UK Indymedia | Open Source poetry

here's an excellent open source poem - originally penned by the radical Supergirly and performed at the October Hammer and Tongue poetry slam. feel free to adapt, adjust, alter, rewrite and forward forward forward..

please post any new versions below.

Steal This Poem v1.2

This poem is copyleft,
you are free to distribute it, and diffuse it
dismantle it, and abuse it
reproduce it, and improve it
and use it
for your own ends
and with your own ending

This is an open source poem
Entering the public domain
Here's the source code,
the rest remains
for you to shape, stretch and bend
add some salt and pepper if you want
share it out amongst your friends

Because I didn't write this poem, I molded it.
picked up the lines out of a skip and refolded it
as I was walking on over here,
rescued leftover ideas,
on their way to landfill,
found screwed up fragments
and found them a use.

Because, think about it
I can't tell you anything truly new.
There can only be few more new ideas to be thought through.
So should we treat them as rare commodities, high value oddities?
Probe the arctic reserves and other sensitive ecologies
for new ideas buried deep beneath the permafrost?
hunt them out of the cultures till the cultures are lost?
then suffocate them with patent protection?
No! we should re use and recycle them
Pile our public spaces high with ideas beyond anyone's imagining..

So I steal a riff here and a rhyme there,
a verse here and a line there
pass them on around the circle,
roll the words, add a joke
here go on.. have a toke,
does it get you high?
This poem is indebted to Abbie Hoffman, Gil Scott Heron, Jim Thomas and Sarah Jones,
This poem is indebted to all the words I've read and the voices I've known
This poem is a composite of intellect, yours and mine.
This poem is RIPPED OFF! every single time

Because intellectual property is theft
and piracy our only defence left against the thought police.
when no thought is new
its just rewired, refined, remastered and reproduced
The revolution will be plagiarised
The revolution will not happen if our ideas are corporatised.
So STEAL THIS POEM
Take it and use it
for your own ends
and with your own ending

This poem is copyleft,
All rights are reversed

Claire Fauset

if I spend two years writing a book, and everyone promptly photocopies it, I make no money from it. so why should I spend hours and hours on it, for people to take it for free? You wouldn't ask people in MacDonalds to work for free - why should you ask it of me?

When someone photocopies your book, you've still got your book. No theft has taken place.

This is a great poem, Claire. I woldn't wanna do anything to it, except frame it.

Song of itself
Let me sing a song for the sake of itself
That doesn't pretend to be anything else
The music is good but it won't bring world peace
But it may just help you find a release
The music won't end disparity of wealth
But it might just make you at peace with yourself

Let me sing a song that's much like myself
It doesn't pretend to be anything but itself
Let me rephrase this and give you a poem
You can add in some words and make it your own
You can place it with your favourite things on a shelf
But never forget it belongs to itself

This is an astonshingly stupid statement. I still have the book - but the value lies not in the printed page but in the arrangement of words on it. I still have the book, but I have no money for all the hours of work spent in research and the physical act of writing. Value lies not only in physical assets. But if you haven't the intelligence to realise that then the book probably wouldn't mean much to you anyway.

Sceptic is right to ask the question. Quite a lot of people have asked it already and the answer is somewhat complex and has to do with the way making software works.

Before going into that I should explain a bit more about what free software is. Free means free as in freedom, not necessarily as in beer. Free software (sometimes called open source, somewhat inaccurately) works like this:
- I write some code and copyright it.
- I grant anybody the rights to use (for any purpose), study, improve and redistribute the program on the condition that they pass these rights on to anyone who they share it with. This licence is called the GPL. See

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html for more on free software.

So back to sceptic's question why would anyone bother to do that?

If I want to solve a problem with software say for example I want my PC to be able to talk to a certain type of printer, I may have enough skill to write this program, or enough cash to pay some one to write it for me. My problem is solved. A program like a driver for a printer has little or no financial value (would you pay for it?), so there's not much point in trying to make money off it by keeping it secret. I have no reason /not/ to share the source code, and, who knows, someone out there could even add some extra functionality to it, which I could benefit from. From this perspective it's all about scratching an itch.

Now expand this to programs that you could make money from, say an operating system, or a web server. Why would you do that for free?

Well, as it turns out people have.

