Last year, the Trotskyist online newspaper World Socialist Web Site, or WSWS (no relation to us and the World Socialist Movement), published a press release and an open letter to the Madrid based magazine Amanecer del Nuevo Siglo accusing them of translating and reprinting WSWS articles without their permission [10,8]. The charge was compounded by the allegation that the Spanish magazine had deliberately misrepresented the source of the articles either by attributing them to their own editorial staff and writers or by removing the byline altogether.
The WSWS staff was understandably surprised and upset at this unsanctioned reproduction, but more surprising still were the threats and capitalist tinged language contained in their accusations. Terms such as “piracy” and “stealing” were used to describe the actions of the Amanecer, implying that the unauthorized copying of political literature is the equivalent attacking a ship, looting its cargo, and kidnapping or killing the people onboard. The WSWS claims its articles enjoy special status as “protected literary works”, as if to imply that copyright laws exist to prevent their articles from destruction or damage by malicious third parties.
While the SPC does not condone the Amanecer’s actions, it is clear from the WSWS’s reaction to this incident that their brand of politics has little in common with the Socialism we advocate. Not only is their conception of copyright and so-called “intellectual property” inconsistent with a Socialist viewpoint, it is also largely unsupported by the current legal systems of the US (whence the WSWS operates), Spain, and other countries. In short, the WSWS has a far more narrowly construed and materialistic view of its “property rights” than even capitalist copyright law affords.
The monopoly of information in nascent capitalism
Before examining this issue further, however, it is helpful to review a few basic concepts about copyright and its history in the Common Law world. Since the very invention of writing, the copying of literary works had traditionally been a painstakingly slow process performed manually by trained scribes. Almost all literature was commissioned or issued by the Church or the state, and nearly everyone outside the ruling and religious classes were illiterate. For these three reasons, the idea of placing restrictions on the reproduction and distribution of written information would have seemed ridiculous at the time. Indeed, there were countless benefits to the free flow of ideas — philosophers and mathematicians were free to borrow, critique, and expand upon the works of their colleagues; historians were free to compile and summarize descriptions of events recorded by others; storytellers were free to retell existing tales while adding their own embellishments. In fact, many ancient texts survive to the present day only through the liberal quotations found in the critiques and summaries of contemporary authors.
This state of affairs changed drastically with the perfection of mechanized printing in the 15th century, which opened up a whole new economic sector for printers and booksellers to exploit. The increasing availability of books led to increasing literacy among the general population, which in turn led to some output of literature that was not necessarily in line with the status quo. It is not surprising, then, that one of the first known laws instituting prohibitions on copying, Britain’s Licensing Act of 1662, was produced not to grant rights to authors but to censor works deemed objectionable by the government. The Act, whose full title is “An Act for Preventing the Frequent Abuses in Printing Seditious Treasonable and Unlicensed Books and Pamphlets and for Regulating of Printing and Printing Presses”, essentially, granted legal monopolies to printers who agreed to restrict the dissemination of political and religious ideas the state found unacceptable. Books and leaflets from unlicensed printers, including foreign imports, were completely outlawed.
As the book trade grew, printers and booksellers rose in economic clout, and the Licensing Act was superseded by the Statute of Anne (1710) which established the principle of “sole ownership” of a literary work. Initially this ownership, or copyright, rested with the author, but in order to be paid for the work the author had to assign the copyright to a publisher. The lump sum or royalties the author earned from this sale helped support his upkeep while he produced his next work. In theory, an author could copy and sell the work himself, but because few authors had the capital necessary to purchase and operate their own printing presses, the Statute was clearly biased in favor of the bourgeois publishers.
