Copyright abolition (was Re: [fc-uk-discuss] DT Articles on recording copyright extension)

[Rob Myers]

On 1 Apr 2006, at 07:27, MJ Ray wrote:

> Aren't moral rights and copyright pretty much distinct?

Certainly all the American writing I've read regard moral rights as a  
European thing. But both are combined in the Berne Convention. Which  
possibly makes that an earlier "Intellectual Property"-style  
deliberate confusion of principles.

We then get on to where rights come from, and the black hole of  
theory opens up beneath us. I do not, personally, regard authors'  
moral rights as natural rights (there are no printing presses in  
nature), but Stallman regards his software freedoms as natural  
rights. So I have more reading to do. :-)

One thing about Crosbie's Freedoms are that this is the kind of Mill/ 
Berlin-style recognition that there has to be a balance of freedoms  
where they interact in real life. Or, to use the Wendell Holmes quote  
that always comes up on Slashdot, “The right to swing my fist ends  
where the other man’s nose begins.”

> Crosbie Fitch point b from a few emails back needs slight
> modification: no author has a right to payment for *past*
> work. If you do the work without a clear idea of how you'll make
> money from it (being paid for the work, or as an advertisment of
> what you can do so that you get paid for future work, or even as
> donationware or ransomware), that's your business problem. Don't
> expect the state to support intellectual capitalism forever. It's
> already holding our cultural development back.

Absolutely.

> I think reciprocality (such as attribute works if you want to
> be attributed) is a moral topic and not necessarily non-free.
> Many religions include the "Golden Rule" in their ethical
> instructions.

Neither Stallman nor Debian 's definitions of freedom preclude  
attribution (or having to make sure that derivatives are distinct,  
which might be a good way of maintaining some of Crosbie's Truth).  
GPL3 even has an optional CC-BY-style right to have your name removed  
from derivatives (this falls under the moral right of paternity).

Freedom is not simply lack of constraint, and it takes some effort to  
maintain it. If, in culture, that effort is modifying a title here or  
there that may not be so bad. But then again the BSD advertising  
clause didn't seem so bad at first.

> By the way, Creative Commons might be free culture's most
> important tool (or it would be if more of their licences were
> free culture ones), but it's also both free culture's biggest
> opportunity and biggest threat.

Yes. CC are too concerned with proving that you can make money using  
their licenses for my money. :-) But BY-SA is the best cultural  
copyleft licence, and the people I've spoken to IRL from CC are well  
aware of the responsibility they carry.

> I don't put much faith in
> RMS's opinion of it because the Free *Software* Foundation's
> non-free-software "Free Documentation License" is far worse
> than anything CC have made: it's an adware-book licence! Even
> if the original author doesn't activate the adware clauses,
> any later modifier can. http://mjr.towers.org.uk/blog/2006/fdl

I agree about the GNU FDL. It is designed as a tool to advance the  
cause of software freedom, not textual freedom. When I failed^D^D  
tried to get people concerned about CC's FDL backdoor last year  
Stallman mentioned that he was working on something to make the  
adware clause less "controversial", so I think that the next revision  
of the FDL (or its rumoured complement/succcessor licence) will be  
something that it will be very worthwhile for fc-uk to try to get  
input into.

- Rob.