Anti-copyright - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Anti-copyright refers to the complete or partial opposition to prevalent copyright laws. Copyright

Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...

is known as the owner's right for copies to be only made by the owner or with his/her authorization in form of a license.

The classic argument for copyright is the view that granting developers temporary monopolies over their works encourages further development and creativity by giving the developer a source of income; normally copyright is enforced within a framework of Berne convention

Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works

The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, usually known as the Berne Convention, is an international agreement governing copyright, which was first accepted in Berne, Switzerland in 1886.- Content :...

, instigated by Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo

Victor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....

and signed in 1886. A central anti-copyright argument is that copyright has never been of net benefit to society and instead serves to enrich a few at the expense of creativity. Some anti-copyright groups may question the logic of copyright on economic and cultural grounds. Also, in the context of the Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

and Web 2.0

Web 2.0

The term Web 2.0 is associated with web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web...

it can be argued that copyright law needs to be adapted to modern information technology

Information technology

Information technology is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications...

Groups advocating abolishing of copyright

Many traditional anarchists, including Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...

, expressed their refusal to accept copyright.

Pirate Cinema

Pirate Cinema

Pirate Cinema is a do-it-yourself cinema. Recently Pirate Cinema has been associated with groups in Brazil, Berlin, Copenhagen, Melbourne and Helsinki, where local Pirate Cinema groups are associated with the anti-copyright movement and squatting....

and groups like The League of Noble Peers

The League of Noble Peers

The League of Noble Peers is an organization credited with producing the Steal This Film documentary series. When releasing Steal This Film the group introduced itself as "a group of friends" that, in 2006, "decided to make a film about filesharing that we would recognise." The Steal This Film...

advance more radical arguments, opposing copyright per se. A number of anti-copyright groups have recently emerged in the argument around peer-to-peer

Peer-to-peer

Peer-to-peer computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application...

file sharing

File sharing

File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digitally stored information, such as computer programs, multimedia , documents, or electronic books. It may be implemented through a variety of ways...

, digital freedom, and freedom of information

Freedom of information

Freedom of information refers to the protection of the right to freedom of expression with regards to the Internet and information technology . Freedom of information may also concern censorship in an information technology context, i.e...

; these include the Association des audionautes

Association des audionautes

The Association des Audionautes is a French lobby group founded by Aziz Ridouan and Quentin Renaudo in October 2004 that supports Internet users sharing files, including copyrighted material, over peer-to-peer networks....

.

Recent developments related to BitTorrent and peer-to-peer

Peer-to-peer

file-sharing have been termed by media commentators as "copyright wars", with The Pirate Bay

The Pirate Bay

The Pirate Bay is a Swedish website which hosts magnet links and .torrent files, which allow users to share electronic files, including multimedia, computer games and software via BitTorrent...

being referred to as "the most visible member of a burgeoning international anti-copyright—or pro-piracy—movement". One well-publicized instance of electronic civil disobedience

Electronic civil disobedience

Electronic civil disobedience, also known as ECD or cyber civil disobedience, can refer to any type of civil disobedience in which the participants use information technology to carry out their actions. Electronic civil disobedience often involves the computers and/or the Internet and may also be...

(ECD) in the form of large scale intentional copyright infringement

Copyright infringement is the unauthorized or prohibited use of works under copyright, infringing the copyright holder's exclusive rights, such as the right to reproduce or perform the copyrighted work, or to make derivative works.- "Piracy" :...

occurred on February 24, 2004, in an event called Grey Tuesday. Activists intentionally violated EMI

EMI

The EMI Group, also known as EMI Music or simply EMI, is a multinational music company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is the fourth-largest business group and family of record labels in the recording industry and one of the "big four" record companies. EMI Group also has a major...

's copyright of The White Album

The Beatles (album)

The Beatles is the ninth official album by the English rock group The Beatles, a double album released in 1968. It is also commonly known as "The White Album" as it has no graphics or text other than the band's name embossed on its plain white sleeve.The album was written and recorded during a...

by distributing MP3

MP3

MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...

files of a mashup album called The Grey Album

The Grey Album

The Grey Album is a mashup album by Danger Mouse, released in 2004. It uses an a cappella version of rapper Jay-Z's The Black Album and couples it with instrumentals created from a multitude of unauthorized samples from The Beatles' LP The Beatles...

