On Intellectual Slavery
Copyright was traditionally invented by booksellers to, supposedly, encourage creativity and innovation (even though historical facts show that it didn’t). Sadly, today’s copyright system benefits only distributors and middlemen, and no one else. Creators and admirers of art and intellect do not benefit from the current situation. In fact, neither do the people performing creative management or marketing, nor do the producers and investors. The only beneficiaries are the conglomerates of the music and film industry who are neither financing nor creating nor consuming the art, but are enslaving it through the “intellectual property” laws they have lobbied hard to establish: The distributors and middlemen.
In case this isn’t crystal clear, less than 7% of the revenues of a song listened on Spotify go to the artist creating it; the rest goes to the label (which does pretty much nothing other than employ lawyers and lobbyists to maintain a cartel). Musicians cannot reproduce and remix others’ songs unless they sign with one of the conglomerates; otherwise, they risk being sued by the conglomerate for infringement, even though the artist who originally produced the song being remixed would be more than happy to see it remixed, as it would increase her outreach and profits. In fact, even the conglomerate would benefit from the exposure that the remix would bring, but they are counting on the ensuing legal battle to create a chilling effect so that they keep artists locked-in, ensuring that all artists sign with them to avoid being the target of lawsuits they cannot handle. Scientific authors write books that publishers demand exclusive copyrights for; when the authors freely publish the material on their website, the publisher often sues the author to bring it down. And scientific paper publishers such as Elsevier do not do any work whatsoever, do not add any value, exploiting government-funded scientists to write their papers and typeset them voluntarily, other government-funded scientists to voluntarily do the peer review and editorial, and reap the benefits by placing papers behind paywalls, maintaining the ability to sue authors in case they wish to publish their papers on their personal website. After all of this, they have they audacity to lecture us about the ethics of copyright and to call their journals “open access,” when they’re nothing but.
More knowledgeable researchers than me have written about the problems of the current copyright system. For more details about the problems of the current copyright system, refer to Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, which explores them more extensively and with substantial history and sources. Clearly, the current copyright system doesn’t serve its purpose, but serves very few non-producer and non-consumer middlemen (labels and publishers) who happened to successfully erect useless businesses upon lobbying and legalese. The copyright lobby and RIAA not only have managed to create an absurd series of copyright laws, but it has managed to convince consumers and producers alike that somehow copyright is good and piracy is bad. This could not be further from the truth. Piracy doesn’t hurt producers in the same way that having their songs broadcast on the radio doesn’t hurt producers (yes, recording radio into your personal cassette is seriously something that the lobby claimed will kill music in the 80s). Piracy allows people to disseminate creative content, which builds the popularity of an artist. Furthermore, it does not deprive the distributor of potential profits, because we have extensive statistics which illustrate that people who pirate typically would not purchase the pirated goods if they didn’t have the ability to pirate; but are more likely to purchase once they pirate. But even if it did, the main reason for depriving creators of profits are the middlemen taking unimaginable cuts, not the pirates. The story that piracy is stealing is a huge mythical construction (yes, I would download a car, if I could). In fact, musicians don’t even make a significant proportion of their profits from the distribution of their content anymore, but make much more from concerts, so increasing their popularity by piracy would unquestionably help them.
In this post, I want to introduce the new term intellectual slavery and make a case for copyright reform.
The way creators’ creations are treated today is not substantially different from slavery. Creative works are forced to be sold out by the creators to the distributors through the distributors’ monopoly. A creator cannot survive unless they sign with a distributor, because, otherwise, the distributor would not give them access to rights which would normally be unalienable; for instance, the ability to remix songs of others. Furthermore, a creator would not be listened to unless they sign with a distributor, because of the chilling effect the copyright lobby has imposed on any broadcaster: The fear that broadcasting any content which is beyond the control of conglomerates would potentially amount to an extremely expensive copyright infringement (copyright holders have gone to such extends with this that they will even send a takedown notice to the people they themselves have stolen from). Creators therefore sell the exclusive rights to their creations, forfeiting their copyrights, and giving them out by a contract. The mere ability to do this is irrational. The intellectual rights to a creation inherently belong to the creator, in the same manner that a person’s body belongs to them and it cannot be sold out by a contract (for work, sex, or murder). Fortunately, today even if a corporation wished to enslave me by buying my labour in perpetuity, they are unable to do that due to protective laws. We should apply the same protective laws to intellectual content, which, by the way, is not property.
