Copyright, copyleft, and culture

Nina Paley's central complaint is certainly about hypocrisy: that if one is going to advocate for free software on ideological grounds, then it's strange to claim the same freedoms are not important for all works. They're just as important for documentation, and for paintings, and for songs, as they are for software.

But regarding this part of Jake's piece:

"Whoever creates a work gets to choose the license it's available under, and no one has argued otherwise."

Actually, many people (including Nina) *do* point out that there's a problem with this reasoning, because it actually results in less choice -- or, another way to put it, in less freedom. If I "choose" to release a book under a restrictive license, then I take away everyone else's choices to share and make derivative works. Why is one choice good and the other bad? After all, if you don't want people to do things with your work, you can always not release it.

The question of whether other people should have these choices taken away from them is not a trivial one. One can't say the magic word "choice" and have everything be settled; the fact is, some choices conflict with other choices, and it's an open question which ones should win.

The argument against copyright restrictions is simply the argument that maximum freedom should win: that giving any one person a monopoly, a right to restrict others' choices about what to do with their own copies of things, is a bad bargain for everyone else.

Note you can be pro-freedom and still anti-fraud. I'm not arguing that people should have the right to strip the author's name from a particular copy, substitute their own, and distribute the result to give the fraudulent impression that they are the author [1]. That's simply plagiarism, a form of lying. It has nothing to do with copyright. Yes, taking away people's freedom to lie is still taking away a freedom, I suppose, but there are persuasive reasons (IMHO) why it's more important to prevent the harm than to allow this particular freedom.

But returning to copyright, which is about copying rather than attribution: the question for those who want to permit restrictive licensing is, what is the harm that's *so important* that we should allow one person to decide everyone else's freedom [2] to copy and modify a particular work? It's not like it's theft [3], after all. And the police structures we are setting up to enforce this lack of freedom are getting more and more disturbing [4].

So there really is an argument here. It's okay for people to make choices about their own freedom. It's not as okay when they start making choices about other people's freedoms... and that's what restrictive copyrights do to everyone.

-Karl

[1] http://questioncopyright.org/minute_memes/credit_is_due
[2] http://questioncopyright.org/minute_memes/all_creative_wo...
[3] http://questioncopyright.org/minute_memes/copying_is_not_...
[4] http://questioncopyright.org/minute_memes/copyright_and_s...

Disclaimer: Nina Paley is artist-in-residence at http://questioncopyright.org/, a non-profit I run.