why i use the unlicense

i don't know that much about copyright law ; this post is more of a philosophical exploration of intellectual property . it's also not a comprehensive argument , as there are quite a few reasons i dislike intellectual property that aren't mentioned here .

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 , and 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 , and relies on the distributed violence of the state to enforce all of this , what’s the alternative ?

copyleft and copyfarleft

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

but if you have 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 you could oppose harmful usage of your work through other channels ?

some people claim that once you've given up your intellectual property , you "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 and get punished by the legal system .

anecdotally , trying to make sense of the rules for using copyleft software ( which is an instance of trying to navigate the legal system ) was very difficult and 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 , and 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" .