Repudiate Copyright Monopoly

I repudiate copyright. I have no desire to take part in the equivalent of legal mind control, private property destruction and the trampling of one person’s right to perform any action they want as long as they don’t violate the physical property of another person. I see no reason to protect the monopoly of copyright, and I think it is one of the worst provisions that the law covers.

The basic design of copyright is to restrict how another person thinks and how that person uses their own capital. Capital includes their body, their land, their mind, their tools and the resources that they have bought or created. Capital is your land and your home, your car and your body. Capital can mean your guitar or your computer and keyboard. It can mean your chainsaw or your fertilizer. It can mean your CD-burner or your printer, too.

Capital is not your thoughts and capital is not the sound or the image or the words that are produced from some machine you own, not even your voice. Once you speak a word and it hits the atmosphere and vibrates it so that I can hear that word, I see no reason to believe that those words are now yours. You shared them with the world, and the world should be free to vibrate their own voice chords to create the same word, or groups of words, if they want to use their time in this fashion.

Copyright basically tells the world that they can not use their vocal chords or fingers on a guitar or fingers on a keyboard in the way that they want to. Copyright forces people to not produce actions that might coincide with the actions of someone else. Can you honestly believe that you can control the actions of another person?

Copyright as a legal creation has existed for less than 300 years — starting in 1710 with the British Statute of Anne. Since the creation of copyright monopolization, we’ve seen the creation of massive media cartels whose sole purpose is to try to create a restriction on the growth of a commodity — information. Because information has become easier and easier to duplicate, the cartels have fought harder and harder to make it a crime to duplicate information, even if you’re only using your own time, body and capital to do so. Through this cartelization that controls the monopoly, we see criminals made of people who are hurting no one’s physical property or bodies. We’re seeing entire legal wars fought over the control of the cartels, and I do believe that in my lifetime, the war over information will be lost by the cartels. I am fighting this war through a moral obligation — without weapons, without armies and without the law. I am fighting this war by starting a movement to repudiate copyright, but still find ways to profit from the act of creation and production of a creative commodity.

This website will be dedicated to 5 ideals:

1. Find ways to profit from the creation of information — without using the law to do so.
2. Find reasons why copyright is immoral and impossible to legislate.
3. Finance the creations of others who are willing to repudiate copyright — musicians, bloggers, artists, and other creative artists.
4. Find new ways to administer a cache of creative works so that the original creator of the art can show that they were the first to come across that work, and find ways to penalize copying through embarassment and acknowledgement of the copying.
5. Promote the immorality of copying content without acknowledging the original creator, and promote the reason why we shouldn’t copy. Realize that the law is not the best way to police copying.

Discuss this article at the No Copyright Studios forum.