I thought the discussion on intellectual property was very good. Maybe this think-piece will interest the participants. It was commissioned by the CSE executive for its 1994 conference but never got taken. To their credit, Pluto Press asked the Bookseller if they would carry it; it was sent to them but nothing more was heard. Copyright and Capital and Class ========================= for 1994 CSE conference Of late, thought has become property. This has deep social implications but the immediate reason for this paper is to start a discussion, and maybe even reach conclusions, about copyright in CSE articles. Counter to the trend, I think the ownership of thought is socially regressive. It is the first time I can think of that capitalism has imposed the form of commodity on an intrinsically social, shareable use-value, with the possible exception of common land. There is no natural limit on the dissemination of knowledge except the labour of communication and training, which is minute in comparison to the labour of originally producing the material in a book, a paper, a speech or a programme. The restraints imposed by the new usage of the laws of copyright, by the rush to 'intellectual property' are purely social, imposed by people on other people. In the case of pure information, knowledge about people rather than nature, it goes even further. The category of 'secret' is a social creation and not an intrinsic feature of information; what was previously public and known becomes private and unknown by virtue of special laws that make it a criminal act to disseminate it. Far from protecting the genuine right of privacy this is the most thorough negation of privacy conceivable. Since the ownership of information no longer resides with the subject of the information but with the person who asserts ownership with money, the right to control what is known about you is passing from your hands. We face a vast extension of the control of humans by the dead products of their labours; from the control of their deeds to the control of their thoughts. An array of new legal instruments is falling into place. Informing oneself, or others, is subject to draconian penalties. For the first time since the Middle Ages the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge is a crime. This is echoed in a veritable cultural counter-revolution. The word 'virus' has seized the public imagination and transformed a design fault in early computers into the basis for a new culture of suppression. The hacker, the most creative subversive of the modern age, has been coupled in the public mind with the drug dealer and the AIDS victim as a carrier of disease and disorder. The communication of knowledge is the most ancient and basic of human activities; it has been with us at least since language. It is the real substance of thought; there is no such thing as an isolated thinker. We have not yet encountered any other being that thinks. It is what makes us human. This humanity is now an alienable property and its expression an alien thing. Our soul is for sale, and our thought no longer free. The corrupting power of money conceals this. Intellectuals have long protected their rights in the products of their knowledge through the laws of copyright. Whether this guild practice was ever progressive is not something we want to discuss here. The important issue is the transformation in the social relations which is going on before our eyes. The same laws of copyright no longer express the same social relations. Past practice is blinding many to a simple fact. It is more lucrative to sell someone else's ideas than your own, and it is to this end that the law is being bent: to protect not the labour of the intellectual but the investment of her patron. More than this; it is to transform thought into capital, a new stage in its history. Equally the information revolution has an immense enabling potential which is currently being realised through the thriving market in software and the growing market in both games and education. Because the market is the current vehicle of this revolution, it is easy to ignore its origin in the free association of free minds. A dilemma thus faces professional intellectuals; should they avail themselves of the growing armoury of laws which ostensibly protect their profession, or should they apparently throw away their livelihood by renouncing their claims on the results of their labours? This has particular implications for Capital and Class because through it we publish our ideas, we make available our knowledge. It would be possible for Capital and Class to enter the market in knowledge to the apparent collective benefit of socialist intellectuals. For example, if we enforced copyright to past materials which are now quite highly sought after, money is certainly to be made from libraries, by republishing it ourselves, but most importantly by preventing others from disseminating it. This will become very pressing as the growing trend towards the publication of readers and electronic materials gathers momentum. There are many publishers out there trying for a fast buck by putting together collections and by putting classic works onto computers. There would be a strong but in my opinion shortsighted case for the CSE going with the flow. The CSE could itself make money, and has done so, by reissuing classic texts (which is unobjectionable) but to protect its 'investment' might have to take action to stop others doing so. Moreover, even if the CSE would be appalled by such a prospect, it may have it done on its behalf. There are a growing number of umbrella arrangements and bodies such as the Copyright Licencing Authority who seek to enforce copyright laws by vigorously acting against people who republish copyright material. It is becoming increasingly difficult to issue quite innocent collections of materials for students because they violate CLA guidelines, and university authorities are starting to take action to stop lecturers inadvertently putting the University in legal danger, explicitly stopping them producing readers, copied collections, electronically disseminated reprints, and so on. In time this may even spread to library lending itself, particularly if the libraries, as would be the obvious thing, start to put materials onto computer systems to enhance student access to them. The situation at present is in fact this: if a library takes the very socially progressive step of putting its entire stock onto computer (or even a part of it) and making it freely available to the public, it would be in breach of the law and would be stopped from doing so, even if the University's own auditors did not step in to prevent such a frivolous abuse of the University's 'intellectual assets'. One wonders why the title 'University' is still employed. 