Freedom Dreams

It’s a bit since my blog post. In that time I’ve been on holiday, upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.8.2 and myself to 18 (ie. years old ).

So, intellectual property. A good recent example to use to discuss this would be the recent Orwellian Kindle case. The irony in this case that it was actually 1984 animal Farm that Amazon chose to delete from users machine. (Yes, really. I almost didn’t believe it myself). The obvious question is, this this action right, or not.

I don’t think it is particularly productive to attack Amazon for actions in this case. Amazon was acting on behalf of the copyright holder, in order to comply with copyright laws. It could be argued that they should not have implemented the DRM in the first place, but many of the book publishers pressured them to do so. And, more importantly, DRM would not have the (partial/percieved) effectiveness it has, if it were not for copyright and laws against cracking DRM (eg. the DMCA).

So, instead lets look at the laws, and whether they are right or not. The laws here, covering copyrights and patents (trademarks are not such an issue), are often referred to as “intellectual property”. This leads to much confusion when trying to discuss whether these laws are moral. Some people claim that creative works are effectively property, and unauthorised copying is akin to stealing, so should be stopped. (This stealing analogy is even used by publishers organisations, that should really know better that the law does not link copyright and theft at all). Others don’t go quite this far, but say simply that the authors of creative works have a right to be able to benefit from their work. (There are example after example in the free software and free culture movements as to why “IP” laws aren’t necessary to make money).

As a voluntaryist believing in the basic natural rights to life, liberty and property. Its a black and white choice, and has nothing to do with existing laws. Either “intellectual property” is real property, subject to the same type of ownership, or it should not be controlled at all. The issue of whether “IP” is moral, for me, hinges on whether it is property. And, I do not think it is.

First of all, lets look at the concept of property in the first place. Why does the idea exist, and why is it better than alternatives. As far as I know, property exists as a way to manage resources. The exact same meal can not be eaten by both me and and the person next to me. So, property is about exclusivity. Something is mine because I am the only one who uses it (or more accurately, the one who decides how it is used).

Does this kind of exclusivity exhibit itself in the information  world? Yes and no. Digital content can be copied very easily which blurs the line of what belongs to who. If I create an image, and send a copy to someone, who owns that copy? If we’re talking about property, if someone creates an object similar to mine, with their own materials, it obviously belongs to them. So, similarly, if someone recreates on their own machine, a file like I have on mine, their copy belongs to them. This means, if you want property like protections, that kind of exclusivity, there is a way – just keep your file to yourself!
(Of course, this issue of server side, or “cloud” software comes up here, but thats an issue I’ll look into in depth in another blog post.)

Of course, my way of thinking about property isn’t the only one. Objectivists maintain that property is created as a result of man’s mind. Raw materials are useless without the cleverness to transform them. Since property comes from the mind, then thoughts, ideas can also be property – intellectual property. The problem I see with this is, where do you draw the line?

Owning property means being able to morally use force to protect it. If someone copies my idea or creative work without permission, Objectivists presumably would argue the same is the case. But what if my idea is simple, or obvious. How do you manage fair decisions on what belongs to who, who has been influenced, and who has been “stolen” from. How do you be sure who the original creator is? And, ultimately, to whom do you want to give the power to make these decisions. Trust not to make decisions that limit creativity, that are in there own interests?
(The current patent system is a woefull example of this. The running of the system is influenced by lawyers who want as much paperwork and as many lawsuits as possible, in order to benefit themselves.)

Another argument is that intellectual property can be seen as an extension of contracts. I could contractually lend or give an object to someone (for example, to pay in installments). That object is used by them, but I still retain ownership. In the same way, I could also contractually lend a digital work to someone, on the condition that the don’t copy it. Breaking such a contract would, in my eyes, be immoral. But, if you are given the digital work by someone else, without my permission, you are not breaking any contract! Only the person who originally got the work from me is.
(In this way EULAs would also be pointless without copyright. It only takes one person to break it, and people can choose not to be bound by them.)

