The Telekommunist Manifesto 

       

        Dmytri Kleiner, 2009

        Extended and reworked f1rom texts by Dmytri Kleiner, JoanneRichardson and Brian Wyrick, 2004-2008

 

Foreward 

        I coined the term "Venture Communism" in 2001 to promotethe ideal of workers self-organization of production as a way ofaddressing class conflict. Telekommunisten is a collective based inBerlin, Germany, where I have lived since 2003. I first encounteredthe term "Telekommunisten" (which became the name of thecollective) in 2005, while visiting the apartment of a friend. He andhis roommate had given the name "Telekommunisten" to thelocal area network used in their apartment to share Internet access.Telekommunisten had been used as a derogatory term for Germany'sformer state telephone company, Deutsch Telekomm, which is now aprivate transnational corporation whose "T-Mobile" brand isknown worldwide. The usage of communist here is intended to cast theTelephone company as a monolithic, authoritarian, and bureaucraticbehemoth. This is a completely different sense than the one in whichI use the term as a positive one for engagement in class conflicttowards the goal of a free society without economic classes, onewhere people produce and share as equals, a society that has noproperty and no State, and produces not for profit, but for socialvalue. We are not simply a collective of worker-agitators working inthe sphere of telecommunications, Telekommunisten promote the notionof a distributed communism; a communism at a distance; aTele-communism. A venture commune is not bound to one physicallocation where it can be issolated and confined. Simular in topologyto a peer-to-peer network, Telekommunisten is intended to bedecentralized, with only minimal co-ordination required among it'sinternational community of producer-owners.

        My background is in the hacker and art communities, in which Ihave been active since the early 90s. My views have been developedand expressed in on-line and off-line correspondence in the course ofmy involvement in software development, activism and culturalproduction. Although I have written a few essays over the years,those who know my work generally know me personally throughencounters in electronic and physical social spaces. The present workis a "Manifesto," not in the sense that it outlines acomplete theoretical system, a dogmatic set of beliefs or theplatform of a political movement, but in the spirit of the meaning ofmanifesto as a beginning or introduction. Matteo Pasquinelli, whopushed me to undertake this "Manifesto," felt that my roleas a background voice in our community was too underground anddeclared it was "Time to come out" with a published text.He connected me with Geert Lovink, who suggested the structure andapproach of the text and offered to serve as editor and, through theInstitute of Network Cultures, as its publisher.

        The Telekommunist Manifesto is largely a cut-up and reworking oftexts I've produced and co-produced over the last few years. Itincorporates significant passages from "Copyright, Copyleft andthe Creative Anti-Commons" produced in co-operation with JoanneRichardson and originally published under "Anna Nimmus" onthe subsol website. Much of the text regarding the commercializationof the Internet is taken from "Infoenclosure 2.0,"co-written with Brian Wyrick originally published in Mute Magazine.Credit is also due to Mute Magazine editors Josephine Berry Slaterand Anthony Iles, for their work on "Infoenclure 2.0" and"Copyjustright, Copyfarfleft,", much of which is reusedhere.

        This publication is intended as summary of the positions thatmotivate the Telekommunisten project, based as it is in anexploration of class conflict in the age of internationaltelecommunications, global migration, and the emergence of theinformation economy. The goal of this text is to introduce thepolitical motivations of Telekommunisten, including a sketch of thebasic theoretical framework in which it is rooted, covering views onpolitical economy and intellectual property. The text also coverssome broader topics, such as workers self-organization of production,anti-copyright/copy-left dissent against intellectual property, andpeer to peer as a networked application topography, as well as a setof relations with growing social implications as networks become morecentral to how we produce and share. The Telekommunist manifesto isalso intended to introduce the reader to some the specifictheoretical components of the project, such as Venture Communism andCopyfarleft, and to explain why we have chosen to struggle againstcapitalism by way of the international telephone system.

        The economic analytical models employed in this text areheterodox, based in the ubiquitous terms of classical politicaleconomy and borrowing from its diverse theorists and critics. Thistext is especially addressed to politically motivated artists,hackers and activists, not to evangelize a fixed position, but tocontribute to an ongoing critical dialogue.

 

Introduction 

        In the preface to "A Contribution the Critique of PoliticalEconomy," Marx and Engels argue "At a certain stage oftheir development, the material productive forces of society come inconflict with the existing relations of production." What ispossible in the information age is in direct conflict with what ispermisable. Publishers, film producers and the telecomunicationindustry conspire with lawmakers to bottle up and sabotage freenetworks, to forbid information from circulating outside of theircontrol. The coporations in the recording industry continue toforcibly maintain their position as mediators between artists andfans, while fans and artists merge closer together and explore newways of interacting. Competing software makers, like armsmanufacturers, play both sides in this conflict; providing the toolsto impose control, and the tools to evade it. The non-heirachicalrelations made possible by a peer network such as the Internet arecontradictory with Capitalism's need for encosure and control. It's abattle to the death, either the Internet as we know it must go, orCapitalism as we know it must go. Will Capital throw us back into anetwork dark-ages inspired by CompuServ, Mobile Telephones and CableTV rather than allow peer communications to bring about a newsociety? Yes. If they can. Marx and Engels go on to conclude "Nosocial order ever perishes before all the productive forces for whichthere is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations ofproduction never appear before the material conditions of theirexistence have matured in the womb of the old society itself."

        The Internet represents a powerful platform for new forms ofproduction to emerge, however, the rapid commercialization of theInternet is increasing the centralization of ownership and control ofInternet-based communications platforms. This is visible in theconsolidation of Internet service providers by massive internationaltelecommunications conglomerates. This rise of Social Media and "Web2.0" have pushed more free, decentralized "peer to peer"systems to the clandestine margins of the network while "cloudcomputing" further centralizes the infrastructure. If new waysof producing and distributing wealth do not emerge to challenge thecapitalist order, ways which are not based on force and enclosure, itis not only the freedom of the Internet that will be lost, but thechance to remake society in it's image will be lost with it.

        The Telekommunist Manifesto is an exploration of class conflictand property, born in the realization of the primacy of economiccapacity in social struggles. Much temphasis is placed on thedistribution of productive assets and their output. Theinterpretation here is always tethered to the understanding thatwealth and power are intrinsically linked, and only through theformer can the later be achieved. As a collective of intellectualworkers, the work of Telekommunisten is very much rooted in the freesoftware and free culture communities. However, acentral premise ofthis Manifesto is that engaging in software development and theproduction of immaterial cultural works is not enough. Thecommunization of immaterial property alone can not change thedistribution of material productive assets, and therefore can noteliminate exploitation. Only workers self-organization of productioncan. Venture Communism is a form of struggle against the continuedexpansion of property-based capitalism, it is a model for workerself-organization inspired by the topology of peer to peer networksand the historical pastoral commons.

 

Capitalism 

        The only way to change society is to produce and sharedifferently.

        Capitalism has its means of self-reproduction: Venture Capitalism.By using exclusive access to the great accumulations of wealthresulting from the continuous capture of surplus value, Capitalistsoffer the participants of each new generation of innovators a chanceto be a junior partner in their club by selling the future productivevalue of what they create in exchange for the present wealth theyneed to get started. The stolen, dead value of the past captures theunborn value of the future. For us to expand the scope of our commonswe must create a chance for innovation to be born and allowed todevelop in a free commons, and for this we need Venture Communism. Wemust develop ways to create and to reproduce commons-based productiverelationships. The degree to which the products of labour arecaptured by commons-based producers or by appropriators willdetermine which kind of society we will have, one based onco-operation and sharing, or one based on force and exploitation. Themotivation to engage in a venture communist struggle against classstratification could not be more vital, for not only does our societyface the age-old afflictions of poverty and injustice, but it becomesincreasingly clear that production levels to sustain the accumulationof an elite few drive us repeatedly into war and inevitably towardsenvironmental catastrophe. Failure to achieve a more equitablesociety likely brings consequences far graver than society can affordto bear. To succeed the space, instruments and resources we need mustbe a common stock employed in production by a dispersed community ofpeers, producing and sharing as equals.

        Politics is not a battle of ideas; it is a battle of capacities.Ideas are powerful, and there development and implementation cancertainly have a political impact, however which ideas are developedand implemented is determined not by their intrinsic value, but bythe relative power of those whom they benefit versus those whom theythreaten. The capability to change a social order, for better of forworse, is rooted in the ability to impose change, which requires thewherewithal to overcome competing capacities for, among things,communication and lobbying. All capacities are, at their base,economic capacities, to cause change requires that enough wealth beapplied to overcome the wealth of those who would resist such achange. Such wealth can only come from production. New ways ofproducing and sharing must always precede any change in the socialorder. New kinds of relationships, if they can create new productiverelations, are needed to constitute a new economic structure which isable to give rise to a new kind of society. No social order, nomatter how entrenched and ruthlessly imposed, can resist beingtransformed when new ways of producing and sharing emerge.

        Society is composed of social relationships. The relations ofproduction constitute the economic structure of society, on whicharises the legal and political structures that define it. Relationsbetween buyer and seller, between tenant and landlord, betweenemployee and employer, between those born to wealth and privilege andthose born to precarity and struggle are all outcomes of therelations of production. These relationships are a consequence of howthings are produced and shared in society. Those who are able tocontrol the circulation of the product of the labour of others canimpose laws and social institutions according to their interests.Those who are not able to retain control of the product of their ownlabour are not able to resist.

        Capitalism depends on the appropriation of value for itssubsistence and growth. The disingenious rhetoric of "FreeMarkets" is a smoke screen to justify a system of privilege andexploitation. In a free market, competitin among producers woudreduce the price of everything to the lowest level that it can beproduced for. If everything truly traded in a perfect market, thenland and capital, like labour would never be able to earn any morethan the cost of providing it. There could be no class that is exemptfrom working as their would be no income to sustain such a class. Inreality, the "free market" is what property owners want toimpose on workers, while retaining their own priviledges. Capitalneeds to make the price of labour low enough to prevent workers, as aclass, from being able to retain enough of their own earnings toacquire their own property. If workers could acquire their ownpropoert, they could also stop selling their labour to thecapitalists. Capitalism could not exists in a free market. The wholeidea of the "free market" is part of the mythology ofcapitalism, is not possible within capitalism and just as unlikely toexists without it. "Free" from the coersion ofprofit-seeking Capitalists, producers would produce and share forsocial value, not for profits, as they do in their private and familylives, and as they have in non-capitalist communities. This is not tosay that a free society would not have competition or that it'smembers would not seek to benefit from their own labour, the devisionof labour required in a complex society implies exchange. Themetaphor of "the market" as it is currently used would nolonger dominate. The need to account value exchange in tiny andreductive lists of individualy priced transactions would besuperceded by more fluid and generalized forms of exchange. Themotive to maximize profit from ownership, so often the driving forcebehind irrational and distructive production, would give way to muchstronger motive, doing work that has direct benefits for our livesand our society, production that fulfils our real world needs anddesires.

        The State's traditional role of mediating between the classes onbehalf of the ruling class depends on its territorial sovereignty.

        The State's ability to grant title and privilege is based on itsability to enforce privilege with its monopoly on the legitimate useof violence. Communications based on global peer networks have achance to resist and evade such title and privilege. Social relationsamong transnational, trans-local communities operate within anextra-territorial space, one where title and privilege could give wayto mutual interest and negotiation. Modes of production employingstructures similar to peer to peer networks, have relationsreminiscent of the historic pastoral commons, yet rather than beinglocated in a specific place, create a commons that spans the planet,offering our society a hope for a way out from the classstratification of Capitalism by undermining its logic of control andextraction.

        Specters of such a potential mode of production can be readilyfound. Peer networks, such as the Internet, and all the material andimmaterial inputs that keep them running, serve as a common stockthat is used independently by many users. Free Software, whoseproduction and distribution frequently depends on peer networks, is acommon stock, available to all. Free software is produced by diverseand distributed producers who contribute to it because the value theygain when they employ it in their own production is greater than thevalue of their individual contributions to it. Popular attacks on therents captured by the recording and movie Industries by users of filesharing technologies show us the difficulties faced by those whoseincomes depends on controlling reproduction. Mass transportation andinternational migration have created distributed communities whomaintain on-going interpersonal and often informal economicrelationships across national borders. All these are examples of newproductive relationships that transcend the currently dominantproperty-based ones. They point to a potential way forward. Oursuccess depends on our ability to prevent property owners fromcapturing the value of our production.

        Developments in telecommunications, notably the emergence of peernetworks such as the Internet, along with internationaltransportation and migration, create broad revolutionarypossibilities resulting from dispersed communities with the abilityto instantly interact on a global scale. Our lives and relationshipsno longer need to be confined by territorially bounded nation states.Though coercive elements in the political and corporate hierarchyimpose ever more draconian controls to resist our ability to evadesuch confinement, we can place our revolutionary hopes in thepossibility that the scale of change is simply so large that they cannever fully succeed.

