Certainly, copyright law as currently constituted works primarily to
advance the interests of capital, not the interests of those who create
works of art and literature. But we should not lose sight of the need to
protect, but more importantly respect, the rights of those who produce
those works. Taking someone else’s ideas and work and presenting them
as your own is quite simply plagiarism. Unfortunately, far too many
anarchists today have lost sight of the most fundamental ethical
foundations of the movement, respect for labor. Many are busy
downloading work others produced and reproducing that work on their own
websites without attribution, giving the appearance that it is they who
have put thousands of hours of labor into digitizing the work. Ah yes,
but it is to advance anarchism! What good is the advance if you lose sight
of the core ethical argument that brought the movement into history?
Thus, there is still the need, not for a law of copyright, but for an
ethic of copyright.
Dana Ward is the creator of the well-known Anarchy Archives