[P2P-F] Fwd: The Creative Commons is to Free Culture what Shareware is to Free Software

Sat Nov 12 14:27:54 CET 2011

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dmytri Kleiner/ Friends. <dk at telekommunisten.net>
Date: Tue, Nov 8, 2011 at 6:30 PM
Subject: The Creative Commons is to Free Culture what Shareware is to Free
Software
To: "Dmytri Kleiner/ Friends. Subscriber" <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>

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IMPORTANT: Stammtisch today is at C-Base. We will not be at Cafe
Buchhandlung this evening.

In the meantime, please enjoy today's Text:

The Creative Commons is to Free Culture what Shareware is to Free Software

Back in the early days of computers proprietary software developers had a
problem. Often working from home or small-offices, far removed from their
potential customers, there was no easy way to sell software to their
customers. One common way was to use classified adds in computer magazines,
but unless a software title was very well known, it was difficult to
convince customers to pay for it before they had the opportunity to try it
and verify that it does what they need it to.

Yet, the very emerging of computers had the solution embedded into the very
technology, users where already distributing software on their own, by way
of exchanging floppy disks, uploading software to Bulletin Board Systems or
Online Services, or even printing out source code so that others could
rekey it on their own computer.

However, this practice was directly contradictory to the way commercial
software was sold: paid for in advance and sold in a box in a store or by
mail order. To prevent such unauthorized distribution, commercial software
was often distributed on copy-protected media that used various
cryptographic and obscurity techniques to prevent it's users from
distributing on it's own. This was "All Rights Reserved" software, the
published insisted on you buying it from them or their contracted
resellers, and not, under any circumstances, share it with others.

In the same way that commercial art, movies, music and books, for instance
is "All Rights Reserved," it's publishers want you to buy it directly from
their or their agents, and never share it with others, and likewise, the
rights being reserved are the publisher's rights. Yet, the very technology
that made a recorded music industry possible, mechanical reproduction, also
made it possible for its users to share it. Starting from home-taping to
today's online social platforms, fans of certain artists actively share
with each others. And just like the commercial software authors, the music
industry has availed itself to a wide variety of tactics to prevent this,
from legal and political intimidation, to all sorts of cockamamie "Digital
Rights Management" techniques.

Yet, this "All Rights Reserved" business practice was well and good for
well-funded publishers who where able to afford effective advertising and
build out large-scale distribution networks, yet for both smaller artist
and smaller commercial software vendors, such a system worked agains them,
and they turned to ways of using users' sharing with other as means to find
their audience and customers.

In the software world this manifested as "Shareware" and in cultural
production this manifested as the "Creative Commons."

Both these movements developed as system of "Some Rights Reserved,"
granting users the ability to share with each other, but restricting them
according to the will of the publisher, common restrictions in both cases
included non-derivate clauses, and non-commercial clauses, effectively
preventing consumers from becoming producers, meaning that the publishers
where eager to use consumer sharing as a means to build the value of their
property, but wanted to make sure that their status as producer was
maintained, that all creative and commercial use of their work was
restricted only to them, that their consumers would remain consumers,
instrumental only as casual distributors.

Reading both the Shareware and the Creative Commons licenses, there was no
confusion over whose rights where being reserved, the publishers claimed
all rights, and denied all responsibilities. The consumers' rights where
not mentioned, except in efforts to limits any they might have.

Meanwhile, at the same time at the radical fringes of cultural production,
and in the quickly expanding belly of information technology, a more
revolutionary way of thinking existed. Artists and Software users felt
constrained by the restrictions on their ability to be creative and
productive with the culture and software they had, from the poet Comte de
Lautreamont's call for a poetry written by all, to Richard Stallman's call
for a computer operating system written by all, free culture and free
software where concerned with the rights of the consumer, not the producer.
Or even more to point, concerned with abolishing the distinction between
producer and consumer, understanding culture and technology to be a
mutually constructed wealth, the value of which becomes more rich the more
people contribute to it.

The use of the word "Share" in Shareware and the use of the word "Commons"
in Creative Commons share a misleading disingenuousness, they seem to imply
common cause with the consumers, but no less than "All Rights Reserved,"
"Some Rights Reserved" is designed to enclose the consumer, to make sure
they can not become the producer. "Some Rights Reserved" allows consumers
to contribute to the value of the producers' product as promoter and
distributor, but not the share in the value, which, far from being
"common," remains the sole property of the producer.

Free Culture and Free Software attempt to prefigure communities that truly
share in common.

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