Left copyleft Some thoughts on copyright In Digital Imperialism I discussed the case of Redis and why the traditional notion of copyleft is insufficient and possibly even counterproductive. In this text I'd like to further describe my thoughts regarding the state of copyright. This is intended to be an addendum to Digital Imperialism, so it is suggested that you read that before you read this. Bear in mind this is not as analytical of a work as the main essay; though I've generally tried to be accurate here this is but a stream of words coming from my brain, so this may be closer to three mini-essays than a single addendum. Production and reproduction Private property as we all may know is the root of all evil. The capitalist owns their private property and makes people work the machines on it to plunder what is beneath it and compensates them with a slither of their labour's value. Maybe they shoot their gun at anyone who dares walk through it. This is generic socialist theory. Copyright is an extension of private property. This is why it is sometimes called intellectual property. If you are to make a work and publish it but withhold the rights to make use of it from others, you own private property. Of course, this is not equivalent to owning a house for living or a factory for manufacturing or a forest for logging, but it is private property regardless. You have the monopolistic control over the use of your creation. Copyright is something we encounter every day. Most of us generally have a good understanding of the concept: it is your exclusive right to copy and distribute something that you have the rights over, usually because you have produced the work or bought the rights to it. Copyleft, and more broadly free licences, are an attempt to circumvent the problems of copyright and the public domain, by requiring that all changes be shared back to the public. I go into more detail about the problems with such free licences in the main essay, but if you haven't read it, just know that companies love unpaid volunteer labour. To make a living off your own work makes you a member of the petty bourgeoisie; you own your means of production but generally you labour them yourself. Online storefronts like Steam or Patreon or whatever extract a cut of your earnings, but this is no obligation to them. But what does it make of you when you forfeit these rights? Giving permission is not a very unusual thing to do for many online creators. Usually these fall under the terms of giving credit and limiting commercial use. This certainly helps, but it is not sufficient, as it is equivalent to granting the right to roam on your plot of land, but not making use of any machinery located within it. It is hard to draw with which class of production these people fall under. It cannot be said that they are the bourgeoisie for they do not own means of production, but neither can they be labelled under the proletariat, since they are not under the relationship of wage labour. Whether they fall under the proletariat or the labour aristocracy or the petty bourgeoisie is no matter. Ultimately, anyone working to the interests of the proletariat class even to the expense of their own is certainly a friend we must consider, and anyone working against it is an enemy we must fight. You would download a car It is a futile effort to fight piracy. Every piracy protection has been circumvented or will be in time. Every game has been cracked, every album has been torrented, and every Patreon has been leaked. Piracy law is de facto completely unenforced against individuals. This is a fact to consider regardless of where you stand on piracy and copyright. As of writing Deltarune costs £20.99 on Steam. If you can not spend that amount of money, I would argue that it is perfectly fine for you to acquire Deltarune through other means. When your budget allows for it you can buy it. Toby Fox would have not seen a single penny from you whether or not you pirated it before you could buy it, so it is at no cost to him. Treating people who do such things as criminals or thieves only serves to drive them away. They were never going to pay anyways; why should you criminalise their conditions? This will only make them less receptive to your work, make it less likely they will share it to others, and will certainly make them very reluctant to pay for any of your future works if their conditions improve. The solution, then, is not to make it harder to pirate or send takedown requests, but to live and let live. In the wise words of Bandcamp: If [a pirate] hit[s] one of those hurdles, it's not like they'd slap their forehead and open their wallet. Instead, they'd just move on to some other site where those restrictions aren't in place, and you'll have squandered the chance to make your own site the premier destination for those seemingly cheap, but enthusiastic, word-spreading, and potentially later money-spending fans. I do not believe that there is such a thing as "piracy". The notion that one pirate maps to one lost sale is a line of thought formulated in executive offices and board rooms and conferences and is completely ungrounded in the reality of material conditions. Most "pirates", really, do not have the money or investment to buy a game. Derivative works, too, are important. They are the lifeline of internet culture. Without it, Minecraft would never be more than a tech demo, Sonic would still be the punching bag of the gaming world, and nobody would have heard of Touhou. And yet CurseForge has 300,000 mods as of writing, Sonic fan works are inseparable from the fandom's culture, and we've all seen Bad Apple!! played on everything and fumos in all sorts of precarious situations. Another standard In an idealistic world, copyright would be abolished and everything would be in the public domain. Unfortunately, we do not live in that world, so we as creators must weaponise copyright against the system that has created it until then. With the consideration of the above points, I suggest a rejection of the notion of copyleft as discussed in Digital Imperialism. It is not any more effective as a solution to copyright as the public domain is, as both leave yourself open to voluntary exploitation. I do not know any other person who has made a criticism of the state of things like the Creative Commons or the GPL or has denounced them in their entirety, though I'm sure I am not the first to do so. Ethical source too is a proposed solution. I do respect their work with their opposite to climate change, war, etc. Still these too surround themselves on grounds of ethics - it's in the name after all. And ethics and morals are a tricky thing to base a framework of progressivism on, because we all have different senses of morality. The Hippocratic License, perhaps the most famous of all ethical source licences, lets you customise your own licence, which already is a bit silly. But if you look at how you can customise it, it appears to be quite Eurocentric and even reactionary. There is the option to add provisions restricting its use by the Taliban and the autonomous government in Xinjiang, but you have no such option to restrict usage for the Israeli government or the US Army. To this end I think the copyleft zealots who cry about arbitrary restrictions are correct in their evaluation of these so-called "ethical licences". They themselves, however, fall under the same trap; believing that everyone, regardless of condition or status, deserves the same universal rights is a naive approach to how the world works. Perhaps under a socialist society, but certainly not under the capitalist one we live under now. Thus I propose a new set of conditions for what makes a work open or closed. A materialist licence, if you will, because it is based exclusively on materialist analysis of how the world works as opposed to any moralist or ethical conceptions of freedoms or what is right. To truly make your work materialist, it should: 1. Allow the freedom to use, modify, copy, and distribute the work, even for commercial purposes, for all individuals, non-profits, co-operatives, etc. without demand for royalty. 2. Allow the freedom to create any kind of derivative work, insofar it is under terms like libel, hate, etc. 3. Prohibit such uses unconditionally, for any purpose, to a for-profit corporation, a military, police, or intelligence agency, or to make use of exploitation like the tracking and selling of personal info or passing it through an AI. 4. Grant such uses irrevocably and perpetually, they cannot be taken away at a later date. 5. Grant such uses virally, anyone making a derivative work should not impose further restrictions such that others cannot exercise these uses. I would not consider attribution to be a critical part of these however it's still a generally nice thing to do, and a licence would not become any less materialist for enforcing it. The daysant licence which I have written is fully compliant with these and can be taken as a "reference implementation" of this. When you publish something, consider licensing it under this licence to pass on the creativity that drives the world.