Copyright is wrong. Abolish it.
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- The fundamental concept of copyright is simple enough: when someone creates something and someone else ‘uses’ it, payment is due.
The devil is, of course, in the details and a whole breed of lawyers have grown rich interpreting them.
Publication means, “I hereby deliver my work to the public, for our cultural enrichment. Let us now make of my art what we will. Share it, enjoy it, react to it, build upon it – this artwork now belongs to all of us. I place no obligations upon anyone that do not naturally exist, to be honest in representing me and my art as I am honest in representing those artists I have enjoyed and learned from, and especially those whose work I have built upon. You are welcome to reward me for the production of my work, as I would like to reward others for theirs, but I shall not accept the surrender of anyone’s liberty, as I have not accepted the surrender of my own.”
Copyright means, “The public’s liberty to share and build upon published culture is hereby suspended, in order that a reproduction monopoly can be granted to the rich and powerful owners of printing presses that they alone may make and sell copies of art at a price of their choosing. From this day forth you are permitted to enjoy and react to art, but you may not share or build upon such published work unless you obtain the copyright holder’s permission.
“There is no apology available for copyright. There is no way of sweetening it nor means of lining its manacles with soft fur that makes it palatable, comfortable, or ethical. Abolish it.”
And —————-
Copyright, “suspends what would otherwise be a musician’s natural liberty to build upon others’ published work. I think that is not only questionable, but highly unethical. Unfortunately, it’s the most I can do to convince people to at least question this state of affairs.
“The elders among us have simply grown up with the idea that it’s wrong to share and build upon each other’s published work without obtaining permission first. One day this will be looked back on as a ridiculous cultural aberration.”
The statements above belong to Crosbie Fitch and he’s being making them for five years or more.
“Copyright is a form of intellectual property which gives the creator of an original work exclusive rights for a certain time period in relation to that work, including its publication, distribution and adaptation; after which time the work is said to enter the public domain,” says the Wikipedia [my emphasis].
But, says Henry Emrich, “It’s actually worse than that … The ‘Elders’ have grown up with the notion that they have a ’sacred right’, NOT merely to monopolies such as copyright and patents, but the ’sacred right’ to break THEIR side of that contract by not allowing them to expire as originally promised. That’s the essense of the whole issue: every copyright extension is ultimately tantamount to ‘breach of contract’: it WOULD have expired on time, but now it won’t. Reason? Whining + Money = Law.”
Both Reader’s Writes come in p2pnet stories on Kutiman, the amazing Israeli artist who’s taken mixing to a whole new level.
Crosbie wrote the first story, “Copyright is an unethical constraint on society’s cultural liberty and those societies who choose to remain bound by it choose cultural stagnation and obscurity.”..”
‘ … most interpretations of copyright laws would conclude Kutiman violated copyrights’
His words struck a resounding chord with Dr Michael Zimmer, assistant professor in the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and an associate at the Center for Information Policy Research) who teaches Information Technology Ethics.
“It’s hard not to agree with the sentiments,” he posted on his blog, going on »»»
Just in time for the sections on intellectual property and fair use in my Information Technology Ethics class, the Israeli artist Kutiman released a brilliant collection of YouTube video mashups called Thru You.
Kutiman has taken existing YouTube videos of people playing music alone, sampled, looped, mixed and mashed them together to make absolutely amazing new music.
These songs are genius. They are original. Yet, most interpretations of existing copyright laws would conclude that Kutiman violated the copyrights of the original uploaders (however, perhaps some uploaded with a Creative Commons license?).
The spirit and original intent of copyright and fair use is to encourage creativity, and it would be tragic to think that Kutiman`s creations aren`t transformative in such a way as to be allowed under our current intellectual property regime.
“Hopefully, signs that the sentiment of the cognoscenti as well as the public generally is gradually changing from, ‘It’s a pity so many of us are infringing copyright holders’ privileges – we must be punished’ into ‘Copyright holders are disrespectful of the public’s rightful liberty – their privilege should be removed’,”says Crosbie.
And that may well be the way things are going.
‘ … we’d ideally like to eliminate patent and copyright laws altogether’
For the first time in history, the Great Unwashed now routinely and completely by-pass the traditional organs of disinformation. They’re talking with each other one-on-one, group-to-group, every minute of every day, using the Net as their global communications vehicle.
Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, economists at the Washington University in St Louis, “have looked at current copyright and patent laws and concluded that they”re not good,” says Ben Jones in TorrentFreak.
“From a public policy view, we’d ideally like to eliminate patent and copyright laws altogether,”the story has Levine, the John H. Biggs Distinguished Professor of Economics, saying.
“There’s plenty of protection for inventors and plenty of protection and opportunities to make money for creators. It’s not that we see this as some sort of charitable act that people are going to invent and create things without earning money. Evidence shows very strongly there are lots of ways to make money without patents and copyright.”
