User:Federico/Licensing

Creating Licenses with Aymeric

Aymeric's lectures about licenses + notes from two chapter of his PhD thesis

Intro

"The idea of copyleft is basic to the natural propagation of digital information among humans in a society"

• The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
• The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Reading PhD's thesis of Aymeric.

In Search of Pluralism

About the link between free software (and open source) and its expansion into other forms of cultural production (pp. 76-91)

• The word "free" refers to freedom, not price: Any individual has the freedo of copying, distribuiting and modifying * for personal, noncommercial purpose
• Copyright not very useful to the digital interworked realm
• From 1998 people from every field started to write their own license
  • Different understandings of what freedom and openness mean in the context of culture and knoweldge
  • Licenses as expressive tools to empower and materialise various ideology
    • 'BUT' this proliferation is not necessarily a positive semantic disorder. Every licenses seem to connect theirself under the same umbrella but they have distinctive fts and attitudes on the understanding of the free/open software template

• Metaphor with liberalism?
  • but the proliferation of licenses is not driven for competition but for an emergence of identity politics!
  • but democratic system depends on the multiplication of discourse
  • multi attempts to protect cultural freedom and openness as a whole.

• What about the legality of these licenses?
  • Here arrives CreativeCommons: more generic approach to openness in culture
  • CC embraces the strategy of economics by providing a collection of licences to fit every purpose
  • Cascading, license's communities which did not embrace CC started to aggregate theirselves

Proto free culture definitions

Four kinds of free knowledge by Pena-Lopez

1. The freedom to use the knowledge, for any purpose (freedom 0).
2. The freedom to study how the knowledge applies, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source information is a precondition for this.
3. The freedom to redistribute knowledge so you can help your neighbour (freedom 2).
4. The freedom to improve the knowledge, and release your im- provements to the public, so that the whole community bene- fits (freedom 3). Access to the source information is a precon- dition for this.

The Open Knowledge Definition (three meanings of open: legally socially technologically open)

1. Access
2. Redistribution
3. Re-Use
4. Absence of Technological Restriction
5. Attribution
6. Integrity
7. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups 8. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor 9. Distribution of License
8. License Must Not Be Specific to a Package
9. License Must Not Restrict the Distribution of Other Works

4Rs Framework Willey's distinction between rework and remix

1. Reuse – Use the work verbatim, just exactly as you found it
2. Revise – Alter or transform the work so that it better meets your needs
3. Remix – Combine the (verbatim or altered) work with other works to better meet your needs
4. Redistribute – Share the verbatim work, the reworked work, or the remixed work with others

• Moral --> different readings of the free software template are possible.
• But --> "As the concept spreads so we are seeing of proliferation of licences and a potential blurring of what is open and what is not": Important to preserve compability

We assume that the Free Software template is a model for large-scale productive social relation where generous collaboration take place and not just a more effective and liberal form of efficient production and sharing:

RELATIONS > PRODUCTIONS

Critical appropriation of technologies + Subvertion of hegemony

• Copyleft, DIY, consensus-based decision-making and free-open source software
• breakin down barriers between producer and consumer is an example of collective intelligence
• changes in aesthetic, economic and social paradigms

"...the role of free and open source software in forging a culture that goes beyond software and exist outside of the “economical time of unlimited profit”; where new ways of learning, creating, and participating, offer an alternative to a dominant productive model of time. [...] free culture was therefore more than a chaotic collection of definitions and licenses, it was also the concrete manifestation of different ideas about society, structured and grounded by the free software template." <== :)

From Techno-Legal Templates to Sandbox Culture

About the problematics/limits of unrestricted sharing, remix, appropriation, etc (pp.285-297)

• Free software is a model to develop free culture:
  • Innovation is central in this discourse
• Remix has been increasingly used to demonstrate the power of combinational practice
  • is not a poor practice per se, that solely exemplifies the failure of artists to change the productive apparatus
  • Change modalities, not content: Ecological choice
  • Remix as appropiation of a certain medium and instruments
  • Also be a framework to analyse the semantics of political discourse
  • Remix as a folk political tool <-- But then, commodification arrived?
    • For example 1800+- Paris: folk songs used as a vector to memorise and spread commentary and critiques on pubblic affairs: original lyrics replaced by critical texts
• From entertainment to political communication network! Other necessities
• Remix as a cultural glue instead of a movement/something framed

Remix and free culture relate to each other in file-sharing culture

Read Only vs Read-Write file system permission?

• With the internet + P2P filesharing > increased democratization of practices > used to accelerate the spread of new ideas
• CC used remix as

1. inspiration
2. shortcut to communicate about licensing changes
3. to show potentiality

• Bourriaud, 2002, fuck new, what can we do with what we have?
  • Artists as remixers
  • consumption and production of informations are no longer so separate
  • Ecology again, extractive datas issue
  • Artists as seminauts
    • produce endless narratives and journeys within informations
    • Artist as comunicator? yes

Remix as creative mechanism VS remix as a controlled environment

/// Issues on Dub Reggae culture and industry: precarious conditions of musician and copyrights... /// Public domain derived corporation +-

Free circulation and transformation of informations cannot be directly linked to an egalitarian participation in a liberated productive apparatus Ignoring the aspect of political economy in relation to these practices

• OCIO: "According to Veal, the whole versioning process can therefore be sensed as a direct result of capitalist influence in the making of music, that turns folkloric practices into a calculated economic strategy based on a complex and possibly endless archaeology."
  • Hegemony eats folk.
• who infrings copyright remixing stuff is often potrayed as a kind of hero?
• but also who prevent the free circulation of information are sustematically impersonated as evil entities
  • Ressentiment, hostility from free culture supporters

"The author-centered regime of the information society that Boyle had warned against35 is therefore not resolved in free culture but only displaced. How such information comes into existence, what kind of technological, social, and political frameworks permit its access, what networks of software it requires or gives rise to, its wider aesthetic inherences and affordances.

• It should also become clear how such frameworks influence the groups that inhabit the structures formed by these templates.

1. who owns the file?
2. Where is it located?
3. Why can it be accessed?
4. Who benefits from reading from or writing to it?
5. Full permissions over a small element of a system does not imply complete control over the latter.