Open licenses session
taking a dive
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.
See also for a deeeep dive: https://www.bleu255.com/~aymeric/dump/aymeric_mansoux-sandbox_culture_phd_thesis-2017.pdf
The following things are mentioned in Aymeric's presentation, and we might need to pause when we encounter them for unpacking.
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: one license per economical model + articulation of what is free culture
- from means → to end (and this needs to be reversed!)
xerox mark
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.
Situationist International
Fluxus
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?
![](/mw-mediadesign/images/thumb/8/8c/Copyleft-sticker-Don-Hopkins_Sandbox-Culture-Aymeric-Mansoux-page-253.jpg/300px-Copyleft-sticker-Don-Hopkins_Sandbox-Culture-Aymeric-Mansoux-page-253.jpg)
Creative Commons
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/