In conclusion, I think the idea of “Intellectual Property” is frankly silly. We would be a lot better off without copyright or patent law (despite what even stallman might say). As for DRM, without copyright laws, and DMCA-like laws, these measures would make no business sense. Even if a company were to try it, a mass boycott would be much easier without this government-perpetuated myth that copying is theft.

There’s an oft reappearing topic of debate in Free Software circles, about whether Free Software is really about freedom. I want to give a different take on this issue, using some ideas from classical liberal philosophy.

The debate that I see most often starts when a strong free software supporter suggests that we should use exclusively free software on our machines. To this, someone else may respond that, surely such a policy is restricting a users freedom to run whatever software they want, including proprietary software.

I want to address this issue in a different way, by asking, what is freedom? According to the FSF, freedom in software is composed of the freedom to #0 run the program in any way, #1 study the program, #2 distribute  the program and #3 modify the program.

Fair enough, but what is freedom in a more general sense? Dictionary definition time – “The condition of being free of restraints.”. Yes, there are many different ways of defining freedom, but this is the one that I, as a voluntaryist would most agree with. It its the simplest and most consistent way of thinking about freedom – you are free if you are not being restrained – that is you are not having force initiated against you.¹

So, how does this conception of freedom tally with the FSF’s. Looked at one way, not too badly. Being free from restraints (if you don’t hurt anyone or their property), in the area of software, would mean no copyright law. This being the case, you would be able to use and copy software as you saw fit (”freedoms” #0 and #2).

However, there’s a problem with this. In order to exercise the supposed freedoms #1 and #3, there is, as the FSF says, a prerequisite, the source code. Of course, in the sense of real freedom, without copyright law, you would not necessarily be given the source code, a programmer might choose to withold it. However, you could choose to use only software that is “open” (has source code), and the majority of software would probably be this way, since there isn’t the incentive of a copyright monopoly over the work, and open code makes it much easier for benevolent people to participate.

In this way, real freedom – that is, no restraining copyright law – fits very nicely with principles of free software. However, the same does not work so well the other way round. It may seem outrageous to suggest free software advocates, such as the FSF are working against real freedom and initiating force – after all, for all their heckling, they don’t actually force people to use software – but, in other ways they do.

As I said, to be actually free, you must not have the implied force of copyright threatening you. With this in mind, take a look at the GPL – what is it? A copyright license, and a fairly restrictive one at that.Yes, it is a free software license, because it doesn’t restrict any of the four specific software freedoms. But it restricts plenty of other things, you being able to distribute only parts of it (ie. binaries), or, combine it with non-compatible code and distribute (potentially very useful). These things are restricted with the threat of force. A threat, that through the legal system (SFLC lawsuits) has been carried out in some cases. Such restriction by force, is, in my eyes at least, anti-freedom and immoral.

However, in case it was obvious, these are not reasons for me to be making a big move away from free software, as I said, free software fits well with my sense of freedom – I strongly support the idea of being free to do what you want and having source code. Proprietary software is a much worse use of immoral copyright force. But, I disagree with the use of copyright, to advance the specific software freedoms, as it leads to other freedoms being lost – this is especially so with copyleft.

So, instead of fighting copyright with copyright, and amassing users to free software systems, we should try to abolish copyright, to try to make all software free. After all, do we really think we will manage to switch a majority of users away from the dominating OSes any time soon? Abolishing copyright might seem the harder thing to do, but it is much easier for ordinary people to get behind, without needing to switch much software etc. (of course, it would be good if they did). Now is as good a time as ever due to the outrage over ridiculous bittorent fines.

One final note, the emphasis on anti-copyright rather than 100% free software is why I now conceed to convenience in certain matters – namely, I now use adobe flash plugin on an ubuntu system.

#1 – Defensive force is of course another matter. You still have freedom, I would say, if you would have reasonable defensive force used against you if you hurt someone else.