propositional writing

A Copyright Skeptic's Manifesto

Philip Dorrell, 11 January 2012

For those who "believe" in copyright, copyright as it currently exists is inherently a good thing, and the only problem to be solved is to make it "work" by successfully preventing all or most copyright infringement.

This conservative belief in the validity of copyright and the righteousness of unlimited copyright enforcement seems to dominate most public discussion about copyright, particularly as reported in the mainstream media. (Is the mainstream media actively suppressing discussion about copyright reform, or is it just too boring and technical to be interesting to their readers?)

The purpose of this manifesto is to state some propositions – together with explanations of why they hold true – which challenge this dominant point of view.

Some of the items in this manifesto are based on ideas originally discussed by Richard Stallman in his essay Misinterpreting Copyright - A Series of Errors.

Also, see below for notes on terminology (with regard to the use of the terms "author" and "society").

Reference

Stallman, 2002: Misinterpreting Copyright - A Series of Errors   This essay by Richard Stallman remains one of the most significant refutations of what might be called "copyright maximalism".

In particular, Stallman explains that copyright should derive from public benefit, and not from any natural right of authors, and he outlines three major errors in the interpretation of copyright, which are: the concept of "balance" between the rights of consumer and the rights of authors, the assumption that "maximisation of output" is an optimal result of copyright, regardless of whether or not such output is available to all consumers (which it isn't, because they can never afford to buy all of it), and the assignment of maximum rights to publishers over all future use of content, even after it has been "sold" to consumers. He also mentions the possible desirability of copyright term limitation, and some of the negative effects that laws to "protect" copyright have on free software.

Footnotes

The following footnotes are all in relation to Stallman 2002:

Notes on Terminology

In this manifesto, I have followed Stallman's convention of using "author" to describe the creator of any type of content to which copyright might apply. (Unlike Stallman I do not make so much of the distinction between "author" and "publisher" to which an "author" may have assigned copyright for the purposes of promoting and selling their content, as this distinction is not so relevant to most of the items in this manifesto – in particular, if authors naturally have certain "rights", then it is presumably OK for them to assign those rights to publishers, and if they don't have those rights, then they cannot be assigned anyway.)

Also in the manifesto I have used the term "society", to vaguely refer to some group of people who must make moral or political decisions about copyright. In practice this will be either a country (since most laws about copyright are national laws), or, the whole world (because copyright laws are mostly determined and constrained by international copyright treaties, see List of parties to international copyright agreements on Wikipedia for specific details).

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This manifesto is a Propositional Manifesto. It is licensed under the Creative Commons License Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.