My Lawyer is an Artist: Free Culture Licenses as Art Manifestos. Aymeric Mansoux
Originally published in ISEA2011 proceedings -- Copyleft: This work is free, you can distribute and modify it under the terms of the Free Art License. http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en -- Introduction Most discussions around the influence of the free software philosophy on art tend to revolve around the role of the artist in a networked community and her or his relationship with so-called open source practices. Investigating why some artists have been quickly attracted to the philosophy behind the free software model and started to apply its principles to their creations is key in understanding what a free, or open source, work of art can or cannot do as a critical tool within culture. At the same time, avoiding a top down analysis of this phenomenon, and instead taking a closer look at its root properties, allows us to break apart the popular illusion of a global community of artists using or writing free software. This is the reason why a very important element to consider is the role that plays the license as a conscious artistic choice. Choosing a license is the initial step that an artist interested in an alternative to standard copyright is confronted with and this is why before discussing the potentiality of a free work of art, we must first understand the process that leads to this choice. Indeed, such a decision is often reduced to a mandatory, practical, convenient, possibly fashionable step in order to attach a "free" or "open" label to a work of art. It is in fact a crucial stage. By doing so, the author allows her or his work to interface with a system inside which it can be freely exchanged, modified and distributed. The freedom of this work is not to be misunderstood with gratis and free of charge access to the creation, it means that once such a freedom is granted to a work of art, anyone is free to redistribute and modify it according to the rules provided by its license. There is no turning back once this choice is made public. The licensed work will then have a life of its own, an autonomy granted by a specific freedom of use, not defined by its author, but by the license she or he chose. Delegating such rights is not a light decision to make. Thus we must ask ourselves why an artist would agree to bind her or his work to such an important legal document. After all, works of art can already 'benefit' from existing copyright laws, so adding another legal layer on top of this might seem unnecessary bureaucracy, unless the added 'paper work' might in fact work as a form of statement, possibly a manifesto. In this case we must ask ourselves what kind of manifesto are we dealing with, what is its message? What type of works does it generate, what are their purpose and aesthetic? more... http://su.kuri.mu/00000001/2011----MY.LAWYER.IS.AN.ARTIST/ _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