With the Industrial Revolution, capitalism quickly established itself as the dominant socioeconomic system in Europe, and with it came more rules and legislation designed to protect the profits of the established publishing houses. Foremost among these was the 1886 Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, a treaty which harmonized the recognition of copyrights among national governments. Prior to its adoption, a book published, for instance, in London, was covered by copyright only in Britain, and could be reproduced and distributed with impunity by French and German publishers. Of greater importance to the actual producers of literary works was the fact that any author was theretofore free to translate and incorporate text from foreign works into his own; he did not need to seek prior permission from the author (or more likely, from the publisher, to which copyright was almost invariably assigned). In this way ideas flowed freely across national borders with the same ease they did from writer to writer in the ancient world, allowing for the rapid development and improvement of science, philosophy, and the arts.
Recognizing that maintaining this sort of freely reproducible public pool of works was important for the synthesis of new ideas, the drafters of the Statute of Anne and the Berne Convention tried to strike a balance between the short-term profit motives of publishers and the higher goal of advancing human knowledge. They stipulated that copyright on any given work was in effect for a limited term, after which the work fell into the public domain and could be reprinted by anyone. The term specified by the Statute was fourteen years, renewable once if the author was still alive. The Berne Convention extended this to, at minimum, the lifetime of the author plus fifty years.
The Mickey Mouse Preservation Act
In practice, however, publishers realized that some of the works they owned remained potentially profitable well after the expiry of the original copyright term, and lobbied their respective governments to extend copyright terms to ever-greater lengths. For example, shortly before the copyrights on early Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and other cartoons were due to expire, Walt Disney Co. executives led an intense and highly successful lobbying campaign to the US government. Through extensive public propaganda, direct proselytizing to legislators in secret hearings, and that form of legalized bribery known as “campaign contributions”, Disney and its allies in the Motion Picture Association of America were able to secure a twenty year extension to US copyright [5].
No longer able to maintain the pretence that copyright exists simply to benefit authors (the retroactive extension affecting only works whose creators were long dead), lobbyists and legislators seeking extension upon extension resorted to outrageous claims such as that “lack of copyright protection actually restrains dissemination of the work, since publishers and other users cannot risk investing in the work unless assured of exclusive rights” [1, pp. 134–5; 2, pp. 117–18]. Of course, this claim is patently false in the majority of cases; witness the continued sales and profitability of classic public domain works from Dickens and Shakespeare all the way back to Homer and Æsop. The true issue is not the profitability of older works, but the right to concentrate that profit in the hands of a single publisher. The total sales of Mickey Mouse cartoons would be the same whether one large company or a dozen different small ones sold them. As the owner of the reproduction rights to the cartoons, however, Disney is strongly motivated to do whatever it can to preserve its income from its legal monopoly.
Information under Fire in the Digital Age
The freedom of the common people to access and use published materials suffered an even greater blow in 1998 with the passing in America of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, most of the provisions of which were later adopted by the EU and 43 other countries as the WIPO Copyright Treaty. This radical new legislation essentially gives publishers of electronic media carte blanche to rewrite the law as they see fit. The key is the infamous “anti-circumvention” clause, which states that “[n]o person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work” [4, §1201 ¶ (a); 9, §11]. This clause makes not only copying a book a crime, but even merely reading it or otherwise using it in any manner not approved by the publisher.
To recount one infamous example, in the late 1990s the Software company Adobe Systems developed a computer file format for storing and distributing books electronically, along with a program which could access these files. Along with each “e-book” in Adobe’s format was stored a series of computer readable rules specifying which actions were and were not authorized uses—for example, there might be a rule against transferring the e-book to another computer, or a rule against using a speech synthesizer to read the e-book aloud. It is important to note that neither of these uses is illegal in and of itself; there is no law stating that someone may not lend a book to a friend, or read a book aloud in private. However, Adobe’s proprietary Software for accessing these e-books would always abide by the rules encoded in the file, thus denying users the rights they would have enjoyed had the book been of the regular printed kind. When an independent programmer named Dmitry Sklyarov produced his own e-book reading Software that ignored the access restrictions, he was arrested by the FBI and charged with circumvention of the DMCA.
