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I'm with him right the way except where he dis's CC-NC-SA. Surely if someone from the copyfarleft community works on the project then they too will be releasing it free and so how is the work not endogenic. CC-NC-SA simply puts up a wall, that PD does not, to prevent exploitation from outside the sharealike community (to coin a term).

I can see that without [intellectual] property if we wish to enjoy artistic works we must establish a way of paying artists; the question is will we do any better than copyright?

It is only really the long terms [monopoly periods] that stop copyright from performing its duty to aid movement of creative works into the public domain AND allow ample time for artists to gain reward from that work.

Oh yeah and viva la revolution comrades.



Hi, thanks for the comments. For example take the book 54 by Wu Ming, released under a NC license, because it is NC this prevents both Random House and the local Anarchist bookshop from havin free terms, Copyfarleft allows the bookshop to have free terms, but not Random House. That way the bookshop could independenlt manufacture and sell copyfarleft material without any violation, but Random House would need to negotiate a licence with the authors, exactly as they did for 54.


The Anarchist Bookshop can produce it, just not commercially, in copyright law commercial damage can be made by giving stuff away for free but I've always assumed in CC that commercial means anything above material costs.

You say the Anarchist Bookshop (I'm not sure if that's a real example?) could then sell the work, why, why should they sell it I thought this was about removing rental costs on intellectual items. What's your criterion for allowing a reseller to make profit, political persuasion?

Now I'm confused.


Material costs, like all prices must include rent, interest and wages. CC removes rent only on the IP, not on the location the store is in, for example, which still must be included in the final consumer price. Manufacturing books and selling them is commercial activity even when undertaken by an anarchist book shop. The anarchist book shop, presumably works collectively and thus has no external shareholders, and therefore can only have income, not profit. The point of copyfarleft is to prevent value derive from free terms from being captured by non-producing capital owners.


First up don't say "The anarchistic book shop" (definite article) when you mean "An anarchistic bookshop", ie a hypothetical bookshop which from your description appears to be a worker owned co-op.

I get where you're at now (I think), you want to allow the commercial use provided that the business, eg a co-op, isn't providing profit to external agents only to owners or workers in the form of wages. That's still commercial. It's not greatly different if a family owned bookshop make millions off liberalised copyright works versus a publically owned company making millions split amongst it's shareholders. In fact in some ways it's worse.

The only way to keep your model and not have this sort of scenario would be to specify the allowed wages, but then if the same people own the building they can put the rent up - the company doesn't make a profit as their rent eats up all excess monies which goes to the same peoples bank accounts at the end of the day.

I like the spirit of what you appear to be suggesting but in practice it seems entirely unworkable as a system unless all members of society agree not to abuse it. Most systems would work under those terms IMO.




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