[lbo-talk] Time to Get Religion

Chuck chuck at mutualaid.org
Thu Dec 7 07:53:02 PST 2006


Tayssir John Gabbour wrote:
> On 12/6/06, Chuck <chuck at mutualaid.org> wrote:
>
>> The free software movement is essentially a big example of anarchism in
>> action. This was first pointed out in the late 90s and is more true
>> today given the ongoing developments in free/open source software. As
>> much as I've been burned by Wikipedia, I'll point out that it is very
>> much a successful example of collaborative anarchy.
>
>
> Yeah, in fact you can often see offtopic flamewars spontanously erupt
> about capitalist vs. anarchist modes of production (not in those fancy
> words, of course). There's at least one going on right now.
> http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_frm/thread/74c79856f46e6071/83ce343cb93e9f48#83ce343cb93e9f48


> Interestingly, the central government types are completely absent.
> There's no one saying, "Well, replace copyright with straight gov't
> funding!"

What boggles my mind is the complete revolution in thinking about copyright and intellectual property. Ten years ago there were only a handfull of us around the world who considered ourselves anti-copyright activists. This attitude was prevalent in the anarchist movement, where magazines frequently had "anti-copyright" notices. I was involved in the Spunk Library project, an online digital library of anarchist texts which was found in 1992, before the Web took off. Around 1996, we were having an intense discussion inside our collective about how to handle copyright and intellectual property issues. Most of us wanted to adopt a militant anti-IP position and just put texts online for public use. Some of us pointed out that we needed to be pragmatic, in order to make arrangements to get permission from authors such as Alan Ginsberg.

We never came up with a copyright policy and ended up putting more texts online before the project went into hibernation. As far as I know, our conversations on copyright were unusual at the time, because everybody else putting material on the web were just shit and giggles over the new technology.

Ten years later there is lots of hostility towards IP law. There is a huge file-sharing movement and many websites put material online with no care about copyright. There are the GPL and Creative Commons licenses. The free software/open source movement is huge.

This is one of those reasons why I'm still optimistic about the prospects for radical social change. Things can change in ways that reflect your ideas, in ways tha you least expect.

Chuck -------------------------- Bread and Roses Web Design serving small businesses, non-profits, artists and activists http://www.breadandrosesweb.com/



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