        As bold as the emergence of peer to peer technologies, freesoftware and international communities have been, the obstacles tosocial change are daunting. We must overcome the great accumulationof wealth the Capitalist elite have at their disposal. This wealthgives them the ability to shape society according to their interests.

        In order to change society we must actively expand the scope ofour commons, so that our independent communities of peers can bematerially sustained and can resist the encroachments of Capitalism.

        Whatever portion of our productivity we allow to be taken from us,will return in the form of our own oppression.

 

Property 

        Property is by it's nature antagonistic to freedom. Property isthe ability to control productive assets at a distance, the abilityto "own" something being put to productive use by anotherperson. Property makes possible the subjugation of individuals andcommunities. Where property is sovereign there can be no freedomwithin it's domain. The owners of scarce property can deny life bydenying access to property, or if not outrightly denying life, thenmake the living work like slaves for no pay beyond their reproductioncosts.

        British classical political economist David Ricardo firstdescribed Economic Rent in the early 19th century. Put simply,economic rent is the incomeVenetian Statute on Industrial Brevets theowner of a productive asset can earn just from ownership itself. Theowner earns Rental income not by doing anything or making any sort ofcontribution, but just by owning. In the terms of John Stewart Mill,the rent collector earns money even as he sleeps. Take for exampletwo identical buildings, one in a major economic center, and one in aminor city, while both may be of identical materials, both requireidentical amount of work to maintain, in terms of the costs that mustbe undertaken by the owners to bring these buildings to market atdwellings or commercial spaces there is no difference. The buildingin the major city will however earn more income than the one in theminor city, not withstanding the equal amounts of work and expenseundertaking to maintain them. This difference is Rent. Rent is notcollected for any contribution to production, but because of legalprivilege such as a title to a valuable location. This does not meanthat the owner does not ever do anything, only that the value ofwhatever contribution they make is not calculated as "Rent."Rent, in economic terms, is the income earned for allowing others touse property, ultimately, this income is derived by claiming aportion of what they produce as your own. As our ability to providefor our material subsistence requires access to the property thatmakes up our "means of production" we must agree totransfer a portion of what we produce to those that allow us toaccess such means, or else we could not live. The portion of aproducer's productive output that can be demanded for the right toexist is the entire total of their productive output, minus theproducer's subsistence costs. This is the conclusion reached by DavidRicardo in his 1817 "Principles of Political Economy andTaxation," and this is the basic bargaining position faced byall of us who are born into a world entirely owned by others.

        In his "Essay on Profits," David Ricardo argues: "Theinterest of the landlord is always opposed to the interest of everyother class in the community." This analysis was not based onsocial milieu such as upper class or lower class, but rather basedupon relationship with the factors of production, landlord orcapitalist, and thus is based on class conflict. e As arepresentative of the emergent Capitalist class, Ricardo did notintend his critique of land rent to be extended to the income earnedby Capitalists. Critical commentators like William Thompson andThomas Hogskin, the best know of the "Ricardian Socialists"did just that, arguing that profits earned by Capitalists are just asexploitive and unearned as the rents of landlords, and from theirwork the critique of "Capitalism," a term coined to draw ananalogy with Feudalism, begins. Thompson and Hodgskin pointed outthat the interests of workers are opposed to the interests of bothlandlords and capitalists. Socialism and all other movements of the"left" start with this class conflict as their point ofdeparture. The belief that producers themselves should own the meansof production was already common among socialists of the time,notably among the supports of Robert Owen and the co-operativemovement. Understanding class as being based on relationship to thefactors of production, not on categories such as as rich and poor, ornoble, clergy and peasant, but as Capitalist, Landlord, and Worker,provided a solid intellectual foundation that allowed a morescientific socialism to emerge from it's Utopian roots.

        Rent allows owners of scarce property to drive property-lessworkers to subsistence. David Ricardo explains: "The naturalprice of labour is that price which is necessary to enable thelabourers, one with another, to subsist and to perpetuate theirrace". It is often claimed that this can be refuted because ofthe difference between the theoretical "natural" price andthe actual market price of labour, but such an argument is simply anequivocation, Ricardo himself explains that market price fluctuates.Subsistence should not be taken to mean the bare minimum required toactually survive and reproduce. Even in Ricardo"s time, mostworkers were generally not in the position that if they earned onepenny less they would immediately fall over and die. Rather, workers,by their very definition, are unable to earn enough to do anythingmore than make a living and struggle to live according the acceptablestandards of their community. The "acceptable standards"are established in terms of the canons of taste and decencyestablished by a predatory economic elite. Thorstein Veblen, aNorwegian-American economist and sociologist who's work lays thefoundation for the institutional economics movement argues that it isan essential feature of class society that in order to live accordingto our community standards of respectability all but the very richestmust dispose of practically their entire income in what Veblen calls"Conspicuous Consumption" and "Conspicuous Waste"or else face social exclusion and further reduced prospects of upwardmobility. "Failure to consume in due quantity and qualitybecomes a mark of inferiority and demerit" Veblen argues in his1899 "The Theory of the Leisure Class"

        Workers have more than cultural forces working against theirability to form Capital from whatever earnings that retain beyondsubsistence. So long as workers do not have property, whatever wageincreases they gain are swept away by price inflation, most often asthe result of increased money competition for locations and theincrease of land rents. This is no secret to Capitalist negotiatorsand their public sector collaborators. Reducing real wages byinflation as an alternative to reducing money wages works because ofthe "money illusion.' As John Maynard Keynes, perhaps the mostimportant economist of his day and the founder of modern"macroeconomics" writes in his 1936 "The GeneralTheory of Employment, Interest, and Money": "It issometimes said it would illogical for labour to resist a reduction ofmoney-wages but not to resist a reduction of real wages [...]experience shows that this is how labour in fact behaves."Daniel Bell makes this process clear in his paper "TheSubversion of Collective Bargaining," where he examines severalcases of wage increases won by collective bargaining and shows thatthese do not lead to a change in the general level of real wealth, inmost cases workers who received wage increase had not increased theirshare of wealth, only wound up paying higher prices.

        Property is not a natural phenomenon, but rather something that iscreated by law. The ability to extract rent is dependent on one"sability to control a scarce resource even when it is being used bysomebody else. In other words, the ability to force that other personto share the product of their labour with the property owner.Property is control at a distance. In this way, rent is only possibleso long as it is supported by force, which is happily provided by theState to the owners of property. Without a means of forcing those whoput property to productive use to share the product of their labourwith the absent and idle property owner, the property owner could notearn a living, let alone accumulate more property. As Germanrevolutionary Marxist Ernest Mandel claims in "HistoricalMaterialism and the Capitalist State" (1980): "Withoutcapitalist state violence, there is no secure capitalism." Thepurpose of property is to ensure that a property-less class exists toproduce the wealth enjoyed by a propertied class. The institution ofproperty does not benefit workers. This is not to say that individualworkers cannot become property owners, but rather that to do so meansto escape their class. Individual success stories do not change thegeneral case. As Canadian political philosopher Gerald Cohen,proponent of Analytical Marxism, quipped, "I want to rise withmy class, not above my class!"

        The current global situation confirms that it is the case thatworkers, as a class, are not able to accumulate property. A study bythe World Institute for Development Economics Research at UnitedNations University reports that the richest 1% of adults alone owned40% of global assets in the year 2000, and that the richest 10% ofadults accounted for 85% of the world total. The bottom half of theworld adult population owned barely 1% of global wealth. Extensivestatistics, many indicating growing world disparity, are included inthe report.

        It is in the context of this great disparity of wealth and thestruggle between classes that any investigation of intellectualproperty must be understood.

 

The Internet 

        While computers and digitization have fueled the flames ofdisputes surrounding intellectual property, the networkedapplications used to share and collaborate have also become acontested field. The revolutionary possibilities of the Internet layparticularly in the fact that it allows direct interaction betweenusers, that it promised to be a platform where freedom of speech andassociation was built into to the architecture. However without mostusers noticing, the architecture is being changed and the topology ofthe network is being remade in such a way that not only serves theinterests of Capitalism, but also enables monitoring and control ofit's users on a scale never dreamed of before.

        The Internet took the corporate world by surprise, coming as itdid out of publicly funded universities, military research, and civilsociety. It was promoted by way of a cottage industry of smallindependent Internet service providers who were able to squeeze abuck out of providing access to the state-built and financed network.Meanwhile, the corporate world was pushing a different idea of theInformation Superhighway, producing monolithic, centralized "on-lineservices" like CompuServe, Prodigy and AOL. What made thesedifferent from the Internet is that they were centralized systemsthat all users connect directly to, while the Internet is apeer-to-peer network and every device with a public Internet addresscan communicate directly to any other device. This is what makespeer-to-peer technology possible and is also what makes independentInternet service providers possible. While both users of CompuServeand the Internet had access to similar applications, namely email,discussion groups, chat groups and file sharing, users of CompuServewhere completely dependent on CompuServe for access to these, whileusers of the Internet could gain access through any service provider,and could even chose to run their own servers. Platforms such asInternet Email, Usenet and Internet Relay Chat where based on adistributed structure that no one entity owner or controlled. Thiswas fine for the public institutions and NGOs that where the mostenthusiastic adopters of the Internet, however capitalist investorswhere unable to see how such an unrestrictive system would allow themto earn profits. The Internet seemed anathema to the capitalistimagination. The original dotcom boom, was characterized by a rush toown the infrastructure, to consolidate the independent Internetservice providers and take control of the network. Money was thrownaround quite randomly as investors struggled to understand what thismedium would actually be used for, however the overall mission waslargely successful. There mission was to destroy the independentservice provider and put large, well-financed corporations back inthe driver's seat. If you had an Internet account in 1996 it waslikely provided by some small local company. Ten years later, whilesome of the smaller companies have survived, most people get theirInternet access from gigantic telecommunications corporations.

        The World Wide Web is a technology that runs on top of thePeer-to-Peer Internet, However, it is unlike the classic Internettechnologies mentioned earlier, it is neither distributed, nor peerto peer. The web is a Client-Server technology. The publisher of awebsite runs the servers and has exclusive control over the contentand applications their website provides, including control of whoshould or should not have access to it, the users run only a browser,which is client software used to access the website. A website is farmore similar to CompuServe than it is to a peer to peer system. Thepublisher has full control of the content and options available tothe users. The web started innocently enough as a platform forpublishing text on-line Very quickly, however, it became the focus ofthe commercialization of the Internet, from modest beginnings as acompanies began to put brochure's on-line, the commercial web tookoff with the development of e-Commerce. So far, the web had not yettaken over on-line sharing. People used the web to browse a bookstore, but continued to employ distributed technologies tocommunicate with other users. However soon enough the web, funded byventure capital, would move in and make websites operate by largecorporations into the primary on-line social platforms. The Internetitself would disappear behind the web, the users would never againleave their browser. Web 2.0 emerged as a venture capitalist"sparadise where investors pocket the value produced by unpaid users,ride on the technical innovations of the free software movement, andkill off the decentralizing potential of peer-to-peer technology.

        Wikipedia says that "Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O"ReillyMedia in 2004, refers to a supposed second generation ofInternet-based services, such as social networking sites, wikis,communication tools, and folksonomies, that emphasize on-linecollaboration and sharing among users." The use of the word"supposed" is noteworthy. As probably the largestcollaboratively authored work in history, and one of the currentdarlings of the Internet community, Wikipedia should know. Unlikemost of the members of the Web 2.0 generation, Wikipedia iscontrolled by a non-profit foundation, earns income only by donation,and releases its content under a copyleft. It is telling thatWikipedia goes on to say "[Web 2.0] has become a popular (thoughill-defined and often criticized) buzzword among certain technicaland marketing communities."

        The free software community has tended to be suspicious, if notoutright dismissive, of the Web 2.0 moniker. Tim Berners-Leedismissed the term, saying: "Web 2.0 is of course a piece ofjargon, nobody even knows what it means." He goes on to notethat "it means using the standards which have been produced byall these people working on Web 1.0." In reality there isneither a Web 1.0 nor a Web 2.0. There is only an ongoing developmentof on-line applications that cannot be cleanly divided. In trying todefine what Web 2.0 is, it is safe to say that most of the importantdevelopments have been aimed at enabling the community to create,modify, and share content in a way that was previously only availableto centralized organizations that bought expensive software packages,paid staff to handle the technical aspects of the site, and paidstaff to create content which generally was published only on thatorganization's site.

