David Wallace-Wells has a very long review of the great Lewis Hyde's new book, Common as Air, at The Nation. The point of his 6,000 words is to convince you that Hyde, like other "free culture warriors," is engaged in a project to "exhort[ others] to piracy and the plundering of culture."
As a "free culture warrior" myself, I was a bit surprised to learn that I was in the business of "exhort[ing others] to piracy." After all, my book Free Culture (2004) explicitly condemns so-called "piracy" almost a dozen times. I repeat that condemnation again and again in Remix (2008). And so I dove with eagerness into Wallace-Wells' review, to see whether I had in fact made a mistake. Would The Nation finally erase my false consciousness? Was I now, and had I always been, a pirate?
It didn't take much reading, however, to unearth the fallacy at the core of Wallace-Wells' world: characterizing (while simplifying) Jaron Lanier's work, Wallace-Wells refers to an "open-source imperative to piracy."
Readers of my work will, with that single phrase, recognize the error in Wallace-Wells' ways: for his target is an oxymoron. There could be no "open-source imperative to piracy" since "open-source" is a practice that rests explicitly upon a respect for copyright.
"Open-source" software, like Free Software, and much of what I refer to as "free culture" is creative work that is protected by a copyright license. Like any copyright license, these open source or free culture copyright licenses impose certain requirements on people who would use creative work in a manner that triggers the application of copyright law. They all depend upon the copyright system to function in the way that their copyright owners desire. They are expressions of the will of a creator within a system that respects copyright. There could therefore be no conflict between "copyright" and anything remotely attached to "open source" culture. "Open source" culture celebrates one of the freedoms to choose that the system of copyright gives us.
So called "piracy," by contrast, is a denial of a choice by a copyright owner. It says to the creator, "I don't care what you want. I am taking what you have created." It doesn't respect the freedom that copyright law gives to the creator. It denies that the law should secure to the creator any such freedom to choose. The only relevant choice in pirate culture is the choice of the pirate to take. Not the choice of the creator to make her work available.
I understand the motivations of at least some of these so called "pirates." Some are political. Some are simply selfish. But whatever complex set of justifications stands behind their actions, their actions have nothing to do with the "open source" or free culture ethic. What is distinctive about that ethic is that they enable creators to exercise a choice. They don't try to justify the choice of consumers to take from a creator what she doesn't offer.
Of course, the creator doesn't, and shouldn't, have the power to restrict access to her work beyond the limits of copyright. Thus of course, "free culture warriors" celebrate the rights of "fair use," which are express limits on the scope of the copyright monopoly. But to celebrate limits is not to deny the legitimacy of the control permitted within those limits. I celebrate the moment a work enters the public domain. That doesn't mean I deny the legitimacy of a period during which the work is under the protection of copyright.
Maybe, however, Wallace-Wells' real concern is that by giving away some of the rights protected by copyright, creators would therefore encourage piracy. Maybe the concern is that being soft on rights is just the first step down a slippery slope to ignoring all rights.
But why would anyone believe that? Do public parks encourage trespassing? Does Bill Gates giving away more than $20 billion to charity encourage communism?
The idea betrays a sloppiness of thinking that has animated dozens of self-righteous "defenders" of the copyright system. The free choice of copyright owners to waive some portion of their copyright is not a rejection of copyright. It is instead -- as even the great (and sadly late) Jack Valenti recognized when he endorsed the Creative Commons project -- an expression of the freedoms guaranteed by copyright: The freedom, as any property system rightly secures, of the property owner to deploy her property as she sees fit.
That choice is not "piracy." And in 2010, to suggest that it is betrays not just sloppy thinking. It betrays an extraordinary ignorance. This terrain has been plowed a hundred times in the past decade. It would take anyone keen to understand before they blathered on exactly 10 minutes to find any number of essays that have pointed to this error precisely. (Indeed, Hyde makes the point himself when he discusses both the GPL (p220) and Creative Commons (p244).) Yet here again is a defender of the sanctity of authors who refuses to read what other authors have written.
I'm all for protecting authors' rights. But I think the most important thing to protect is respect for what has been written. Reading is the first step to that respect. Reading is what Wallace-Wells has not done well.
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While it may sometimes be dangerous, there are no issues involved in stealing I'll gotten gain from pirates.
Thanks
tl;dr - you've made a mountain out of a molehill.
I can say it even shorter than Larry: The issue is protecting creators' give-away-rights not consumers' (or 2nd-party copyright holders') rip-off rights.
For more, google: "Distinguish the non-give-away literature from the give-away literature"
Stevan Harnad
Sometimes I wonder (which can be dangerous in itself) on why I cannot copyright myself. I mean my personal information can be bought and sold without my permission for profits. Why isn't my personal information mine to sell for market research and profit?
/soapbox off
No copyright would arguably be better than what we have right now. It's not like we can vote against lobbyist dollars, so really the only way we can make a statement on the subject is to stop giving copyright holders money.
They're just going to turn around and spend it on buying laws to make the copyright system even worse anyway, so really, actually _buying_ proprietary works of art arguably constitutes an active detriment to the copyright system.
The Constitution says "for limited times". But copyright never expires, under the current policy of extending it whenever any work would enter the public domain.