'Microversity' might be more appropriate. In the field of software there is a strong and thriving movement which is looking for alternatives to these developments and I want to make a case for extending their principles to literature. The Shareware movement has successfully placed excellent material in the reach of everyperson on the principle that you pay after evaluation, and in some cases pay if you can afford, pay what you want, etc. This provides a useful income and reward for labour to the originator of the software without giving away the rights to corporate ripoff. Interestingly enough it also puts the direct consumer in an immediate relation with the direct producer. This extremely important movement is one of the main reasons why software is not a lot more expensive than it is. The Free Software Federation has consciously organised to make sure that, for example, Unix software of equivalent standard to commercially-available material can be had by anyone who wants it for a fee that properly covers the reasonable costs of administration. The very success of the Internet, which is at present permeated by the practice of freely available services and the free exchange of information, is a startling demonstration of the power of such principles in action. The Internet is unequestionably the largest community of electronic information sharers, and does not even have a mechanism for charging people. We should also note that the 'paid' information services provided on Compuserve or Prestel are subscribed to by a small corporate minority and it is the free services which are most widely used. In fact without the solid basis in free (or fixed-rate rental) use, Compuserve would be unable to attract any custom worth speaking of in terms of numbers of users. The FSF have been developing a series of guidelines for promoting these principles. The point is that it is not sufficient just to renounce copyright. If you decline to take copyright in your own work, someone else can do so, and will do so, in order (a) to make a lot of money (b) deprive the community of large of access to your work so as to raise the fees they can charge. Many of the most successful pieces of software started in just this way; effectively, the theft of a public idea through its privatisation via the law of copyright. FSF have developed a principle they call 'copyleft' which means that authors take out copyright in their works, but under conditions that guarantee free dissemination. Effectively you have take out personal copyright in order to prevent it being stolen from the community. I think that CSE and Capital and Class in paticular, needs to work out a similar formulation for its published works. Just as the Internet is 'commercially' successful, that is it has the largest number of users, anyone who successfully establishes free or lowcost dissemination of their published material will find, I think, that they reach a much larger number of people. This is proved by the success of Capital and Class itself. The low subscription rate is an extremely important moral asset. Not only is it possible to get a large base of individual subscribers, it encourages an important loyalty. People feel, and I think by and large they are right, that they are not being ripped off by Capital and Class. The trend of publication, I think, is going to be that the cost of obtaining copyright material will rise substantially above its real costs of reproduction. The name of the game will be to establish watertight copyright in printed or electronic material in order to raise its price above its real cost of reproduction. Alongside with this will obviously come legal and criminal penalties against violators, a culture which protects intellectual property, and so on. These social relations, I would hazard, will conflict with the realities of the forces of production. As long as it is actually physically possible to reproduce knowledge for low cost - and this is the trend of technology - I suspect there will be a continual tendency for society to reproduce knowledge for its real cost rather than the cost of financing the legal owners of knowledge. This is an important contradiction. The trend in the technology of information has been for high entry costs caused by the economies of scale of large-scale production. The ultimate development is television, a megamillion-pound industry under almost total corporate control, a one-way medium with a captive audience equal to nearly the whole population. Networked information systems buck this trend. If the technology is a public good, then the only obstacles to public access are specific social institutions directed against it: intellectual property rights and the criminalisation of violators. We can hypothesise a constant tendency for the technology to subvert the social relations, reversing the trend in information systems in the last century. My view is that CSE should consciously endorse this. We should make a practice of providing good quality, accessible educational material; the intellectual equivalent of shareware. We should make a principle of disseminating at low cost. This may indeed make socialist material, for the first time since the advent of television, available more cheaply than antisocialist material. At the same time as we undercut the neoclassicals, we can disseminate the alternative. I think that the FSF shows that in order for this to happen it has to be helped. I propose that the CSE should make it a public fact, part of the editorial statement of Capital and Class and part of the constitution of the CSE, that it defends the right of public access to its printed materials, that it will seek to make this available at costs corresponding only to the reasonable costs of administration, and that it will take action to defend this access. How could this be done? I think we need a copyright agreement, which contributors to Capital and Class should be obliged to sign as a condition of publication. This should 1. assert the author's copyright over the work 2. grant the right to republish the work to the public at large, provided only that the views of the author are not misrepresented or distorted by omission or juxtaposition. 3. deny in perpetuity the right of any other body, corporate or private, to assert exclusive intellectual property over the work and restrict its dissemination. I have no idea what the precise legal form of this agreement should be; that is a matter for lawyers. But I am confident it is not beyond the ingenuity of that able profession to draw it up. Alan Freeman 24/6/94
