7th october 2004
creative commons
I recently came across the Creative Commons organisation. Their aim is to create copyright licenses that enable individual authors to distribute work freely under certain conditions. For example, you may write an article which you are happy for others to copy or build upon as long as it is for non-commercial purposes – what I would call ‘fair use’. The difference between a Creative Commons license and standard copyright is that your terms and conditions are explicitly laid out in an easy to follow format (see an example), as opposed to the iron-clad legalese which many people bolt onto their websites. The catchphrase of ‘some rights reserved’, rather than the usual ‘all rights reserved’, immediately suggests freedom and inclusivity, a willingness to engage in creative or academic collaboration, to share good things and use the ability of our networked world to engage culture and creation to its fullest. In short, a great scheme.
So I have put monkeyinfez, along with my other web projects, under a Creative Commons license. This replaces the copyleft principle which I previously cited. In effect this is much the same thing, except that the term copyleft arose from the open-source software movement and consequently, as the name suggests, is focussed on software rather than other intellectual property.
intellectual property – dirty terminology?
An interesting caveat of the Creative Commons idea is that it uses standard copyright law in order to create a scheme of free and fair distribution. In some ways this is far from ideal as it means we are still dealing with a system entrenched in global capitalism and all the accompanying corporate domination of intellectual property rights; examples of this include umpteen Microsoft patents such as the FAT file system and their recent, nebulous, patent of information transmission through the body, Amazon’s one-click ordering method (see James Gleick, Patently Absurd, published in What Just Happened: a chronicle from the information frontier, Abacus 2002), not to mention the ongoing hatred of peer-to-peer file sharing networks (e.g. this article).
The journal Anthropology Quarterly recently ran a series of articles entitled “Culture’s Open Sources: Software, Copyright and Cultural Critique” (themselves distributed under a creative commons license, they can be downloaded from the Anthropology Quarterly website). The article by Coombe & Herman in particular deals with this eking out of a new system within the framework of existing (and disliked, mistrusted, corporately appropriated) copyright laws. In reference to Lego’s Bionicle range, which lifted much of its mythology from the Maori and other Polynesian peoples, an internet-post defending Maori culture by Katarina is commented upon:
“It is also telling that Katarina is compelled, ultimately, to express Maori hold in the language of property immediately after disavowing that Maori hold a proprietary relation to their language and expressing the relation as one of safekeeping.”
They go on to say:
“The rhetoric of the digital commons also privileges a particular positionality with respect to cultural artefacts. Within this ecumeme [paradigm] we are, first and foremost, always individuals – independent authors and cultural creators projected (but never acknowledged) as privileged Americans with indisputable first amendment freedoms. This unfettered individual appears to adopt the same limited liability, responsibility, and accountability that his corporate nemesis traditionally assumed.”
And finish with:
“More imaginative ecumemes [paradigms/systems] with richer visions of sociality and more convivial relations between them must be envisioned and inhabitied as we move forward into new phases of digital cultural practice.”
In part I agree with this sentiment. It is easy to view the Creative Commons as bringing a new legitimacy to traditional copyright law by seeking to exist within the establishment. Consequently it seems that there could be a danger of big business taking over this new ‘some rights reserved’ system in the same way it has monopolised copyright, trademark and patent laws. However, this is a somewhat disingenuous view of the people who have actually set-up the Creative Commons framework.
In the same journal Glenn Otis Brown, executive director of Creative Commons, discusses how standard copyright has been turned into the ‘some rights reserved’ Creative Commons license via a “legal hack”. However, he also goes on to talk about how the new system is not envisaged as a strong-arm of the law, like conventional copyright, but more as a set of guidelines to fair usage which leave space for the ambiguity and cultural differences inherent in creative practice. He finishes with:
“I like to call this approach to copyright reform ‘creative civil obedience’. The idea is to build a parallel system of copyright within the current system, to use contract and copyright law and technology to build a shadow copyright system, a more balanced system that better reflects the preferences of the emerging creative culture. This world of alternative copyright can act as a haven for copyright progressives, but its significance is larger: it also serves as a draft for copyright’s future, a model for what copyright should or could look like. There has been little formal cooperation between lawyers and anthropologists in this area until now, but the more that the lawyers come to realize that the real action in the copyright debate takes place far from the courtroom, in the wilds of culture, the more they should turn to the natives of norms – anthropologists and artists – to lay plans for this new system.”
So, with that, I say good luck to the Creative Commons. It’s definitely a step in the right direction. Feel free to copy, use and enjoy my stuff, just don’t pass it off as your own – that’s just rude... and indicative of capitalist greed, hence the need for all of this in the first place instead of a purely trust-based system. (rant end).
links
a good story on european software patents from the guardian archives
those articles from anthropology quarterly
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
