Forwarded with the permission of the author. Felix ---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Subject: [ipr] A pragmatic respone to a Critique of the Commons without Commonalty Date: Thursday, 7. July 2005 19:58 From: Andrew Rens <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: ipr&publicdomain <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <...> The article certainly provides a stimulating theoretical critique of Creative Commons. There are a number of places where the critique elides the complex nature of issues most notably the characterisation of Res Communes, and the analysis of precisely what copyright constitutes as "private" and "public". I am however not going to address the theoretical critique of Creative Commons at this point. There are a few matters of pragmatic import, which the analysis seeks to occlude. I address these as matters of strategy as someone who has experienced political struggle, and also has used law to effect rhizomatic change. No-one at Creative Commons, certainly not Professor Lessig is suggesting that Creative Commons is the only or even primary model for creativity, nor that it represents the ideal state of copyright. Rather it is one working model amoung many. For those who believe that Intellectual Property can be balanced; a healthy creative ecosystem will include a multitude of different models. For those who don't believe in Intellectual Property at all Creative Commons is a practical strategy of working towards an open culture given real world conditions. It has already opened up space for voices that would not otherwise have been heard. The energy and excitement surrounding Creative Commons stem in part because many people are for the first time to see what open culture looks like, and so imagine what it could be in the future. As such it is a greater stimulant to libre culture than academic critiques of late capitalist cultural production. It is also a project which people and organisations of all theoretical stripes and ideological flavours can co-operate in, which is why both Jack Valenti and John Perry Barlow spoke at the opening. One of the greatest strengths of Creative Commons is this aspect of an open project; people who may differ on many other issues can all contribute to the common good. A common project such as this can easily be stigmatized as co-option, but only by the same logic that human rights lawyers, using what law there is within a repressive state to secure the freedom or safety of prisoners, can be regarded as co-opted. Participation in Creative Commons is not an exhaustive index of who a person is. A person can support Creative Commons and be committed to the long term abolition of all Intellectual Property or work full time for a corporate law firm or any of the whole range of options in between. The analysis rejects copyright law as an organising strategy for creativity, yet does not develop an alternative vision of a commons, specifying only what it is not, it is thus difficult to imagine this theoretical commons at all. Andrew Rens Legal Lead Creative Commons South Africa ----+-------+---------+--- http://felix.openflows.org # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
