“I argue in my article, copyright is essentially a means of allowing people to take what they’ve borrowed from elsewhere (like Paul Simon did in ‘Graceland’) and stamp the label ‘Theirs’ on it. Virtually nothing is completely original, but copyright acts as though the whole work was. It allows people to steal from the ideas, culture, language that we have all created in common and to label it their own.”

* Article: Copyright, Ethics and Theft. Stephen Downes.

We excerpted the 10 most salient arguments here, but Stephen Downes key position on ‘coyright as theft’ is summarized here:

“To me, this is theft. It comes in many guises, many forms. But it has in every incarnation the same appearance, the removal of something from the common domain and the making of that idea or concept the property of some person or corporation with the resources to defend it. It has become nearly impossible to simply share an idea on the open internet without it being stolen in this way. And (to judge from the list of patents) it seems that anything new that appears on the net is instantly seized upon by a horde of vultures determined to profit from someone else’s work. How did it come to this?

Now I can hear your response already. I could have protected my work, you say, had I merely copyrighted it, or as applicable, registered a trademark or filed a patent. Well, yes, I could, which is why today the Creative Commons logo is attached to all of my work. But this is only a reluctant admission that the system is deeply broken. And worse, it legitimizes all those copyrights and trademarks and patents. It allows these vultures to say that they have legitimately acquired that which they have stolen.

Copyright, from my perspective, is a haven for thieves. It is a license to claim ownership over anything you might happen to find on the internet (and elsewhere) that isn’t clearly nailed down. Worse, it is providing a means for those who enter this free and open space called the internet to put up fences and say “this is mine,” to appropriate a network designed for open exchange and to convert it to a private publication and distribution system.”