permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>]

The copyright issue has created pretty heated discussion on a couple of
earlier occasions on this list and on alt.permculture (we should get my
300-years distant relative Dan Hemenway in here to make it even more heated;
he's knowledgeable and has strong feelings about copyright).

Akiva wrote:

> Copyright is a legal construct used to protect intellectual property for the
> purpose of commerce.

It does that, plus something at least as important. The goals of copyright
legislation are to "stimulate the creation and public dissemination of works
and to give their authors a generous reward for their contributions to
society." (Encyc. Brit.) So copyright is designed to promote the creation of
original works by granting the authors a virtual monopoly over their
distribution. The relevance here is, why should Mollison have worked so hard
to collect and organize the body of ideas called permaculture without some
protection from having others appropriate it, rename it, or degrade it?
Copyright, in theory, fosters creativity by forcing others to create and
market their own works rather than pirate that of others, and this is
Mollison's specific complaint--others are not being creative, just lifting
his words and Andrew Jeeves' illustrations.

The confusing point is that while the name "permaculture," the text of
Bill's books, and the pattern of organization known as the PDC curriculum
are copyrighted, the information within them is not. Hence the angry cries
of "how can he claim all these ideas are his property?" are a
misunderstanding. Not the ideas, but their organization into a coherent
supra-disciplinary system. And I'm sure lawyers could keep busy for years
over just how different something like ecological design has to be not to be
considered infringement.

I'd like to point out another source of confusion so that we can tease apart
the issues. Bill cites virtually no references in his Pc books, so we never
know if he's using an original description of someone else's ideas, his own
ideas, or even copying the works of others. He does cite a few references,
thus we mistakenly think he's pointing out the few times he uses others'
ideas. So in part he's created his own mess by not providing attributions
for the astounding body of knowledge he's accumulated (which would be a
Herculean task, so I don't blame him, but technically he should have).
Readers (and lawyers and scientists) usually assume that if a writer doesn't
attribute to someone else what he's written, or if that idea isn't utterly
common knowledge, it's an original idea. Yet this is clearly not the case
with Bill's work. He, of course, would never claim that all the ideas in the
Manual are his, but to the uninformed, that's the logical assumption.
There's no way to know if Bill conceived of, or believes he conceived of,
swales or Zone and Sector or the various principles, or all the other
new-to-us ideas he presents. So we assume he created them, and then we cry
"ripoff" when we find he didn't. This anger is understandable, but based on
a mistaken assumption. And some people figure, hey, he took all this stuff
from other people, I can take it from him and rearrange it anyway I want. So
the mess, aside from copyright, is partially of Bill's own making. It's our
job to sort through it and use the work with integrity.

Toby