Re: copyright under stress

On 05/31/2000, Kevin Grierson <kgrierson[_at_]wilsav.com> wrote:
>
> I submit that the reason people use gnutella is not to publically
> disobey an unjust law, but to violate the law anonymously for their
> own private benefit.

I submit that the reason people use gnutella (and will use freenet and its successors) is to obtain information which is unnecessarily unavailable to them otherwise. Copyright prevents access to information and restricts the movement, reuse and ongoing development of that information. By its nature, the internet thrives on access, on more information, more links, more knowledge; it treats censorship (economic or otherwise) like damage, and routes around it. This is driven by positive feedback -- in a sense, the process is inherent in the design of the net.

> I also find your argument that copyright amounts to "appropriation from
> the commons" unconvincing (and ironic, given that the "tragedy of the
> commons" led to property rights in the first place).

I might argue that property itself is theft from the commons -- although we'll have to wait a couple of decades for nanotech to make that more obvious -- but I certainly have difficulty with the thesis that property rights arose as a solution to a failure of the commons. Is this a widely accepted interpretation?

> The works that are being copied were not in the commons to start with

All art comes from the commons, and feeds back into it in turn. (The artist recombines, remixes, selects, reflects on and reinterprets existing art in the light of personal experience, and new art is created. This is the nature of culture.)

> they were placed there by their creators, who had the option
> of not making them public, but chose to do so because of the
> protections afforded by copyright.

The purpose of art is to communicate. Artists do not take the option of not making their art public, and certainly they don't withhold their creativity because they fear their art might become part of the culture. Were they to do so (exclusively) they would not be artists.

CYa,
JEREMY Jeremy G. Byrne
<jeremy[_at_]iz.org> Received on Fri Jun 02 2000 - 23:10:31 GMT