[Rumori] Libre Society

[David]

 From http://www.libresociety.org


LIBRE SOCIETY MANIFESTO

Towards a Libre Society

David Berry and Giles Moss

 

A constellation of interests is now seeking to increase their ownership 
and control of creativity. They tell us that they require new laws and 
rights that allow them to control concepts and ideas and protect them 
from exploitation. They say that this will enrich our lives, create new 
products and safeguard the possibility of future prosperity. But this 
is an absolute disaster for creativity, whose health depends on an 
ongoing, free and open conversation between ideas from the past and the 
present.


— In response, we wish to defend the idea of a creative sphere of 
concepts and ideas that are free from ownership.


1
Profit has a new object of affection. Indeed, profiteers now 
shamelessly proclaim to be the true friend of creativity and the 
creative. Everywhere, they declare, “We support and protect concepts 
and ideas. Creativity is our business and it is safe in our hands. We 
are the true friends of creativity!”

2
Not content with declarations of friendship, these profiteers are eager 
to put into practice their fondness for creativity as well. “Actions 
speak louder than words” in capitalist culture. To display their 
affection, profiteers use law, such as intellectual property rights, to 
watch over concepts and ideas and to protect them from those who seek 
to misuse them. While we are dead to the world at night, they are 
busily stockpiling intellectual property at an astonishing rate. More 
and more the creative sphere is being brought under their exclusive 
control.

3
That the profiteers are now so protective of creativity, jealously 
seeking to control concepts and ideas, ought to rouse suspicion. They 
claim to be friends, but we know that friendship is not the same as 
dependency. It is very different to say, “I’m your true friend because 
I need you”, than to say, “I need you because I’m your true friend”. 
But how are we to settle this issue? In any relationship between 
friends we should ask, “Are both partners mutually benefiting?”

4
The profiteers clearly benefit from their new friendship with the 
creative, when measured by their insatiable thirst for profit. Unlike 
physical objects, concepts and ideas can be shared, copied and reused 
without diminishment. However many people use and interpret a 
particular concept, the original creators’ use of that concept is not 
surrendered or reduced. But through the use of intellectual property – 
in the form of copyright, patents and trademarks – concepts and ideas 
can be transformed into commodities that are controlled and owned. An 
artificial scarcity of creativity can then be established. Much money 
is to be made when creative flows of knowledge and ideas become scarce 
products to be traded in the market place. And, increasingly, 
intellectual property is providing profiteers with vast accumulations 
of wealth

5
5. For many of us the thought of intellectual property law still evokes 
romantic apparitions of a solitary artist or writer protecting their 
creative endeavours. So it is unsurprising that we tend to view 
intellectual property law as something that defends the rights and 
interests of the creative. Perhaps, in some removed and distant time, 
there was a modest respectability in this notion. But this romantic 
vision is now ill at ease with the emerging abuse of intellectual 
works. Creators have become employees and each concept and idea they 
produce is appropriated and owned by the employer. The profiteers use 
intellectual property law to amass the creative output of their 
employees and others. What is more, they continually lobby to extend 
the control of intellectual property law for longer periods.

6
The multitude is becoming excluded from using and reinterpreting a 
whole field of concepts and ideas. Profiteers use digital technologies 
to enforce copyright and patent law through the code that runs 
computers and networks. Using digital rights management software, 
creative works are locked and only profiteers have the keys. This 
prevents copying, modification and reuse of the increasing number of 
works that are being controlled in this way. The freedom to use and 
re-interpret work is restricted through legally based but 
technologically enforced enclosures. In the current age of 
technological capitalism, public pathways for the free flow of concepts 
and ideas and the movement of the creative are steadily being closed.

7
This development is an absolute disaster for creativity, whose health 
depends on an ongoing conversation and confrontation between concepts 
and ideas from the past and present. It is shameful that the creative 
multitude is being excluded from using concepts and ideas. Creative 
work is never solely the product of a single creator. Creativity cannot 
subsist in a social nothingness. It always owes debts to the 
inspiration and previous work of others, whether they be thinkers, 
artists, scientists, teachers, paramours or friends. Concepts and ideas 
depend upon their social life, and it could not be otherwise.

