Question: Copyright has yet had little chance to go on the spree in post-Soviet countries. But it seems that Russia has prepared an analogue of Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998 (DMCA) — the amendments to the RF Law «On copyright and allied rights». The bill on the amendments contains amenability for by-passing copyright protection hardware, as well as the ban on manufacturing and distributing devices used for by-passing or facilitating the by-pass of protection hardware… Among many other things. What will happen if the bill is passed?[440]

A. Sergeyev: If the bill is passed, our legislature will become even worse than that of America, which has almost reached the level of totalitarian regimes in the aspect of freedom of information distribution (put in bold type by the authors of the book). By the way, the next bill is being discussed in the US, concerning the ban on manufacture and sale of hardware and software not equipped with the means of copyright information control.[441]

The number of information activities and information relations is limitless. Any of them may appear unprofitable to someone. And if the corresponding lobby is powerful enough, this activity is banned. While the lobby of freedom is often the weaker side. Freedom is lost gradually, almost imperceptibly. Every such step in itself seems insignificant. But constant dropping wears away the stone.

Recently I received news — some companies are trying to prohibit through court placing links leading to pages other than the homepages of their sites as it may create a different impression with the user than the author originally intended. Even in the Soviet times[442] nobody thought of banning reference to particular pages of books. Yet now to someone this practice became unprofitable.

Actually, the more bans are introduced, the easier it is to make money on them. The scheme is a very simple one and has been known since the times of Inquisition: you introduce a public ban — a moral, legal, political one — and then you start selling pardons…»

Though the problem has been discovered by the society, it is clear that A. Sergeyev is speaking only about selling «pardons» to the end of making profit. The crucial issue has not been understood and clearly expressed. It has been left in silence, as it is necessary for the bosses of the Biblical project on enslaving the mankind:

A kind of mafia regime controlling the society is being formed and is becoming more powerful. Its power is exercised not by actual dictatorship, but indirectly — through controlling the distribution of information favorable to the Biblical project bosses and persecuting those who distribute unfavorable information, under the pretext of copyright breach. As an interim result, the direction of cultural development on the whole and of scientific and technological development in particular to a very large extent comes under legalized control of the international mafia of usurers who have started to buy up © copyrights.

Thus, substituting the issue of providing public access to all cultural accomplishments with the issue of presumably protecting the interests of creators from the attempts to parasitize on their work, the Biblical «world backstage» is trying to pursue its slave-owning ambition by new means.

The Russian idea of copyright is that it is the right of a person gifted by God to gift other people with the fruits of his or her work according with his genuine understanding of God’s Will. It is incompatible with the abominable Western conception of copyright and allied rights and the laws it is reflected in.

Ignore the laws on copyright and allied right for the benefit of all, and God speed you.

Only in a nightmare hallucination can one imagine Jesus as a pettifogger who defends in court his © copyright on the Gospel. But the very fact of the © copyright institution’s existence in the West explains that the West lives under the power of the New Testament which has been privatized and perverted by the mafia like the Testament given from the above through Moses had been privatized and perverted by mafia before.

2. The interview with Joseph E. Shtiglits

The interview with Joseph E. Shtiglits, former vice-president of the World Bank, economic advisor to US President Clinton, winner of the Nobel prize in economy for 2001. Published in the Sunday supplement to the «El Pais» newspaper of June 23, 2002. Recently he wrote a book about the IMF under the title of «El malestar en la Globalización» («The Disease of Globalization» — approximate translation). Here are some parts of that interview (based on Russian translation).

— You write that while working in the Clinton administration you were surprised by the circumstance that many decisions in the White House, as well as the IMF, were often taken out of ideological and p o litical co n siderations, rather than according to the requirements of economy?

— In a certain sense, I was not greatly surprised by what was happening in the White House. I was disturbed that ideology and politics played such a significant role in international economic organizations where professional economists are supposed to set the fashion. For example, research indicated that liberalizing financial market would result not in economic growth but in destabilization of economy. We knew that, it should not have been done according to the science of economics, yet the IMF kept trying to implement exactly this kind of liberalization. Its motives in doing so were purely ideological and political…

— When the reader comes to the end of your book, he might be puzzled with the following question: who is taking decisions which d e termine world events affecting the well-being of millions of people?

— According to my experience of working in the American government and the World Bank there is no single person who makes such decisions. This is a complex process involving many forces. Even the President of the USA is not able to influence many issues. He doesn’t even have the information necessary to do it. There are too many decisions to be made, one must also take into account the nature of information that he gets… Different groups try to control his incoming information, informing him only of what can persuade him to take a certain position favorable to them. Many people cannot understand that there is no such single man who controls the situation personally.

— OK, it is not a single person, not the President of the United States, but someone, some people do make decisions. Who are they?

— In my book I tried to clarify the fundamental role played in this process by major financial interests and transnational corporations. But at the same time, I would like to stress that there are other forces involved in this game. For example, the «Anniversary-2000» movement played a significant role in reducing the debt. The IMF resisted, but the civil movement turned out to be so strong that got the upper hand on that point. There are many economists inside the World Bank itself who are genuinely concerned with the problems of poverty and environment protection…

— You leave no doubts in your book about the US Treasury and the IMF having the real power. Is it they who determine policy?

— Yes, the IMF sets the macroeconomic and financial policy. Unfortunately, a country needs to get the IMF’s approval before it can receive help from the European Community or the World Bank. In this sense, the Fund’s power is enormous…

— In crisis situations in developing countries the US Treasury and the IMF deliberately gave recommendations which aggravated pro b lems, as you firmly claim in your book, but which corresponded to the ec o nomic and ideological interests of developed countries. What does it mean from the moral point of view?