A student called Linus Torvalds had an itch that he wanted to scratch back in Finland in the early 90s. He wanted to be able to connect to his university's big mainframe computer with his home PC, and he wanted to learn about how to write operating systems. So he started on a project called Linux, initially just for doing that. He posted the code on the internet and released it under the GPL for people to change and improve and whatever . And they did(see the original posting

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&safe=off&th=d161e94858c4c0b9&rnum=9 ).

Linux (

http://www.linux.org/ ) is now one of the most powerful and stable operating systems on the planet, and runs much of the infrastructure of the internet. The webserver that is sending you this page is running Linux as it's operating system. Thousands of people around the world have contributed to it. Millions of people use it directly or indirectly, from students, to governments, to nasa. Similarly, the Apache webserver (

http://www.apache.org/ ) runs around 70% (cf.

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/10/01/october_2004_web_server_survey.html ) of the sites on the internet (many more than Microsoft's IIS webserver). The BIND program (

http://www.isc.org/sw/bind/ ) helps you to connect to websites by turning domain names into numerical addresses that your PC can understand, and so on and so on.

The fact that this is happening presents an extremely potent challenge to traditional capitalist economic analysts. Clearly people aren't doing all this to get paid (though there are opportunities to make money from free software). Perhaps we're actually going to have to grow out of the childish belief in the profit motive as being the sole motivation in human behaviour. Actually people quite like doing things to :
- Make the world a 'better' place
- Solve problems
- Make themselves more popular/respected by their peers.
- Express their creativity

Eric Raymond pondered all this in a book called The Cathedral and The Bazaar, although I don't agree with everything he says he writes well, and assks some important questions. You can check it out at

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/

Taking it back to the book example, I'd say perhaps some people write books just for money, but more often people write them because they love writing, or they want to have a rant, or they have something to say, or they like thinking of themselves as an author, or they like other people thinking of them as an author.

Sceptic wrote his/her comment without wanting to receive 2p or something for the contribution, and I replied without wanting exclusive world distribution rights or royalties!

Good reads on freedom and intellectual property:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/

http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/

Stallman's mainly talking about software here, but the concepts he outlines apply much more widely to other questions of intellectual property.

PS: I'd rather eat a photocopy of a McDonald's burger than the original. :)

Here's a perl version (perl is an open source programming language, that's quite good for being poetic).

You can get perl(tested on 5.8.0 on linux) from

http://www.perl.org/get.html if you want to run it.

All it does when run is print out the value of $ending. You can change this by altering the bit between the quotes in the line that reads:
my $ending="The revolution will not be analogue";

See

http://www.perlmonks.org/?node=Perl%20Poetry for other perl poetry.

Have fun ;-)

#!/usr/bin/perl
# steal_this_poem.pl: V.1.0 Perl implementation of
# "steal this poem" by Claire Fauset
# See

http://tinyurl.com/58p8e for original poem
#
# Copyright (C)2004 Charlie Harvey
#
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
# modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
# as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version
# 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be
# use_less_, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied
# warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
# PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more
# details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public
# License along with this program; if not, write to the Free
# Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330,
# Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
# Also available on line:

http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

my $poem = Poem->new("copyleft");
foreach (@your_ends) {
$you = "Free to " .
$poem->distribute() .
$poem->diffuse() .
$poem->dismantle() .
$poem->abuse() .
$poem->reproduce() .
$poem->confuse();
$poem->ending($yours);
}

open (SOURCE, "this_poem");
$public_domain=$poem;
if(exists $you[$want]) {$salt++;$pepper++;};
foreach(my @friends) {$_+=$source;};
$poem{'author'} != $me;
$poem{'moulder'} = $me;
while ($i{'walk'} 0 ? $yes : $no ;
$Poem{'indebted'} .= "Abbie Hoffman" . "Gil Scott Heron" .
"Sarah Jones";
$Poem{'indebted'} .= $me{'words_read'} . $me{'voices_heard'};
$Poem{''} .= $intellect{'composite'} .
$you{'intellect'} .
$me{'intellect'};
$RIPPED_OFF = $Poem;

$intellectual_property == $theft &&
$piracy == $us{'defend'} - $thought_police;
! $thought == $new_thought;
@it = ["rewired","refined","remastered","reproduced"];
$revolution .= "plagarised";
unless ($us{'ideas'}!="corporatised") {$revolution=0};

sub steal_this_poem() {
foreach(@your_ends) {
$you .= $poem->take() . $poem->use();
}
$poem->ending($your_ending);
}

$this_poem = Poem->new("copyleft");
$all_rights=reverse $rights;

my $ending="The revolution will not be analogue";
$poem->ending($ending);

######################################################
package Poem ;
sub new() {
my($class) = shift;
bless {},$class;
}
sub distribute(){}
sub diffuse(){}
sub dismantle(){}
sub abuse() {}
sub reproduce() {}
sub confuse(){}
sub ending() {
my ($self)=shift;
(my ($ending)=shift) ? print $ending . "\n" : 0;
}
sub take(){}

lost all the formatting. Here's a prettier version:

http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=397635

If you write a book/poem/software/whatever, you are at perfect liberty to give it away free.

