A while back, I wrote a few posts in regards to the Pirate Party, BitTorrent, the Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman, and the divide in understanding between the hacker culture and the P2P file-sharing culture. Thinking about the issue since then, I’ve thought about whether Stallman, Perens and the FSF are the standout representatives of the "first-wave copyleft", which relied upon licensing "hacks", programming know-how and a self-sufficiency sustained by autonomous collaboration, while TPB, the Pirate Party, and the file-sharing networks, trackers, search engines and clients are representative of the "second-wave copyleft", which is less self-sufficient, less fond of licenses, more reliant upon the assumption of the ubiquity of the Internet and the availability of the media which can be copy-distributed to every Internet-capable device, but much more visibly and explicitly challenging to the very nature of intellectual property licenses and structures.
What the second-wave copyleft, a movement which questions the very need for licenses, is seeking to accomplish (the softening of IP restrictiveness) may have a secondary impact upon most free culture licenses, since they also rely upon the same or similar levels of enforcement as the most restrictive EULAs. At least, that’s what Stallman wrote in an Op-Ed not long after the PP took its seat(s) in the European Parliament.
But, in the present, we have two sharp slopes of intellectual property regime which rely upon the same muscle of legal enforcement: the free/open source and the proprietary/closed source. If the PP (and, I assume, the entire second-wave) wants to reform or soften the underlying legal enforcement (and the longevity of such licenses), then it also means that the two slopes of IP conception will be lessened in their heights. But the main fear of the first-wave copyleft, which is currently dependent upon the more liberal of those two slopes of IP conception, is that the softening of the underbelly will result in a much more frenetic and frenzied re-proprietization of source code, production material and "innovative" mechanisms by those who desire a more restrictive regime for whatever convergence that they have managed to construct. It may be possible to gain a "default" licensing scheme whereby those who do seek to proprietarize source code are doing so on a commons-based "short leash" that doesn’t prevent the same source code from being copied and modified by others, including competing proprietors, but no one from the Swedish PP has commented on such a possibility (as far as I’ve heard).
Anyway, I contend that both the first-wave and second-wave are part of a continuum towards the liberalization of intellectual property regimes for commons-based purposes and are far from being competing ideologies or ideological wings.