, in an attempt to draw public attention to copyright reform issues and anti-copyright ideals. Reportedly over 400 sites participated including 170 that hosted the album with some protesters stating that The Grey Album

The Grey Album

illustrates a need for revisions in copyright law to allow sampling

Sampling (music)

In music, sampling is the act of taking a portion, or sample, of one sound recording and reusing it as an instrument or a different sound recording of a song or piece. Sampling was originally developed by experimental musicians working with musique concrète and electroacoustic music, who physically...

under fair use of copyrighted material, or proposing a system of fair compensation to allow for sampling.

Groups advocating changes to copyright law

French group Association des audionautes

Association des audionautes

is not anti-copyright per se, but proposes a reformed system for copyright enforcement and compensation. Aziz Ridouan, co-founder of the group, proposes for France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

to legalise peer-to-peer

Peer-to-peer

file sharing

File sharing

and to compensate artists through a surcharge on Internet service provider

Internet service provider

An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...

fees (i.e. an alternative compensation system

Alternative compensation system

Various alternative compensation systems have been proposed as ways to allow the widespread reproduction of digital copyrighted works while still paying the authors and copyright owners of those works. This article only discusses those proposals which involve some form of government intervention...

). Reportedly, major music companies have equated Ridouan's proposal with legitimizing piracy. In January 2008, seven Swedish members of parliament from the Moderate Party

Moderate Party

The Moderate Party is a centre-right, liberal conservative political party in Sweden. The party was founded in 1904 as the General Electoral League by a group of conservatives in the Swedish parliament...

(part of the governing coalition), authored a piece in a Swedish tabloid calling for the complete decriminalization of filesharing; they wrote that "Decriminalizing all non-commercial file sharing and forcing the market to adapt is not just the best solution. It's the only solution, unless we want an ever more extensive control of what citizens do on the Internet."

Groups advocating using existing copyright law

Groups that argue for using existing copyright legal framework with special licenses to achieve their goals, include the copyleft

Copyleft

Copyleft is a play on the word copyright to describe the practice of using copyright law to offer the right to distribute copies and modified versions of a work and requiring that the same rights be preserved in modified versions of the work...

movement and Creative Commons

Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons...

. Creative Commons is not anti-copyright per se, but argues for use of more flexible and open copyright licenses within existing copyright law. Creative Commons takes the position that there is an unmet demand for flexibility that allows the copyright owner to release work with only "some rights reserved" or even "no rights reserved." According to Creative Commons many people do not regard default copyright as helping them in gaining the exposure and widespread distribution they want. Creative Commons argue that their licenses

Creative Commons licenses

Creative Commons licenses are several copyright licenses that allow the distribution of copyrighted works. The licenses differ by several combinations that condition the terms of distribution. They were initially released on December 16, 2002 by Creative Commons, a U.S...

allow entrepreneurs and artists to employ innovative business models rather than all-out copyright to secure a return on their creative investment.

Scholars and commentators

Scholars and commentators in this field include Lawrence Liang

Lawrence Liang

Lawrence Liang is an Indian Chinese legal researcher and lawyer based in the city of Bangalore, who is known for his legal campaigns on issues of public concern...

, Jorge Cortell

Jorge Cortell

Jorge Cortell is an activist and commentator known for his opposition to the concept of Intellectual Property.-Work:Cortell has founded and has actively cooperated with the Creative Commons and the FFII....

, Rasmus Fleischer

Rasmus Fleischer

Rasmus Fleischer is a Swedish historian, musician, freelance journalist and debater. He is currently working as a Ph.D...

, Stephan Kinsella

Stephan Kinsella

frame|right|Stephan KinsellaNorman Stephan Kinsella is an American intellectual property lawyer and libertarian legal theorist. His electronically published works are primarily published on his blog and websites associated with the Ludwig von Mises Institute and anarcho-capitalist...

, and Siva Vaidhyanathan

Siva Vaidhyanathan

Siva Vaidhyanathan is a cultural historian and media scholar, and is currently a professor of Media Studies and Law at the University of Virginia. Vaidhyanathan is a frequent contributor on media and cultural issues in various periodicals including The Chronicle of Higher Education, New York Times...