        A Web 2.0 company fundamentally changes the production of Internetcontent. Web applications and services have become cheaper and easierto implement, and by allowing the end users access to theseapplications, a company can effectively outsource the creation andthe organization of their content to the end users themselves.Instead of the traditional model of a content provider publishingtheir own content and the end user consuming it, the new model allowsthe company"s site to act as the centralized portal between theusers who are both creators and consumers. For the user, access tothese applications empowers them to create and publish content thatpreviously would have required them to purchase desktop software andpossess a greater technological skill set. For example, two of theprimary means of text-based content production in Web 2.0 are blogsand wikis, which allow the user to create and publish contentdirectly from their browser without any real need for knowledge ofmarkup language, file transfer or syndication protocols, and allwithout the need to purchase any software.

        The use of the web application to replace desktop software is evenmore significant for the user when it comes to content that is notmerely textual. Not only can web pages be created and edited in thebrowser without purchasing HTML editing software, photographs can beuploaded and manipulated on-line through the browser without the needfor expensive desktop image manipulation applications. A video shoton a consumer camcorder can be submitted to a video hosting site,uploaded, encoded, embedded into an HTML page, published, tagged, andsyndicated across the web all through the user"s browser. InPaul Graham"s article on Web 2.0, he breaks down the differentroles of the community/user into more specific roles. These includethe Professional, the Amateur, and the User (more specifically, theend user). The roles of the Professional and the User were, accordingto Graham, well understood in Web 1.0, but the Amateur didn"thave a very well defined place. As Graham describes it in "WhatBusiness Can Learn From Open Source," the Amateur just loves towork, with no concern for compensation or ownership of that work; indevelopment, the Amateur contributes to open source software whereasthe Professional gets paid for their proprietary work.

        Graham"s characterization of the "Amateur" has anodd similarity with "If I Ran The Circus'" by Dr. Suess,where young Morris McGurk says of the staff of his imaginary CircusMcGurkus:

        My workers love work. They say, "Work us! Please work us!

        We"ll work and we"ll work up so many surprises

        You"d never see half if you had forty eyses!"

        And while "Web 2.0" may mean nothing to Tim Berners-Lee,who sees recent innovations as no more than the continued developmentof the web, to venture capitalists, who like Morris McGurk daydreamof tireless workers producing endless content and not demanding a paycheque for it, it sounds stupendous. And indeed, from YouTube toFlickr to Wikipedia, you"d truly "never see half if you hadforty eyses." Tim Berners-Lee is correct. There is nothing froma technical or user point of view in Web 2.0 which does not have itsroots in, and is not a natural development from the earliergeneration of the Web. The technology associated with the Web 2.0banner was possible and in some cases readily available before, butthe hype surrounding this usage has certainly affected the growth ofWeb 2.0 Internet sites. The Internet has always been about sharingbetween users. In fact, Usenet, the distributed messaging system, hasbeen operating since 1979! Since th, Usenet has been hostingdiscussions, "amateur" journalism, and enabling photo andfile sharing. Like the Internet, it is a distributed system not ownedor controlled by anyone. It is this quality, a lack of centralownership and control, that differentiate services such as Usenetfrom Web 2.0.

        If Web 2.0 means anything at all, its meaning lies in therationale of venture capital. Web 2.0 represents the return ofinvestment in Internet start-ups. After the dotcom bust (the real endof Web 1.0), those wooing investment dollars needed a new rationalefor investing in on-line ventures. "Build it and they willcome,' the dominant attitude of the "90s dotcom boom, along withthe delusional "new economy,' was no longer attractive after somany on-line ventures failed. Building infrastructure and financingreal capitalization was no longer what investors were looking for.Capturing value created by others, however, proved to be a moreattractive proposition. Web 2.0 is Internet Investment Boom 2.0. Web2.0 is a business model; it means private capture ofcommunity-created value. No one denies that the technology of siteslike YouTube, for instance, is trivial. This is more than evidencedby the large number of identical services such as DailyMotion. Thereal value of YouTube is not created by the developers of the site,but rather it is created by the people who upload videos to the site.Yet, when YouTube was bought for over a billion dollars worth ofGoogle stock, how much of this stock was acquired by those that madeall these videos? Zero. Zilch. Nada. Great deal if you are an ownerof a Web 2.0 company.

        The value produced by users of Web 2.0 services such as YouTube iscaptured by capitalist investors. In some cases, the actual contentthey contribute winds up as the property of site owners. Privateappropriation of community-created value is a betrayal of the promiseof sharing technology and free cooperation. Unlike the dotCom boomera, where investors often financed expensive capital acquisition,software development and content creation, a Web 2.0 investor mainlyneeds to finance hype-generation, marketing and buzz. Theinfrastructure is widely available for cheap, the content is free andcost of the software, at least that much of it that is not also free,is negligible. Basically, by providing some bandwidth and disk space,you are able to become a successful Internet site if you can marketyourself effectively. The principal success of a Web 2.0 companycomes from its relationship to the community. More specifically, theability of the company to "harness collective intelligence,"as O"Reilly puts it. Web 1.0 companies were too monolithic andunilateral in their approach to content. Success stories of thetransition from to Web 2.0 were based on the ability for a company toremain monolithic in its brand of content, or better yet, itsoutright ownership of that content, while opening up the method ofthat content"s creation to the community. Yahoo! created aportal to community content while it remained the centralizedlocation to find that content. EBay allows the community to sell itsgoods while owning the marketplace for those goods. Amazon, sellingthe same products as many other sites, succeeded by allowing thecommunity to participate in the "flow" around theirproducts.

        Because the capitalists who invest in Web 2.0 start-ups do notoften fund early capitalization, their behaviour is markedly moreparasitic as well. They often arrive late in the game when valuecreation already has good momentum, swoop in to take ownership anduse their financial power to promote the service, often within thecontext of a hegemonic network of major, well-financed partners. Thismeans that companies that are not acquired by venture capital end upstarved of cash and squeezed out of the club. In all these cases, thevalue of the Internet site is created not by the paid staff of thecompany that runs it but by the users who use it. With all of theemphasis on community created content and sharing, it"s easy tooverlook the other side of the Web 2.0 experience: ownership of allthis content and ability to monetize its value. To the user, thisdoesn"t come up that often and is only part of the fine print intheir Facebook Terms of Service agreement or it"s the Flickr.comin the URL of their photos. It doesn"t usually seem like anissue to the community and is a small price to pay for the use ofthese wonderful applications and for the impressive effect on searchengine results when one queries one"s own name. Since most usersdo not have access to alternative means to produce and publish theirown content, they are attracted to sites like Facebook and Flickr.

        It should be added that many open source projects can be cited asthe key innovations in the development of Web 2.0: free software likeLinux, Apache, PHP, Ruby, Python, etc. are the backbone of Web 2.0,and the web itself. But there is a fundamental flaw with all of theseprojects in terms of what O"Reilly refers to as the CoreCompetencies of Web 2.0 Companies, namely control over unique,hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them– the harnessing of the collective intelligence they attract.Allowing the community to contribute openly and to utilize thatcontribution within the context of a proprietary system where theproprietor owns the content is a characteristic of a successful Web2.0 company. Allowing the community to own what it creates, though,is not. Thus, to be successful and create profits for investors, aWeb 2.0 company needs to create mechanisms for sharing andcollaboration that are centrally controlled. The lack of centralcontrol possessed by Usenet and other peer controlled technologies isthe fundamental flaw. They only benefit their users, not the absenteeinvestors, as they are not "owned." Thus, because Web 2.0is funded by the same-old Capitalism, Usenet is mostly forgotten.While everybody uses Digg and Flickr, and YouTube is worth a billiondollars, PeerCast, an innovative peer-to-peer live video streamingnetwork that has been in existence for several years longer thanYouTube, is virtually unknown.

        From a technological standpoint, distributed and peer-to-peer(P2P) technologies are far more efficient than Web 2.0 systems.Making better use of network resources by using the computers andnetwork connections of users, P2P avoids creating bottlenecks createdby centralized systems and allows content to be published with lessinfrastructure, often no more than a computer and a consumer Internetconnection. P2P systems do not require the massive data centers ofsites such as YouTube. Distributed systems also tend to have greaterlongevity. Usenet has been subsumed, in some way by Google, who ownsthe largest Usenet archive and the most accessed Usenet web-basedclient, Google Groups. However because of the distributed nature ofUsenet, other means of access continue to exist in parallel, andwhile it's role as an on-line platform has lost prominence, manynewsgroups remain active, notably the Church of The SubGenuisnewsgroup, alt.slack, continues to be an important social forum forthe popular US-Based mock religion. The lack of centralinfrastructure also comes with a lack of central control, meaningthat censorship, often a problem with privately-owned "communities"that frequently bend to private and public pressure groups andenforce limitations on the the kinds of content they allow. Also, thelack of large central cross-referencing databases of user informationhas a strong advantage in terms of privacy.

        From this perspective, it can be said that Web 2.0 is capitalism"spre-emptive attack against P2P systems. Despite its manydisadvantages in comparison to these, Web 2.0 is more attractive toinvestors and thus has more money to fund and promote centralizedsolutions. The end result of this is that capitalist investmentflowed into centralized solutions, making them easy and cheap or freefor non-technical information producers to adopt. Thus, this ease ofaccess compared to the more technically challenging and expensiveundertaking of owning your own means of information productioncreated a "landless" information proletariat ready toprovide alienated content-creating labour for the new info-landlordsof Web 2.0. The mission of Web 2.0 is to destroy the P2P aspect ofthe Internet and to make you, your computer, and your Internetconnection dependent on connecting to a centralized service thatcontrols your ability to communicate. Web 2.0 is the ruin of free,peer-to-peer systems and the return of monolithic "on-lineservices." A telling detail here is that most home or officeInternet connections in the 90s, modem and ISDN connections, weresymmetric, equal in their ability to send and receive data. Bydesign, your connection enables you to be equally a producer and aconsumer of information. On the other hand, modern DSL andcable-modem connections are asymmetric, allowing you to downloadinformation quickly but upload slowly. Not to mention the fact thatmany user agreements for Internet service forbid you to run serverson your consumer circuit and may cut off your service if you do.

        Capitalism, rooted in the idea of earning income by way of idleshare ownership, requires centralized control without which producershave no reason to share their income with outside shareholders.Capitalism, therefore, is incompatible with free P2P networks, andthus so long as the financing of Internet development comes fromprivate shareholders looking to capture value by owning Internetresources, the network will only become more restricted andcentralized. And while the information commons may have thepossibility of playing a role in moving society toward more inclusivemodes of production, any real hope for a genuine, communityenriching, next generation of Internet-based services is not rootedin creating privately owned, centralized resources, but rather increating cooperative, P2P and commons-based systems, owned byeverybody and nobody. Although small and obscure by today"sstandards, with its focus on peer-to-peer applications such as Usenetand email, the early Internet was very much a common, sharedresource, Along with the commercialization of the Internet and theemergence of capitalist financing comes the enclosure of thisinformation commons, translating public wealth into private profit.Thus Web 2.0 is not to be thought of as a second generation of eitherthe technical or social development of the Internet, but rather asthe second wave of capitalist enclosure of the Information Commons.

        The third wave of enclosure is already coming into view, CloudComputing provided by large corporations such as Google and Amazon,where customers do not own their physical infrastructure, is furthercentralizing the infrastructure of the Internet, and legislation suchas the "Telecoms Reform Package" presented to the EuropeanParliament, seeks to make it possible for service providers (largetelecommunications conglomerates) to decide which websites thereusers are able access. Capital is showing us their vision of thefuture of the Internet, and the future looks a lot like CompuServe:Monolithic, centralized, mediated, controllable and exploitable, and, naturally, operated by a few large corporations.

        Virtually all of the most used Internet resources could bereplaced by P2P alternatives. Google could be replaced by a P2Psearch system, where every browser and every web serverr is an activenode in the search process; Flickr and YouTube could also be replacedby PeerCast, BitTorrent and eDonkey-type applications, which allowusers to use their own computers and Internet connections tocollaboratively share their pictures and videos. However, developingInternet resources requires the application of wealth, and so long asthe source of this wealth is finance capital, the great peer-to-peerpotential of the Internet will remain unrealized. In order to developalternative ways of producing and sharing we need an alternative toventure capital and it's logic of capture and exploitation.

 

Peer Production 

        Imaging that a "better" copyright system or a "freer"Internet could exist within the present system of economic relationsis to misplace the deterministic factors. The intrinsic truth inarguments against copyright and the clear technical superiority ofdistributed technologies over centralized ones have not been thedeciding factors in the ultimate development of our intellectualproperty system or our global communications infrastructure, both ofwhich have gotten more consolidated, regulated and restrictive. Thedetermining factor is, as always, the fact that those who's interestsare served by restricting freedom have more wealth with which torelentlessly push toward their ends then is available to resist them.The economic reasons for this are well understood, this numericallysmall class of Capitalists are the beneficiaries of an unfairdistribution of productive assets that allows then them to capturethe wealth produced by the masses of property-less workers. If wewant to have a say in the way copyright works (or to abolish it) orto influence the way communication networks are operated, or if wewant to make any social reforms whatsoever, we must start bypreventing property owners from turning our productivity into theiraccumulated wealth. The wealth they use to endorse restrictions onour freedoms is the wealth they have taken from us. Without us theywould have no source of wealth, even the great accumulated wealthfrom centuries of exploitation can not ultimately save them if theyare unable to continue to capture current wealth. The value of thefuture is far greater than the value of the past. Our ideas aboutintellectual property and network topology are ultimately no threatto Capitalism, who can always co-opt, sabotage or simply ignore them.It is the new ways of working together and sharing that are emergingthat have the potential the threaten the capitalist order and bringabout a new society.

