User:Δεριζαματζορπρομπλεμιναυστραλια/thematicpoliticsofcraft/dkleiner

COPYFARLEFT AND COPYJUSTRIGHT

Challenges to traditional copyright resulting from peer-to-peer applications, free software, filesharing and appropriation art have caused a wide ranging debate on the future of copyright.

In the area of software development copyleft has proved to be a tremendously effective means of creating an information commons which broadly benefits all those whose production depends on it. However, many artists, musicians, writers, film-makers and other information producers remain sceptical that a copyleft based system where anyone is free to reproduce their work, can earn them a living.

property is the enemy of freedom

David Ricardo first described Economic Rent. Put simply, economic rent is income the owner of a productive asset can earn just by owning it, not by doing anything, just by owning.

Thus, Rent is the economic return for allowing others to use property. What would a person pay for the right to exist?

THE IRON LAW OF WAGES

Rent allows owners of scarce property to drive propertyless workers to subsistence, as David Ricardo explains in his ‘Iron Law of Wages’ in his essay Of Wages: ‘The natural price of labour is that price which is necessary to enable the labourers, one with another, to subsist and to perpetuate their race’

Price inflation, mostly in the form of econonic rent, prevents workers from ever earning enough to accumulate ownership of productive assets themselves and keeps them dependent on the property owners.

What the iron law of wages really means is that workers, as a class, cannot become property owners and thus cannot escape from having to allow property owners to appropriate the product of their labour. This creates different interests between ‘owners’ of scarce productive assets and the rest of society.David Ricardo argues: ‘the interest of the landlord is always opposed to the interest of every other class in the community. This opposition is called class struggle – the struggle of those who produce against those who own. Socialism and all other movements of the ‘left’ start with this class struggle as their point of departure As Pierre-Joseph Proudhon famously argued in his landmark ‘What is Property?’ published in 1840: 'property is theft' Property is not a natural phenomena, but rather something that is created by law.The ability to extract rent is dependent on one’s ability to control a scarce resource even when it is being used by somebody else. In other words, the ability to force that other person to pay for it. Or, in terms of production, to force them to share the product of their labour with the property owner. Control at a distance.

The purpose of property is to ensure a propertyless class exists to produce the wealth enjoyed by a propertied class. Property is no friend of labour. This is not to say that individual workers cannot become property owners, but rather that to do so means to escape their class. 'Intellectual Property, including copyright, is the extension of property to immaterial assets, to information. Copyright is a legal construction that tries to make certain kinds of immaterial wealth behave like material wealth, so that they can be owned, controlled, and traded.

It is often unfortunately said that intellectual property is intended to allow information producers to earn a living. To allow musicians, for instance, to earn money from the music they make. However, an understanding of class struggle makes it clear that so long as the owning class wants to have music, they must allow musicians to make a living. They do not require intellectual property for this purpose. Rather, they require intellectual property so that property owners, not musicians, can earn money on the music made by musicians

The purpose of intellectual property, to rephrase my earlier statement, is to ensure a propertyless class exists to produce the information profited on by a propertied class

THE IRON LAW OF COPYRIGHT EARNINGS

The system of private control of the means of publication, distribution, promotion and media production ensures that artists and all other creative workers can earn no more than their subsistence Whether you are biochemist, a musician, a software engineer or a film-maker, you have signed over all your copyrights to property owners before these rights have any real financial value for no more than the reproduction costs of your work. This is what I call the Iron Law of Copyright Earnings. There are, however, an important differences between intellectual property and physical property. Physical property is scarce and rivalrous while intellectual property can be copied, has almost no reproduction cost and can be used simultaneously by anyone with a copy. It is exactly this characteristic of unlimited reproducibility that requires the copyright regime to make information into property Only by making it illegal for others to copy it can the owners extract rent for the right to copy