Intellectual monopoly

...results in a weaker incentive at creativity

Non-scarcity

Some libertarians, particularly proponents of Austrian economics, including McElroy, Palmer, Lepage, Bouckaert, and Stephan Kinsella, argue that copyright is invalid because, unlike physical property, intellectual property is not scarce and is, they claim, a legal fiction created by the state. That is, infringing

on copyright, unlike theft

Theft

In common usage, theft is the illegal taking of another person's property without that person's permission or consent. The word is also used as an informal shorthand term for some crimes against property, such as burglary, embezzlement, larceny, looting, robbery, shoplifting and fraud...

, does not deprive the victim of the original item, and so enforcement of copyright law constitutes aggression on the part of the state.

Web 2.0

One of the founders of Piratbyrån

Piratbyrån

Piratbyrån was a Swedish organization established to support people opposed to current ideas about intellectual property — by freely sharing information and culture...

Rasmus Fleischer

Rasmus Fleischer is a Swedish historian, musician, freelance journalist and debater. He is currently working as a Ph.D...

argues that copyright law simply seems unable to cope with the Internet, and hence is obsolete. He argues that the Internet, and particularly Web 2.0 have brought about the uncertain status of the very idea of "copying" itself. He argues that in an attempt to rein in Web 2.0, copyright law in the 21st century is increasingly concerned with criminalizing entire technologies. Leading to recent attacks on different kinds of search engines, solely because they provide links to files which may be copyrighted, Fleischer points out that Google, while still largely uncontested, operates in a gray zone of copyright (e.g. the business model of Google Books is to display millions of pages of copyrighted and uncopyrighted books as part of a business plan drawing its revenue from advertising). In contrast, others have pointed out that Google Books blocks-out large sections of those same books, which incentivizes purchases, and supports the legitimate interests of rightsholders.

Fleischer's central argument is that copyright has become obsolete with regards to the Internet, that the cost of trying to enforce it is unreasonable, and that instead business models need to adapt to the reality of the darknet.

The Darknet Theory

In 2002, a group of Microsoft-affiliated researchers, published "The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution", investigating what they call "the darknet", a collection of networks and technologies used to share digital content (such as peer-to-peer

Peer-to-peer

file sharing

File sharing

and CD and DVD copying). The authors state that "we believe it probable that there will be a few more rounds of technical innovations to sidestep existing laws, followed by new laws, or new interpretations of old laws, in the next few years." The paper discusses evidence that the darknet "will continue to exist and provide low cost, high quality service to a large group of consumers. This means that in many markets, the darknet will be a competitor to legal commerce."

The authors also argue that people have always "copied", however in the past valuable objects were mostly physical and it was uneconomical or, when carried out on a large scale, stoppable using patent

Patent

A patent is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention....

or copyright law. They argue that this has fundamentally changed with the Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

and associated technologies, as valuable digital content can be copied at little cost and distributed on an unprecedented scale.

Freedom of knowledge

Groups such as Hipatia advance anti-copyright arguments in the name of "freedom of knowledge" and argue that knowledge should be "shared in solidarity". Such groups may perceive "freedom of knowledge" as a right, and/or as fundamental in realising the right to education

Right to education

The right to education is a universal entitlement to education, a right that is recognized as a human right. According to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights the right to education includes the right to free, compulsory primary education for all, an obligation to...

, which is an internationally recognised human right, as well as the right to a free culture

Free Culture movement

The free culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify creative works in the form of free content by using the Internet and other forms of media....

and the right to free communication. They argue that current copyright law hinders the realisation of these rights in today's knowledge societies relying on new technological means of communication.

Such groups see copyright law as preventing or slowing human progress. They argue that the current copyright system needs to be brought into line with reality and the needs of society. Hipatia argues that this would "provide the ethical principles which allow the individual to spread his/her knowledge, to help him/herself, to help his/her community and the whole world, with the aim of making society ever more free, more equal, more sustainable, and with greater solidarity."

Authorship and creativity

Lawrence Liang

Lawrence Liang is an Indian Chinese legal researcher and lawyer based in the city of Bangalore, who is known for his legal campaigns on issues of public concern...

, founder of the Alternative Law Forum, argues that current copyright is based on a too narrow definition of "author", which is assumed to be clear and undisputed. Liang observes that the concept of "the author" is assumed to make universal sense across cultures and across time. Instead, Liang argues that the notion of the author as a unique and transcendent being, possessing originality of spirit, was constructed in Europe

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

after the industrial revolution

Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution was a period from the 18th to the 19th century where major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, transportation, and technology had a profound effect on the social, economic and cultural conditions of the times...

