“Remember the old aphorism, if you love something,
set it free? I freed the music.”
“But you didn’t! You signed rights over-“
“But you didn’t! You signed rights over-“
“But first I uploaded the entire stash to several cryptographically anonymized public network filesystems over the past few hours, so there’ll be rampant piracy. And the robot companies are all set to automagically grant any and every copyright request they receive, royalty-free, until the goons figure out how to hack them. But that’s not the point. The point is abundance. The Mafiya can’t stop it being distributed. Pam is welcome to her cut if she can figure an angle- but I bet she can’t. She still believes in classical economics, the allocation of resources under conditions of scarcity. Information doesn’t work that way. What matters is that people will be able to hear the music- instead of a Soviet central planning system. I’ve turned the network into a firewall to protect freed intellectual property.”
-Accelerando by Charles Stross, pg. 72 (Available as an ebook under Creative Commons here.)
Copyleft is the way of the future, even though I'm sure plenty of people would rather it not be. Personally, I’m perfectly glad to see alternatives to copyright, and I want to see more lenient copyright laws in the future. And, strangely, this desire stems from works published long, long ago.
Let’s look at Sherlock Holmes for a moment. There are a number of original stories that form the foundation of who Sherlock is, how he acts, and what he does. And, nowadays, those works are all in the public domain. If I wanted to write a Sherlock Holmes story, I could, and plenty of people do. By now, Sherlock Holmes has battled Moriarty in the 22nd Century, grappled with a time-travelling criminal cult in Erasing Sherlock, become a married beekeeper in the Mary Russell novels, met the Doctor and fought the alien god Azathoth in Doctor Who: All-Consuming Fire, and has had two modern-day reimagining TV shows in the 2010s alone, with Sherlock and Elementary.
Now here’s the important part: all of that is fanfiction. It’s fanfiction that people were paid to write and that other people wanted to read, or watch, or listen to. Because people have been free to keep the character alive, they’ve done more with him than Arthur Conan Doyle would ever have humanly been able to. And yet, if their stories featured a Stephen King character instead, they’d be committing a crime. (Sidenote: Now that I mention Stephen King, Roland Deschain should totally fight Professor Moriarty in the 22nd Century.)
This annoys me, chiefly, for two reasons: 1) there are tons of stories I’d like to make or see made that are based on other stories still in copyright, and 2) I’ve read some fanfiction, and speaking as someone who edited countless short stories for a year straight, there are some pieces of fanfiction that deserve novels and movie licenses, and lots of published “original” fiction that shouldn’t be touched with a barge pole.
Some people are afraid that writers and other artists aren’t going to be paid if they start using copyleft, but that’s also nonsense. We live in a world of constant torrenting and piracy, and yet the film and music industries are doing fine and the worst we have are big-name music stars crying into their golden champagne-chalices. Indie artists, the kind who have to make a living for themselves, are actually helped by how far they can spread their work. It turns out that people understand that if you want to see more music from an indie band, or the next novel in a print-on-demand series, then it’s a good idea to support the creator(s) financially.
Demanding attribution is fair, but problems like plagiarism aren’t nearly as big of an issue as some people think. It’s really easy for people to fact-check these days, and anyone who says that they made something which they actually didn’t can be caught in the lie by anyone with five free minutes and a search engine. People, being generally cool individuals, are usually willing to call people out for misattribution without the need for oppressive laws.
I also think that the editing of other work is relatively harmless, and that it can lead to new, weird creations which may have their own artistic merit. I don’t think Cleanflix is making meaningful work, and I think what they’re doing is annoying, but I support their ability to make those edits. I don’t like them, but it would be arrogant of me to say that these practices are only alright when I agree with them. It’s enough to say that I’m not going to be watching any censored-in-the-name-of-family-fun films any time soon, and their existence doesn’t really bother me.