        Often discussions of the productive relations in free softwareprojects and other collaborative projects such as Wikipedia attemptto bottle up commons-based production and trap it within the sphereof "immaterial production," restricting it exclusively tothe domain where it can not affect wealth distribution and therebyplay a role in class conflict. Yochai Benkler, Professor forEntrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, coined the term"Peer production" to describe the way free software,Wikipedia articles and similar works are produced. Benkler limits hisanalysis to the so-called "Networked Information Economy."The novelty of Peer Production as understood by Benkler and manyothers is that the property in the commons is entirely non-rivalrousproperty: Intellectual property and network transferable oraccessible resources. Property with virtually no reproduction costs.Also, another distinguishing feature of this limited concept of PeerProduction is that the producers in these examples do not receiverenumeration for what they have produced since their products areavailable for free, for example users of free software do notcompensate the original developers. Thus they claim that PeerProduction is "Non-reciprocal."

        There is no denying that Benkler's wealthy network has a lot tooffer. The value of this information commons to it's users isfantastic, as evident by the millions who employ Free Software,Wikipedia, on-line communications and social networking tools, etc.However, if commons-based peer-production is limited exclusively to acommons made of digital property with virtually no reproductioncosts, how can the use-value produced be translated intoexchange-value? Where is the money to pay for the production of thesevaluable things? Something with no reproduction costs can have noexchange-value in a context of free exchange, anybody who wants acopy can obtain one from anybody that has one. But if what theyproduce has no exchange-value, how can the peer producers be able toacquire the material needs for their own subsistence?

        The wealthy network exists within a context of a poor planet. Thesource of the problem of poverty does not dwell in a lack of cultureor information but in the direct exploitation of the producing classby the property-owning classes. The source of poverty is notreproduction costs but rather extracted economic rents, surplus valuecaptured by way of forcing producers to accept less than the fullproduct of their labour as their wage by denying them independentaccess to the means of production. So long as commons-basedpeer-production is applied narrowly to only an information commonswhile the capitalist mode of production still dominates theproduction of material wealth, owners of material property willcontinue to capture the marginal wealth created as a result of theproductivity of the information commons. Whatever exchange value isderived from the information commons will always be captured byowners of real property, which lies outside the commons. For PeerProduction to have any effect on general material wealth it has tooperate within the context of a overall system of goods and services,where the physical means of production and the virtual means ofproduction are both available in the commons for peer production. Byestablishing the idea of commons-based peer-production in the contextof an information-only commons, Benkler is creating a trap, ensuringthe value created in the peer economy is appropriated by propertyprivilege. We have found Benkler standing on his head, we will needto redefine peer production to put his head above his feet again.

        It is not the "production" in "immaterial,non-reciprocal" production that is immaterial. The computers,the networks and the developers and their places of work andresidence are all very much material and all require material upkeep.What is immaterial is the distribution. Digitized information, sourcecode or cultural works, can multiply and zip across global networksin fractions of a second, yet production remains a very materialaffair. If Peer Production can only produce immaterial good, such assoftware, and the producers get nothing in return for suchproduction, if Peer Production is "immaterial, non-reciprocal"production, then this form of "production" has no right tobe called a mode of production at all. First and foremost any mode ofproduction must account for it's material inputs or else vanish,these inputs must include the subsistence costs of it's labourcontributers, to at minimum "enable the labourer's, one withanother, to subsist and to perpetuate their race" in the wordsof Ricardo. "Immaterial, Non-reciprocal" production can notdo so, since to produce free software, free culture or free soup theproducers must draw their subsistence from some other source, andtherefore "immaterial, non-reciprocal" production is not aform of production at all, only a special case of distribution withinanother form of production. "Immaterial, Non-reciprocal"production is no more a mode of production than a charity soupkitchen or socialized medicine. It is simply a super-structuralphenomenon which has another mode of production as it's base.

        Rather than placing emphasis on the immaterial distribution ofwhat is produced by current examples of Peer Production, we may noteinstead that such production is characterized by independentproducers employing a common stock of productive assets. This view ofPeer Production is not categorically limited to immaterial goods.Understood this way, the concept of Peer Production, where a networkof peers apply their labour to a common stock for mutual andindividual benefit, certainly resonates with age-old proposedsocialist modes of production where a class-less community of workers("peers") produce collaboratively within a property-less("commons-based") society. Unlike the "immaterial,non-reciprocal" definition this formulation can account for it'smaterial inputs, it's labour specialization, it's means of capitalformation, etc, and also better describes the productive basis offree software as well as more closely relates to the topology of peernetworks from which the term is derived. Further, this formulationalso is better rooted in history, as it describes historical examplesof commons-based production such as the pastoral commons, cottageagriculture and cottage industry as well. As the distribution ofproductive assets is so much at the root of the inequality of wealthand power that perpetuates exploitive systems, a mode of productionwhere productive assets are held in common is clearly a potentiallyrevolutionary one if it could take root. However if the form ofproduction can be contained to the immaterial, if it can becategorized as immaterial by definition, then it's producers can notcapture any of the value they create, and thus Harvard Law Professorsstrive to keep it so defined. However if we can implement ways ofindependently sharing a common-stock of material assets and therebyexpand the scope of the commons to include material as well asimmaterial goods, then direct producers who employ these assets intheir production can retain a greater portion of their product.

        Peer production is distinct from other modes of production.Worker's independently employing a common-stock of productive assetsis a different mode, distinct from both capitalist and collectivistmodes. The capitalist mode of production is exploitive by nature,it's fundamental logic is to capture surplus value from labour bydenying independent access to the means of production. However,collectivist modes can also be exploitive. For instance inCo-operative production, in which producers collectively employjointly owned productive assets, the distribution of productiveassets is likely to be unfair among different co-operatives, allowingone to exploit the other. Larger scale collectivist forms, such asSocialist states or very big diversified co-operatives can be said toeliminate the sort of exploitation that can occur betweenco-operatives, however, the expanding coordination layers needed tomanage these large organizations give rise to a coordinator class, anew class consisting of a techo-administrative elite that has provenin historical examples to have the capacity to be just as parasiticand stifling to workers as a Capitalist class. However the communityof Peer producers can grow without developing layers of co-ordinationbecause they are self-organizing and produce independently, and assuch they do not need any layers of co-ordination other than thatwhat is needed to provision the common stock of productive assets,thus co-ordination is limited to allocation of the common stock amongthose who wish to employ it. It is no surprise then, that this sortproduction has appeared and flourished where the common stock isimmaterial property, the low reproduction costs eliminate allocationconcerns. Thus what is needed for Peer production to incorporatematerial goods into the common-stock is a system for the ofallocation of material assets among the independent peers whichimposes only a minimal co-ordination burden. Venture Communism issuch a way.

 

Venture Communism 

        The core innovation of Copyleft was to turn the copyright systemagainst itself. The chief vehicle of asserting control undercopyright is the license the work is released under, this establishesthe terms under which other are permitted to use the copyrightedmaterial, thus copyleft uses the authority of the license toprescribe freedom, using the authority granted by copyright toguarantee that access for all and require that this freedom is passedon. This is consistent with the copyright laws, and dependent onthem, as without copyright and the institutions that protect it,their could be no copyleft. Copyleft effectively hijacks theapparatus that exists to enforce intellectual privilege and insteadinstrumentalizes it to guarantee intellectual freedom. VentureCommunism requires that this same freedom be extended to materialproductive assets, as such it seeks to prescribe this freedom toproperty, not intellectual property, and the chief vehicle ofasserting control of productive assets is the firm. Thus VentureCommunism is not based on a license, but rather on a corporate form:The Venture Commune. Employing a Venture Commune to share materialproperty hijacks the apparatus that exists to enforce privilege toinstead protect a common stock, available for use by independentproducers.

        Legally, a Venture Commune is a firm, much like the VentureCapital Funds of the Capitalist class, however it has distinctproperties which transform it into an effective vehicle forrevolutionary worker's struggle. The Venture Commune holds ownershipof all productive assets that make up the common-stock employed by adiverse, and geographically distributed network of collective andindependent peer producers. The Venture Commune does not co-ordinateproduction, the peer producers produce according to their own needsand desires, the role of the Commune is only to manage thecommon-stock, making property available to the peer producers as theyrequire. The Venture Commune is the federation of these workerscollectives and individuals workers and is itself owned by each ofthem. In the case that the worker's are working in a collective orco-operative, ownership is held by the individuals that make up thecollective or co-operative individually. Ownership in a VentureCommune can only be acquired by contributions of labour, notproperty. Only by working is ownership earned, not by contributingland, capital or even money: Only labour. Through the commune,Property is always held in common by all the members of the Commune.The Venture Commune Is owned equally by all its members. Each membercan only have one share. Thus, each member may never never accumulatea disproportionate share of the proceeds of Property. Property cannever be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.

        The function of the Venture Commune is to acquire property andallocate it to it's members. The commune acquires property whenrequested to do so. The members interested in having this propertyoffer a rental agreement giving the terms they wish to have forpossession of this property, the Commune issues a series of Bondswhich are backed with the demanded property-itself as collateral andthe offered rental agreement as guarantee. This series of Bonds aresold with a public auction setting the interest rate. If the Bondsale clears, the property is acquired and the rental agreement isexecuted. The property returns to the commune whenever those rentingit no longer want to or are unable to meet the agreed terms, at whichpoint the Commune offers it, once again at auction, to it's members,who bid on new rental terms. If there is no more demand for theasset, it is liquidated. After the Bonds that where issued to acquirean asset are fully redeemed it becomes fully owned by the Commune.The remaining rental income the property earns is from then ondivided up equally among all members of the commune and paid out tothem, proceeds from liquidated property is likewise divided. In thisway, members using exactly their per-capita share of the commune'sfully owned property neither pay nor receive any payment, since whatthe pay in rent for that property will equal what the receive astheir share of this income. Member's using more than their per-capitashare will pay more, and presumably be choosing to pay because theyare employing the property as a productive asset, and thus earningenough to pay. Conversely, member's using less than their per-capitashare receive more in payment then they pay in rent, thus beingrewarded for not hording property. The main activities of the VentureCommune, managing bond s and rental agreements do not impose a highlevel of co-ordination and, just like the computer networks thatmanage the allocation of immaterial goods, are activities that arewell suited for computerized automation. Many Venture Communes couldbe exist and as they become interrelated, merge together forminglarger, and more stable and sustainable, communities of commons-basedproducers.

        Proposing a form of class conflict that employs a joint stockcorporation, bonds, rental agreements and retains market exchange ofthe products of labour will be shocking to many revolutionaries. Itmust be noted that Venture Communism is a only means of classconflict, it is not an ideal. It is intended as a means of organizingproduction towards the end of building the economic capacity requiredto engage in class conflict. In the words of the IWW, "not onlyfor everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry onproduction when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizingindustrially we are forming the structure of the new society withinthe shell of the old" Capitalism, a mode of production where theworker earns only subsistence while property owners retain theremainder of the productive output can only create a society in whichthe interests of the property owner will be reflected in the socialinstitutions and the interests of the producers subjugated. As longas producers operate within the Capitalist mode of production, theycan not change society politically, because whatever wealth they canapply to influencing social institutions must come from the share ofthe product that they retain and thus will always be smaller then theshare of the product that can be applied by property owners toprevent this change.

        Any change that can produce a more equitable society is dependenton a prior change in the mode of production which increases the shareof wealth retained by the worker. The change in the mode ofproduction must come first. This change cannot be achievedpolitically, not by vote, nor by lobby, nor by advocacy, nor byrevolutionary violence. Not as long as the owners of property havemore wealth to apply to prevent any change by funding their owncandidates, their own lobbyists, their own advocates, and ultimatelybuilding up a greater capacity for counter-revolutionary violence.Society cannot be changed by a strike, not as long as owners ofProperty have more accumulated wealth to sustain themselves duringproduction interruptions. Not even collective bargaining can work,for so long as the owners of Property own the product they set theprice of the product and thus any gains in wages are lost to risingprices. Venture Communism should not be understood as a proposal fora new kind of society, it is an organizational form with which toengage in social struggle. Venture Communes are not intended toreplace labour unions, political parties, NGOs and other potentialvehicles of class conflict,, but to compliment them, to tilt theeconomic balance of power in the favour of the representatives ofworker's class interest. Without Venture Communism, these otherorganized forms are always forced to work against opposition withmuch deeper pockets, and are thus doomed to endless co-option,failure and retreat. Without Venture Communism, we can not changesociety to better represent the interests of producers. Not bypolitical means, nor by strike, nor by collective bargaining. Theonly way is to stop applying our labour to property owned bynon-producers and instead form a common stock of productive assets.This means taking control of our own productive process, retainingthe entire product of our labour, forming our own Capital, andexpanding until we have collectively accumulated enough wealth toachieve a greater social influence than those that defendexploitation, making real social change possible, change that is fargreater than the modest goals of Venture Communism. A truly freesociety would have no need for copyleft, copyfarleft or venturecommunism, these are only practices around which workers can unitetowards the the realization of their historic role, building aclassless society, a society of equals. Workers of the world unite!You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to win.

