The Gatalog Foundation
June 3, 2024
The Black Flag White Paper is now on Amazon. Thank you for the enthusiastic reception. Yes, I’m showboating in places, but it was fun to stretch my legs. To make the same points, all I really had to do was post the longtime motto of the Deterrence Dispensed Keybase: “Code is free speech. Copyright is theft.”
I wonder where they got that?
These days, you’ll find the admins of that very Keybase misguiding newcomers to our space with entirely opposite (and embarrassing) legal takes:
All we’re left with after such friendly and frequent legal misstatements is the impression these people will proudly suffer comparison to Taylor Swift. Conceptual failures this great invite questions, and I answer the more serious of these in the Black Flag paper.
The most obvious remaining question is cui bono?
In 3D2A, the principles dictate the methods. After JStark died and his Keybase was flushed, his lieutenants had, at best, a casual grasp of the principles. They assumed 3D2A meant property, that copyright meant good title, and they ended up teaching gun control to hundreds of would-be developers without even realizing it.
Consider the new website for The Gatalog Foundation. Though Gatalog Command quickly took it down after publication of the Black Flag, we can still examine the site’s most recent snapshots from May:
$400 a year. Now, I know what you’re thinking. And yes, it does seem a little underpriced.
“Digital Right” means intellectual property. They have no other theory of right. The word “steward” is custodial and similarly propertarian. For $400 a year, these guys will sell you a letter from Ashley at the Copyright Office and a full federal doxxing as title to your work.
And I don’t have to imagine the dumb shit they wrote in their copyright registration applications. Ashley will show me. Did you know it’s a crime to lie to her?
The Gatalog embraced IP to maintain the appearance that they somehow lead community sentiment rather than get led by it. There’s something more than dishonest about this. They misguide the “masses” and demand the impossible of the law in order to be affirmed in their own ideological naïveté. What, for example, am I to make of this text?
By my count, it’s been 5,568 hours since that was sent. Were repression and private vindication not the desired outcomes?
Chief among their feminine habits in conflict, The Gatalog Foundation employs the Fudd Busters method of disavowal.
The Fudd Buster is much more concerned with the possibility of manipulation than with the traumatic dimension of reality. His theories (consumer, legal, media) are entirely anchored in the will to not be deceived; in the will to let others know he is not.
His trivial knowledge of firearms, or really anything, serves as an object-fetish that allows him to ignore and survive the real. We can read The Gatalog Foundation’s tagline differently now: “A pro-gun org run by people who actually like guns.” Ah, so that’s what was missing from 2A advocacy and litigation. Nobody liked the guns enough.
$400 a year is ten times more expensive than an NRA membership. It is twenty-six times more expensive than an annual membership with the Second Amendment Foundation. That organization is running almost sixty cases nationwide, and all the Fudd Buster can do is tell you they’re somehow ripping you off. This becomes even easier for them when there’s no chance they will be invited to participate in major 2A litigation.
So, gun printer to thy guns? Not quite. Though a Creative Commons membership is free, The Gatalog Foundation’s membership fee is less than the $425 required to join the American Intellectual Property Law Association. I’m not saying legal amateurs shouldn’t organize and build what they like, even if that means IP organizations. The American tradition in arms is an amateur tradition.
Marx himself praised the “watchmaker [James] Watt” for inventing the steam engine. So you see, even the best of us get fooled by IP. James Watt improved the steam engine. He patented this improvement, fought his competitors for title in the idea, and delayed the mass adoption of the steam engine by two decades.
Now you’re nobody’s fool. That’ll be $400.
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