The existence of "copy rights" predated 18th century notions of the author"s right to ownership. From the 16th to the 17th century royal licenses gave exclusive rights to certain publishers to print particular texts. In 1557, England"s Queen Anne granted an exclusive printing monopoly to a London guild of printers, the Stationers Company, because it assured the Crown control over which books were published or banned. The first copyrights were publishers" rights to print copies, which emerged out of the ideological needs of absolutist monarchies to control knowledge and censor dissent.
After the Licensing Act expired in 1694, the monopoly of the Stationers Company was threatened by provincial booksellers, the so-called "pirates" from Ireland and Scotland. The Stationers Company petitioned Parliament for a new bill to extend their copyright monopoly. But this was a different England from 1557: Parliament had executed King Charles I in 1649, abolished the monarchy and installed a republic under Cromwell, restored the monarchy with Charles II, overthrew James II in the Revolution of 1688, and, in 1689, it passed the first decree of modern constitutional sovereignty, the Bill of Rights. This was now John Locke's England. The philosopher John Locke was among the chief architects of the liberal state and the ideology of private property, to Locke property was en extension of one's ownership of oneself. As you own yourself, therefore you own what you produce. The right to Property is created by labour. The English Parliament now took a view consistent with this outlook and The Statute of Anne, passed in 1710 by Parliament, turned out to be a hard blow against the Stationers Company. The Statute declared authors, not publishers, to be owners of their works and limited the copyright term to 14 years for new books and 21 years for existing copyrights. The Statute, which was subtitled "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of such Copies, During the Times Therein Mentioned," created a marketplace of knowledge through competition. The Statute"s aim was not to create an author"s copyright but to break the Stationers Company"s monopoly.
The principal players in what the press hailed as the great cause concerning literary property were not authors. Publishers sued each other in the courts, invoking the author"s rights as a pretext in their battle for economic power. The notion of the author as an originator with a natural right to own ideas may have been invented by artists and philosophers, but it was publishers who profited from it. Laws are not made by poets but by states, and states exist to enforce economic privilege, adopting whatever philosophical legitimation they find convenient at any given time. The Statute of Anne codified the capitalist form of the author-publisher relationship: copyright was attached to the author at birth but automatically assumed by publishers through the "neutral" mechanisms of the market. Authors had a right to own the products of their labour in theory, but since they created immaterial ideas and lacked the technological means to produce books, they had to sell their rights to another party with enough capital to exploit them. In essence, it was no different than having to sell their labour. The exploitation of the author was embedded in the intellectual property regime from its inception.
There are important differences between intellectual property and physical property. Physical property is scarce and finite, while intellectual property can be copied, has almost no reproduction cost, and can be used simultaneously by anyone with a copy. It is exactly this characteristic of unlimited reproducibility that requires the copyright regime to make information into property. In the long term, the exchange value of any reproduce-able good is driven towards its reproduction cost by competition. Since there are few barriers to reproducing an information asset, it can have no exchange value beyond the labour and resources required to reproduce it. In other words, it has no long term exchange value of its own. Thus, owners of this property (again, not to be confused with the producers) need laws to prevent this reproduction. Only by making it illegal for others to copy it can the owners extract Rent for the right to copy. Intellectual Property, including copyright, is the extension of property to immaterial assets and information. Copyright is a legal construction that tries to make certain kinds of immaterial wealth behave like material wealth so that they can be owned, controlled, and traded. In any system of property, musicians collectively can no more retain ownership of the product of their labour than can workers at a textile sweatshop. The system of private control of the means of publication, distribution, promotion and media production ensures that artists and all other creative workers can earn no more than their subsistence. Whether you are biochemist, a musician, a software engineer, or a film-maker, you have signed over all your copyrights to property owners before these rights have any real financial value for no more than the reproduction costs of your work.
