<div>On 12/7/06, Chuck <<a href="mailto:chuck@mutualaid.org">chuck@mutualaid.org</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> 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</blockquote><div> 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 ( <a href="http://www.jonathancoulton.com">www.jonathancoulton.com</a> ), 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. </div> </div>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