There’s a good article on the GNU project website that talks about copyright: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.en.html though there are many other writings on copyright from a socialist perspective. (disclaimer, author is a bernie bro libertarian)

Essentially copyright acts as a mechanism for the bourgeois classes (publishers, media conglomerates, large firms) to siphon and hoard works for themselves. Initially the system was germane but as patent and publisher lobbying groups grew under capitalism, the system of copyright, patent and trademark law all were lobbied to favor publishers more highly than both authors and readers (the infamous “Mickey Mouse” law was used to extend copyright past a regular human’s average lifespan, essentially enshrining artistic works as permanent private property.

In a socialist society, copyright would be essentially done with as its main purpose was to “protect” (big air quotes here) the profits of publishers. If every author and artist had a guaranteed salary and training, copyright would not be needed. Note that copyright is explicitly not the same as attribution. A sad example of this is how many manga artists in Japan (a global north country that is infamous for draconian copyright enforcement) actually don’t hold the copyright to their works. For example, the creator of One Piece (a series which grossed hundreds of billions of dollars in its 2+ decade span) doesn’t actually “own” One Piece, Shueisha, the publisher, does. The mangaka is simply an employee hired by the publisher to produce authorized content of said series.

Today we have what we call “copyleft” licenses which were coined by Richard Stallman back in the late 80s which use copyright laws and flips them on its head, allowing for the work to be collectively owned. The GNU General Public License and Creative Commons licenses are both examples of copyleft licenses.

its bad

Piracy and legal consumption of media are really two sides of the same coin under capitalism: The value of a piece of so-called “intellectual property” comes from the labor that went into it, which is Not Just the labor that went into creating the original copy, but also the labor that went into creating all subsequent copies — crucially including “illegal” copies! — as well as all fan content and all other derived works including all commentary. Copyright itself is just the use of everypony’s favorite Monopoly on Legitimate Violence to create the artificial scarcity that is a prerequisite of value, both through actually shutting down so-called “copyright infringement” and by controlling the Discourse to present piracy as a bad or dangerous thing. This means that Walmart DVDs are kinda like the O’Hare Air of media: We could’ve had a breathable atmosphere, but we’re stuck with this crap instead.

So this is why I support total copyright abolition and hear no excuses for the institution.

I don’t know that there is a functional model of IP law that will not be eventually bent to serve the most powerful at the expense of everyone else. At this point I feel the whole thing needs to be thrown out and rebuilt from the ground up with great care and trepidation, if at all.

Copyright is private property applied to the intellectual commons.

they’re a tool of the bourgeoise and are net-bad for humanity, but i would like a mechanism to prevent nazis from using something i created.

I like to be a bit “realpolitik” about it.

The original concept made sense under a capitalist mode of production, if you are the inventor of some idea you should essentially have “dibs” on making money off it for a certain duration of time before people can just copy your work and sell it as their won. And yeah I see why that original model did benefit artists cuz it would suck if you wrote a cool novel that was selling well but then some guy CTRL+C CTRL+V’d it into another doc and changed the title and sold it for $5 less than your own copy.

But obviously it pretty quickly got abused with the length of that period of “dibs” getting extended to essentially forever and being mostly used by massive corporations to try and demand everyone pay them for fucking everything.

Ideally under FALGSC none of this shit would matter, you could just create stuff, and the only issue would be proper crediting of work since nobody would care about profit. But I guess as long as we live in a world where people get paid for shit and we’d like artists to get paid sometimes having some better version of copyright exist may be good.

“Intellectual Property” is a lobotomy on civilizational development.

It creates scarcity out of the most vibrant and fruitful products of our mind. It is fundamentally incompatible with the collaborative nature of intellectual and cultural work. It hangs like a sword of Damocles above every creative endeavor, ready to be dropped by large Owners who weaponize it to protect and expand their power. The worst part is: the very existence of IP laws forces participation from creators, and they end up having to defend it to survive.

