The mind is territory and it can be owned.
At least in today's world it can through copyright and the force of law.
The mass perception is programmed through repetition. To control the mediums that repeat the data into the mass perception is to own the vehicle that can edit the mind and its collective base programming.
Traditional music was once a way to preserve culture. Through songs that no one could really own but were owned by everyone within that culture, customs carried on, and people then repeated these songs onto the next generation.
When a new song is born and it catches as a song worth repeating, then it is repeated and it also becomes part of the cultural repertoire.
Modern popular music is no different, however with controlled media seemingly meaningless songs find a seat into core conditioning of the collective mind the same way traditional/folk music once did.
Controlled media in this sense is the ability to market a symbol through repetition in popular public mediums; which is dependent on ownership of that medium, the amount of money in one's pocket to push that symbol divided by the present value of that symbol in the group mind.
The controllers of the media in effect have control of the ability to imprint new group conditioning through repetition.
Look at Coca Cola for example. A useless product that has no nutritional value (it actually causes disease) that has become an international cultural icon and it is accepted without question to have huge banners at all major events, whether it be music, sport or charity; and plastered onto every spare space it can smear its marketing faeces onto in every major town and city. One of the latest advertisements which I have seen plastered in Thessaloniki in Greece, Perth in Australia and Copenhagen features both a male and a female motioning toward to an upright bottle with their mouths open indicating a possible commencement of fellatio.
Modern popular music in the modern age has become the same thing. Seemingly useless crap that holds no substance, yet is deemed valuable because of the manipulation of the rules of the group mind through the media - dependent on a public that remains unaware of their nature and their tendency to behave as a group; all the while the public being conditioned from birth with the belief they are individuals who are making individual decisions living in a 'free' society.
So the group mind is like a country divided in territory by corporations, products, governments, religions, belief systems and culture.
Copyright of a song like, Hotel California is an interesting place to start with exploring this phenomenon.
By all rights it holds the cultural heritage of an era and is deemed an 'iconic' song in which the group mind collectively 'owns'.
It is a modern traditional song. Programmed into the group perception by mass repetition under favourable circumstances all thanks to marketing geniuses of the era.
But, here's the catch, it is 'owned' by the corporation. The corporation enforces its 'ownership' using the force of physical laws in a country. Through our conditioning into the system or 'rights' and our collective tacit consent to this system it effectively 'owns' a piece of something that is collectively owned. That is, it owns a guaranteed trigger or switch in consciousness that, should anyone want to or try to use it (this collectively owned traditional song) must pay the corporation per use with money = physical labour (well, for the majority of us not born with it, or not having the skills to swindle it through 'smart business'). So for something that cannot be inherently owned, through the invisible fences put in our minds in this 'free' society, it IS 'owned'.
And by no means am I suggesting you go out immediately and copy everyone's work and then try and sell it as yours. There is a place to give credit where it is due, it helps us collectively to gain a system of reference points by which to gain a constantly perfecting picture of reality.
Ownership of the mind is corporate slavery. To understand how the group mind works and how our individual minds are affected by the group mind on an unconscious level is a good place to start research to become self-aware. Pick up a text book on group psychology and if you are like any normal person, you should be shocked at what you're reading. The level of sentience or conscious decision making actually present in a public that believes they are all sentient is possibly below 1 percent of the population.
Copyright, although sounding great to assist everyone in protecting their work, is only in effect able to protect those that have the money to take those to court that have done the wrong thing.
So while, in the modern society of the hipster, the 'individual' is bandied about as some kind of modern cultural saviour, we actually live under a very intense kind of invisible mental slavery where entire swathes of group mind territory has been claimed by corporations who are willing to police their territory with the long arm of the law.
Consider what kind of laws are to be passed by corporations that own such music through international trade agreements only answerable to international courts run by the corporations themselves. The TPP (Trans-Pacific-Partnership) in Australia for example.
If the strict copyright laws that are in these agreements are passed, 'Hotel California' (a modern traditional music - a piece of mind territory - a conditioned trigger in the collective bag of tricks) won't even be allowed to be played on the street by a busker.
It's not just music that we should be aware of, it's anything cultural and that is anything that is in our group perception that we relate to as a group. As soon as something becomes popular enough, it is owned by the group. The 'creator' acted as the group to seed the idea and can not use it to pump up their ego any longer than the introductory period.
But everybody wants to be god you see. Everyone plays a game of power, wanting to have some kind of eternal life through imprinting their personality through a creation or discovery into the group mind. The desire to never be forgotten. The desire for power.
What we all share and use on a daily basis cannot be owned. It's a fundamental flaw in the present system. But I do believe it is not a mistake either.
Free the mind with self-awareness. Free your own mind first, understand what parts of your mind is the group mind, then assist others in finding the same. With enough people on board, real freedom will become part of our collective bag of tricks and this kind of invisible chains can never hold anyone ever again.
If a desire for power caused this mess, shouldn't appeasing our need to control others alleviate it? In this discovering the personal insecurities that caused us to need this power in the first place. Then is the solution then, not to be the 'chosen one' as the media constantly puts in your head through a thousand super hero films but just to learn to be ordinary and be satisfied by being ordinary?
The mind is not territory and it cannot be owned, though we constantly manifest physical representations of this greed to try to lock the mind down from the outside in...
What is it really to be a rebel?
