Chris Barton: Copyleft may become the new copyright

Imagine a world without copyright - where there is no legislated right to prevent copying. A recipe for anarchy? Maybe, but that's how it was in the early 18th century and before.

The British Statute of Anne in 1710 was the first copyright act. On the face of it, the legislation was to protect the rights of authors, but in reality it was a deal to protect printers.

One way or another, that's how it's been ever since - publishers, music labels, movie studios and other business interests wresting copyright from hapless authors or artists for their own ends. Sometimes the artist or author reaps rewards, too. Bravo when they do.

But often they don't and often the rewards they get are disproportionately small compared with the promoters.

I suspect the inherent injustice, or at least the potential for injustice, in copyright law is understood by vast numbers of netizens. How else to explain the widespread copying of music and movies via the net?

Especially when the music and movie studios brand such activity as outright theft, but surveys show the majority of those doing the downloading don't really care about copyright.

It's possible to explain away this attitude as the callowness of youth. But perhaps this devil-may-care culture is just responding to mixed messages. After all, there are an awful lot of business interests working hard to make digital copying such a breeze.

Telcos all over the world are pouring billions of dollars into broadband networks to make the copying process faster. Then there's the attendant "format shifting" gear - CD and DVD burners and mp3 players - that copy music and the like from one digital gadget to another. Some of that hardware is made by companies like Sony which, on the one hand, decries copying but on the other makes the technology to do it.

We're in the midst of a technological revolution that's really upset the apple cart. The printing press is a fine piece of copying technology. But it has been well and truly usurped by the far superior copying (and distribution) technology of the internet and personal computers.

And just as unruly copying ensued in the early 18th century so, too, does it now. But today we have an added problem - trying to control runaway internet copying with printing press laws. Not that the lawyers aren't trying.

There's also a fundamental shift in power. While the printing press gave copies to the masses, the internet gives the masses copying.

On the net anyone and everyone can at once be a reader, listener, viewer and printer, publisher, producer, not to mention pornographer or pirate if they wish.

So what sort of copyright law is needed in the internet age? New ways of dealing with this most vexed of issues are evolving. One of the most interesting is Creative Commons. It owes much to the Free Software Foundation's General Public Licence (GPL) and its concept of copyleft: "The central idea of copyleft is that we give everyone permission to run the program, copy the program, modify the program, and distribute modified versions - but not permission to add restrictions of their own ... For an effective copyleft, modified versions must also be free."

The idea is difficult to take on board because it turns copyright inside out. Instead of having copyright vested by default, Creative Commons lets authors and artists permit copying under their own terms. Copy is left for others to use.

The mechanism - covering music, film, literature, photography and websites - is the attachment of custom licences using a machine-readable format.

Artists and authors may indicate things such as whether their work may be used for commercial or non-commercial purposes or just with attribution.

How enforceable or effective these new licences for creative endeavours - to be "exchanged, used and found" - will be is still to be played out.

But in the early 21st century, with copyright clearly in chaos, it's a sad indictment that our Government isn't even thinking about such measures in its review of our Copyright Act

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