Now they are even trying to take sin away from us
Good news from the world of international commerce. An American company has at last copyrighted sin, which means that it is no longer available to the rest of us. Unless we pay, I suppose. No more free sin, anyway.
The company concerned is called Slimming World. It claims to have held the copyright on sin for 35 years, although so far as I can ascertain its definition of sin does not stretch to murder, rape, genocide etc., just to people eating stuff which might make them fatter. Like cream cakes, doughnuts and so on. In other words, sin has now become a very different ethical prospect from the one originally intended by God; its meaning has narrowed dramatically. You might even argue that ‘sin’ as envisaged by Slimming World is not really sin, as God would know it, at all — in fact he might even consider it a virtue. A refusal to conform to the demands of a weight-obsessed society: go on, defy convention and authority, have another pie. Trouble is, God’s lawyers are useless and they have failed to fight his corner on this one — sin is now all tied up precisely as Slimming World defines it.
The story has arisen because another fatuous slimming company has come along and started using the word ‘sin’ in precisely the same context and incurred the wrath of Slimming World’s legions of lawyers. And so there is a legal battle over the word which, I daresay, will cost many millions of dollars, all of which will come, in the end, from the pockets of people stupid enough to buy products from either of the two slimming companies. So perhaps we shouldn’t worry. But for the time being the rest of us, and particularly, say, the Reverend Ian Paisley, will have to watch where and how we bandy the word around. Get a bit too carried away delineating the sins of the Whore of Rome and Slimming World’s legal team may well issue a writ. I suppose we should be grateful that Slimming World hasn’t, so far, copyrighted the word ‘world’.
Meanwhile, the Ethiopians are in trouble and not, on this occasion, simply because they are starving. This time it’s far worse. There is a television programme broadcast out of Addis Ababa called Ethiopian Idol, wherein talentless no-hopers sing songs in front of a panel of nonentities who are hideously rude to them. Even now, a bell may be ringing somewhere towards the rear of your cerebral cortex. Hang on, that programme format sounds familiar! You may well have heard about people, or perhaps even met some people, who watch a British programme called Pop Idol, where much the same thing happens. And you may be doubly confused because there’s another British programme called The X Factor which your daughter watches when you are out of the house and which again has a very similar format. Dead right. And while there is a legal battle going on between Pop Idol and The X Factor on precisely this issue, the people who claim to hold the ‘intellectual copyright’ on the format, a group called FremantleMedia, are also jabbing with their sharp little writs at the Ethiopians. ‘We have global intellectual copyright on the format,’ they explain. No irony can be detected in their use of the word ‘intellectual’, which you might argue has, in this case, become as divorced from its commonly assumed definition as has Slimming World’s concept of ‘sin’.
You may wonder, too, how many Ethiopians were a party to the decision that FremantleMedia should have global ‘intellectual’ hegemony over this vapid, stupid, mind-numbing programme format. None, I would guess. But somewhere along the line the poor Ethiopians are presumably signatories to some World Trade Organisation or World Intellectual Property Organisation treaty which means they’re bang to rights good and proper. Maybe it’s time the BBC copyrighted the innovative format of having a well-dressed middle-class person telling people what’s going on in the world, interspersed with television pictures illustrating stuff from a slightly left-of-centre perspective. They could call it The News.
You may wonder, too, how substantially The X Factor and Pop Idol differ from that old staple of early evening television, New Faces — or indeed any old deadbeat, corny, windswept end-of-the-pier talent contest. Does the ‘intellectual’ bit of the copyright refer to FremantleMedia’s brilliant innovation of making the judges nasty and eminently dislikeable? But they were sometimes a bit nasty on New Faces too. And I can remember being in a talent contest in Whitby in 1971 and being slated by the judges for rushing through my piano rendition of The Elves’ Caprice.
We are perhaps in Dick the Butcher territory: ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’ Almost all manifestations of evil in the modern world might be banished if we did as Dick suggested in Henry VI Part Two. But maybe on this I should declare a personal interest, because I’ve given the bloodsuckers 20,000 quid this last year or so and therefore am in any case suffused with a sort of loathing for the lot of them.
There have been suggestions of late that intellectual property should be rendered taxable; that it is a capital asset every bit as much as industrial premises, workforce, machinery and so on. That way, it is argued, companies like Slimming World and FremantleMedia might be reminded of their responsibilities as well as their legally enforced rights. There is the secondary suggestion that those companies which allow their ‘innovations’ — and of course one uses the word lightly in this context — to remain free and accessible in the public domain would be exempted from this tax. It is tempting to sign up to this notion if only out of spite. The more important side to this argument is the effect it would have upon the pharmaceutical industry.
But there is a simpler solution. No word which appears in a dictionary should be capable of being deemed the private property of a person or corporation, regardless of specifics placed upon the contextual usage of the word. Words are a resource which have been generated communally and are to be shared and enjoyed by all. Secondly, once a television or radio programme has been broadcast — or, for that matter, a book has been published — the ideas inherent within it are deemed to be public property and owned by mankind communally. That would stop the Pop Idol–X Factor nonsense and the collateral ramifications for the programme-makers in Ethiopia.
But in lieu of such a development we clearly need a new word for what we used to call ‘sin’, a word which as a nation we can copyright for ourselves, so that Slimming World can’t appropriate it.
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