Despite Copyleft's beneficial role in forming a valuable common-stock of software, it remains problematic when the model is retrofitted back to the original domains of art and culture from which dissent against intellectual property sprung. Cultural works, unlike software, are a consumer's good, not a producer's good. The distinction between Producer's goods (Capital) and consumer's goods (Products) is a core distinction in economic discussion, which separates the inputs to production into three factors, Land, Labour and Capital. The application of these three factors results in the productive output, the products, which are the yield of the productive process, the distribution of these products among the providers of the three inputs is income, divided as Rent, Wages, and Interest, respectively. The balance between these incomes determines the distribution of wealth in society. Economic discussions of property must distinguish between Capital and Product, that is between producer's goods and consumer's goods. The distinction is not always obvious when referring to any particular article, for instance a tractor would normally be considered a productive asset, and therefore Capital, however someone may also purchase a tractor for recreational purposes, as a sort of recreational vehicle. In this case this particular tractor is not really Capital, however this does not change the fact that in most cases, the manufacturer of tractors is funded by Capital demand, not consumer demand. Capitalism is naturally willing to fulfill Capital demand, regardless of whether any profit or made doing so, so long as it can make a profit from whatever Consumer demand is being fulfilled in end.
Art is not, in most cases, a common input to production as software is. Thus it's demand is Consumer demand, not Capital demand There are certainly cases where Artworks could be considered productive inputs, for instance sound effects, clip art, music clips and the like, and the tradition of artists drawing on the work of their predecessors has been discussed at length, however when we discuss the economics of content-based works, like poems, novels, films, or music, as well as entertainment oriented software titles such as games, we are not talking about producer's goods, but consumer's goods. Owners of property will support the creation of copyleft software in order to employ it in production. However, in most cases, they will not support the creation of copyleft art. Why would they? They are not in the business of giving away consumer's good for free. They are in the business of earning profits by controlling the distribution of consumer's goods. Like all copyable information, content-based works have no direct exchange value, and unlike software they rarely have use value in production either. Use value exists only among the fans of these works, and if owners of property can not charge these fans money for the right to copy, why would they fund the production? And if owners of property will not support copyleft art, which is freely distributed, who will? The answer is unclear. In some cases institutions such as private and state cultural funds will, but these can only support a very small number of artists, and only by employing a dubious and ultimately somewhat arbitrary selection criteria in deciding who does, and who does not, receive such funding.
The problem is obvious when attempting to translating copyleft to cultural works.. If someone releases a novel under a copyleft license, and Random House prints it and makes a profit off the author"s work, Random House has not violated copyleft as long as the copyleft is passed down. To be free means to be open to commercial appropriation, since freedom is defined as the non-restrictive circulation of information rather than as freedom from exploitation. It comes as no surprise that the major revision in applying copyleft to the production of artworks, music and texts has been to permit copying, modifying and redistributing as long as it"s non-commercial. Wu Ming claims it is necessary to place a restriction on commercial use or use for profit in order to prohibit the parasitic exploitation of cultural workers. They justify this restriction, and its divergence from the GPL and GFDL versions of copyleft, on the grounds that the struggle against exploitation and the fight for a fair remuneration of labour is the cornerstone of the history of the left. Other content providers and book publishers (Verso, for example) have expanded this restriction by claiming that copying, modifying and redistributing should not only be non-profit but also in the spirit of the original - without explaining what this "spirit" means. Indymedia Romania revised its copyleft definition to make the meaning of "in the spirit of the original" clearer after repeated problems with the neofascist site Altermedia Romania, whose "pranks" ranged from hijacking the indymedia.ro domain to copying texts from Indymedia and lying about names and sources. Indymedia Romania"s restrictions include: not modifying the original name or source since it goes against the desire for transparency, not reproducing the material for profit since it abuses the spirit of generosity, and not reproducing the material in a context that violates the rights of individuals or groups by discriminating against them on the basis of nationality, ethnicity, gender or sexuality, since that contradicts its commitment to equality.
Stallman"s original definition of copyleft attempts to found an information commons solely around the principle of information freedom – in this sense it is purely formal, like a categorical imperative that demands freedom of information to be universalizable. The only limit to belonging to this community is those who do not share the desire for free information, and in any case they are not excluded but only they refuse to participate because they refuse to make information free. Other versions of copyleft have tried to add further restrictions based on a stronger interpretation of the "left" in copyleft as needing to be based not on a negative freedom from restrictions but on positive principles, like valuing social cooperation above profit, non-hierarchical participation and non discrimination. The more restrictive definitions of copyleft attempt to found an information commons that is not just about the free flow of information but sees itself as part of a larger social movement that bases its commonality on shared leftist principles. In its various mutations, copyleft represents a pragmatic, rational approach that recognizes the limits of freedom as implying reciprocal rights and responsibilities – the different restrictions represent divergent interpretations about what these rights and responsibilities should be. Yet, given the poor economic condition of the majority of artists who reserve full copyrights, the prospect of mutations of copyleft that restrict commercial usage by way of including "non-profit" or "non-commercial" terms improving the economic conditions of the artists that use seems remote. Artists, like other workers, have no means to bargain for anything more than subsistence. The chief advantage of reserving commercial rights is the right of the creators to transfer ownership of there works to the propertied class whenever the propertied class finds it in its interests to take ownership, and, of course, entirely on the terms dictated by the propertied class. This is illustrated in "Artists Earnings and Copyright" by Martin Kretschmer, Professor of Information Jurisprudence at Bournemouth University, where he concludes that "The creator has little to gain from exclusivity" and in his 2006 study Empirical Evidence On Copyright Earnings, which states: "Earnings from non-copyright, and even non-artistic activities, are an important source of income for most creators," which includes many startling statistics. For example, the median payment distributed by the Performing Right Society (UK) in 1994 to its copyright holders was £84.