 

A Critique of Free Culture 

        The production of software and cultural works as a factor in classconflict exists within the broader context of the forces andrelations of production.

        A key distinction that is often overlooked in discussions ofintellectual property is that property is not a monolithic category.Immaterial assets must be separated into producer's goods andconsumer's goods. Capital demand is distinct from consumer demand"Capital" assets, goods that are employed in production,are different from Inventory, the stocks of consumables, products,that are the output of production. Failure to make this distinctionpropagates the myth that the success of Free software in creatingimmaterial producer's goods can be a template for the production ofimmaterial consumer's goods. Free software and free cultural worksmust be understood in light of this distinction "Copyleft,"despite its success in creating capital stocks such as free software,cannot succeed in producing cultural stocks or provide for thesubsistence of artists. For cultural works, copyleft must evolve into"Copy-far-left," which ties the rights to reproduceimmaterial assets with the economic mode of production employed,granting free access only to those engaging in co-operative,commons-based production and not embrace counterproductive projectslike "The Creative Commons" which represents a"Copy-just-right" approach that attempts to fit a moreflexible approach to copyright into a property-based system ofcapitalist domination. Free culture can not flurish within a classstratified society, but requires a free society, one that producesprimarily for social value, not exchange value.

 

A Critique of Free Culture 

        The production of software and cultural works as a factor in classconflict exists within the broader context of the forces andrelations of production.

        A key distinction that is often overlooked in discussions ofintellectual property is that property is not a monolithic category.Immaterial assets must be separated into producer's goods andconsumer's goods. Capital demand is distinct from consumer demand"Capital" assets, goods that are employed in production,are different from Inventory, the stocks of consumables, products,that are the output of production. Failure to make this distinctionpropagates the myth that the success of Free software in creatingimmaterial producer's goods can be a template for the production ofimmaterial consumer's goods. Free software and free cultural worksmust be understood in light of this distinction "Copyleft,"despite its success in creating capital stocks such as free software,cannot succeed in producing cultural stocks or provide for thesubsistence of artists. For cultural works, copyleft must evolve into"Copy-far-left," which ties the rights to reproduceimmaterial assets with the economic mode of production employed,granting free access only to those engaging in co-operative,commons-based production and not embrace counterproductive projectslike "The Creative Commons" which represents a"Copy-just-right" approach that attempts to fit a moreflexible approach to copyright into a property-based system ofcapitalist domination. Free culture can not flurish within a classstratified society, but requires a free society, one that producesprimarily for social value, not exchange value.

 

Copyright 

        The existence of "copy rights" predated 18th centurynotions of the author"s right to ownership. From the 16th to the17th century royal licenses gave exclusive rights to certainpublishers to print particular texts. In 1557, England"s QueenAnne granted an exclusive printing monopoly to a London guild ofprinters, the Stationers Company, because it assured the Crowncontrol over which books were published or banned. The firstcopyrights were publishers" rights to print copies, whichemerged out of the ideological needs of absolutist monarchies tocontrol knowledge and censor dissent.

        After the Licensing Act expired in 1694, the monopoly of theStationers Company was threatened by provincial booksellers, theso-called "pirates" from Ireland and Scotland. TheStationers Company petitioned Parliament for a new bill to extendtheir copyright monopoly. But this was a different England from 1557:Parliament had executed King Charles I in 1649, abolished themonarchy and installed a republic under Cromwell, restored themonarchy with Charles II, overthrew James II in the Revolution of1688, and, in 1689, it passed the first decree of modernconstitutional sovereignty, the Bill of Rights. This was now JohnLocke's England. The philosopher John Locke was among the chiefarchitects of the liberal state and the ideology of private property,to Locke property was en extension of one's ownership of oneself. Asyou own yourself, therefore you own what you produce. The right toProperty is created by labour. The English Parliament now took a viewconsistent with this outlook and The Statute of Anne, passed in 1710by Parliament, turned out to be a hard blow against the StationersCompany. The Statute declared authors, not publishers, to be ownersof their works and limited the copyright term to 14 years for newbooks and 21 years for existing copyrights. The Statute, which wassubtitled "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vestingthe Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of suchCopies, During the Times Therein Mentioned," created amarketplace of knowledge through competition. The Statute"s aimwas not to create an author"s copyright but to break theStationers Company"s monopoly.

        The principal players in what the press hailed as the great causeconcerning literary property were not authors. Publishers sued eachother in the courts, invoking the author"s rights as a pretextin their battle for economic power. The notion of the author as anoriginator with a natural right to own ideas may have been inventedby artists and philosophers, but it was publishers who profited fromit. Laws are not made by poets but by states, and states exist toenforce economic privilege, adopting whatever philosophicallegitimation they find convenient at any given time. The Statute ofAnne codified the capitalist form of the author-publisherrelationship: copyright was attached to the author at birth butautomatically assumed by publishers through the "neutral"mechanisms of the market. Authors had a right to own the products oftheir labour in theory, but since they created immaterial ideas andlacked the technological means to produce books, they had to selltheir rights to another party with enough capital to exploit them. Inessence, it was no different than having to sell their labour. Theexploitation of the author was embedded in the intellectual propertyregime from its inception.

        There are important differences between intellectual property andphysical property. Physical property is scarce and finite, whileintellectual property can be copied, has almost no reproduction cost,and can be used simultaneously by anyone with a copy. It is exactlythis characteristic of unlimited reproducibility that requires thecopyright regime to make information into property. In the long term,the exchange value of any reproduce-able good is driven towards itsreproduction cost by competition. Since there are few barriers toreproducing an information asset, it can have no exchange valuebeyond the labour and resources required to reproduce it. In otherwords, it has no long term exchange value of its own. Thus, owners ofthis property (again, not to be confused with the producers) needlaws to prevent this reproduction. Only by making it illegal forothers to copy it can the owners extract Rent for the right to copy.Intellectual Property, including copyright, is the extension ofproperty to immaterial assets and information. Copyright is a legalconstruction that tries to make certain kinds of immaterial wealthbehave like material wealth so that they can be owned, controlled,and traded. In any system of property, musicians collectively can nomore retain ownership of the product of their labour than can workersat a textile sweatshop. The system of private control of the means ofpublication, distribution, promotion and media production ensuresthat artists and all other creative workers can earn no more thantheir subsistence. Whether you are biochemist, a musician, a softwareengineer, or a film-maker, you have signed over all your copyrightsto property owners before these rights have any real financial valuefor no more than the reproduction costs of your work.

        If property is theft, as Proudhon famously argued, thenintellectual property is fraud. Property is theft, not in a strictlylegal sense, since the laws of the liberal capitalist state are thefoundations of property. Property is theft, in the philosophicalsense, as the Lockean concept of property as an extension ofself-ownership means it is intrinsically unjust to take what you didnot produce. Proudhon, like Thompson and Hodgskin before him, arguesthat the owner of property has no legitimate claim to the product ofthe direct-producers that employ this property. Without recourse toforce, property owners could not extract any more than thereproduction costs of the instruments they contribute to theproductive process. A Capitalist class could not exist withoutdenying workers independent access to the means of production, In thewords of American Individualist Anarchist Benjamin Tucker, the lenderof capital is entitled to its return intact, and nothing more. Inthis sense, when the peasants of the pre-industrial age were deniedaccess to common land by the new enclosures, it can be said thattheir land was stolen, and further, that being forced into wagelabour as a result of this expropriation, the institution of propertyitself, since the common lands where not previously property, is aninstitution of theft. But if physical property can be stolen, canintelligence or ideas be stolen? If your land is stolen, you cannotuse it anymore, except on the conditions set by its new private"owner." If ownership of an idea is analogous to theownership of material property, it should be subject to the sameconditions of economic exchange, forfeiture, and seizure - and ifseized it would then cease to be the property of its owner. But ifyour idea is used by others, you have not lost your ability to use it– so what is really stolen? The traditional notion ofproperty, as something that can be possessed to the exclusion ofothers, is irreconcilable with intangibles like ideas. Unlike amaterial object, which can exist in only one place at a given time,ideas are infinite and non-exclusive. A poem is no less a poet's poemdespite its existence in a thousand memories.

        Every expression is an extension of a previous perception.Artistic creation is not born ex nihilo from the brains ofindividuals as a private language; it has always been a socialpractice. Ideas are not original; they are built upon layers ofknowledge accumulated throughout history. Out of these common layers,artists create works that have their unmistakable specificities andinnovations. All creative works reassemble ideas, words, and imagesfrom history and their contemporary context. Before the 18th century,poets quoted their ancestors and sources of inspiration withoutformal acknowledgement, and playwrights freely borrowed plots anddialogue from previous sources without attribution. Homer based the"Iliad" and the "Odyssey" on oral traditions thatdated back centuries. Virgil"s "Aeneid" is liftedheavily from Homer. Shakespeare borrowed many of his narrative plotsand dialogue from Holinshed. This is not to say that the idea ofplagiarism didn"t exist before the 18th century, but itsdefinition shifted radically. The term plagiarist (literally,kidnapper) was first used by Martial in the 1st century to describesomeone who kidnapped his poems by copying them whole and circulatingthem under the copier"s name. Plagiarism was a false assumptionof someone else"s work. But the fact that a new work had similarpassages or identical expressions to an earlier one was notconsidered plagiarism as long as the new work had its own aestheticmerits. After the invention of the creative genius, practices ofcollaboration, appropriation and transmission were activelyforgotten. When Coleridge, Stendhall, Wilde and T.S. Eliot wereaccused of plagiarism for including expressions from theirpredecessors in their works, this reflected a redefinition ofplagiarism in accordance with the modern sense of possessiveauthorship and exclusive property. Their so-called "theft"is precisely what all previous writers had regarded as natural.

        Ideas are viral. They couple with other ideas, change shape, andmigrate into unfamiliar territories. The intellectual property regimerestricts the promiscuity of ideas and traps them in artificialenclosures, extracting exclusive benefits from their ownership andcontrol. Intellectual property is fraud - a legal privilege tofalsely represent oneself as the sole "owner" of an idea,expression or technique and to charge a tax to all who want toperceive, express or apply this "property" in their ownproduction. It is not plagiarism that dispossesses an "owner"of the use of an idea; it is intellectual property, backed by theinvasive violence of the state, that dispossesses everyone else fromusing their common culture. The basis for this dispossession is thelegal fiction of the author as a sovereign individual who createsoriginal works out of the wellspring of his imagination and thus hasa natural and exclusive right to ownership. Foucault unmaskedauthorship as a functional principle that impedes the freecirculation, free manipulation, free composition, decomposition, andrecomposition of knowledge. The author-function represents a form ofdespotism over the proliferation of ideas. The effects of thisdespotism, and of the system of intellectual property that itshelters and preserves, is that it robs us of our cultural memory,censors our words, and chains our imagination to the law. And yetartists continue to be flattered by their association with the mythof the creative genius, turning a blind eye to how it is used tojustify their exploitation and expand the privilege of theproperty-owning elite. Copyright pits author against author in a warof competition for originality. Its effects are not only economic; italso naturalizes a certain process of knowledge production,delegitimizes the notion of a common culture, and cripples socialrelations. Artists are not encouraged to share their thoughts,expressions and works or to contribute to a common pool ofcreativity. Instead, they jealously guard their "property"from others, who they view as potential competitors, spies andthieves lying in wait to snatch and defile their original ideas. Thisis a vision of the art world created in capitalism"s own image,whose ultimate aim is to make it possible for corporations toappropriate the alienated products of its intellectual workers.

