While property itself is created by law, material assets are scarce and rivalrous by nature. However, because copyable information is made scarce only by law, it can also be made abundant by law. The practice of using copyright law itself as a form of dissent against copyright, called copyleft, grew to prominence in software development and in the rise of the free software community.
Free software guru Richard Stallman, the inventor of the General Public License (GPL), the first copyleft license under which a lot of free software is released, claims that in the age of the digital copy the role of copyright has been completely reversed. While it began as a legal measure to allow authors to restrict publishers for the sake of the general public, copyright has become a publishers" weapon to maintain their monopoly by imposing restrictions on a general public that now has the means to produce their own copies. The aim of copyleft more generally, and of specific licenses like the GPL, is to reverse this reversal. Copyleft uses copyright law, but flips it over to serve the opposite of its usual purpose. Instead of fostering privatization, it becomes a guarantee that everyone has the freedom to use, copy, distribute and modify software or any other work. Its only "restriction" is precisely the one that guarantees freedom – users are not permitted to restrict anyone else"s freedom since all copies and derivations must be redistributed under the same license. Copyleft claims ownership legally only to relinquish it practically by allowing everyone to use the work as they choose as long the copyleft is passed down. The merely formal claim of ownership means that no one else may put a copyright over a copylefted work and try to limit its use.
Copyleft licenses guarantee intellectual property freedom by requiring that reuse and redistribution of information be governed by "the four freedoms." These are the freedoms to use, study, modify and redistribute. Seen in its historical context, copyleft lies somewhere between copyright and anticopyright. The gesture by writers of anticopyrighting their works was made in a spirit of generosity, affirming that knowledge can flourish only when it has no owners. As a declaration of "no rights reserved," anticopyright was a perfect slogan launched in an imperfect world. The assumption was that others would be using the information in the same spirit of generosity. But corporations learned to exploit the lack of copyright and redistribute works for a profit. Stallman came up with the idea of copyleft in 1984 after a company that made improvements to software he had placed in the public domain (the technical equivalent of anticopyright, but without the overt gesture of critique) privatized the source code and refused to share the new version. So in a sense, copyleft represents a coming-of-age, a painful lesson that relinquishing all rights can lead to abuse by profiteers. Copyleft attempts to create a commons based on reciprocal rights and responsibilities; those who want to share the common resources have certain ethical obligations to respect the rights of other users. Everyone can add to the commons, but no one may subtract from it.
But in another sense copyleft represents a step back from anticopyright and is plagued by a number of contradictions. Stallman"s position is in agreement with a widespread consensus that copyright has been perverted into a tool that benefits corporations rather than the authors for whom it was originally intended. But no such golden age of copyright exists. Copyright has always been a legal tool that coupled texts to the names of authors in order to transform ideas into commodities and turn a profit for the owners of capital. Stallman"s idealized view of the origins of copyright does not recognize the exploitation of authors by the early copyright system. This specific myopia about copyright is part of a more general non-engagement with economic questions. The "left" in copyleft resembles a vague sort of libertarianism whose main enemies are closed, nontransparent systems and totalitarian restrictions on access to information rather than economic privilege or the exploitation of labour. Copyleft emerged out of a hacker ethic that comes closest to the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge"s sake. Its main objective is defending freedom of information against restrictions imposed by "the system," which explains why there"s such a wide range of political opinions among hackers. It also explains why the commonality that links hackers together - the "left" in Stallman"s vision of copyleft - is not the left as it is understood by most political activists.
The GPL and copyleft is frequently invoked as an example of the free software movement"s anticommercial bias. But there is no such bias. The four freedoms required by the GPL “the freedom to run, study, distribute and improve the source code so long as the same freedom is passed down“ means that any additional restriction, like a non-commercial clause, would be non-free. Keeping software "free" does not prevent developers from selling copies they"ve modified with their own labour, and it also does not prevent redistribution for a fee by a commercial company, as long as the same license is passed down and the source code remains transparent. This version of freedom does not abolish exchange, as some free software enthusiasts have claimed, nor is it even incompatible with a capitalist economy based on the theft of surplus value. The contradiction inherent in this commons is partly due to the understanding of proprietary as synonymous with closed-sourced or non-transparent. Proprietary means having an owner who prohibits access to information and keeps the source code secret; it does not necessarily mean having an owner who extracts a profit, although keeping the source code secret and extracting a profit often coincide in practice. As long as the four conditions are met, commercial redistribution of free software is non-proprietary.
Software is capital, it is a producer's good. As such, it doesn't not need to capture profit directly in order to be an input into a productive process that ultimately captures profit. Software is used in production. Virtually every office, every academy and every factory relies on software in their day-to-day work. For all these organizations, the use-value of software can be directly translated into exchange-value in the course of their normal production, not by selling the software directly but by doing whatever business they do, selling whatever product they sell and using software to increase their productivity. Paying for software licenses and agreeing to the restrictive terms of such licenses is not in their interests. As David Ricardo said about landlords, the interest of a software company like Microsoft is always opposed to the interest of every software user. The organizations that use software, namely schools, factories, offices, and e-commerce enterprises, collectively employ far more software developers than the few companies who sell proprietary software, such as Microsoft. Thus, free software is very attractive to them as it allows them to reduce their individual development costs by collectively maintaining a common stock of software assets. Thus, the use-value of free software is wanted by organizations who can and do pay software developers to make it, even though they have no exclusive copyright on it. Just like Liberal Capitalists like David Ricardo worked to break the advantages Landlords had against Capitalists by attacking restrictions on trade such as the Corn Laws which increased the price of industrial inputs, technology giants like IBM today endorse free software and copyleft to reduce the costs of their own production and overcome advantages of Software companies like Microsoft and Oracle.
