‘You’ll never live like common people
You’ll never do what common people do
You’ll never fail like common people
You’ll never watch your life slide out of view, and dance and drink and screw
Because there’s nothing else to do’
Jarvis Cocker (Pulp frontman)
What licence did I attach to my blog? Well, thanks to the Creative Commons project it was a relatively easy task. In essence I answered a few automated questions, and was recommended a licence. The rationale behind my answers was as follows; I want people to read my work, I want people to use my work – but if it is used directly I want to be cited, and I don’t want to be used for commercial purposes. The end. With that, I was recommended a ‘Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia Licence.’ I pasted the code for the recommended licence into a widget on wordpress and the deed was done.
Glad to get another academic task out of the way, I left the Creative Commons licence intact for a couple of weeks before deciding to blog about it.
Reading into creative commons and broader issues of internet licensing I was surprised at what a political decision attributing a blog to a CC licence actually is.
Signing up to the licence, I subscribe to the political and even social beliefs of the CC project.
Creative Commons is basically an alternative licence framed in opposition to the tyranny of ‘intellectual property.’ Intellectual property law, as argued by CC patriarch Lawrence Lessig is a subversion of law by big media which have created de facto monopolies over creative works[1]. This copyright control is essentially what makes big media money. Artists, musicians, intellectuals, writers and engineers effectively sign away their rights to these companies in order to have their works distributed and sold[2]. Creative commons advocates frame the licence as an egalitarian seizure of control by the cultural producers themselves.
However, at least in the mind of the creative commons lobby, this re-structuring is more conservative than revolutionary. Both Lessig and fellow CC advocate Marc Garcelon frame creative commons in terms of US Constitutional law – as inscribed by Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s view, as summarised by Garcelon dictates that, ‘only the expression of ideas in artistic works [should] be eligible for copyright protection and then only for a limited period of time [14 years],[3]’ before entering the public domain. Losing a copyright Supreme Court case in 2003, Lessig invoked the ghost of Jefferson[4].
Jefferson: Father of Copyright
Understandably, the advocates paint a rosy picture of creative commons; however the ideology does have significant weaknesses. Firstly, creative commons functions firmly in implicit complicity with global capitalism[5].
As identified by Pasquinelli, Lessig harks back to the Anglo-American libertarian tradition, where free speech is a synonym for free market, and the line between ideology and action is blurred[6]. This is painfully apparent in Lessig’s analysis of ‘rivalrous’ (limited resources) and ‘non-rivalrous’ (unlimited) resources[7]. Here, Lessig wilfully ignores the cultural capital and physical work that goes into producing online content to embark on a purely economic appraisal of cultural commodities.
Pasquinelli in particular highlights this limitation in the rhetoric of creative commons, and wider ‘digitalism’ ideology. He challenges the disembodied politics of creative commons, noting, ‘the flesh is first, before the Logos… merged with the global economy, each bit of free information carries its own micro slave like a forgotten twin.[8]’ This micro-slave means that creative commons, far from empowering producers simply facilitates existing producer exploitation.
Big media and the Micro slave (you!)
The wider point here is that all copyright reallocates profits in favour of owners rather than producers. Creative commons is still a copyright licence, and thus exists within the existing paradigm of copyright protection.
Creative commons, as Anna Nimus argues, ‘legitimises, rather than denies, producer-control, and enforces, rather that abolishes, the distinction between producer and consumer.[9]
So how does this fit into the context of my use of a creative commons licence? The arguments against creative commons are strong. Politically, I concur. However, as with so much radical theory, no substantial, practicable and usable alternative are offered by the far left. Creative commons is flawed, but it is there – in the public sphere and easily available for use. Licensing a blog with a non-commercial, no derivative attribution licence, is, for my purpose, favourable to refraining from licensing altogether.
[1] Lawrence Lessig ‘Open Code and Open Societies’ 2005, http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/works/lessig/final.PDF
[2] Anna Nimus (alias Dmytri Kleiner & Joanne Richardson), “Copyright, Copyleft & the
Creative Anti-Commons”, Dec. 2006. Web: www.subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/nimustext.html
[3] Marc Garcelon, ‘An Information Commons? Creative Commons and Public Access to Cultural Creations’ 2009, pp. 1308
[4] Marc Garcelon, 2009, pp. 1313
[5] Matteo Pasquinelli, ‘The Ideology of Free Culture and the Grammar of Sabotage’ 2009 www.rekombinant.org/mat
[6]Matteo Pasquinelli 2009, pp. 5
[7] Lawrence Lessig ‘Open Code and Open Societies’ 2005 pp.122-23
[8] Matteo Pasquinelli 2009 pp. 4
[9] Anna Nimus, 2006
Of Your Evil Doings You Will Be Judged 