COPYLEFT AND COPYRIGHT Information may not have any exchange value without copyright, but it certainly has use value without copyright As David Ricardo said about landlords, the interest of a software company like Microsoft is always opposed to the interest of every software user. Richard Stallman, The inventor of the General Public Licence (GPL) under which a lot of free software is released writes on his organisations website: My work on free software is motivated by an idealistic goal: spreading freedom and cooperation. I want to encourage free software to spread, replacing proprietary software that forbids cooperation, and thus make our society better.This spirit of cooperation is certainly not unique among software developers, other creative producers have expressed the desire to work on a common-stock, a ‘commons’ of intellectual material in their practice. As a result copyleft has moved beyond the world of software and into art as well. musicians, writers and other artists began releasing their work under GPL-style copyleft licences However, there is a problem, art is not, in most cases, a common input to production as software is. Owners of property will support the creation of copyleft software, for the reasons described, however in most cases, they will not support the creation of copyleft art. Why would they? Like all copyable information, it has no direct exchange value, and unlike software it generally has no use value in production either. It’s use value exists only among the fans of this art, and if owners of property can not charge these fans money for the right to copy, what good it is for them? And if owners of property will not support copyleft art, which is freely distributed, who will? The answer is unclear. In some cases institutions such as private and state cultural funds will, but these can only support a very small number of artists, and only by employing a dubious and ultimately somewhat arbitrary selection criteria in deciding who does, and who does not, receive such funding.Copyleft, as developed by the free software community, is thus not a viable option for most artists.Even for software developers, the iron law of wages applies, they may be able to earn a living, but nothing more, owners of property will still capture the full value of the product of their labour. As copyleft cannot allow workers to accumulate wealth beyond subsistence, copyleft alone cannot change the distribution of productive assets, which is what any revolutionary strategy must seek to do. Yet the emergence of free software, filesharing and art forms based upon sampling and reuse of other media has created a serious problem for the traditional copyright system.

COPYJUSTRIGHT Thus, just as capital joined the copyleft software movement to reduce the cost of software development, capital is also joining the copyright dissident art movement to integrate filesharing and sampling into an otherwise property-based system of control. As copyleft does not allow the extraction of rent for the right to copy, and what owners of property want is not something that will challenge the property regime, but rather to create more categories and subcategories so that practices like filesharing and remixing can exist with the property regime. In other words, copyjustright. A more flexible version of copyright that can adapt to modern uses but still ultimately embody and protect the logic of control. The most prominent example of this is the so-called Creative Commons and it’s myriad of ‘just right’ licenses. ‘Some rights reserved,’ the motto of the site says it all.

So if neither copyleft, copyright or copyjustright can overcome the iron law and ultimately increase the wealth of artists and other workers as a class, is there any reason at all for a socialist to be interested in intellectual property licenses?

COPYFARLEFT For copyleft to have any revolutionary potential it must be Copyfarleft. It must insist upon workers ownership of the means of production.

In order to do this a license cannot have a single set of terms for all users, but rather must have different rules for different classes. Specifically one set of rules for those who are working within the context of workers ownership and commons based production, and another for those who employ private property and wage labour in production.

A copyfarleft license should make it possible for producers to share freely and to retain the value of their labour product, in otherwords it must be possible for workers to make money by applying their own labour to mutual property, but impossible for owners of private property to make money using wage labour Thus under a copyfarleft license a worker-owned printing cooperative could be free to reproduce, distribute, and modify the common stock as they like, but a privately owned publishing company would be prevented from having free access. A trend in works by pro-copyleft artists seems in one sense related. The copyleft Non-Commercial licenses create two sets of rules with theoretically endogenic (orginating within the commons) ‘non-commercial’ uses being allowed while exogenic (orginating outside the commons) ‘commercial’ uses are forbidden except by agreement from the orginal authors. Examples of such licenses include the Creative Commons Non-Commercial ShareAlike license However, in order to create commons endogenic terms, the works themselves must be in the commons, and so long as the authors reserve the right to make money with this work and prevent other commons based producers from doing so, the work can not be considered to be in the commons at all, it is a private work. As such, it can not have commons endogenic-free terms, such as a copyfarleft license would require. This problem of creating ‘commons deeds’ for works that are not really a common stock is typical of the Copyjustright approach typified by the Creative Commons.

A copyfarleft license must allow commons based commercial use while denying the ability to profit by exploiting wage labour.