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Revision as of 12:02, 2 May 2003 by Alex756 (talk | contribs) (added some discourse on underlying policy against copyright)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)The term Anti-copyright describes both the opposition to copyright law and specific statements that are added to works in order to encourage wide distribution.
Anti-copyright notices
Such statements are legally required because, under the Berne Convention in international copyright law, works are protected even if no copyright statement is attached to them. However, "anti-copyright" statements typically do not take the form of either sophisticated open content licenses or a simple dedication to the public domain; instead, they usually just encourage wide distribution. It is possible to denounce all claims to copyright in a work including moral rights in a written disclaimer.
An example of an anti-copyright notice is the following: :Anti-Copyright! Reprint freely, in any manner desired, even without naming the source. Where such notices are attached depends highly on the type of work. They are often found in anarchist magazines and books.
A copyright waiver might state the following: The author of this work hereby waives all claim of copyright (economic and moral) in this work and immediately places it in the public domain; it may be used, distorted or destroyed in any manner whatsoever without further attribution or notice to the creator.
Most people would regard "anti-copyright" notices as being equivalent to a dedication of material into the public domain (as in the second example above). Some of these disclaimers, however, are less accurate and need to be interpreted individually as the term anti-copyright has no accepted legal meaning. For example, if just free distribution is encouraged, modification or lack of atribution is still illegal, making the material ineligible for collaborative writing projects like Misplaced Pages. In such a case anti-copyright is not a true denial of copyright, but just a modification of the protection it affords copyright holders.
Anti-copyright movement
The opposition to copyright law per se is not strictly limited to anarchists. The term "infoanarchism" was coined in recent years (starting with a July 2000 TIME Magazine article about Ian Clarke called "The Infoanarchist") to describe specific opposition to intellectual property, often including patents. The classic argument for intellectual property is that protection of author and creator's rights encourages further creative work by giving the creator a source of income. Those against copyright suggest that income to a creator must be generated by ancilliary means because the link between the creator and the marketplace was long ago broken by big business and multinational corporate interests, in any case creativity is not controlled by the link between artist and audience, but between artist and corporate sponsor.
The classical anarchist perspective on anti-copyright is that ideas and knowledge should not be owned or controlled. This is perhaps best summed up in Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's slogan Property is Theft. Anarchists do not consider plagiarism and theft of other people's ideas a good thing. Anarchists and others who do so would be looked at as dishonest and untrustworthy. What is more important to anarchists is the refusal to "own" ideas and knowledge as such things are not capable of ownership, being part of the patrimony of our common heritage.