Source: Garrison Center
by Thomas L Knapp
“In most southern states prior to the Civil War and the end of chattel slavery, teaching a slave (or, in some cases, anyone with dark skin) to read and write was punishable by fine or imprisonment if the teacher was white, flogging if the teacher was black. As relatives of antebellum slaveholders go, the jealous beneficiaries of ‘intellectual property’ laws aren’t especially distant. The former claimed to own their subjects’ bodies first, and secondarily, as the anti-literacy laws demonstrated, minds. The latter merely reverse those priorities. Nor are their reasons dissimilar. Slaveholders believed that, absent a property rights claim on other bodies, their plantation-based economic model would collapse. Copyright holders believe that absent a property rights claim on other minds, the journalists, novelists, screenwriters, and actors of the world might have to find other jobs.” (03/20/25)