The Constitution says Congress has the power "to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing" copyright and patents. That implies that copyright and patent exist as an exercise of government power for the benefit of society, not as a protection of any rights of authors and inventors.
People have the inherent right to think, say, write, and make whatever they can without harming anyone else -- regardless of whether someone else has previously thought, said, written, or made something similar. We accept some artificial limits on what we may legally do, in order to loosen the natural limits on what we're capable of doing.
This trade-off is perfectly legitimate, but it is very different from how the Constitution views property rights. Property rights are considered inherent rights that government must respect and protect.
There is no such thing as intellectual property. If there were, the owners would be within their moral rights, if it were possible, to have the thought police remove the stolen property from the intellect where it was wrongfully brought. And ownership doesn't expire.
Now imagine that this non-profit website could stream movies, songs and videos to the public over the web. Sort of like a Netflix and iTunes that is *truly* publicly owned. Like an online media distribution corporation, only a non-profit coop managed entirely democratically by all the citizens.
Now imagine that this bank had the authority to create money as society required.
Imagine that instead of being managed by business people motivated by profits, it was managed by scientists motivated to serve the good of the public, humanity in general and the environment in general.
Now imagine that all of this media was available to all of the citizens of the internet at all times completely free of charge. Nobody would have to pay for any movie, song or video.
This system, being computerized and online and democratically owned by the people, good them reward artists financially based solely on the frequency and use of their creations. Sort of like a royalty clearinghouse. This would enable poor people in third world countries to have access to all the worlds media for free, yet the artists would be rewarded.
http://define.com
We have the internet. This is the most powerful tool ever created for creating a global consensus. We have enough people that are on the internet now to get a populist message out to everybody. Like they say, "the internet routes around censorship."
I'm donating the domain "define.com" for the purpose. This means that is could be a multimedia dictionary where when you look up a word, you get a list of video clips from Hollywood movies with those words used in context, or songs lyrics even. With artists being rewarded for that.
I'm being careful to promote the idea among intelligent and compassionate people so they are the first to become aware of the possibility of organizing this consensus.
As for me, I've made my plans known to the world, and am confessing and surrendering to the public and willing to take the blame or risk the wrath of the rich for collapsing the global economy. At at the mercy of the public. If Uncle Sam wants to shut the site down, they don't even need to get a National Security Letter and deliver to my hosting provider. They can simply send me an e-mail and ask me to change the message. My e-mail address is at the bottom of the essay.
It's easy to say "humans will always be thus" - by which we usually mean will always be driven by the more 'base' instincts we carry.
We are told compassion, cooperation, and urge to be "of service" are equally among our in-born drives, but in our bleak unexamined belief of "reality", we reject these better in-born impulses as "unusual". (While structuring their impracticality - I've witnessed the "fade out" in young school children.)
Granted, "need" to "look after #1 (and any tribe to which #1 belongs), continues to pressure even the most generous spirited person to restrict what she/he is willing to do "in cooperation". And it's fair to say "civilization has been ever thus". BUT those behaviors pre-date (by 1000's of years) what we began to learn in the 20th century about ourselves - as psychological beings, specifically.
The role of our "psychological nature" in economic structures based on "the necessity of inequality", is complete. The future, now that we've begun to learn, depends on development of undeveloped psychological potential.
Something along lines you outline IS possible - although radical to what we've known. That's no reason not to bravely explore possibility!
The "fullness of human promise" lies nowhere else.
You have to wonder just how bad people have been hypnotized when the idea of forgiving all debts, letting them keep their homes and cars, and giving everybody free money without their needing to work is something that they think is somehow unpatriotic or crazy. Talk about a brainwashed populace.
Really, we're the boss, not the stupid politicians who are our so-called "Representatives." They don't represent us at all. We're perfectly capable of representing ourselves from the keyboards of our computers or the touch screens of our smart phones.
Our current culture is very controlled by the concept of "authority." You tell someone that there's this website suggesting that we start over and they say, "Fat chance. Pipe dream."
I'm not saying this is true, and if it was true there is no way it could be confirmed or denied because if it was true it would be illegal, but let me allude to authority here and just think about it.
What if these statements were true:
This site represents the combined interest of the scientific community and the United States military and the President of the United States.
Now, get some Pentagon correspondent or White House correspondent to pointedly and directly ask President Obama what he thinks of http://define.com. Whether he knew about it before or didn't, now he knows about it.
See if the site gets shut down. Really.
When put into two simplified groups like that of course.
Why not just say one sentence: Copyright protection allows the owner the right to do whatever he wants with his own work.
Which if true, would mean that no laws work anyway.
It is that simple, but those against it don't want it to be.
Therefore, it really does need to repeated in variation.
To what extent has the extension of copyrights to longer and longer periods "promoted" the useful arts? Would fewer books and movies be produced if the current term was reduced to, say, twenty five years? Or, in the case of computer programs, would fewer new works be produced if the copyright term were reduced to five years? Would Microsoft suffer if the copyright protection were lifted from Windows 3.1?
I believe that what has happened is that the intent of the framers of the Constitution has been completely perverted in the interest of the propertied class.