If property is theft, as Proudhon famously argued, then intellectual property is fraud. Property is theft, not in a strictly legal sense, since the laws of the liberal capitalist state are the foundations of property. Property is theft, in the philosophical sense, as the Lockean concept of property as an extension of self-ownership means it is intrinsically unjust to take what you did not produce. Proudhon, like Thompson and Hodgskin before him, argues that the owner of property has no legitimate claim to the product of the direct-producers that employ this property. Without recourse to force, property owners could not extract any more than the reproduction costs of the instruments they contribute to the productive process. A Capitalist class could not exist without denying workers independent access to the means of production, In the words of American Individualist Anarchist Benjamin Tucker, the lender of capital is entitled to its return intact, and nothing more. In this sense, when the peasants of the pre-industrial age were denied access to common land by the new enclosures, it can be said that their land was stolen, and further, that being forced into wage labour as a result of this expropriation, the institution of property itself, since the common lands where not previously property, is an institution of theft. But if physical property can be stolen, can intelligence or ideas be stolen? If your land is stolen, you cannot use it anymore, except on the conditions set by its new private "owner." If ownership of an idea is analogous to the ownership of material property, it should be subject to the same conditions of economic exchange, forfeiture, and seizure - and if seized it would then cease to be the property of its owner. But if your idea is used by others, you have not lost your ability to use it – so what is really stolen? The traditional notion of property, as something that can be possessed to the exclusion of others, is irreconcilable with intangibles like ideas. Unlike a material object, which can exist in only one place at a given time, ideas are infinite and non-exclusive. A poem is no less a poet's poem despite its existence in a thousand memories.
Every expression is an extension of a previous perception. Artistic creation is not born ex nihilo from the brains of individuals as a private language; it has always been a social practice. Ideas are not original; they are built upon layers of knowledge accumulated throughout history. Out of these common layers, artists create works that have their unmistakable specificities and innovations. All creative works reassemble ideas, words, and images from history and their contemporary context. Before the 18th century, poets quoted their ancestors and sources of inspiration without formal acknowledgement, and playwrights freely borrowed plots and dialogue from previous sources without attribution. Homer based the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" on oral traditions that dated back centuries. Virgil"s "Aeneid" is lifted heavily from Homer. Shakespeare borrowed many of his narrative plots and dialogue from Holinshed. This is not to say that the idea of plagiarism didn"t exist before the 18th century, but its definition shifted radically. The term plagiarist (literally, kidnapper) was first used by Martial in the 1st century to describe someone who kidnapped his poems by copying them whole and circulating them under the copier"s name. Plagiarism was a false assumption of someone else"s work. But the fact that a new work had similar passages or identical expressions to an earlier one was not considered plagiarism as long as the new work had its own aesthetic merits. After the invention of the creative genius, practices of collaboration, appropriation and transmission were actively forgotten. When Coleridge, Stendhall, Wilde and T.S. Eliot were accused of plagiarism for including expressions from their predecessors in their works, this reflected a redefinition of plagiarism in accordance with the modern sense of possessive authorship and exclusive property. Their so-called "theft" is precisely what all previous writers had regarded as natural.
Ideas are viral. They couple with other ideas, change shape, and migrate into unfamiliar territories. The intellectual property regime restricts the promiscuity of ideas and traps them in artificial enclosures, extracting exclusive benefits from their ownership and control. Intellectual property is fraud - a legal privilege to falsely represent oneself as the sole "owner" of an idea, expression or technique and to charge a tax to all who want to perceive, express or apply this "property" in their own production. It is not plagiarism that dispossesses an "owner" of the use of an idea; it is intellectual property, backed by the invasive violence of the state, that dispossesses everyone else from using their common culture. The basis for this dispossession is the legal fiction of the author as a sovereign individual who creates original works out of the wellspring of his imagination and thus has a natural and exclusive right to ownership. Foucault unmasked authorship as a functional principle that impedes the free circulation, free manipulation, free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of knowledge. The author-function represents a form of despotism over the proliferation of ideas. The effects of this despotism, and of the system of intellectual property that it shelters and preserves, is that it robs us of our cultural memory, censors our words, and chains our imagination to the law. And yet artists continue to be flattered by their association with the myth of the creative genius, turning a blind eye to how it is used to justify their exploitation and expand the privilege of the property-owning elite. Copyright pits author against author in a war of competition for originality. Its effects are not only economic; it also naturalizes a certain process of knowledge production, delegitimizes the notion of a common culture, and cripples social relations. Artists are not encouraged to share their thoughts, expressions and works or to contribute to a common pool of creativity. Instead, they jealously guard their "property" from others, who they view as potential competitors, spies and thieves lying in wait to snatch and defile their original ideas. This is a vision of the art world created in capitalism"s own image, whose ultimate aim is to make it possible for corporations to appropriate the alienated products of its intellectual workers.