        The private ownership of ideas over the last two centuries has notmanaged to completely eradicate the memory of a common culture or therecognition that knowledge flourishes when ideas, words, sounds andimages are free for everyone to use. Ever since the birth of theproprietary author, different individuals and groups have challengedthe intellectual property regime and the "right" it gave tosome private individuals to "own" creative works whilepreventing others from using and re-interpreting them. In his 1870"Poesies," a pair of text discovered and revered bySurrealists Louis Aragon and André Breton, Uruguayan-born Frenchpoet Comte de Lautreamont, called for a return of impersonal poetry,a poetry written by all. He added, "Plagiarism is necessary."Progress implies it. It closely grasps an author"s sentence,uses his expressions, deletes a false idea, replaces it with a rightone. His definition subverted the myth of individual creativity,which was used to justify property relations in the name of progresswhen it actually impeded progress by privatizing culture. The naturalresponse was to re-appropriate culture as a sphere of collectiveproduction without acknowledging artificial enclosures of authorship.Lautremont"s phrase became a benchmark for the 20th centuryavant-gardes. Dada rejected originality and portrayed all artisticproduction as recycling and reassembling - from Duchamp"sready-mades, to Tzara"s rule for making poems from cut-upnewspapers, to the photomontages of Hoech, Hausmann and Heartfield.Dada also challenged the idea of the artist as solitary genius and ofart as a separate sphere by working collectively to produce not onlyart objects and texts but also media hoaxes, interventions atpolitical gatherings and demonstrations on the street. Its assault onartistic values was a revolt against the capitalist foundations thatcreated them.

        Dadaist ideas were systematically developed into a theory by theSituationist International. The SI acknowledged that detournement -putting existing artworks, films, advertisements and comic stripsthrough a detour, or recoding their dominant meanings - was indebtedto Dadaist practices, but with a difference. They saw Dada as anegative critique of dominant images (one that depended on the easyrecognition of the image being negated) and defined detournement as apositive reuse of existing fragments simply as elements in theproduction of a new work. Detournement was not primarily anantagonism to tradition. It emphasized the reinvention of a new worldfrom the scraps of the old. And implicitly, revolution was notprimarily an insurrection against the past but learning to live in adifferent way by creating new practices and forms of behaviour. Theseforms of behaviour also included collective writings, which wereoften unsigned, and an explicit refusal of the copyright regime byattaching the labels "no copyright" or "anticopyright"to their works, along with the directions for use: any of the textsin this book may be freely reproduced, translated or adapted evenwithout mentioning the source.

        Digitalization has proven to be much more of a threat toconventional notions of authorship and intellectual property than theplagiarism practiced by radical artists or critiques of the author bypoststructuralist theorists. The computer is dissolving theboundaries essential to the modern fiction of the author as asolitary creator of unique and original works. Ownership presupposesa separation between texts and between the author and reader. Theartificiality of this separation is becoming more apparent. Onmailing lists, newsgroups and open publishing sites, the transitionfrom reader to writer is natural, and the difference between originaltexts vanishes as readers contribute commentary and incorporatefragments of the original in their response without the use ofquotations. Copyrighting on-line writing seems increasingly absurdbecause it is often collectively produced and immediately multiplied.As on-line information circulates without regard for the conventionsof copyright, the concept of the proprietary author really seems tohave become a ghost of the past. Perhaps the most important effect ofdigitalization is that it threatens the traditional benefactors ofintellectual property since monopolistic control by book publishers,music labels and the film industry is no longer necessary as ordinarypeople are taking up the means of production and distribution forthemselves.

 

Free Software 

        While property itself is created by law, material assets arescarce and rivalrous by nature. However, because copyable informationis made scarce only by law, it can also be made abundant by law. Thepractice of using copyright law itself as a form of dissent againstcopyright, called copyleft, grew to prominence in softwaredevelopment and in the rise of the free software community.

        Free software guru Richard Stallman, the inventor of the GeneralPublic License (GPL), the first copyleft license under which a lot offree software is released, claims that in the age of the digital copythe role of copyright has been completely reversed. While it began asa legal measure to allow authors to restrict publishers for the sakeof the general public, copyright has become a publishers" weaponto maintain their monopoly by imposing restrictions on a generalpublic that now has the means to produce their own copies. The aim ofcopyleft more generally, and of specific licenses like the GPL, is toreverse this reversal. Copyleft uses copyright law, but flips it overto serve the opposite of its usual purpose. Instead of fosteringprivatization, it becomes a guarantee that everyone has the freedomto use, copy, distribute and modify software or any other work. Itsonly "restriction" is precisely the one that guaranteesfreedom – users are not permitted to restrict anyone else"sfreedom since all copies and derivations must be redistributed underthe same license. Copyleft claims ownership legally only torelinquish it practically by allowing everyone to use the work asthey choose as long the copyleft is passed down. The merely formalclaim of ownership means that no one else may put a copyright over acopylefted work and try to limit its use.

        Copyleft licenses guarantee intellectual property freedom byrequiring that reuse and redistribution of information be governed by"the four freedoms." These are the freedoms to use, study,modify and redistribute. Seen in its historical context, copyleftlies somewhere between copyright and anticopyright. The gesture bywriters of anticopyrighting their works was made in a spirit ofgenerosity, affirming that knowledge can flourish only when it has noowners. As a declaration of "no rights reserved,"anticopyright was a perfect slogan launched in an imperfect world.The assumption was that others would be using the information in thesame spirit of generosity. But corporations learned to exploit thelack of copyright and redistribute works for a profit. Stallman cameup with the idea of copyleft in 1984 after a company that madeimprovements to software he had placed in the public domain (thetechnical equivalent of anticopyright, but without the overt gestureof critique) privatized the source code and refused to share the newversion. So in a sense, copyleft represents a coming-of-age, apainful lesson that relinquishing all rights can lead to abuse byprofiteers. Copyleft attempts to create a commons based on reciprocalrights and responsibilities; those who want to share the commonresources have certain ethical obligations to respect the rights ofother users. Everyone can add to the commons, but no one may subtractfrom it.

        But in another sense copyleft represents a step back fromanticopyright and is plagued by a number of contradictions.Stallman"s position is in agreement with a widespread consensusthat copyright has been perverted into a tool that benefitscorporations rather than the authors for whom it was originallyintended. But no such golden age of copyright exists. Copyright hasalways been a legal tool that coupled texts to the names of authorsin order to transform ideas into commodities and turn a profit forthe owners of capital. Stallman"s idealized view of the originsof copyright does not recognize the exploitation of authors by theearly copyright system. This specific myopia about copyright is partof a more general non-engagement with economic questions. The "left"in copyleft resembles a vague sort of libertarianism whose mainenemies are closed, nontransparent systems and totalitarianrestrictions on access to information rather than economic privilegeor the exploitation of labour. Copyleft emerged out of a hacker ethicthat comes closest to the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge"ssake. Its main objective is defending freedom of information againstrestrictions imposed by "the system," which explains whythere"s such a wide range of political opinions among hackers.It also explains why the commonality that links hackers together -the "left" in Stallman"s vision of copyleft - is notthe left as it is understood by most political activists.

        The GPL and copyleft is frequently invoked as an example of thefree software movement"s anticommercial bias. But there is nosuch bias. The four freedoms required by the GPL “the freedom torun, study, distribute and improve the source code so long as thesame freedom is passed down“ means that any additional restriction,like a non-commercial clause, would be non-free. Keeping software"free" does not prevent developers from selling copiesthey"ve modified with their own labour, and it also does notprevent redistribution for a fee by a commercial company, as long asthe same license is passed down and the source code remainstransparent. This version of freedom does not abolish exchange, assome free software enthusiasts have claimed, nor is it evenincompatible with a capitalist economy based on the theft of surplusvalue. The contradiction inherent in this commons is partly due tothe understanding of proprietary as synonymous with closed-sourced ornon-transparent. Proprietary means having an owner who prohibitsaccess to information and keeps the source code secret; it does notnecessarily mean having an owner who extracts a profit, althoughkeeping the source code secret and extracting a profit often coincidein practice. As long as the four conditions are met, commercialredistribution of free software is non-proprietary.

        Software is capital, it is a producer's good. As such, it doesn'tnot need to capture profit directly in order to be an input into aproductive process that ultimately captures profit. Software is usedin production. Virtually every office, every academy and everyfactory relies on software in their day-to-day work. For all theseorganizations, the use-value of software can be directly translatedinto exchange-value in the course of their normal production, not byselling the software directly but by doing whatever business they do,selling whatever product they sell and using software to increasetheir productivity. Paying for software licenses and agreeing to therestrictive terms of such licenses is not in their interests. AsDavid Ricardo said about landlords, the interest of a softwarecompany like Microsoft is always opposed to the interest of everysoftware user. The organizations that use software, namely schools,factories, offices, and e-commerce enterprises, collectively employfar more software developers than the few companies who sellproprietary software, such as Microsoft. Thus, free software is veryattractive to them as it allows them to reduce their individualdevelopment costs by collectively maintaining a common stock ofsoftware assets. Thus, the use-value of free software is wanted byorganizations who can and do pay software developers to make it, eventhough they have no exclusive copyright on it. Just like LiberalCapitalists like David Ricardo worked to break the advantagesLandlords had against Capitalists by attacking restrictions on tradesuch as the Corn Laws which increased the price of industrial inputs,technology giants like IBM today endorse free software and copyleftto reduce the costs of their own production and overcome advantagesof Software companies like Microsoft and Oracle.

        Yet, free software was not conceived as merely a way to reduce thecost of corporate software development. Richard Stallman writes onhis organization's website: 'My work on free software is motivated byan idealistic goal: spreading freedom and cooperation. I want toencourage free software to spread, replacing proprietary softwarethat forbids cooperation, and thus make our society better.' Sincefree software can not directly capture exchange value, producers offree software must still sell their labour to provide for theirmaterial subsistence. Copyleft is thus not able to "make societybetter" in any material sense because the majority of the extraexchange value created by producers of free software is captured byowners of material property who are able to provide for theirsubsistence. As copyleft cannot allow workers to accumulate wealthbeyond customary subsistence, copyleft alone cannot change thedistribution of productive assets or their output. Therefore copylefthas no direct impact on the distribution of wealth and power.

        Just as copyleft is in some ways a retreat from the ideologicalposition of anticopyright, the political position of copyleft is verymuch a retreat from the ideological position of the socialist left,even when it appropriates arguments against property from the left itlimits the critiques to the narrow field of immaterial property. Aparticularly shameless example of this is Eben Moglen's "dotCommunistManifesto," an insulting pastiche of the seminal Marx and Engelsmanifesto that invokes the 1848 call to arms for the working class tounite towards the abolishment of capitalism only to instead demandthe abolishment of intellectual property alone. The two 19th centuryMaterialists would have understood that abolishing intellectualproperty would not free the working class of their chains. Moglen,Culumbia University law professor and chief consul for Stallman'sFree Software Foundation, fails to engage with the issue of theinstitution of property itself, and thus has learned nothing from theposition of the revolutionaries he smugly mimics.

        Yet, despite the ideological and political retreats that copyleftrepresents, in the area of software development, copyleft has provedto be a tremendously effective means of creating an informationcommons that broadly benefits all those whose production depends onit, and the rise of the free software movement is rightly aninspiration to all who strive towards more equitable forms ofproducing. The Socialist left promotes the idea that wealth must bemore justly and equitably shared and controlled by the people whoproduce it. Perhaps the best method of achieving this is throughdecentralized, worker-owned enterprises, co-operatives, and councils.For the same reason that capitalist organizations support copyleftsoftware, because it represents a common stock of use value they canapply to production, commons-based producers and therefore all workerself-organized enterprises can also benefit from such a common stockof copyleft art and can incorporate artists in their collectiveenterprises. As the International Workers of the World state in thepreamble to their Constitution (1905) "It is the historicmission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army ofproduction must be organized, not only for everyday struggles withcapitalists but also to carry on production when capitalism shallhave been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming thestructure of the new society within the shell of the old."

        Free Software, is therefore of inestimable value for worker'sself-organized production, giving us a source of valuable capital,software, that would have previously been exclusively controlled bypropriatarian corporations and thereby reduces losses to Rent andallowing us a possibility to retain a greater portion of the productof our labour. And perhaps just as importantly, the free softwarecommunity pioneers ways to co-operatively organize large scaledistributed projects, bringing together internationally dispersedcontributors effectively working towards the design, development anddeployment of valuable software. In these ways the free softwaremovement makes important contributions towards the goal of"organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the newsociety within the shell of the old."

        This is not to say free software has no revolutionary value, it'svalue has to be understood in context, and is not applicableexclusively towards revolutionary aims, but it also usable towardsnon-revolutionary and even reactionary aims as well. The applicationof copyleft is only potentially revolutionary to the degree that itis employed towards revolutionary aims, and it's applicability islimited to immaterial producer's good, intellectual capital such assoftware. Just as free software is used by capitalist organizations,there can also be situations where worker's controlled organizationsmay chose to use commercial software, in cases where the freelyavailable options are less productive than non-free ones and theincreased productive output is greater than the lost Rent. Such achoice should be made with caution though, as not only does the lostRent contribute to the capacities of reaction (which can be avoided,with some risk, by pirating software), but an opportunity tocontribute to the development of the freely available is missed.