Yet, free software was not conceived as merely a way to reduce the cost of corporate software development. Richard Stallman writes on his organization's website: 'My work on free software is motivated by an idealistic goal: spreading freedom and cooperation. I want to encourage free software to spread, replacing proprietary software that forbids cooperation, and thus make our society better.' Since free software can not directly capture exchange value, producers of free software must still sell their labour to provide for their material subsistence. Copyleft is thus not able to "make society better" in any material sense because the majority of the extra exchange value created by producers of free software is captured by owners of material property who are able to provide for their subsistence. As copyleft cannot allow workers to accumulate wealth beyond customary subsistence, copyleft alone cannot change the distribution of productive assets or their output. Therefore copyleft has no direct impact on the distribution of wealth and power.
Just as copyleft is in some ways a retreat from the ideological position of anticopyright, the political position of copyleft is very much a retreat from the ideological position of the socialist left, even when it appropriates arguments against property from the left it limits the critiques to the narrow field of immaterial property. A particularly shameless example of this is Eben Moglen's "dotCommunist Manifesto," an insulting pastiche of the seminal Marx and Engels manifesto that invokes the 1848 call to arms for the working class to unite towards the abolishment of capitalism only to instead demand the abolishment of intellectual property alone. The two 19th century Materialists would have understood that abolishing intellectual property would not free the working class of their chains. Moglen, Culumbia University law professor and chief consul for Stallman's Free Software Foundation, fails to engage with the issue of the institution of property itself, and thus has learned nothing from the position of the revolutionaries he smugly mimics.
Yet, despite the ideological and political retreats that copyleft represents, in the area of software development, copyleft has proved to be a tremendously effective means of creating an information commons that broadly benefits all those whose production depends on it, and the rise of the free software movement is rightly an inspiration to all who strive towards more equitable forms of producing. The Socialist left promotes the idea that wealth must be more justly and equitably shared and controlled by the people who produce it. Perhaps the best method of achieving this is through decentralized, worker-owned enterprises, co-operatives, and councils. For the same reason that capitalist organizations support copyleft software, because it represents a common stock of use value they can apply to production, commons-based producers and therefore all worker self-organized enterprises can also benefit from such a common stock of copyleft art and can incorporate artists in their collective enterprises. As the International Workers of the World state in the preamble to their Constitution (1905) "It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggles with capitalists but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old."
Free Software, is therefore of inestimable value for worker's self-organized production, giving us a source of valuable capital, software, that would have previously been exclusively controlled by propriatarian corporations and thereby reduces losses to Rent and allowing us a possibility to retain a greater portion of the product of our labour. And perhaps just as importantly, the free software community pioneers ways to co-operatively organize large scale distributed projects, bringing together internationally dispersed contributors effectively working towards the design, development and deployment of valuable software. In these ways the free software movement makes important contributions towards the goal of "organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old."
This is not to say free software has no revolutionary value, it's value has to be understood in context, and is not applicable exclusively towards revolutionary aims, but it also usable towards non-revolutionary and even reactionary aims as well. The application of copyleft is only potentially revolutionary to the degree that it is employed towards revolutionary aims, and it's applicability is limited to immaterial producer's good, intellectual capital such as software. Just as free software is used by capitalist organizations, there can also be situations where worker's controlled organizations may chose to use commercial software, in cases where the freely available options are less productive than non-free ones and the increased productive output is greater than the lost Rent. Such a choice should be made with caution though, as not only does the lost Rent contribute to the capacities of reaction (which can be avoided, with some risk, by pirating software), but an opportunity to contribute to the development of the freely available is missed.
The question must also be asked to what degree does "copyleft" really benefit the free software movement, despite examples such as Stallman's formative experience of having his public domain software privatized in 1984, there are also ample counter examples of large scale free software projects that continue to employ licenses that allow proprietary redistribution, such as various BSD based operating systems and the hugely popular Apache web server. While a corporation can employ code from these projects in proprietary applications, it does so at a cost, by separating their development from the main free software project, they have to manually patch or reimpliment code improvements from the free distribution into their own fork and forgo help from the free software community in improving their own proprietary contributions. Meaning that companies that chose to make proprietary versions of free software need a strong business reason to do so, in practice this rarely happens as proprietary versions tend to quickly fall behind the free software versions in functionality and thereby lose their market value.
Most successful examples of proprietary use come from companies whose primary business is selling hardware, not software, such as Apple Computer or Juniper routers, both of which run proprietary versions of software derived from BSD-based projects. That Apple and Juniper make their software proprietary, not yo sell the software, but to bundle it with their expensive hardware, is demonstrated by both companies efforts to stop users from legally buying the software to run on cheaper commodity hardware, e.g. Apples efforts to thwart the Hackintosh project and legal action against companies selling non-Apple hardware preloaded with legally purchased copies of OS X.
Examples like this demonstrate the emphasis on freedom embedded within copyleft, Apple's actions have not threated the BSD-based free software projects they have drawn from, in fact Apple has contributed to these projects, however the BSD style license allows Apple to control their users and deny their freedom in using their legally purchased software as they please. They would not have such an option if their OS was based on copyleft licensed software such as Linux, which is published under the GPL.
There has been error in communication with booki server. Not sure right now where is the problem.
You should refresh this page.