.S. influenced intellectual property regime to New Zealand. Already, this influence has been felt in the shaping of copyright legislation as evidenced by leaked cables indicating the industry is willing to pay $533,000 to fix “key gaps in intellectual property rights enforcement”. The lesson: it appears our legislation can be bought.

Wednesday, April the 13^th was a black day for democracy in New Zealand. The Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill was rushed through under urgency, which had been previously reserved for Canterbury earthquake related legislation. This Bill had been postponed due to previous public outcry and was highly contentious law. It seemed particularly insulting to Christchurch residents, the victims of the February 22^nd Earthquake, because their suffering and the nation’s state of emergency had seemingly been trivialised.

The Bill introduces a ‘guilt upon accusation’ infringement notice three-strike scheme. This scheme dresses up a civil action, between two parties, as a criminal offense. The copyright holder can request an Internet Service Provider to send an infringement notice, with or without good cause for suspicion, to an account holder. After three strikes, the account holder can be taken to the Copyright tribunal. The burden is on the account holder to prove their innocence against the allegation.

The scheme places the account holder at a disadvantage. At a Tribunal hearing, both parties are denied legal representation. This does not put the parties on an equal footing. The copyright holder is likely to be a corporate entity that has access to a legal team, experienced representatives and wealth. Therefore, it appears unlikely that an account holder will be able to prove their innocence, which raises the question of whether there will be a fair hearing. Faced with such overwhelming odds, the wise account holder, whether guilty or not, would seemingly be better off to settle than face the steep penalties imposed under the Bill.

The Bill has not gone unopposed by the public. In 2008, the Internet Blackout Protests forestalled its passing and demonstrated that hearing the Bill under normal democratic processes would be met with protests. This time, the Bill has already been passed despite National Business Review polls indicating that 89% of the people are opposing it. The opposition to the Bill is evident in the three day exponential growth of the ‘Opposing The Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill’ Facebook group, which has currently reached a membership of 13,518 members. Its membership ‘blacked out’ their profiles to express opposition.

The social network website also allowed for the organisation of the May 1^st protests, which were held in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin to oppose the implementation of the Bill. The Christchurch demonstration was particularly forceful as participants expressed disdain for the Bill passed under urgency despite the fact it added nothing to fixing their devastated city. A second round of protests is currently being planned for August 27^th, which will occur several days before the new law will come into effect. Those interested in that round are able to find further details on the ‘Opposing The Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill’ information page available at http://www.facebook.com/#!/NZBlackout.

One week from now New Zealand’s new copyright laws will come into effect, including the “guilt by accusation” clause (Section 92A) meaning Internet Service Providers will be forced to take down internet connections and websites of anyone accused (not convicted) of copyright infringement. The Workers Party is opposed to this clause and supports the protests against it that have been occurring. As well as section 92A we support repealing the parts of the law criminalising circumventing the so-called “Technological Protection Measures” on media such as DVDs, something we have covered in detail here.

The Copyright (New Technologies) Amendment Bill was passed into law earlier this week, the following is a slightly edited version of an article published in The Spark in Feburary 2007 after the bill passed its first reading.

On April 7 the Copyright (New Technologies and Performers Rights) Amendment Bill was passed into law by a 111 to 10 majority. The bills aim was to bring New Zealand’s terribly outdated 1994 copyright act into the 21st century, and makes some progress in that it decriminalises the increasingly common practice of copying your CD collection to a portable MP3 player (however it fails to to extend these same rights to other media such as DVDs).

More importantly though, the bill criminalises circumventing Technological Protection Measures, defined as “any process, treatment, mechanism, device, or system that is designed in the normal course of its operation to prevent or inhibit the unauthorised exercise of any of the rights conferred by this Act.” An example of TPM would be copy-protected audio CDs-CDs with software to prevent, for example, copying the music to a portable MP3 player. Circumvention of TRM for legal uses such as this is permitted but must be done by a ‘qualified person’ (prescribed libraries, archives and educational establishments). Even then these ‘qualified persons’ are required to “apply to the copyright owner or the exclusive licensee for assistance enabling the user to exercise the permitted act”. As lawyer Stephen Marshall pointed out “The hidden gotcha here is that the owner can charge like a wounded bull for the privilege and attach any conditions they feel like to the assistance process, in essence a form of copyright ‘filibuster’ that makes this whole provision as illusionary as every other consumer ‘freedom’ provided in this Bill”.

The bill emulates similar legislation in the USA; the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the anti-circumvention provisions of which have been invoked not against pirates, but against average consumers. A, a number of these cases have been documented by online rights organisation the Electronic Frontiers Foundation (see http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/unintended_consequences.php) Commenting on the New Zealand equivalent the popular blog Boing Boing stated “The US had an excuse: when it passed the DMCA in 1998, no one else had tried this and seen how bad it was … what possible excuse can New Zealand have for adopting this failed US policy initiative? Why would you want to import another country’s disaster?”

Media containing TRM, or DRM as it is called in the United States (for Digital Rights Management) have caused problems for a number of US consumers. Copy protection software often prevents media from being played by some devices and software, particularly Free Software which, in addition to usually being free in price, has a decentralised distribution model that makes paying royalties to media companies impossible.

In response to DRM the Free Software Foundation launched the Defective by Design campaign in 2006 to target companies using DRM and educate the public, the campaign has since attracted over 15,000 registered members and staged public demonstrations in the US and the UK. With DMCA-style laws now on the books here, maybe its time to bring the campaign to New Zealand.