8
An analogy can be drawn with everyday language — that is, the system of 
signs, symbols, gestures and meanings used in communicative 
understanding. Spoken language is shared between us; it is non-owned 
and free. But imagine a devastating situation where this was no longer 
true. George Orwell’s 1984 dystopia — and the violence done to 
free-thinking through ‘newspeak’ — helps to illustrate this. In a 
similar way, the control and ownership of concepts and ideas is a grave 
danger to what we affectionately call our freedom or self-determination 
— it is the emerging threat to creative thought and expression.

9
The creative multitude can decide either to conform or rebel. In 
conforming they become creatively inert, unable to create new synergies 
and ideas, mere consumers of the standardised commodities that 
increasingly saturate cultural life. In rebelling, they continue to use 
concepts and ideas in spite of intellectual property law, and are 
labelled “pirates”, “property thieves”, even “terrorists”, answerable 
as criminals to the courts of global state power. In other words, 
profiteers declare a permanent state of exception, which is then used 
to justify the coercive use of state power against those who rebel. As 
we will discuss, a growing number of the creative are also responding 
by an active resistance to the present through the creation of an 
alternative creative sphere for concepts and ideas.

10
1. There will be immediate objections to all we have said. The 
profiteers will turn proselytizers and say, “If there is no private 
ownership of creativity there will be no incentive to produce!” The 
idea that the ownership of knowledge and ideas promotes creativity is a 
shameful one, however plausible it may seem from the myopic perspective 
of the profiteers. To say that creativity will thrive when the freedom 
to use concepts and ideas is denied is clearly upside-down. After 
giggling a little at this, we should now turn this thinking the right 
way up.

11
According to this “incentive” claim, there cannot have been any 
creativity (i.e., art, music, literature, design and technology) before 
the profiteer’s owned and controlled our concepts and ideas. This seems 
like pure fantasy. But we might say that history is enough of a fiction 
to raise doubts about the previous incarnations of creativity and the 
creative. The “incentive” claim, however, also implies that there 
cannot be any creativity currently operating outside of the 
intellectual property regime. Fortunately, in this case, we are our own 
historical actors and witnesses. We can begin to know what we have 
always already known — creativity is not reducible to the exploitation 
of intellectual property.

12
A new global movement of networked groups that operate across a variety 
of different creative media — e.g., music, art, design, software — is 
now emerging. These groups produce concepts, ideas and art that exist 
outside of the current intellectual property regime — for example, the 
creative works of the Free/Libre and Open Source communities, which can 
be examined, challenged, modified and improved. Here, knowledge and 
ideas are shared, contested and reinterpreted among the creative as 
friends. Like the symbols and signs of language, their concepts and 
ideas are public and non-owned. Against the machinations of profit, 
these groups are in the process of constituting a real alternative — of 
constructing an alternative model of creative life.

13
Through the principles of attribution and share-alike, previous works 
and ideas are given due recognition in these communities. This means 
that although a work may be copied, modified and synthesised into new 
works, previous creative work is valued and recognised for its 
contribution to creativity as a whole. This is a constitutive principle 
of the Free/Libre and Open Source movements.

14
These movements adopt an ingenious viral device, implemented through 
public licenses, known as copyleft. This ensures that concepts and 
ideas are non-owned, while also guaranteeing that future synergies 
based on these concepts and ideas are equally open for others to use. 
In this way, copyright (all rights reserved) is stood on its feet by 
copyleft (all rights reversed). It now stands the right way up for 
creativity — it can now look creativity in the eyes.

15
The vision and practice of these alternative movements is defiantly 
growing in strength. They offer a glimpse in formation of an 
alternative creative sphere for flows of concepts and ideas that are 
shared freely among friends. The creative multitude everywhere should 
embrace and defend this radical mode of creative life. These groups are 
acting in a way that is ‘counter to our time and, let us hope, for the 
benefit of a possible time to come’ — creativity is creating resistance 
to the present.



(version 1.2)