You’re a citizen of a state or at least live in the jurisdiction of one, and the servers you operate and access points to the network you use have a physical location too. Almost all countries have a national copyright law of their own. Countries are generally able to enforce their laws, and be it only occasionally or selectively. There is no international copyright law (due to different historical and practical approaches/contexts), but most states signed the Berne Convention. Signatory states expand their local copyright law on foreigners from other participating countries as if they were domestic citizens even at the expense of the interests of their own population. In exchange, authors can expect some enforcement of their demands abroads where there otherwise would be none. Still, some trouble is caused by the misconception that there is or can be harmonized international copyright, not realizing the legislatory differences between sovereign nation states and their respective cultural heritage.

In most jurisdictions, every recorded/manifested non-trivial human expression is covered by copyright per default and all rights are exclusively reserved for the author automatically if he/she doesn’t explicitly state otherwise. When encountering a work that’s likely copyrightable and doesn’t come with an explicit license statement granting you the permissions for what you want to do with the work in question, you have to assume that you’re not legally allowed to perform these actions regardless of technically being perfectly able to. Typically, you need to obtain explicit permission from the current rightsholder for the following activities:

• get/make a copy from whatever source
• keeping your copy for as long and in whatever form you want, using it for whatever purpose indefinitely
• sending copies to other people or places (including websites for example, regardless if they make the copy publicly available for everybody or just share the work within a closed group)
• creating derived, modified works that still largely rely on the original work (including translations for example) and sending the result to other people or places

It doesn’t matter if you do it free of charge for downstream recipients, as a non-profit or for-profit operation. Furthermore, it can be very difficult or even impossible to identify/contact the rightsholder, and permission for the use you have in mind might be flat-out rejected with no reasons given. Copyright term tends to be 70 years after the death of the author, but the legislator keeps expanding the time span, so you won’t see most contemporary works ever entering into Public Domain during your lifetime, which is pretty impractical for any sort of culture and renders works under restrictive licensing virtually useless, irrelevant and non-existent.

Copyright is fairly new legislation: during the antiquities and medieval times, the concept was unknown and unrestricted copying was in fact the only way to increase chances of preservation. Just 200-300 years ago, copyright started out as a regulation of the publishing industry without affecting ordinary people, but since the advent of computers, networks and digital, it does. The print-era law wasn’t updated, it instead received outrageous expansion. Still, everybody knows of course that copyright law is largely not enforcable and therefore easy to be ignored for the following reasons:

• if not for new technology, publishers together with the legislator have a hard time to take away rights people enjoyed earlier despite they keep trying – for example, hand-copying continues to remain legal even if for commercial purposes
• for personal use with no connection/involvement of another party, neither the state nor the rightsholder have a way to learn about a violation of their copyright demands
• learning about violations, investigating them to collect evidence, catching the violator and persecuting a case requires a significant investment of time/effort/money, and if infringement is commited by a lot of people on a large scale, chances decrease for the single individual to face persecution
• opposition to and lack of understanding for immense legal complexity, aggressive conduct of rightsholders/persecutors, increasing criminalization, draconian punishment and artificial restriction of common everyday activities of an ordinary, average digital lifestyle for the sole purpose of preserving the obsolete business model of selling copies and the transactions based on it

This is widely acknowledged even by the state, publishers and rightsholders despite they don’t openly admit it. Consider

• limits to copyright that allow personal use and even sharing within narrow, confined boundaries
• the introduction of technical copy protection attempts because the law turned out to be not enforcable, and then the creation of a new law that makes it illegal to circumvent copy protection because the technical measures don’t work either, as if a law against circumvention would suddenly become enforcable
• countries adding a tax/fee on computers, storage devices and other copying machines, assuming that copying without explicit permission by the rightsholder will happen with them, billing those users too who will never engage in any such activity

Nonetheless, copyright isn’t going away any time soon, it’ll only get more strict with no hope for reform/improvement. Those who benefit from the copyright regime and the politicians who are called upon to protect the digital-ignorant business models of the existing industry plus a few confused authors who think it’s about their interests will do everything they can in order to make sure that it’ll take another several hundred years until decent digital policy can be established. As some of the players are newspapers, publishers and media companies, politicians don’t want to find themselves portrayed in the press as allegedly or actually destroying the foundations of traditional media production. Additionally, software eats the world and code is law – politicians and governments are totally dependent on it just as everybody else is.

There’s certainly some “pragmatism” towards copyright law, namely to just ignore it or accepting the risk of persecution in full awareness, but that’s not an option for everybody. Businesses, compliant institutions and law-abiding individuals can’t afford to have persecution interfere with their operations, so they have to either meet the demands of the rightsholders or entirely refrain from using the work in question. In that scenario, the real danger doesn’t come from the marginal risk of general, random copyright enforcement, but that it is available and can be used selectively as a lucrative + destructive instrument. The exposure to the risk of a single infringement, the need to defend against a claim thereof (be it a legitimate, mistaken or false/fraudulent one) or actual punishment being carried out – these can easily shut down an endeavor or cause the removal of crucial access/capabilities. While the individual citizen can remain unaware of or ignorant about problems caused by copyright or claim that it’s relatively OK for them, society as a whole, companies, organizations, groups and creators of works can not. They’re either completely dependent on whatever demands are made by the rightsholders of the works they use or else face a surprising scarcity of works that are available under a license/policy that respects the digital human rights every user deserves. It’s a sad state of affairs that prevents us from a decent, truly digital future.

There is a community of creators however who decided against making intrusive, restrictive demands as suggested by copyright law per default. Instead, they choose a copyright license for their work that grants their users a set of certain digital freedoms, enabling licensees to retain sovereignty when using their digital equipment or other information/media technology. They realized that with cheap electronic devices and the network being available, everybody is both now, a creator/producer and a user/consumer at the same time, hence rewarding solidarity and cooperation. Trying to legally, technically or socially restrict each other would only harm themselves. A libre-free license isn’t waiving copyright entirely as releasing into the Public Domain would – provisions are carefully put in place to actively protect the freedoms once they have been established, including demands on redistribution and derived works in order to make sure that each user/recipient can never be prevented from effectively exercising the rights the original creator intended to grant him/her. For the individual licensee and with selective enforcability, a libre-free license revokes/terminates itself in case it gets violated + can be reinstantiated if compliance is reached again. Another common misconception is that libre-freely licensed works cannot be used commercially. The libre-free movement isn’t opposed to business at all, but digital-compatible business models can’t be based on the exploitation of denying users the sovereign and independent use of the equipment they own.

Copyright (C) 2019 Stephan Kreutzer. This text is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License 3 + any later version and/or under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. See also the revisions (rendered) of this text.