Some people are not in that happy position. The 'profit motive' isn't the point - the point is getting paid for your work.

Steal This PDF - application/pdf 232K

Sceptic, you're assuming that you can only get paid for your work if you lock it up. Do you also believe that "theft" has taken place when someone borrows a book/poem/software/whatever from a public library?

It's perfectly reasonable to insist that no-one else should make money by selling copies of your work, but it's perfectly absurd to insist that you be paid every time someone shares or borrows your idea.

By the way Richard, framing it is an excellent idea. Here's a two-page PDF, with Claire's poem on page 1 and Charlie's perl on page 2.

Dear Sceptic,

I'll try to answer your "questions". Information like some other privileged goods is nonrivalrous, meaning it is not naturally scarce, unlike burger or car, for example. Property is created mainly for managing access to rivalrous goods. So why is "intellectual property" created? Because it artificially creates scarcity, and thus helps line the pockets of publishers. Read up on history, copyright was invented in England, and lobbied for bay publishers, using authors as an excuse. Authors are "cheated" out of this "property" by boilerplate contracts, that is, all but the luckiest of authors. So, "intellectual property" is not the "natural" state of things, in fact it was unheard of during most of our history.

Another point, burger chefs are not paid royalties, neither are bricklayers, why should you of I be paid such special bonuses? The very word "royalty" suggests special treatment. Why should authors be treated as kings? I am not saying we should not be paid. (I am being paid as we speak to coordinate the production of a couple of free software packages, the developers of these are also being paid.) As a matter of fact, I would rather be paid exactly as a bricklayer would, per item of labour, not per instance of use or copy of my labour. If I have already been paid to make it, let others use it as much as they can. If others can improve their work by imitating mine, I'm glad, hopefully they will let me copy them if I find their work useful. If my work is any good, then perhaps the more people use it, the more I'll be hired.

Lastly, please don't call anyone dumb when they disagree with you. If we all did that, it would not leave room for discussion.

Regards,
Jergas

The Buddha taught that generousity brings the best karma. Giving starts a flow, a movement in time and space that results at some point further along generates receiveving. Give enough and you posess true wealth, which isn't money piled in a bank but a flow of good things into and out of your life.

I run a creatives site, a non profit co-op and I have noticed time and time again that those who are most generous to others, who support, help and share their resources are the ones who have the most to say, the easist flow of ideas and words.

Maybe because writing/ creating is a form of giving and when you become practised and learn to give easily, generously... in one sense, it becomes easy in many others.

We are the inheritors of a scarcity world, where all the luxuries and many of the necessities were in short supply and being competitive was necessary for survivial.

But now people die from too much food instead of to little and IT plus the Net makes communicating on every level easy with an infinite supply of space for creativity.For writers to hold on too tightly to their words can create a blockage, a constipation of the spirit.

I respect the copyright and creativity of others and always give credits and links; but you can come to my/our site and copy what you want;poems, recipes ideas. If have to you rip me off..you are just proclaiming your own poverty.

You have written the poem. So you were the instrument for putting forth an idea. But does that poem really belong to you??? Do ideas and thoughts belong to someone??????
No. They are for everyone. It is a complement to you if you were the chosen instrument for presenting that idea. But sharing it will only widen you and not deplete you of anything!
If the discoverer of electricity would have patented it, we would be paying so many cents per unit to someone today.....

Love this poem and was wondering if it was available as mp3 or wav. Id quite like to set it to music.

Open Source poetry - Steal this poem!

Comments

bollocks

Would you eat a photocopy of a burger?

Loved it

poems and songs belong to themselves

phtoto copying burgers

free software

Freedom and intellectual property

steal_this_poem.pl V.1.0

ooops

some people still don't get it

Agreed, some people really still don't get it

On the scarcity of bollocks.

The Buddha would have loved your poem

Who's Poem is it?

Is this available as audio?

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