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Dear Misguided Inquisitors Of Copyright And Affiliate Marketing
What happened to innocent until proven guilty, ha?
The rules of writing and publishing. As ancient as the Ten Commandments, and if you’re Catholic enough or look hard enough, you could argue they’re in there under “thou shalt not steal”. Sounds fair, right? What’s mine ain’t necessarily yours, unless of course you suddenly wake up in a communist regime, and you find everything but your underwear — no one wants that, not even the communists — nationalised. Yay! Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were many things, but in hindsight, weren’t as bright as they appeared in their own mirrors. Ownership is a much more complex topic they could have ever imagined.
Hand in hand with ownership, also comes trustworthiness and honesty. Did you ever ponder how modern society actually works? There are records, be that analogue — very thin sheets of dead trees, called paper — or digital, that state you own something. We trust those records to be kept safe, so that if ever a dispute comes your way around who owns that plot of land you built your hippie outhouse on, it doesn’t turn out you’ve been shitting in your neighbour’s garden for a decade and a half. A flawed, but still brilliant system for the most part.