The idea that you can invent or create something and then reap the rewards for it to create stable employment for yourself is no longer a thing that exists. Anything valuable that you create as an individual will be either copied or straight up stolen by a better capitalized firm.

copyright is bad but absence of copyright is also not great. it should be replaced with a far more restricted version that only applies to art, with a massively shortened duration (10~15 years seem about right, from when you see it in your childhood to your mid 20s when you can start to produce meaningful works), with fair use baked in alongside new protections for non-commercial use and establishing faster and significantly cheaper mechanisms to settle disputes. the legislation should allow for evolution of culture and rapid dissemination of information while still retaining some rights for small artists.

will that work out? maybe but we haven’t even tried, and it’ll certainly be better than our public domain being frozen to basically 1930s while big media conglomerates merge and continue to hoard IPs, essentially holding our entire culture hostage. something has to give. unfortunately it’s not a high priority issue and media lobby pockets are deep, so it’s not gonna happen.

EDIT: of course the whole point of copyright is to protect the right holder’s profits to provide “incentive” for people to create original works. outside of a capitalist system such system of ownership is just bad, although some measure to stop misattribution might be useful.

Money was a mistake

Copyright and Private property kind of go hand in hand where they basically exist so someone can’t “steal” your property and profit off of it themselves.

But it’s been talked over a bunch and I don’t wanna repeat the points that provide compelling and reasonable arguments for why it could/should be abolished. Or how should we abolish it.

I’m more interested in the identity aspect of it. Copyright law doesn’t actually do anything to make sure your attribution to something you’ve put your work into stays. Capitalists love turning things into hobbies so you work for free in a precarious environment and they can keep stealing from you and copyright anything you made, that they see they can extract value from. They will copyright anything and everything their wallet allows them to and hold it all hostage.

The current system is nonsense, and allows the rich to control too much media (and thus culture). There are some movies or books that are hard to find “legitimate” copies of, because the “rights holders” don’t want them out there, or a complicated confluence of “well the movie has music in it” or whatever.

The main thing I would like to see protected is for some nobody who makes a cool creative work to get credit. I don’t want someone to make a cool cartoon, and then Disney just swoops in and makes their own movies and tv shows based on it while the creator is left in the dust. But I also don’t want people to be able to hold onto an idea for decades, either.

I feel like anyone should be allowed to go make a Lord of the rings movie without needing permission. That shit is old now. It’s just part of our culture.

Some sort of “you have exclusive rights for 3 years” plus “you must attribute previous works to their creators” might work for me.

I’m not a scholar I’m just shooting from the hip, but it was really annoying not being able to find a"legitimate" copy of spinal tap to stream recently.

There are two things I think are important: credit and resource allocation. So a socialist solution would be more restrictive and allow someone to take the benefit of their work. If a group makes a project then that’s cool and good and they should get their flowers and people should generally be willing to give labor in exchange for it. You need a couple years to be like “yes, this is good, this is doing numbers for society. I’ve taken what I need to afford luxury, I’ve gotten my ELO gain. I will continue to monitor the open source space and move on to my next project.”

The limitations inherent to a more socialist resource allocation is when someone else could take that work, make it 10% better, and revolutionize industry or take us to the moon in respect to scientific advancement, scalability of industry, or automation. Like if someone made 90% Haber-Bosch process. If you’re in the later stages of communism and you could go “well, you’re going to be compensated with luxuries for this,” they don’t have to go back to scrubbing the proverbial toilet, and they are assuredly part of the narrative even after someone makes that 10% improvement (e.g. I can’t add the final 10% and call it the WDYMP Process) then I could see them being in the presence of justice as they are compelled to pass the torch without copyright protection.

But as I type this I realize I’m thinking a lot more about patents and inventions. If you published some kind of novel/entertainment product and someone started making a bunch of AI smut of your characters and you had no tool to tell them to piss off then it would be cringe. Beyond my wheel house because I would feel sad to see my characters be compelled into the public domain. But then again, my material conditions are like some Hasbro-Disney amalgam played by Chris Pratt completely missing the point and never having to ask my what my vision was - if I were in a less barbarous society people might do justice to my vision even if I don’t control it with an iron fist

theyre fun to violate