The Revolutionary Have/Give Licensing agreement
for the 21st Century

On one side you have the dinosaurs who grew up in the industrial age. "mp3s are like a pair of shoes," they say. "If you have one without paying for it, you've stolen it."

On the other side you've got the kids who grew up in the information age. And when you try to enforce industrial age copyright laws on them, they laugh and hack your code. They say, "You want us to pay money for what we can have free when we know perfectly well the artist sees little of it and that most of it will go to guys in suits who already have more money than we will make in our entire lives? No way, dude."

The kids are right. Digital files are not like a pair of shoes. Shoes are hard to copy-- you'd have to be a shoemaker. And if one person has a pair of shoes, nobody else can have that pair. Digital files are easy to copy (Non-Excludable is the technical term). And if one person has one, no one else is denied having it, too (Non-Rivalrous is the technical term).

That's different. It just is.

It is simply and obviously not "stealing" to share a digital file in the same way it would be stealing to take a pair of shoes from a shoe store without paying. In fact, in a lot of cases, the buzz created by kids sharing files ends up benefitting the artist.

It's absurd that we have capitalist dinosaurs filing lawsuits against information age kids.

What's a mother to do?

The Revolutionary Have/Give Licensing agreement for the 21st Century:

• If you have it, it's yours. No questions asked.
• We ask you to donate any amount, if you intend to share it with others. (People, not bots-- no websites or list-serves, etc., please.)
• No enforcement. Plain and simple. End of story. No cops. No Big Brother. No law suits. We'd rather you share it without donating than not share it at all.

This is digital age stuff. It won't work for shoes any more than the shoe model works for digital files. The shoe store guy will still call a cop if you take a pair without paying for it. But we won't call a cop if you share our files.