"Non-commercial" terms are very problematic for advocates of worker's self organized production, as these terms restrict the ability of non-capitalist enterprises to reproduce such works, and thus such licenses are corrosive, not only to the interests of artists, but to all workers as they are not compatible with the general objective of the socialist left: the creation of a worker's controlled economy. In order for copyleft to mutate into a revolutionary instrument in the domain of cultural production it must become Copy-far-left. It must insist upon worker's ownership of the means of production. The works themselves must be a part of the common stock and available for productive use by other commons-based producers. So long as the authors reserve the right to make money with this work and prevent other commons based producers from doing so, the work can not be considered to be in the commons at all and remains a private work, a non-commercial copyleft is thereby a non-free license A copyfarleft license, to avoid being non-free, must not restrict commercial usage, but rather usage that is not commons-based. Specifically, copyfarleft must have one set of rules for those who are working within the context of workers ownership and another for those who employ private property and wage labour in production. A copyfarleft license should make it possible for producers to share freely and to retain the value of their labour product. In other words, it must be possible for workers to earn renumeration by applying their own labour to mutual property but impossible for owners of private property to make profit using wage labour. Thus, under a copyfarleft license, a worker-owned printing cooperative could be free to reproduce, distribute, and modify the common stock as they like, but a privately owned publishing company would be prevented from having free access. In this way copyfarleft remains free in the same sense as copyleft is free, despite restrictions on proprietary redistribution, it only restricts taking away from the commons, not contributing to it. A copyfarleft license would allow commons-based commercial use while denying the ability to profit by exploiting wage labour. The copyleft Non-Commercial approach does neither; it prevents commons-based commerce while not effectively restricting wage exploitation, which requires a change in the distribution of wealth, and only a license that effectively prevents alienated property and wage labour from being employed in the reproduction of the otherwise free-information commons can change the distribution of wealth. Copyleft provides a solid foundation for software in commons-based productions. Copyfarleft could potentially provide a workable foundation for cultural works to also become a part of the common stock employed by independent producers.
However for Copyfarleft to have an impact, it would need to be employed within the context of a nascent worker's economy that includes various forms of production, cultural and material. Art as well as food, etc. In the absence of such a environment, copyleft and it's various mutations have little advantage for the majority of artists for whom the prospects of gaining financially by way of commercial licensing are negligible. For these artists Anticopyright retains it's strong appeal. Anticopyright is a gesture of being radical that refuses pragmatic compromises and seeks to abolish intellectual property in its entirety. Anticopyright affirms a freedom that is absolute and recognizes no limits to its desire. The incompatibility between these positions poses a dilemma: does one affirm absolute freedom, knowing it could be used against one, or moderate freedom by restricting the information commons to communities that won"t abuse it because they share the same "spirit?" While some have multiplied restrictions, others have rejected any restriction at all, including the single restriction imposed by the initial copyleft. It is the movement around peer-to-peer file sharing that comes closest to the gesture of anticopyright. The best example is the Copyriot blog by Rasmus Fleischer of Pyratbiran (Bureau of Piracy), an anti-IP think tank and the one-time founders of Pirate Bay, the best known Bittorent site in the P2P community. The motto of copyriot is "No copyright. No license." But there is a difference from the older anticopyright tradition. Fleischer claims that copyright has become absurd in the age of digital technology because it has to resort to all sorts of fictions, like distinctions between uploading and downloading or between producer and consumer, which don"t actually exist in horizontal P2P communication. Pyratbiran rejects copyright in its entirety, not because it was flawed in its inception but because it was invented to regulate an expensive, one-way machine like the printing press and no longer corresponds to the practices that have been made possible by current technologies of reproduction. However, despite the absurdity of the fictions on which copyright rests, the broader political context suggests that copyleft inspired models also have an important role to play as outright rejection of the legal environment is not always possible when practical considerations are taken into account. Building alternative ways of producing and sharing, "building the new society within the shell of the old," requires us to operate within the Capitalist legal system where the logic of capture and exploitation is embedded, and while space for defiant gestures exists, we must also get on with the business of finding the forms and structures required to build and expand the commons, and it seems clear that restrictions such as those of copyleft and copy-far-left serve to protect the commons and keep it free.
Others, such as Joost Smiers, Professor Emeritus of Political Science of the Arts at the Utrecht School of the Arts also insist on the abolishment of Copyright. He argues that copyright centralizes media ownership by giving large media conglomerates an anti-competitive advantage which damages the position of artists. Artists would benefit more from a level playing field consisting of larger number of publishers competing for their services then from exclusivity of copyright. Professor Smiers has a valid point, copyright is a market inefficiency. It should be abolished. However there is no reason to believe it will be abolished. Copyright is far from the only market inefficiency in the contemporary capitalist market. Without market inefficiencies, Capital would be unable to capture any more than it's own reproduction cost in any branch of industry, the elimination of competition is central to the logic of Capitalism. Without unfair advantages, a Capitalist class of owners could not accumulate wealth and there could be no Capitalism. Smiers is correct in his criticism of copyright, he is also correct when he goes further and denounces copyright as a form of censorship, however as with all political ideas, it can only be implemented when those that support it can overcome the wealth of those who oppose it, and that is not currently the case. So long as copyright continues to exist, copyleft inspired licenses continue to be needed to allow intellectual freedom within the copyright regime.
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