The private ownership of ideas over the last two centuries has not managed to completely eradicate the memory of a common culture or the recognition that knowledge flourishes when ideas, words, sounds and images are free for everyone to use. Ever since the birth of the proprietary author, different individuals and groups have challenged the intellectual property regime and the "right" it gave to some private individuals to "own" creative works while preventing others from using and re-interpreting them. In his 1870 "Poesies," a pair of text discovered and revered by Surrealists Louis Aragon and André Breton, Uruguayan-born French poet Comte de Lautreamont, called for a return of impersonal poetry, a poetry written by all. He added, "Plagiarism is necessary." Progress implies it. It closely grasps an author"s sentence, uses his expressions, deletes a false idea, replaces it with a right one. His definition subverted the myth of individual creativity, which was used to justify property relations in the name of progress when it actually impeded progress by privatizing culture. The natural response was to re-appropriate culture as a sphere of collective production without acknowledging artificial enclosures of authorship. Lautremont"s phrase became a benchmark for the 20th century avant-gardes. Dada rejected originality and portrayed all artistic production as recycling and reassembling - from Duchamp"s ready-mades, to Tzara"s rule for making poems from cut-up newspapers, to the photomontages of Hoech, Hausmann and Heartfield. Dada also challenged the idea of the artist as solitary genius and of art as a separate sphere by working collectively to produce not only art objects and texts but also media hoaxes, interventions at political gatherings and demonstrations on the street. Its assault on artistic values was a revolt against the capitalist foundations that created them.
Dadaist ideas were systematically developed into a theory by the Situationist International. The SI acknowledged that detournement - putting existing artworks, films, advertisements and comic strips through a detour, or recoding their dominant meanings - was indebted to Dadaist practices, but with a difference. They saw Dada as a negative critique of dominant images (one that depended on the easy recognition of the image being negated) and defined detournement as a positive reuse of existing fragments simply as elements in the production of a new work. Detournement was not primarily an antagonism to tradition. It emphasized the reinvention of a new world from the scraps of the old. And implicitly, revolution was not primarily an insurrection against the past but learning to live in a different way by creating new practices and forms of behaviour. These forms of behaviour also included collective writings, which were often unsigned, and an explicit refusal of the copyright regime by attaching the labels "no copyright" or "anticopyright" to their works, along with the directions for use: any of the texts in this book may be freely reproduced, translated or adapted even without mentioning the source.
Digitalization has proven to be much more of a threat to conventional notions of authorship and intellectual property than the plagiarism practiced by radical artists or critiques of the author by poststructuralist theorists. The computer is dissolving the boundaries essential to the modern fiction of the author as a solitary creator of unique and original works. Ownership presupposes a separation between texts and between the author and reader. The artificiality of this separation is becoming more apparent. On mailing lists, newsgroups and open publishing sites, the transition from reader to writer is natural, and the difference between original texts vanishes as readers contribute commentary and incorporate fragments of the original in their response without the use of quotations. Copyrighting on-line writing seems increasingly absurd because it is often collectively produced and immediately multiplied. As on-line information circulates without regard for the conventions of copyright, the concept of the proprietary author really seems to have become a ghost of the past. Perhaps the most important effect of digitalization is that it threatens the traditional benefactors of intellectual property since monopolistic control by book publishers, music labels and the film industry is no longer necessary as ordinary people are taking up the means of production and distribution for themselves.
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