>>>SHORT ANSWER:No one an owner, everyone a steward.
>>>MORE PRACTICAL ANSWER:
We hope that you feel free to take any of our songs, pictures, ideas, artwork (creative resources) and borrow them, change them, develop them further, sing them yourself, record them, use them in your indy-movie, include them in your podcast or radio show, music compilation, trade em online, eat them with almonds, do that which you see fit. We'll kiss you for it. Give us credit where you think we ought to get it (giving credit is a credible deed indeed). If you think we deserve compensation for your use of our creative resources, we probably agree with you. Thanks for being a steward of the creative commons.
>>> LONGER ANSWER:
What’s behind “Copyright?”
The “Copyright” emblem symbolizes fear: fear of people not being trustworthy, fear of not getting credit for work, fear of change (someone freely borrowing-from, or developing an idea), and fear of the businesses in the land (corporations) who could take it hostage, that is - make it their property, and then profit from it.
What’s behind “Anti-Copyright?”
The Anti-Copyright emblem symbolizes our dire need for trust. Anti-Copyright says: "If people can't be trusted to be stewards of the resource of art, how can they be trusted with resources that really matter like soil, air, and water? And if people can't be trusted with soil, air, and water - the resources that life depends on - we have much bigger problems than what happens to someone's song!"
For life to continue we have to demand that each other be stewards of the resources we hold in common, and Anti-Copyright is such a demand. The alternative is each of us receiving royalties from our carefully copy written works while we die of poisoned air, food, and water on our obscenely expensive hospital beds...
There is no "intellectual property" in nature.
Nature is the greatest Anti-Copyright artist and is our model for the Anti-Copyright philosophy. For example, Land is an Anti-Copywritten song/resource, presented free to the public for the public to use and personally adapt. It is also presented with the hope that the public will find a way to give back to the giver (Nature) so that the giver can continue to produce its artwork.
Land isn't given to individuals, but is presented in trust to the entire community of life - animals, plants, and humans - to share in common. SHAKE YOUR PEACE! similarly presents its songs in trust, contributing its work to the "creative commons," to be shared and cared for.
Just as it would be strange for someone to take a part of a SHAKE YOUR PEACE! song and say it was their "intellectual property," especially when we as the creators didn't even make such a claim, so also it's strange when we see a person take a part of the free gift of Land and mark it out as their own legal “property,” when Nature as the creator never delineated its work that way.
Saying that something's your personal or intellectual property when it was a free gift to everybody to begin with, is basically stealing from the community of life— taking the creative commons hostage. If instead of “owners of property” we could be stewards of the creative commons we’d have less individual wealth, but we’d live more wealthy lives, filled with the riches of abundant and shared art, songs, and land.
Some folks might ask here: "So are you saying that people ought to share everything and let anybody and everybody live in their house, eat from their garden, or walk away with their nice tools or instruments?" That's a good question. I think that the answer is no, it's up to everyone to decide what it means to be "a good steward" of any given thing. I don't personally think it'd be an exercise in good stewardship to let some random person walk off with the food from my garden that I was going to use to feed my family for example. On the other hand, I think they'd be justified in eating from my garden if I wasn't being a good steward of our common land, water, soil, and was taking up too much space and water for example.
In a conflict like this, where both parties are convinced the other isn't being a good steward, I suppose it comes down to negotiation - ideally through peaceful mediation with the input of the entire community, and least ideally through physical confrontation - like any mammal fighting to protect its access to food, water, soil, land, livelihood, and survival and security for its young.
In regard to violence, I'd like to note that I was raised to "turn the other cheek," which I think is a wonderful discipline to practice with people (your mom for example) who are otherwise good stewards of you most of the time and who have maybe just temporarily lost their mind (and maybe with good reason in the case of your mom :)). In the case of dealing with psychotic entities like abusive family members, friends, lovers, armies, corporations, mafias, thugs, etc. I think that "turning your cheek" would just be really bad stewardship of your cheeks, and contributing to the general disregard, abuse, and murder of vulnerable things.
Anti-Copyright aligns us with nature- Nature’s fate is our fate.
Like sitting up in a California redwood, Anti-Copyright aligns the artist’s fate with the fate of nature. How? Well for example, the values that allow society to cut down a redwood tree because 1) it's not "protected by law," and/or 2) money can be made from its desecration, are the same values that allow society to exploit and wrongly profit from un-copywritten artists. It's the same spirit of taking advantage of free-gifts and not giving back. (SHAKE YOUR PEACE! would like to point out that we don't think we're even a smidgen as cool or courageous as the folks who physically risk their lives sitting in trees - aligning their fate with nature's to that extreme). Like nature, if an artist is repeatedly stripped with no reimbursement, they will be exhausted and will be unable to continue supporting society. On the other hand if they’re nourished, they'll continue to produce.
SHAKE YOUR PEACE! views it a great honor and privilege to align ourselves in the small way that is Anti-Copyright/ Pro-Stewardship with both the redwoods and the larger community of nature that the redwoods represent, as well as the people who risk their lives and livelihoods fighting destruction with soul-force.
Anti-Copyright is a gesture of Satyagraha (satya= truth, graha=firmness).
Like Gandhi’s ferocious vulnerability, Anti-Copyright is an act of Satyagraha or as MLK Jr. called it: “soul force.” Its unwavering helplessness reminds of that which is sacred: selflessness, community, and free will.These free gifts require stewardship not enforced by laws, but by conscience.
Plagiarism and Credit
A wise high school art teacher once said: “anything can get done so long as nobody cares who gets the credit.” The great folksinger and songwriter Pete Seeger, in his book The Incompleat Folksinger says: “More thoughts on the copyright situation: there is nothing really wrong with plagiarism except the dishonest claim to have created something which was really borrowed from another. If human beings didn’t plagiarize, we would all still be living in caves.”
His dad Charles Seeger, a talented musician and folk music scholar, said: "Perhaps the Russians have done the right thing, after all, in abolishing copyright. It is well known that conscious and unconscious appropriation, borrowing, adapting, plagiarizing, and plain stealing are variously, and always have been, part and parcel of the process of artistic creation. The attempt to make sense out of copyright law reaches its limit in folk song. For here is the illustration par excellence of the Law of Plagiarism. The folk song is, by definition and, as far as we can tell, by reality, entirely a product of plagiarism."
Perhaps all the music ever written could be compared to the cookies in the family cookie jar. By taking a cookie from the jar we're not stealing (we can't steal something that belongs to us in the first place) - but it's important to recognize that we are drawing nourishment from the family's supply, and it's just good manners to thank the family member who made the cookie you're eating: thanking them and crediting them by name, telling their story, honoring their legacy, and maybe even making them a cookie in return, or washing the dishes for them or something.
SHAKE YOUR PEACE! personally strives to give credit to the artists we’ve borrowed from or who's songs we cover for this reason. If you ever need your dishes done R.L. Burnside, let us know. Thank you for the cookies, "Skinny Woman," and "Trying to Get Along!"
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