Anticopyright

The following article was written by Charles Johnson and published on his Rad Geek People’s Daily, February 6th, 2013.

All of the original work on this website is free content. It’s free content because I am against copyright, and indeed all forms of so-called intellectual property. Copying is not theft, and when you reprint, duplicate or imitate you don’t deprive anyone of the work or the ideas that they had. If you like it, or you’re interested by it, or you want to single it out for mockery, you can feature it on your web page, you can print it in your newsletter, you can hang a copy on a bar wall and throw darts at it. If you do any of that, I’d love to hear about what you’re doing, but you don’t need to ask permission. Copy, reprint, translate, make derivative works as you please. If you want to support the work, you can do that. But anyone found copying the content on these pages without permission, will be a real good friend of mine.

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Several years ago, when I first put this website together, I dealt with these issues by means of copylefting notices and policy statements intended to make my writing freely available through a Creative Commons license. If you want to reprint this stuff under a Creative Commons license, you can still do that, all you want. But I don’t care anymore. It’s not enough to try to kludge the legalities of copy-monopolies from within. So-called intellectual property is in fact nothing more than a legally fabricated monopoly, suppressing competition and emulation, constraining creativity, confining culture, science and technology to captive, capitalist-dominated markets, and violently depriving many of the poorest and most marginalized from access to critical resources for education and life-saving medicines. The legal fictions of copyright and patent are despotic attempts to monopolize the human mind; power-psychotic burdens crippling and destroying individual ownership and the progress of grassroots culture and technologies; outrageous constraints on human intelligence and creativity; and a destructive and desperate protectionist scheme for the profit of powerful corporations. This web project is, in spirit and in letter, at war with every aspect of Intellectual Protectionism, in its principles — of monopolizing power, entitlement, social control and economic privilege — and in its operation — through increasingly invasive government policing and legal coercion — and in the disastrous global effects of patent and copyright restrictions.

This machine kills intellectual monopolists.

“Anticopyright” on C4SS Media.