The economists’ view are presented in their new book, Against Intellectual Monopoly’ where, “they suggest that the copyright and patent systems in the US should at least be brought back into line with their constitutional establishment that of promoting the progress of science and the useful arts,” says TorrentFreak, adding:
“In the book, they put the case quite simply – ‘In the decades to come, sustaining economic progress will depend, more and more, on our ability to progressively reduce and eventually eliminate intellectual monopoly’.”
Stay tuned.
Jon Newton – p2pnet
March, 2009
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March 12th, 2009 at 9:41 am
“Evidence shows very strongly there are lots of ways to make money without patents and copyright.â
How about concentrating on this sentence.
If there are enough ways presented to make money, copyright abolition will be an easier sell.
March 12th, 2009 at 11:09 am
I think it needs to be remembered that copyright abolition is not the objective. The objective is for people (artist and audience alike) to enjoy their natural, cultural liberty, ideally without fear of prosecution.
People are already making good progress in resuming the enjoyment of their natural, cultural liberty. Included within that is the natural right to share and build upon published culture and to be able to exchange one’s labour for whatever the market will bear.
P2PNet is doing an excellent job of pointing out all those situations in which people are being prosecuted or persecuted by publishers for sharing and building upon published works, even before they get around to inviting their audiences to pay them for their labours, e.g. DJing, reviewing, remixing, singing along to, etc.
Human culture has become the controlled property of immortal publishing corporations and they will jealously guard it against any mere mortal who dares assume this commonwealth of knowledge and art as the birthright of Homo Sapiens.
Fortunately, mere mortals are outnumbering the publishers’ hired lawyers, legislators and congressmen. We are seeing a cultural insurgency, and this is why such cultural insurgents as file-sharers and remix artists are being labelled by the publishing cartel as pirates, counterfeiters, and other miscreants pursuing funding for terrorism and other organised crime. They are labelling the people as criminals for doing nothing more than ignoring the publishers’ monopoly, ignoring their unethical privilege of copyright.
So, the abolition of copyright is not suggested as a way of restoring the people’s cultural liberty – because they are already wresting it back – but, as a way to cease the publishers’ continued spiteful and retaliatory persecution of the public.
Now, of course, if one can find alternative ways for publishers to make money other than by suing the public to enforce their unethical monopolies they might undo some of the terrible damage they’ve done to their own reputations. Unfortunately, I don’t think publishers can adapt to the idea of selling art without a monopoly. It’s far too ingrained in their corporate mentality.
However, one can certainly find alternative ways for artists to make money other than by selling their work to publishers. The most obvious way is for artists to sell their work directly to their audience. We are beginning to see this happening already. It will only become an ever more popular business model for artists, given the publishers no longer have an effective monopoly to tempt them with potentially larger payouts (albeit equivalent to loans paid off by lottery wins).
I recognise there are others who like the idea of a tax, i.e. forcing the entire population to pay publishers a colossal bail-out scale compensation for the copies they can no longer sell given their monopoly is no longer effective. You can tell I think a tax is almost as bad as copyright. This is because it would compound the crime of copyright to compensate a publisher because the public have reclaimed the liberty that was confiscated from them to privilege the publisher in the first place. If anything, the publishers should compensate the public for the suspension of their cultural liberty that they have exploited for so long.
March 13th, 2009 at 10:07 am
“I recognise there are others who like the idea of a tax, i.e. forcing the entire population to pay publishers…”
But there are those, like me, that feel that artists (not publishers) should somehow should be compensated or subsidized for their work if that work is of significant value. Anyone can write a worthless poem or song and that author deserves no compensation or subsidy and if the judgement that says it is worthless turns out to be wrong or biased, that can be corrected (appealed). The subsidy can come from the general tax and payment can be based on individual works or based on the authors lifetime work.
Also, because large investments are sometimes made to produce movies an recordings and those investments cannot be recouped in if free commercial copying is allowed, these should be allowed a monopoly of just a few years, no more than 10 to 20 years, depending on the investment made and when the investment was recouped.
“If anything, the publishers should compensate the public for the suspension of their cultural liberty that they have exploited for so long.”
Great idea. Start with the so called music publishers that have collected worthless songs by the millions so as to collects all sorts of blanket license/monopoly/extorsion based royalties. There are billions there.
March 15th, 2009 at 8:33 am
And under no conditions should school text books, regardless of cost to create be covered by copyrights.
To begin with, the costs to create are minimal as these books are all based on previous writings or the writings of other.
That way the $100 school book that can only be used during one year will cost only $10 and can be used for many years.
It’s time to end the education book racket.
October 24th, 2010 at 8:57 am
It’s no wonder that most countries that have copyright laws don’t bother enforcing them, and some of them don’t even bother with having any on the books in the first place. People are much more level-headed on the issue here in Turkey, where I see students with obviously photocopied books in my English class. Last year, I worked with a bunch of boobs from the States (I’m also from the States, but from another region.) who told us we shouldn’t copy textbooks because it was illegal. A colleague of mine commented that these aforementioned boobs didn’t seem to realize where they were.