I’m republishing this very important and crucial argument by St. Peter, who has one of the landmark blogs about the public domain. We recommend reading his explanation on the linkage between copyright and the public domain, which is also a how-to guide on how to place your creative work directly into the public domain.
Please also do note how we have been re-working our specialized pages on peer property formats.
“Text: copyright is not a right!.
There is no right to forcibly prevent others from making copies of texts, maps, music, photographs, movies, or any other creative product. There is a government-granted privilege to do so (enforced by the government’s police power, which ultimately means the power of a gun), but there is no natural, human right to do so.
It is important to be careful about the language we use. If we accept the terminology that copyright is a right, then most people are going to associate it with the Bill of Rights, with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, with the rights of man, with human rights, and with all manner of wonderful, positive, humanistic ideas about individual dignity and respectful interaction in a modern, civilized society.
But copyright is about none of those things. Instead, it is at root a government-granted and government-enforced monopoly that was originally created to protect the market access of printers’ guilds and publishing companies, and that has been continually extended to cover music, motion pictures, still photography, and just about everything else under the sun. It is an unnatural privilege that has been wrested from the powers that be. It is not now and never has been a natural, human right.
We are up against a deep-seated, long-lived, deliberate twisting of moral and legal concepts — a misuse and misdirection of our innate respect for individual rights, human dignity, and personal creativity — a package deal of epic proportions claiming that a coercive monopoly and artificial privilege is a natural, human right. To grace this phenomenon with the noble word “right†was a stroke of genius by those who foisted it upon us in the first place. But I think that those of us who are concerned about perpetual copyright weaken our cause by continuing to grant that copyright is a right at all.
Once we recognize that copyright is in fact a government-granted privilege restricting market access to a single publisher (typically not the creator but instead an agent of the creator who brings a creative product to market), we can have a civil discussion about whether it is good public policy to grant such privileges, and for how long. But as long as that privilege is wrapped in the timeless, universalistic, moral language of rights rather than the temporal, consensus-driven, political language of privileges, we will never make progress in reforming the laws that govern publication of creative products.”
What about the “rights” of a single, new musical artist (i.e., lyricist or musician) or a writer who is just getting started? Creative output is not so easy come by that if someone “steals” a hit song or short story, that they author won’t suffer. Copyright isn’t just for publishers. Not all artists are represented.
In fact, my own research on the history of music (which spans decades) suggests that copyright initially started because of all the artists that got screwed in the 50s and 60s. However, in those days, the labels were sometimes run by artists, so as label owners and publishers, they were hoping to protect themselves. But copyright does also protect the individual, or is supposed to – which especially now on the Internet is important, with all the bloggers, etc., trying to make a living online.
Not that copyright is going to succeed on the Internet [I think cyberpunk author Bruce Gibson said that in a novel], but that doesn’t mean it isn’t intended to protect individuals.
The Greek word for “art creation” is “δημιουÏγία” (dimiourgia) that means “a piece of art (ÎÏγο=ergo) that belongs to the public/commons (δήμος=demos)”. By stating that, I would like to emphasize the public essence of art. Greek language stresses that the art process is an exchange amongst artists and the commons.
In my opinion art is not for money, and when it becomes for it, art is not real. Copyright transform artistic endeavors into products, into commodities. Artists of new age will make a living through their concerts or exhibitions (who said that it is normal artists to earn so much money?) or they will create art just because they want to express themselves and then share their creations with the commons.
PS: Being myself an artist I have deeply realised the truth of my fore mentioned allegations: once somebody asked me to write some songs for making money from them, and when I entered the process of creating I reached a point where I started hating my art.