It may seem a stretch at first to talk about copyright in the context of social justice: and thus equating it with human rights, peace, environmentalism, and other important realms.

It turns out, however, that the issues behind copyright, and the emerging “copyleft” movement can deeply affect all realms of social justice in some way.

First, let’s understand what “open source” means.

The open source movement has its roots in the concept of the public domain. As is explored in the 2009 Film RiP: A Remix Manifesto, copyright has its roots in Western History, in particular during times in Europe when artists had no protections under common law.

In Shakespeare’s time, as an example, actors in his theatrical productions were only given scripts with one character’s lines. Very few full scripts were ever copied, as there was no legal framework stopping another playwright (or anyone) from taking a script of Hamlet, setting up shop in another city, and putting on a production and passing it off entirely as an original work without any credit or “royalties” paid to the original author.

The new copyright laws, introduced in 1710 in Britain as the Statute of St. Anne established two different realms of intellectual property: copyrighted material, and public domain. It began as a very short timeframe in which an artist had all rights to their property – 14 years. After this time, the work would pass into the public domain for anyone to make money from.

Obviously, this has changed quite a bit over time.

Today, depending on the country one produces works in, copyright lasts anywhere from 50 years, to 90 years, to a specified number of years after the death of the creator.

In the early 1980s, a new realm of copyright began to be explored. After years of computer hobbyists sharing programming code between each other freely and openly with no real established rules or guidelines, Microsoft emerged with Bill Gates’ “MS-DOS”, based on code licensed from a Seattle software company. This code became mainstream in the computer realm at the time, and created a separation between two different camps of software programmers: those who shared their code, and those who licensed and sold it.

Those who shared were known as the “open source” movement. They developed a legal license, known as the GNU public license. This license allows anyone to use the code of a program, and even make alterations, as long as the code never becomes “closed”. Basically, the license must follow along all descendents of the original work.

So we have three realms: public domain: where the artistic work is free and anyone can do anything including commercial use, open source: where everything is shared, and the only limit is the inability to financially gain from the sale or licensing of derivative works, or copyrighted: where the author has certain legal protections under the law from others gaining monetarily from the work.

Human Rights

Until recently, it would be considered a bit strange to consider copyright issues to be comparable with human rights. But with the development of genetic research, and the increasing corporate interests in property, some copyrights have become human rights issues.

Most notably, the copyrighting of the human genomic sequence, and certain retro-viral serums patented by medical corporations. Recently, Brazil become one of the first countries to make null and void any patents on AIDS retro-viral serums. Currently many other governments and medical corporations are paying residual royalties for each serum made, allowing the patent owners to capitalize on the spread of the AIDS virus.

Now that copyright has moved into the realm of scientific discoveries and processes, it has become an issue of great concern who might own current and future treatments for ailments such as cancer, AIDS, influenza, and countless others. If a medical research company is given publically raised funds for research, do they own the intellectual rights, or should they become public domain?

Current Affairs

This debate is going on right now. As of this writing, the ACLU is in court against Myriad Genetics, a medical research corporation which is claiming ownership over two gene mutations thought to be responsible for breast and ovarian cancer. Should the ACLU lose this case, any researcher wanting to investigate or perform tests on these mutated genes would need permission of the Myriad corporation to do so. This prevents patients from getting second opinions, and the advancement of cancer research.

Further Thoughts and Explorations

For an in-depth look at the confusing realm of modern copyright laws, with a focus mainly on music, take a look at RiP: A Remix Manifesto, an “open source film” available for free online.