why i use the Unlicense & CC0

• 2024-07-21
• series : 2/6 in liberatory computing : [previous] [next]
• tags : anticopyright , philosophy

introduction

i don't know that much about the specifics of copyright law ; this post is more of a philosophical exploration of the concept of "intellectual property" in general^[1] .

"intellectual property" relies on death

what would "perfect" copyright enforcement look like ? extrapolating what i see as the current system’s telos , it would look like protected "intellectual property" being physically impossible to create for everyone in the universe except for the "owner" .

every time new "intellectual property" is created , everyone else’s agency decreases by some amount . it is a system reliant on death , because if death were abolished , all of the most important expressions would get copyrighted eventually , & never expire , rendering most people born after that period unable to express much .

so , if copyright decreases everyone’s agency , uses death as a mechanism to redistribute temporal privilege , & relies on the distributed violence of the state to enforce all of this , what’s the alternative ?

copyleft & copyfarleft

efforts to use the system against itself , like copyleft & copyfarleft , are admirable in terms of what they aim to achieve . they can stop people who use one's work from restricting others as much as they would have otherwise .

but if one has the option to forgo copyright entirely , i’m not convinced that copyleft is preferable . it still relies on the copyright system in a significant way . why rely on an inefficient system that harms others , when one could oppose harmful usage of their work through other channels ?

some people claim that once one has given up their "intellectual property" , they have no "right" to oppose anyone’s usage of it . this would only make sense if the legal system were the only way to stop harm .

as an example , if somebody used a painting i made in a widely shared fascist propaganda video without permission , there are numerous reasons why this is bad that are not "they stole my 'intellectual property'" . there are also countless ways to counteract this other than to wait around for the copyright system to punish them in a way that isn’t even responding directly to what was wrong about what they did in the first place .

even copyleft causes psychic damage

another unfortunate side effect of copyleft’s strategy is that , similar to permissive licenses , even users of copyleft software that are trying their best to make their derivatives freely available have to worry about the chance that they misunderstand something & get punished by the legal system .

anecdotally , trying to make sense of the rules for using copyleft software^[2] was very difficult & stressful for me . i have a particularly low tolerance for that kind of thing , but i doubt that this is an uncommon experience more generally , at least to a lesser extent .

in contrast , i don't have those issues when i’m using public domain software , because there aren't so many rules to keep track of .

releasing work into the public domain

regarding anticopyright praxis , my current preference is to use the Unlicense for code , & CC0 for everything else .

one could also release work without a license notice at all , if they felt like their audience could trust them enough to not do anything about "infringements" .