The reform should disallow anyone from forfeiting their natural rights to their creation, such as the ability to distribute it, share it, have it remixed, have their name associated with it, copy it, or commercialise it. Such rights must remain with the creator of the work. The creators must be protected from giving away the freedom of their intellectual creations and enslaving them, and, so, contracts which purchase intellectual property must be rendered illegal. If a creator wishes to enter into a commercial relationship with a distributor, this relationship can include a term that the distributor can make use of the content, but cannot disavow the creator’s rights. Any such commercial relationship must therefore be only inclusive and never exclusive. In particular, if a distributor wishes to be able to take commercial advantage of the content created by a creator, the creator must still retain the rights to take commercial advantage of her work. Furthermore, like any work relationship, the creator entering into such an agreement must be able to withdraw from the agreement at any time, with the exception of a reasonable period of prior notice (of, say, two months, rather than today’s several dozen decades). This is similar to employment contracts which are always at-will by the side of the employee; otherwise they would amount to slavery and would be illegal.
This reform will empower creators to renegotiate their terms when their content becomes popular, or threaten pulling out of a deal, giving them significant leverage to increase their profits. It would allow creators to publish their own works as they see fit on their personal website without being threatened with being sued, and would necessarily limit the audacious amount publisher charge government-funded libraries to remove paywalls, as most scientific works would be available online for free. It would encourage creativity and innovation, as content creators would be free to remix others’ artworks, given that no distributor would hold exclusive copyrights to anything. It would still enable open licensed content such as Creative Commons, but a lot of it would not be required any more. It would render piracy legal, as it should be, allowing people to share content and increasing the reach of creators. Such a reform would create a new era for creators in which creativity will flourish, chilling effects of the copyright mafia would be eliminated, and grotesque situations in which authors are sued for distributing their own content would be eliminated.
Finally, if you’re having second thoughts about this reform when it pertains to the ability of corporations to exploit intellectual content and make money, remember that human slavery, too, deprived the ability of sugarcane plantation fields to produce profits for their masters, but abolition was still the ethical thing to do. If you think disallowing people from selling their intellectual creations is unfair to them and is infringing with their voluntary ability to transact in a free market, remember that the fact that I cannot enter into a contract which enslaves me in return for a significant sum of money is still infringing on my ability to voluntarily transact, but is a desirable limitation. Last, you may think that creators will not be able to survive in a system with such a copyright reform. Anti-abolitionists also thought that slaves would not be able to make a living unless supported by their masters.
Addendum. A couple of points were brought to my attention by my friends who read early drafts of this piece.
- That this reform may make copyright law more complex than it is; and it may lead to long-running legal disputes in which creators will make claims that they normally couldn’t. I agree with that; many simplistic approaches to life are also unfair.
- That the pain caused by real slavery is incomparable to what intellectual slavery amounts to. Of course that’s true and there’s no question about that. The analogy is made because there’s an inherent and primitive right here; we must demand that the freedom creators have over their intellectual content remains as unalienable as the freedom that humans have over their work hours and own bodies.
- That intellectual property is much more than music and movies. As a professional scientist and software engineer, my own work doesn’t fall in those categories. This reform will be useful for these cases also. A company which creates software will receive an inclusive license from their programmers to use their code. If a multitude of programmers have contributed to a particular piece, they would, collectively as a group, retain the inclusive rights to their software. In typical situations, they would not be able to use this right unless they all collaborate. This is not different in practice from the situation we have today. However, if two programmers write a software library for a company and they decide to take it out and use it themselves, potentially commercially, this should be allowed; any contract disallowing that must be rendered illegal.
- That the duplication of intellectual content sometimes does harm the creator. However, I insist that it should not be called property and that this does not amount to theft. The word theft implies that the situation is a zero-sum game. If the creator decides to keep their work secret, that’s within their rights — for example the source code of a software program can remain that way, and if revealed through an act of breaking into someone’s home and making a copy of it, this can be prosecuted. However, the mere fact that there’s complex economics at play here doesn’t allow us to call it theft. Let the following guide enlighten you:
