Open licenses session

taking a dive into free, libre and open source licenses

Pick a license from the list on this page, read/discuss for 30 minutes in groups of 2/3: Open licenses

copyright

A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives the creator of an original work, or another right holder, the exclusive and legally secured right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright

4 free software freedoms

- 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.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

licenses as legal + ideological interfaces

https://sound.constantvzw.org/Authors-of-the-future/recordings/5_Aymeric_Mansoux_Free_Only_if.wav (27 min)

Aymeric Mansoux, Free Only If

Presented during Authors of the future: Re-imagining Copyleft, a study day organised by Constant around open license practices in Brussels, September 2019.

For a deeeep dive, see also: Aymeric's PhD thesis Sandbox Culture: A Study of the Application of Free and Open Source Software Licensing Ideas to Art and Cultural Production.

The following things are mentioned in Aymeric's presentation, and we might need to pause when we encounter them for unpacking.

The examples are all coming from his PhD thesis btw, if you want to read more and find others: you can find them in chapter 5.

notes

• practice ↔ society = political
• junction: cybernetic techno-legal view on the world (for example: GPL license) ↔ post-avant-garde art and activist practices in 1900-2000 (for example: sort of underground publishing, ways of challenging intellectual property and copyright)
• pluralism of proto-free licenses (political) ↔ Creative Commons: generalized universal framework (post-political)
• post-political aspect of Creative Commons: one license per economical model + articulation of what is free culture
• from means → to end (and this needs to be reversed)

xerox mark

a "xerox mark" appearing in Radical Software, 1973

http://www.radicalsoftware.org/e/volume1nr3.html

COPY-IT-RIGHT

an anti-copyright approach

Morton developed an approach he called COPY-IT-RIGHT, an anti-copyright approach to making and freely sharing Media art. The Distribution Religion and Morton’s individual and collaborative Media art works were released under his COPY-IT-RIGHT license. COPY-IT-RIGHT encouraged people to make faithful copies, caring for and distributing the work as widely as possible.

"copy it right", Phil Morton 1973

snippet from intro Distribution Religion

Situationist International

publication statement of Situationist International (1959

Fluxus

Ben Vautier, To Change Art Change Ego (1965)

GPL

GNU General Public License

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html

copyleft

🄯

"source of confusion through language"

• used by artists in the 60s already
• the "viral" element used in a subset of open licenses

copyleft sticker story

Richard Stallman?

Don Hopkins?

(…) [O]ne day in 1984 Stallman received by mail a programming manual that had been borrowed by American hacker and computer artist Don Hopkins. On the envelope a stickers reading “Copyleft (L)” was used to seal the small package. Hopkins had bought a pack of stickers at a science fiction convention, where hackers, including Stallman, often gathered and where it was common for them to organise and share rooms, notably for “@” parties in which people with email addresses could meet each other. 14 According to Hopkins, at that time the term copyleft was not part of the hacker culture, and the stickers had been purchased in the dealer’s room of one convention with other comics, political, and satirical stickers and buttons. 15 Knowing Stallman’s appreciation for such things, Hopkins had decorated the letter in a similar spirit. Little did he know that eventually the sticker and the pseudo-copyright statement he had written as a joke (Figure 5.2), would inspire Stallman to use the word copyleft to describe the properties of the GPL. 16 This is how copyleft, the symbol of rebellious cultural practices, ended up being claimed as a term to describe a particular mechanism of free software licensing. Aymeric Mansoux, Sandbox Culture (2017) - p. 211-212

Creative Commons

https://creativecommons.org/

"The CC License options": https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/cclicenses/

the rising ethical storm

Coraline Ada Ehmke on ethical open licenses, presented at CopyleftConf 2020. (27 min)

https://archive.org/details/copyleftconf2020-ehmke

The blog post that Ehmke refers to in her presentation by Bruce Perens, in which he critiques the Hippocratic License: https://perens.com/2019/09/23/sorry-ms-ehmke-the-hippocratic-license-cant-work/