[lbo-talk] Time to Get Religion

[boddi satva]

On 12/7/06, Chuck <chuck at mutualaid.org> wrote:
>
>
> 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

Wait a second, Chuck. You mean **stealing** is a popular activity?

I mean no disrespect to Creative Commons people. One of my favorite
singer-songwriters makes his living as a Creative Commons producer (
www.jonathancoulton.com ), but it seems to me that he Internet is just the
big apple cart from which we all occasionally snitch as we walk by. We know
what file "sharing" is, and it's not a "movement" per se. It's a common
practice - stealing and trafficking in stolen property. And it's not as if
the files stolen are always the property of big, heartless corporations.

But Creative Commons is a pretty naive beginning. It works if there is
reciprocal altruism, but that altruism has to be there. What anti-copyright
thinking boils down to is that ethics are more important than law. Okay,
that was always true. You can't, as a practical matter, engineer a society.
All societies rely on ethics. But at the same time, if your ethics are
incomplete, practices will develop that systematically victimize people,
particularly the altruistic.

Both copyright AND the anti-copyright "movement" fail to address the
fundamental question directly: how do we pay innovators and artists and keep
them going? Most workers produce things that have a reasonably narrow range
of use-values. Innovators create work that is of highly uncertain value,
with many if not most consumers putting zero value on the work. That's why
so many innovators are paid by distributor/marketers, who often buy many
works although they plan to distribute only a percentage of them. Every new
product (or new movie or new song) needs distribution and marketing. You
have to get a new product to people who you think will like it. Distribution
and marketing is work with a relatively predictable value and so they are
the logical people to smooth out the cash flow to creators. But the Internet
created a community of self-distributors who are also self-centered. They
have taken over the distribution without taking over the responsiblity of
smoothing out revenue for innovators and artists.

boddi
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