The benefit to the publishers of such a law may not be apparent at first, but consider the many freedoms people enjoy with printed books that with digital media can now be restricted and exploited for profit. When someone buys a printed book, they’re free to keep it as long as they wish and read it as many times as they wish. An e-book, on the other hand, might have limits on reading it more than a certain number of times, or after a certain date; if you wish to continue to access it afterwards, you need to pay. A printed book can be bought from, sold to, or traded at a used bookstore. An e-book, however, might be licensed for use only on one device, making transfer impossible. For the same reason, it might be impossible to give a used e-book to a friend or check one out from a library the way you can with a physical book. Any time someone needs to obtain a book, he or she will have to pay the full price.
All of these restrictions could also be, and in many cases already are being, implemented for other types of electronic media. Most DVD players, for example, are specially programmed to refuse to play any DVD purchased outside its regional market. This helps movie publishers and sellers maximize revenue by preventing people from mail ordering DVDs from cheaper markets. (In a case that grimly parallels that of Sklyarov, in 2000 sixteen-year-old Jon Johansen was charged under access circumvention laws when he published a simple computer program capable of playing DVDs from any region. Four years later, he was finally acquitted, but not without having accumulated nearly $30000 in legal costs [6].) In an effort partly to prevent people from copying music to their computers and partly to lock users into certain commercially produced media players, music publishers have recently begun releasing sabotaged CDs which can be played on a computer only with specially licensed Software. Those who do not have the necessary Software must fork over the cash to buy it before being able to listen to the music.
Production for use or sabotage for profit?
All these examples clearly show how, under capitalism, businesses use laws to manufacture scarcity of goods in the interests of turning a profit. Instead of allowing the public to freely reproduce and distribute venerable literary and artistic works that should belong to all of humanity, companies shackle them under restrictive copyright licenses, the contravention of which results in heavy fines and even prison sentences. Instead of distributing digital music and movies in standard, published formats which any device can understand, publishers and hardware manufacturers collude to engineer crippled discs which can be played only on certain proprietary systems, and prosecute anyone who builds a cheaper compatible player. Instead of innovation to improve existing media, businesses produce and promote digital books deliberately designed to deny readers the most basic of freedoms they enjoyed with the printed variety.
Faced with such evidence, how can anyone still believe the myth that capitalism works in the interest of the working class by providing us with useful consumer goods? With the advent of high speed computer networks such as the Internet and inexpensive home computers which can store and copy digital media with the click of a mouse, for the first time in history the working people of this world are finding themselves with access to the means of production and mass distribution of information. Those who previously enjoyed exclusive rights to these means are now scrambling to reestablish their privileged position as their sole beneficiary. They will do this even if it means stopping and even reversing the course of technological innovation. They will do this even if it means using the threat of violence (criminal penalties) to deter those who would avail themselves of said innovation.
The fact of the matter, as has been demonstrated in this article, is that the law is and has always been designed by and for the possessing classes, not for those who must work to create or earn enough money to purchase the literary and artistic works copyright ostensibly “protects”. True, copyright works in part to ensure artists are compensated for their works, but as with all other types of labor, in the vast majority of cases this remuneration is simply a pittance intended to tide the artist over while they produce their next work. Even many famous, multi-platinum selling rock stars don’t earn more than their country’s median household income [3]. The bulk of the money generated by writers and artists goes to the increasingly obsolescent and parasitic publishing and distribution companies; the artist who finds himself a millionaire is the rare exception, not the rule.
Copyright and socialism
Before we return to the story of the World Socialist Web Site, we need to point out one further tactic that capitalist publishers use to justify copyright to the public. They claim that information is a kind of property—”intellectual property”—and that unauthorized copying of information is the same as stealing. However, this comparison is deliberately misleading. Stealing is when someone walks into a library, takes a book off the shelf, and leaves without checking it out. Copyright infringement is when someone walks into a library, photocopies a book for later reading at home, and then replaces the book on the shelf. In the first case, here is one less book in the library, and the public has been deprived of the ability to use it. In the second case, the book remains in the library, and other patrons can continue to read it. Unlike with physical property, ownership of so-called intellectual property is not exclusory; like the atmosphere we breathe, information can be owned and used concurrently by any number of people. Even the legislative and judicial systems have grudgingly admitted to this, refusing to equate criminal copyright infringement with the•[7]. Nonetheless, publishers continue to propagandize to legislators and consumers that the unauthorized dissemination of information is akin to destructive crimes such as vandalism, armed robbery, and piracy on the high seas.
