The precedents that cleared the way for the
patenting and copyright of the words of the English language were those established
originally for patenting microorganisms and deciphered DNA sequences. In the
earlier cases, naturally occurring biological information structures were
deemed to be intellectual property. Words in a language are also information
structures, perhaps part of nature, perhaps not, but also not fabricated by
particular human beings. The courts were able to define words in a language as
intellectual properties, and protectable sources of revenue. Once this was
established, the governments of the most powerful English-speaking countries
negotiated an agreement whereby the English lexicon was regarded as
intellectual property held in common by all English speakers, with the
governments administering the rights of this property. They formed a consortium
in which each country held a percentage of the rights for the entire lexicon. Privatization
immediately followed, and the rights to each word were auctioned off to private
bidders, who were subsequently able to collect royalties for each published
instance of any word in their portfolio. A new unit of currency, the microEuro,
was established, to permit individually small but collectively enormous
royalties to be collected from authors of books, articles, web pages, blogs,
emails and tweets. Anyone using a copyrighted word in written, printed or screen form was forced to pay
royalties, on a monthly basis.
As surveillance cameras became more
ubiquitous and facial recognition quicker and more accurate, it soon became
possible to collect royalties on spoken words as well. People found themselves
being billed for hundreds of euros of royalties each year, which added together
formed a revenue stream of over a trillion euros annually. People reacted against
paying royalties in various ways. Some affected an opaque argot, which had to
change continually as words in the argot were identified and auctioned off.
Others adopted different languages, which, one by one, became intellectual
property as other countries formed their own consortia. Even Esperanto became
intellectual property, the royalties being divided between the family of Zemenhof, who constructed the language in 1878, and the consortia for the
various languages from which Esperanto derived its vocabulary.
An open source language project was
launched to develop a royalty-free language, with an aleatorically generated
vocabulary, checked against every protected lexicon to insure there were no
infringement of protected words. This open source project became the target of
incessant legal attacks that effectively diverted all of the participants’
energies and all of its funding into defending it, and ultimately it collapsed.
Speech and writing in general became
laconic or terse, and expressions such as “you know what I’m saying?” mostly
disappeared. Gestures-- a nod or shake of the head, shrugging of shoulders, or
pointing of fingers-- were used more
often until they, too, were defined as
intellectual property.
Garrulous people who were unable to pay
their royalties became debt slaves with speech centers endoscopically
excised. Direct stimulation of debt
slaves’ brains enabled their owners to use them for various repetitive tasks in
industry as well as services such as cleaning and elder care. The US and Europe
were able to challenge the Chinese economy for the first time in decades.
Prophets of evolution predicted the
emergence of telepathy. In anticipation of this, linguistic patent/copyright
trolls began funding research into defining, detecting and protecting elements
of what Steven Pinker called “mentalese,” a universal, sub-verbal, deep-structural kind of thought language. This tendency was condemned
by both Pinker and the aging but ever-vigorous Noam Chomsky as an outrageous assault
against the very core of humanity.
This text, including this disclosure, pays a royalty of 18,437
microEuros.