        The question must also be asked to what degree does "copyleft"really benefit the free software movement, despite examples such asStallman's formative experience of having his public domain softwareprivatized in 1984, there are also ample counter examples of largescale free software projects that continue to employ licenses thatallow proprietary redistribution, such as various BSD based operatingsystems and the hugely popular Apache web server. While a corporationcan employ code from these projects in proprietary applications, itdoes so at a cost, by separating their development from the main freesoftware project, they have to manually patch or reimpliment codeimprovements from the free distribution into their own fork and forgohelp from the free software community in improving their ownproprietary contributions. Meaning that companies that chose to makeproprietary versions of free software need a strong business reasonto do so, in practice this rarely happens as proprietary versionstend to quickly fall behind the free software versions infunctionality and thereby lose their market value.

        Most successful examples of proprietary use come from companieswhose primary business is selling hardware, not software, such asApple Computer or Juniper routers, both of which run proprietaryversions of software derived from BSD-based projects. That Apple andJuniper make their software proprietary, not yo sell the software,but to bundle it with their expensive hardware, is demonstrated byboth companies efforts to stop users from legally buying the softwareto run on cheaper commodity hardware, e.g. Apples efforts to thwartthe Hackintosh project and legal action against companies sellingnon-Apple hardware preloaded with legally purchased copies of OS X.

        Examples like this demonstrate the emphasis on freedom embeddedwithin copyleft, Apple's actions have not threated the BSD-based freesoftware projects they have drawn from, in fact Apple has contributedto these projects, however the BSD style license allows Apple tocontrol their users and deny their freedom in using their legallypurchased software as they please. They would not have such an optionif their OS was based on copyleft licensed software such as Linux,which is published under the GPL.

 

Free Culture 

        Despite Copyleft's beneficial role in forming a valuablecommon-stock of software, it remains problematic when the model isretrofitted back to the original domains of art and culture fromwhich dissent against intellectual property sprung. Cultural works,unlike software, are a consumer's good, not a producer's good. Thedistinction between Producer's goods (Capital) and consumer's goods(Products) is a core distinction in economic discussion, whichseparates the inputs to production into three factors, Land, Labourand Capital. The application of these three factors results in theproductive output, the products, which are the yield of theproductive process, the distribution of these products among theproviders of the three inputs is income, divided as Rent, Wages, andInterest, respectively. The balance between these incomes determinesthe distribution of wealth in society. Economic discussions ofproperty must distinguish between Capital and Product, that isbetween producer's goods and consumer's goods. The distinction is notalways obvious when referring to any particular article, for instancea tractor would normally be considered a productive asset, andtherefore Capital, however someone may also purchase a tractor forrecreational purposes, as a sort of recreational vehicle. In thiscase this particular tractor is not really Capital, however this doesnot change the fact that in most cases, the manufacturer of tractorsis funded by Capital demand, not consumer demand. Capitalism isnaturally willing to fulfill Capital demand, regardless of whetherany profit or made doing so, so long as it can make a profit fromwhatever Consumer demand is being fulfilled in end.

        Art is not, in most cases, a common input to production assoftware is. Thus it's demand is Consumer demand, not Capital demandThere are certainly cases where Artworks could be consideredproductive inputs, for instance sound effects, clip art, music clipsand the like, and the tradition of artists drawing on the work oftheir predecessors has been discussed at length, however when wediscuss the economics of content-based works, like poems, novels,films, or music, as well as entertainment oriented software titlessuch as games, we are not talking about producer's goods, butconsumer's goods. Owners of property will support the creation ofcopyleft software in order to employ it in production. However, inmost cases, they will not support the creation of copyleft art. Whywould they? They are not in the business of giving away consumer'sgood for free. They are in the business of earning profits bycontrolling the distribution of consumer's goods. Like all copyableinformation, content-based works have no direct exchange value, andunlike software they rarely have use value in production either. Usevalue exists only among the fans of these works, and if owners ofproperty can not charge these fans money for the right to copy, whywould they fund the production? And if owners of property will notsupport copyleft art, which is freely distributed, who will? Theanswer is unclear. In some cases institutions such as private andstate cultural funds will, but these can only support a very smallnumber of artists, and only by employing a dubious and ultimatelysomewhat arbitrary selection criteria in deciding who does, and whodoes not, receive such funding.

        The problem is obvious when attempting to translating copyleft tocultural works.. If someone releases a novel under a copyleftlicense, and Random House prints it and makes a profit off theauthor"s work, Random House has not violated copyleft as long asthe copyleft is passed down. To be free means to be open tocommercial appropriation, since freedom is defined as thenon-restrictive circulation of information rather than as freedomfrom exploitation. It comes as no surprise that the major revision inapplying copyleft to the production of artworks, music and texts hasbeen to permit copying, modifying and redistributing as long as it"snon-commercial. Wu Ming claims it is necessary to place a restrictionon commercial use or use for profit in order to prohibit theparasitic exploitation of cultural workers. They justify thisrestriction, and its divergence from the GPL and GFDL versions ofcopyleft, on the grounds that the struggle against exploitation andthe fight for a fair remuneration of labour is the cornerstone of thehistory of the left. Other content providers and book publishers(Verso, for example) have expanded this restriction by claiming thatcopying, modifying and redistributing should not only be non-profitbut also in the spirit of the original - without explaining what this"spirit" means. Indymedia Romania revised its copyleftdefinition to make the meaning of "in the spirit of theoriginal" clearer after repeated problems with the neofascistsite Altermedia Romania, whose "pranks" ranged fromhijacking the indymedia.ro domain to copying texts from Indymedia andlying about names and sources. Indymedia Romania"s restrictionsinclude: not modifying the original name or source since it goesagainst the desire for transparency, not reproducing the material forprofit since it abuses the spirit of generosity, and not reproducingthe material in a context that violates the rights of individuals orgroups by discriminating against them on the basis of nationality,ethnicity, gender or sexuality, since that contradicts its commitmentto equality.

        Stallman"s original definition of copyleft attempts to foundan information commons solely around the principle of informationfreedom – in this sense it is purely formal, like acategorical imperative that demands freedom of information to beuniversalizable. The only limit to belonging to this community isthose who do not share the desire for free information, and in anycase they are not excluded but only they refuse to participatebecause they refuse to make information free. Other versions ofcopyleft have tried to add further restrictions based on a strongerinterpretation of the "left" in copyleft as needing to bebased not on a negative freedom from restrictions but on positiveprinciples, like valuing social cooperation above profit,non-hierarchical participation and non discrimination. The morerestrictive definitions of copyleft attempt to found an informationcommons that is not just about the free flow of information but seesitself as part of a larger social movement that bases its commonalityon shared leftist principles. In its various mutations, copyleftrepresents a pragmatic, rational approach that recognizes the limitsof freedom as implying reciprocal rights and responsibilities –the different restrictions represent divergent interpretations aboutwhat these rights and responsibilities should be. Yet, given the pooreconomic condition of the majority of artists who reserve fullcopyrights, the prospect of mutations of copyleft that restrictcommercial usage by way of including "non-profit" or"non-commercial" terms improving the economic conditions ofthe artists that use seems remote. Artists, like other workers, haveno means to bargain for anything more than subsistence. The chiefadvantage of reserving commercial rights is the right of the creatorsto transfer ownership of there works to the propertied class wheneverthe propertied class finds it in its interests to take ownership,and, of course, entirely on the terms dictated by the propertiedclass. This is illustrated in "Artists Earnings and Copyright"by Martin Kretschmer, Professor of Information Jurisprudence atBournemouth University, where he concludes that "The creator haslittle to gain from exclusivity" and in his 2006 study EmpiricalEvidence On Copyright Earnings, which states: "Earnings fromnon-copyright, and even non-artistic activities, are an importantsource of income for most creators," which includes manystartling statistics. For example, the median payment distributed bythe Performing Right Society (UK) in 1994 to its copyright holderswas £84.

        "Non-commercial" terms are very problematic foradvocates of worker's self organized production, as these termsrestrict the ability of non-capitalist enterprises to reproduce suchworks, and thus such licenses are corrosive, not only to theinterests of artists, but to all workers as they are not compatiblewith the general objective of the socialist left: the creation of aworker's controlled economy. In order for copyleft to mutate into arevolutionary instrument in the domain of cultural production it mustbecome Copy-far-left. It must insist upon worker's ownership of themeans of production. The works themselves must be a part of thecommon stock and available for productive use by other commons-basedproducers. So long as the authors reserve the right to make moneywith this work and prevent other commons based producers from doingso, the work can not be considered to be in the commons at all andremains a private work, a non-commercial copyleft is thereby anon-free license A copyfarleft license, to avoid being non-free, mustnot restrict commercial usage, but rather usage that is notcommons-based. Specifically, copyfarleft must have one set of rulesfor those who are working within the context of workers ownership andanother for those who employ private property and wage labour inproduction. A copyfarleft license should make it possible forproducers to share freely and to retain the value of their labourproduct. In other words, it must be possible for workers to earnrenumeration by applying their own labour to mutual property butimpossible for owners of private property to make profit using wagelabour. Thus, under a copyfarleft license, a worker-owned printingcooperative could be free to reproduce, distribute, and modify thecommon stock as they like, but a privately owned publishing companywould be prevented from having free access. In this way copyfarleftremains free in the same sense as copyleft is free, despiterestrictions on proprietary redistribution, it only restricts takingaway from the commons, not contributing to it. A copyfarleft licensewould allow commons-based commercial use while denying the ability toprofit by exploiting wage labour. The copyleft Non-Commercialapproach does neither; it prevents commons-based commerce while noteffectively restricting wage exploitation, which requires a change inthe distribution of wealth, and only a license that effectivelyprevents alienated property and wage labour from being employed inthe reproduction of the otherwise free-information commons can changethe distribution of wealth. Copyleft provides a solid foundation forsoftware in commons-based productions. Copyfarleft could potentiallyprovide a workable foundation for cultural works to also become apart of the common stock employed by independent producers.

        However for Copyfarleft to have an impact, it would need to beemployed within the context of a nascent worker's economy thatincludes various forms of production, cultural and material. Art aswell as food, etc. In the absence of such a environment, copyleft andit's various mutations have little advantage for the majority ofartists for whom the prospects of gaining financially by way ofcommercial licensing are negligible. For these artists Anticopyrightretains it's strong appeal. Anticopyright is a gesture of beingradical that refuses pragmatic compromises and seeks to abolishintellectual property in its entirety. Anticopyright affirms afreedom that is absolute and recognizes no limits to its desire. Theincompatibility between these positions poses a dilemma: does oneaffirm absolute freedom, knowing it could be used against one, ormoderate freedom by restricting the information commons tocommunities that won"t abuse it because they share the same"spirit?" While some have multiplied restrictions, othershave rejected any restriction at all, including the singlerestriction imposed by the initial copyleft. It is the movementaround peer-to-peer file sharing that comes closest to the gesture ofanticopyright. The best example is the Copyriot blog by RasmusFleischer of Pyratbiran (Bureau of Piracy), an anti-IP think tank andthe one-time founders of Pirate Bay, the best known Bittorent site inthe P2P community. The motto of copyriot is "No copyright. Nolicense." But there is a difference from the older anticopyrighttradition. Fleischer claims that copyright has become absurd in theage of digital technology because it has to resort to all sorts offictions, like distinctions between uploading and downloading orbetween producer and consumer, which don"t actually exist inhorizontal P2P communication. Pyratbiran rejects copyright in itsentirety, not because it was flawed in its inception but because itwas invented to regulate an expensive, one-way machine like theprinting press and no longer corresponds to the practices that havebeen made possible by current technologies of reproduction. However,despite the absurdity of the fictions on which copyright rests, thebroader political context suggests that copyleft inspired models alsohave an important role to play as outright rejection of the legalenvironment is not always possible when practical considerations aretaken into account. Building alternative ways of producing andsharing, "building the new society within the shell of the old,"requires us to operate within the Capitalist legal system where thelogic of capture and exploitation is embedded, and while space fordefiant gestures exists, we must also get on with the business offinding the forms and structures required to build and expand thecommons, and it seems clear that restrictions such as those ofcopyleft and copy-far-left serve to protect the commons and keep itfree.

        Others, such as Joost Smiers, Professor Emeritus of PoliticalScience of the Arts at the Utrecht School of the Arts also insist onthe abolishment of Copyright. He argues that copyright centralizesmedia ownership by giving large media conglomerates ananti-competitive advantage which damages the position of artists.Artists would benefit more from a level playing field consisting oflarger number of publishers competing for their services then fromexclusivity of copyright. Professor Smiers has a valid point,copyright is a market inefficiency. It should be abolished. Howeverthere is no reason to believe it will be abolished. Copyright is farfrom the only market inefficiency in the contemporary capitalistmarket. Without market inefficiencies, Capital would be unable tocapture any more than it's own reproduction cost in any branch ofindustry, the elimination of competition is central to the logic ofCapitalism. Without unfair advantages, a Capitalist class of ownerscould not accumulate wealth and there could be no Capitalism. Smiersis correct in his criticism of copyright, he is also correct when hegoes further and denounces copyright as a form of censorship, howeveras with all political ideas, it can only be implemented when thosethat support it can overcome the wealth of those who oppose it, andthat is not currently the case. So long as copyright continues toexist, copyleft inspired licenses continue to be needed to allowintellectual freedom within the copyright regime.

