Copyleft
Explained To Children
Clearing Our Minds of Misunderstandings
by Wu Ming 1, Il Mucchio selvaggio #526, 25 March 2003
"But...
if anyone may copy your books and do without buying them, how do you earn
your living?"
People ask us this question quite often, nearly always adding this remark:
"Copyright is necessary, an author's work must be protected!".
This
kind of utterances shows how much smoke and sand the ruling culture (based
on the proprietary principle) and entertainment corporations have been able
to blow in the eyes of the public. As regards authors' rights and intellectual
property, confusionist ideology still prevails in the media as well as in
our brains, although it's passing through a crisis thanks to the rebirth of
movements and the ongoing transformations. Only bloodsuckers and parasites
benefit from a view that mistakes "copyrights" for "authors'
rights" and sets the latter against "piracy". This is very
far from truth.
The books by the Wu Ming collective are published with a particular notice:
"Partial or total reproduction of this book and its diffusion in electronic
form are consented for non-commercial purposes, provided that this notice
is included". This notice is based on the concept of "copyleft",
which was invented in the 1980's by Richard Stallman and the Free Software
Movement and is being applied in other realms of communication, science information,
creative writing and arts.
"Copyleft"
is a dense and untranslatable pun denoting a philosopy and a set of peculiar
licenses. The first one was the GPL [GNU Public License], which was devised
to protect free software and prevent third parties (an example at random:
Microsoft) from appropriating and privatizing the work of self-managed communities
of users and programmers. For those who don't know it, free software has an
open source-code that can be checked, modified and improved by a user, either
individually or in collaboration with others.
Had it remained simply in the public domain, sooner or later free software
would have fallen into the clutches of corporate predators. The solution was
to turn copyright rightside left: what had been an obstacle to free
reproduction became the prime guarantee of it. In plain words: I put a copyright
on my work, therefore I am the owner, and I avail myself of this and permit
people to use my work any way they want: they can copy it, change it and spread
it. The only thing they cannot do is forbidding someone else to do the same,
i.e. no-one may appropriate the work and limit its circulation, no-one may
put a copyright on it because there is already one, it belongs to me and I'm
gonna kick the shit out of you.
Any ordinary person who either has no money to purchase a Wu Ming's book or
doesn't want to buy it blindfolded may photocopy it, OCR-scan it, or (a rather
convenient way) download it free of any charge from our website www.wumingfoundation.com.
Since this reproduction is not for profit, it's perfectly OK with us. However,
if a foreign publisher wants to translate the book and put it on sale in their
country, or a producer wants to make a movie out of it, that's a reproduction
for the sake of gain, which means these people have to contact us and pay,
for it is right that we too make a profit. After all, it was us who
wrote the book.
Now
let's go back to the question: are we not losing money?
No, we are not. Ever more examples are disproving the equation between "piracy"
and the decrease in sales. Otherwise the Italian edition of our novel Q, which
can be downloaded free of charge since 2000, wouldn't have had twelve reprints
and, what's more, wouldn't have sold over 200,000 copies.
In actual fact, the more a book circulates, the more it sells. Important experiences
take place even in a country that's obsessed with intellectual property:
the US of A. My comrade Wu Ming 2 effectively described them in an
article you can read here.
It
is sufficient to explain what's happening with our books: someone logs on
our website and downloads a novel, e.g. 54. If they do it from an office,
or from a college, they may even print it for free. If they read it and enjoy
it, they may as well want to present friends with it. Nobody would present
a friend with a pile of A4 sheets, most likely they'll go to a bookstore and
purchase a copy, which draws a new equation: one "pirated" copy
= one purchased copy. Some people e-mailed us and wrote that they bought six
or seven copies for presents. One "pirated" copy = several purchased
copies. Even those who don't have money for presents happen to mention and
praise the book during conversations, sooner or later someone else will take
the advice and buy it, or download it. As regards the people who don't like
the book, at least they didn't spend a cent.
This way, as happens with free software and Open Source, we manage to reconcile
the need to reward authors (or, more generally speaking, brainworkers) for
their work with the guarantee of its free reproduction and social use.
The majority of publishers have not yet become aware of this situation and
are still very conservative as far as copyright is concerned. the reasons
of such a short-sightedness are more ideological than economical. We believe
publishers are about to open their eyes. Unlike the record industry, the book
industry is not facing extinction, for it operates in an entirely different
context. Publishers have not yet gone completely insane, they are not pig-headedly
opposing the big revolution which is "democratizing" the access
to the technologies of reproduction. Until a few years ago only recording
studios owned masterizers and CD-burners; nowadays we all have them in our
homes. And what about P2P file sharing? In the face of this irreversible change,
all the present legislation on intellectual property is already obsolescent,
it's in decay.
When copyright was invented, about three centuries ago, there was no possibility
of a "private copy" or a "reproduction for non-commercial purposes":
only a competing publisher could use a printing press. Copyright was not perceived
as anti-social, it was a publisher's weapon against competitors, not against
the public. Nowadays the situation has drastically changed, the public has
access to machines (computers, photocopiers etc.) and copyright turned to
a weapon shooting in the crowd.
There are many more things to say, and we ought to go back to basics: all
knowledge is generated socially. All ideas are either directly or indirectly
shaped by the social relations we maintain, by the communities we're part
of. If the genesis of knowledge is social, than its use is to remain social.
This is a long story though. I hope I explained myself. For further info:
giap@wumingfoundation.com
For further details:
