In RANTIFESTO Nina Paley is astute in noticing inconsistency and a lack of coherent principle in the foundations of the free software and free culture movements. I’ve tidied up my comment to her article as follows.

Nina, the ‘four freedoms’ are not fundamental principles: see Flawed Freedoms

I’ve also explained why (in the absence of privilege) there is no need for an unethical grant of power to coerce distributors of binaries to surrender source code (an offer of an equitable amount of money is ample incentive): Copyleft Without Coercion

As for Creative Commons see: Creative Commons Cultivates Copyright

A principled movement is one based on natural rights – these are the fundamental principles of harmonious human life on this planet per natural law.

I suggest this principled movement would be better named the cultural liberty movement, i.e. freedom ethically constrained by everyone’s natural rights. Better than a movement that pursues freedom unconstrained, whether just for software, or all culture in general.

Richard Stallman’s insistence upon ‘no derivatives’ for literary work can be seen to arise from his arbitrary categorisation of intellectual work (further departing from anything resembling fundamental principle): STALLMAN’S CATEGORIES OF COPYRIGHTED WORKS

It was thus a mistake for the Definition of Free Cultural Works to assume ‘four freedoms’ were fundamental principles that could be extended for all culture generally, especially as this conflicts with RMS’s idea that certain categories of intellectual work don’t warrant as much freedom as others.

It is from the category in which ‘opinion’ falls, that RMS mistakes a need for ‘no derivatives’ as a justified means of preventing misrepresentation (a falsehood). This still doesn’t justify bankruptcy and imprisonment for those who distribute unauthorised derivatives – even those that misrepresent the original author.

The natural right here is to truth (against deceit, or ‘against impairment of its apprehension by others’ as I sometimes put it), and this is the same right that applies in the case of accuracy in attribution vs plagiarism.

Principles do not and cannot arise from freedom, they arise from the vital powers of human beings, human bodies, human minds – to life, privacy, truth, liberty. It is these powers that being equalised into rights delimit freedom.

Artists, authors, software engineers, have the liberty (vital power) to create derivatives of published works that they have in their possession, by nature. It takes an edict by a wicked queen to legislatively abrogate this liberty simply to enrich a consequently beholden press – with a pretext of encouraging her subjects’ learning.

Truth on the other hand is vigorously protected by the people. To deceive others against their will is not a vital power of human beings, except in defence of natural rights, e.g. “There are no Jews in this house”, “I did not have sex with that woman”, etc.

The only power people need is that provided to them by nature. We create law to recognise this power as a right to be protected for all, equally. We create and empower governments to protect this law. We do not empower governments to annul rights in the majority to leave them, by exclusion, in the hands of a few, e.g. copyright (annulling the right to copy). We’ve never had the natural power to prevent others copying the works in their possession, whether we’ve authored them or not, and law that grants people such power is unethical.

In terms of a cultural liberty movement, I’ve started the ball rolling. See CulturalLiberty.org

We already have our natural liberty. What we don’t have is law that properly recognises it – law uncorrupted by the anachronistic privileges of copyright and patent.

The 1709 blog and IPKat copyright debate has concluded. Summaries by James Firth and Emma Beverland & Sam Bardon are pretty fair.

However, I am amused by Copyhype’s Terry Hart who concludes “It appears that Team Copyright won”

Here follows my response to Terry:

He he! =))

Remind me what the contest was again?

It was a debate. At the conclusion many fence-sitters had been swayed toward ‘praising’ copyright.

Frankly, I’m not surprised. Copyright abolition is pretty scary [to those reliant upon it], and publishing corporations’ offers of help and support to poor struggling artists sure sound nice.

What equivalent proportion of the 18 million french pirates do you think were represented in the audience at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer (2nd largest law firm in the world)?

Those interested in copyright tend to be about 100:1 for it vs against it in my experience.

It’s not the ‘abstainers->praisers’ that copyright supporters should congratulate themselves for (they’re easy), but ‘buriers->praisers’ and preventing any ‘abstainers->buriers’. Note that the audience was not asked a show of hands of those who had swung from ‘abstention/praise->bury’.

That more people learn to support copyright every day can mask the increasing numbers of former supporters who become disillusioned.

So, Terry, do you want to hype and praise copyright, or do you want to understand its injustice and the reasons for its inexorable demise?

In Brito: What’s Wrong With a Copyright Alert System? Stephan Kinsella wonders why so many critics of copyright can’t make the paradigm shift and realise that it is copyright that is the problem, not a mere few aspects of its legal implementation.

Even Stephan seems happy to accept a ‘scaled back’ implementation rather than insist on abolition, by which I suspect he’s still fixated on term reduction – “And this means copyright, which is the engine behind all these things, is wrong, and must fall, or at least be radically scaled back, not strengthened.”

Copyright annuls the people’s right to copy, to leave it, by exclusion, in the hands of a few. See T.Paine

The only way one could ‘fix’ copyright and still keep it (until such time as its brainwashed supporters die out) is to exempt individuals, i.e. copyright is reformed into a monopoly that constrains only unnatural persons – corporations.

A corporation is an artificial entity in the first place, having no natural rights, so subjecting such a legal artifice to the legal artifice of a monopoly offends only economists, not ethicists.

I think Stephan would find this a far better ‘solution’ than the half-baked “Let them share Elvis” idea of a shorter copyright term, which would simply result in far more draconian enforcement, more kids in prison, more families bankrupted, and everyone who suggested a shorter term being ‘the answer’ being treated like a pariah.

Remember, there are no corporations languishing in prison for copyright infringement. That’s not because they are upstanding citizens (able to resist the instinct to enjoy their natural liberty to share and build upon their own culture), but because they have no bodies.

For 500,000 years, we have shared and built upon our culture. Folk tales, folk song, folk lore, science, technology and the arts; these were all arrived at via free exchange of ideas, freely copying and improving upon each other’s…

Until, in 1709, Queen Anne re-instituted the monopolies the Stationers’ Company had become dependent on, but instead of making it a temporary, royal grant, she made it law, the law we now call copyright, and by so doing, she annulled mankind’s natural right to copy.

Our right to copy may no longer be recognised by law (save in vestigial form as ‘fair use’), but being innate, it remains within us. By nature, we all have the right and power to share and build upon our culture. It is our imperative to do so.

• Our survival, mankind’s survival, our DNA’s survival depends upon the freedom to copy each other.

Don’t just take my word for it. John Baker has found other voices:

We are all gradually realising that we’ve been indoctrinated with a lie.

Copyright is not an artist’s right, it’s an unethical privilege granted for the benefit of the state (enjoying an enriched, and consequently beholden press).

The artist’s right is to copy.

The scientist’s right is to copy, to learn (from OE leornian, to tread in another’s footsteps, to copy another’s path), to improve mankind’s knowledge, and to share it, freely.

Your right is to copy.

Everyone’s right is to copy.

Sing each other song’s. Tell each other’s stories. Learn each other’s lore. Copy each other’s words. Share them. Build upon them. Don’t let the publishing corporations’ copyright lawyers make you feel ashamed for this ‘sin’, make you attempt to hide your sources. If you are flagrant in naming those you have copied, those who copy you will be flagrant in naming you.

It’s time to bring Queen Anne’s three hundred year old legacy of cultural repression to an end.