, to distinguish the personality of the author from the expanding realm of mass produced goods. Hence works created by "authors" were deemed original, and merges with the doctrine of property

Property

Property is any physical or intangible entity that is owned by a person or jointly by a group of people or a legal entity like a corporation...

prevalent at the time.

Liang argues that the concept of "author" is tied to the notion of copyright and emerged to define a new social relationship - the way society perceives the ownership of knowledge. The concept of "author" thus naturalised a particular process of knowledge production where the emphasis on individual contribution and individual ownership takes precedence over the concept of "community knowledge". Relying on the concept of the author, copyright is based on the assumption that without an intellectual property

Intellectual property

Intellectual property is a term referring to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which a set of exclusive rights are recognized—and the corresponding fields of law...

rights regime, authors would have no incentive to further create, and that artists cannot produce new works without an economic incentive. Liang challenges this logic, arguing that "many authors who have little hope of ever finding a market for their publications, and whose copyright is, as a result, virtually worthless, have in the past, and even in the present, continued to write." Liang points out that people produce works purely for personal satisfaction, or even for respect and recognition from peers. Liang argues that the 19th Century saw the prolific authorship of literary works in the absence of meaningful copyright that benefited the author. In fact, Liang argues, copyright protection usually benefited the publisher, and rarely the author.

Criticism of Anti-copyright

Sumner M. Redstone of the Progress and Freedom Foundation

Progress and Freedom Foundation

The Progress & Freedom Foundation was a U.S. market-oriented think tank based in Washington, D.C. that studies the digital revolution and its implications for public policy...

argued that Copyright drives the economy by compelling creativity, and is a fundamental right for both creators and consumers. He argued that all preposed alternatives to Copyright protection do not allow for viable business model

Business model

A business model describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value...

s, as content creators would not have incentive to produce their products if they cannot be guaranteed payment. "Propose to a dairy farmer that the milk he sells become a free commodity available to all, and he will stop cultivating cows. Why buy the cow, when consumers can get the milk for free?'"'

Richard Verrier, editor at Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles Times

The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....

who covers labor and production issues in Hollywood, wrote in a article that piracy undermined Independent Filmmakers

Independent film

An independent film, or indie film, is a professional film production resulting in a feature film that is produced mostly or completely outside of the major film studio system. In addition to being produced and distributed by independent entertainment companies, independent films are also produced...

, who unlike larger studios, can not afford revenue loss. Independent filmmaker Greg Carter described it as; "It feels like someone is walking into your house and stealing your furniture... The big studios can absorb it, but guys like me, we're not millionaires. We're fighting like crazy for every dollar, every nickel, every penny just to survive in this marketplace."

According to a study by the Institute for Policy Innovation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan

Nonpartisan

In political science, nonpartisan denotes an election, event, organization or person in which there is no formally declared association with a political party affiliation....

public policy think tank

Think tank

A think tank is an organization that conducts research and engages in advocacy in areas such as social policy, political strategy, economics, military, and technology issues. Most think tanks are non-profit organizations, which some countries such as the United States and Canada provide with tax...

, piracy of Copyright material costs the U.S. economy $5.5 billion in annual earnings among U.S. workers, as well as $837 million in lost annual tax revenue and $20.5 billion in lost annual output to all US industries. Furthermore it estimates that piracy costs the U.S 141,030 jobs, two thirds of which are outside the film industry.

External links

Abandoning Copyright: A Blessing for Artists, Art, and Society - opinion by Professor Jost Smiers
Anti-Copyright Resources
Gnomunism - utopia of Anti-copyright applied to all types of data that can be copied
The Surprising History of Copyright and The Promise of a Post-Copyright World by Karl Fogel of QuestionCopyright.org.
Unlicense.org The Unlicense is a template for disclaiming copyright interest in software.
Culture vs. Copyright - ebook by Anatoly Volynets. The book is composed of dialogues of first graders and their teacher contemplations on cultural, psychological, economical and other aspects of "Intellectual Property."

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Groups advocating abolishing of copyright

Groups advocating changes to copyright law

Groups advocating using existing copyright law

Scholars and commentators

Intellectual monopoly

...results in a weaker incentive at creativity

Non-scarcity

Web 2.0

The Darknet Theory

Freedom of knowledge

Authorship and creativity

Criticism of Anti-copyright

See also

External links