It is rather telling of the true motives and beliefs of le• wing organizations such as the WSWS, then, that they have no qualms about using the same misleading arguments and terminology respecting “intellectual property” as the capitalist class they purport to oppose. They nominally decry the artificial scarcity produced by capitalism’s laws while at the same time proudly espousing the property mongering ideals of the monopolistic corporations these laws were designed to benefit. We in the World Socialist Movement believe that the purpose of political literature is not to turn a profit, but to change people’s ways of thinking about government, economics, and society. We want the widest possible audience for our ideas, and in fact encourage people to copy and spread our writings to the greatest extent possible. The WSWS’s characterization of its writings as “protected literary works”, and of those who republish it as thieves and pirates, suggests that they think of political literature in quite a different sense. As is typical of Trotskyist vanguardists, they consider themselves to have a monopoly on political ideas and that the working class cannot be trusted with them. Only their official party vanguard is authorized to dispense and interpret political writings; groups who republish their texts are seen as rival sects seeking to usurp their authority as the true leaders of the working class.
In a true socialist society, however, there will be no need for leaders or owners. The means of production and distribution will be owned and controlled by the community at large. This includes not only factories and railways for the manufacture and transportation of physical goods, but also instruments for the production and dissemination of information: printing presses, film studios, the computers that drive the Internet, and the television and radio airwaves themselves. Everyone will have free access to goods and services, and society will orient its patterns of production to meet these use needs, rather than for the purpose of turning a profit, which often entails producing artificial conditions of scarcity for certain goods. We have seen in this article how the system of copyright is one of the means capitalism employs to artificially restrict a supply of goods—information—that might otherwise be plentiful. Whereas we currently have the means to produce mass digital copies of a book, film, or music album instantly and at virtually no cost, under capitalism the technology to do so has been crippled or criminalized at the behest of publishers.
While some leftwing groups, like the WSWS, hypocritically support the notion that ideas should be owned and controlled, other less authoritarian organizations like the Free Software Foundation, the Creative Commons, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation lobby governments to modify copyright laws to make information more accessible to the general public, or propose new information licensing schemes which operate on top of the existing copyright framework. Such efforts have sometimes succeeded in eroding the power of publishers’ monopolies, but they can never truly eliminate it. As long as capitalism is in place, governments will continue to institute and uphold laws to protect the profits of the publishers at the expense of withholding access to information from the working class. Only by replacing capitalism with a system of free access and common ownership will we be able to truly and finally liberate music, literature, and the arts for the benefit of all humanity.
Bibliography
1. Report 941476, United States House of Representatives Judiciary Commi•ee, 1976.
2. Report 94473, United States Senate Judiciary Commi•ee, 1976.
3. Courtney Love. Courtney Love does the math. Salon.com, 14 June 2000.
4. One Hundred Fifth Congress of the United States of America. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, October 1998.
5. One Hundred Fifth Congress of the United States of America. Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, October 1998.
6. Associated Press. ‘DVD Jon’ wants authorities to cover legal costs. Washington Post, 27 January 2004.
7. Richard G. Stearns. Memorandum of decision and order on defendant’s motion to dismiss. In United States of America v. David LaMacchia, Criminal Action No. 9410092RGS. United States District Court, District of Massachusetts, 28 December 1994.
8. Bill Vann. WSWS letter to Spanish website. World Socialist Web Site, 7 January 2004.
9. WIPO. The WIPO Internet treaties. WIPO Publication L450IN/E, World Intellectual Property Organization, Geneva, 2000.
10. WSWS Editorial Board. Spanish magazine/web site engaged in theft of WSWS material. World Socialist Web Site, 7 January 2004.
—Tristan Miller
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