 

The Creative Anti-Commons 

        The emergence of free software, file sharing and art forms basedupon sampling and reuse of other media has created a serious problemfor the traditional copyright system. The music and film industries,in particular, are in the middle of what basically amounts to anall-out war against their own consumers to prevent them fromdownloading and sampling their property. It is clear that digitalnetwork technology poses a serious problem to the recording and filmindustries.

        In the earlier stages of the free software movement mostcorporations, especially software companies, reacted very negativelyto the idea of copyleft, and tried to fight it with the sameaggressive tactics The Recording Industry Association of America(RIAA) and its friends are unleashing on the file sharing community.Most famous of these was the SCO Group"s legal actions againstcompanies that use or promote Linux. The actions of RIAA can beunderstood in that same way: it is a conservative reaction to protecttheir interests. However, not all owners of property believe thatlegal action can stop new technologies from emerging. Many believethat the music and film industry will need to adapt and thatcopyright law must be modified for this changing environment. Thus,just as capital joined the copyleft software movement to reduce thecost of software development, capital is also joining the copyrightdissident art movement to integrate file sharing and sampling into anotherwise property-based system of control.

        The dissidents of intellectual property have had a rich historyamong avant-garde artists, zine producers, radical musicians, and thesub-cultural fringe. Today the fight against intellectual property isbeing led by lawyers, professors and members of government. Not onlyis the social strata of the leading players very different, which initself might not be such an important detail, but the framework ofthe struggle against intellectual property has completely changed.Before law professors like Lawrence Lessig became interested in IP,the discourse among dissidents was against any ownership of thecommons, intellectual or physical. Now center stage is occupied bysupporters of property and economic privilege. The argument is nolonger that the author is a fiction and that property is theft butthat intellectual property law needs to be restrained and reformedbecause it now infringes upon the rights of creators. Lessigcriticizes the recent changes in copyright legislation imposed byglobal media corporations and their powerful lobbies, the absurdlengths to which copyright has been extended, and other perversionsthat restrict the creativity of artists. But he does not questioncopyright as such since he views it as the most important incentivefor artists to create. The objective is to defend against IPextremism and absolutism, while preserving IP"s beneficialeffects.

        In his keynote at Wizards of OS4 in Berlin, Lessig celebrated theRead-Write culture of free sharing and collaborative authorship thathas been the norm for most of history. During the last century thisRead-Write culture has been thwarted by IP legislation and convertedto a Read-Only culture dominated by a regime of producer-control.Lessig bemoans the recent travesties of copyright law that havecensured the work of remix artists like DJ Dangermouse (The GreyAlbum) and Javier Prato (Jesus Christ: The Musical). Both weretorpedoed by the legal owners of the music used in the production oftheir works, as were John Oswald and Negativland before them. Inthese cases the wishes of the artists, who were regarded as mereconsumers in the eyes of the law, were subordinated to control by theproducers - the Beatles and Gloria Gaynor, respectively - and theirlegal representatives. The problem is that producer-control iscreating a Read-Only culture and destroying the vibrancy anddiversity of creative production. It is promoting the narrowinterests of a few privileged "producers" at the expense ofeverybody else. Lessig contrasts producer-control to the culturalcommons - a common stock of value that all can use and contribute to.The commons denies producer-control and insists on the freedom ofconsumers. The "free" in free culture refers to the naturalfreedom of consumers to use the common cultural stock and not thestate-enforced freedom of producers to control the use of "their"work. In principle, the notion of a cultural commons abolishes thedistinction between producers and consumers, viewing them as equalactors in an ongoing process.

        Lessig claims that today, within the context of the CreativeCommons project more specifically, the possibility of a Read-Writeculture is reborn. But is the Creative Commons really a commons?According to its website, Creative Commons defines the spectrum ofpossibilities between full copyright - all rights reserved - and thepublic domain - no rights reserved. Our licenses help you keep yourcopyright while inviting certain uses of your work - a "somerights reserved" copyright. The point is clear: Creative Commonsexists to help "you," the producer, keep control of "your"work. You are invited to choose among a range of restrictions youwish to apply to "your" work, such as forbiddingduplication, forbidding derivative works, or forbidding commercialuse. It is assumed that as an author-producer everything you make andeverything you say is your property. The right of the consumer is notmentioned, nor is the distinction between producers and consumers ofculture disputed. Creative Commons legitimates, rather than denies,producer-control and enforces, rather than abolishes, the distinctionbetween producer and consumer. It expands the legal framework forproducers to deny consumers the possibility to create use-value orexchange-value out of the common stock.

        This problem of creating "commons deeds" for works thatare not really a common stock is typical of the Copy-just-rightapproach typified by the Creative Commons. Had the Beatles and GloriaGaynor published their work within the framework of Creative Commons,it would still be their choice and not the choice of DJ Dangermouseor Javier Patro whether "The Grey Album" or "JesusChrist: The Musical" should be allowed to exist. The legalrepresentatives of the Beatles and Gloria Gaynor could just as easilyhave used CC licenses to enforce their control over the use of theirwork. The very problem of producer-control presented by Lessig is notsolved by the Creative Commons "solution" as long as theproducer has an exclusive right to choose the level of freedom togrant the consumer, a right that Lessig has never questioned. TheCreative Commons mission of allowing producers the "freedom"to choose the level of restrictions for publishing their workcontradicts the real conditions of commons-based production. Lessig"shas no basis to use DJ Dangermouse and Javier Patro as examples topromote the cause of Creative Commons .

        Lessig"s praise of the Free Software movement likewise ringsfalse because its architecture assures everyone (technologically aswell as legally, in the form of its licenses) the possibility to usethe common resource of the source code. Despite its claim to beextending the principles of the free software movement, the freedomCreative Commons gives to creators to choose how their works are usedis very different from the freedom the GPL gives to users to copy,modify and distribute the software as long as the same freedom ispassed down. Stallman recently made a statement rejecting CreativeCommons in its entirety because some of its licenses are free whileothers are non-free, which confuses people into mistaking the commonlabel for something substantial when in fact there is no commonstandard and no ethical position behind the label. Whereas copyleftclaims ownership legally only to relinquish it practically, thereferences to ownership by Creative Commons is no longer an ironicreversal but real. The pick and choose CC licenses allow arbitraryrestrictions on the freedom of users based on an authors"particular preferences and tastes. In this sense, Creative Commons isa more elaborate version of copyright. It doesn"t challenge thecopyright regime as a whole, nor does it preserve its legal shell inorder to turn the practice of copyright on its head, as copyleftdoes.

        The public domain, anticopyright and copyleft are all attempts tocreate a commons, a shared space of non-ownership that is free foreveryone to use. The conditions of use may differ, according tovarious interpretations of rights and responsibilities, but theserights are common rights and the resources are shared alike by thewhole community – their use is not decided arbitrarily, on acase by case basis, according to the whims of individual members. Bycontrast, Creative Commons is an attempt to use a regime of propertyownership (copyright law) to create a non-owned, culturally sharedresource. Its mixed bag of cultural goods are not held in commonsince it is the choice of individual authors to permit their use orto deny it. Creative Commons is really an anti-commons that peddles acapitalist logic of privatization under a deliberately misleadingname. Its purpose is to help the owners of intellectual propertycatch up with the fast pace of information exchange, not by freeinginformation, but by providing more sophisticated definitions forvarious shades of ownership and producer-control.

        What began as a movement for the abolition of intellectualproperty has become a movement of customizing owners" licenses.Almost without notice, what was once a very threatening movement ofradicals, hackers and pirates is now the domain of reformists,revisionists, and apologists for capitalism. When capital isthreatened, it co-opts its opposition. We have seen this scenariomany times throughout history; its most spectacular example is thetransformation of self-organized workers" councils into a tradeunion movement that negotiates legal contracts with the owners ofcorporations. The Creative Commons is a similar subversion that doesnot question the "right" to private property but tries toget small concessions in a playing field where the game and its rulesare determined in advance. The real effect of Creative Commons is tonarrow political contestation within the sphere of the alreadypermissible.

        While narrowing this field of contestation, Creative Commonssimultaneously portrays itself as radical, as the avant-garde of thebattle against intellectual property. Creative Commons has become akind of default orthodoxy in non-commercial licensing, and a popularcause among artists and intellectuals who consider themselvesgenerally on the left and against the IP regime in particular. TheCreative Commons label is moralistically invoked on countless sites,blogs, speeches, essays, artworks and pieces of music as if itconstituted the necessary and sufficient condition for the comingrevolution of a truly "free culture." Creative Commons ispart of a larger copyfight movement, which is defined as a fight tokeep intellectual property tethered to its original purpose and toprevent it from going too far. The individuals and groups associatedwith this movement advocate what has been called a smarter IP, or areform of intellectual property that doesn"t threaten freespeech, democracy, competition, innovation, education, the progressof science, and other things that are critically important to oursocial, cultural, and economic well-being.

        In an uncanny repetition of the copyright struggles that firstemerged during the period of Romanticism, the excesses of thecapitalist form of intellectual property are opposed but using itsown language and presuppositions. Creative Commons preservesRomanticism"s ideas of originality, creativity and propertyrights, and similarly considers "free culture" to be aseparate sphere existing in splendid isolation from the world ofmaterial production. Ever since the 18th century, the ideas of"creativity" and "originality" have beeninextricably linked to an anti-commons of knowledge. Creative Commonsis no exception.

        The Free Software foundation, publishers of the GPL, take a verydifferent approach in their definition of "free," insistingon the "four freedoms:" The freedom to use, the freedom tostudy, the freedom to share, and the freedom to modify. This isconsistent with the idea of "free" in the history of freeculture, for instance, the journal Situationist International waspublished with the following copyright statement:

        "All texts published in Situationist International may befreely reproduced, translated and edited, even without crediting theoriginal source."

        Even earlier, Woody Guthrie including the following note in a1930's songbook distributed to listeners who wanted the words to hisrecordings had the following message:

        "This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright#154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin' itwithout our permission, will be mighty good friends of ours, cause wedon't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodelit. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."

        In these cases what is evident is that the freedom being insistedupon is the freedom of the consumer to use and produce, not the"freedom" of the producer to control. If free culture isreally intended to create a common stock for culturalpeer-production, then the framework provided must specifically bedesigned in such a way that can not be used to attack free culture,the GPL and the terms presented by Woody Guthrie and the SituationistInternational pass this test, the Creative Commons does not.Moreover, proponents of free cultural must be firm in denying theright of Producer-control and denying the enforcement of distinctionbetween producer and consumer, Lawrence Lessig and the CreativeCommons, affirm both the right and distinction of the Producer and assuch can only be considered the sworn enemies of free culture.

        One reaction to this has been Benjamin Mako Hill's Criticism ofthe Creative Commons, along the same lines as Stallman's, that theCreative Commons, with it's combination of free and non-freelicenses, does not define any single standard of freedom for culturalworks. To address this, Mako Hill and others undertook the FreedomDefined project and produced a set of free terms, in the image of theGPL, for Cultural works. However, the project failed to address theissues of applicability of a standard copyleft licensing approach tocultural works, not asking if art could be funded from Capital demandas a producer's good such as software, or if it is merely meant to bea non-commercial activity financed by related or non-art activity orperhaps by grants. As a result of not addressing the economic basisof free culture, the project did not produce a distinct option forartists more compelling than the existing copyleft mutations oranticopyright. To make matters worse, the Creative Commons respondedby adding to their plethora of conflicting choices by marking some oftheir licenses with a shield stating "Approved For CulturalWorks" when the license is compatible with the definition ofcultural works as defined by the standard copyleft approach of theFreedom Defined project. The end result is despite it's well-meaningintent, it only serves to make the Creative Commons even moreconfusing, and produced yet more licensing categories which continueto fail to address the distinction between software and art. Artistscontinue to not use the licenses, according to Creative Commonsstatistics, it is estimated that perhaps around 16% of CreativeCommons licensed works are licensed ander the "Approved"licenses, the overwhelming majority of the rest choosing morerestrictive licenses, often with "non-commercial" and"non-derivative" terms, in other words non-free licensesthat prevent the works from effectively being part of anycommon-stock of cultural works. For free cultural to create avaluable common stock it must deny the privilege of the producer tocontrol the common stock

 

Copyfarleft