[Rumori] Libre Commons Licenses

David Meme david at locarecords.com
Fri Jul 1 10:57:45 PDT 2005



http://www.libresociety.org/library/libre.pl/Libre_Commons



Libre Commons

Welcome to the Libre Commons Licenses. This is a project to develop  
non-legal licenses that will operate in the shared space that can non- 
bureaucratically and non-instrumentally be formed resisting law, the  
intellectual property regime and state violence. These licenses are  
written explicitly against the presuppositions and caveats of the  
Creative Commons licenses which (un)consciously seek to use culture  
as purely a resource. Instead these licenses are anti-licenses;  
ethical frameworks or chromosomes of social practices.

Rather than relying on law or legal fictions (written by clever  
lawyers) these Libre Commons licenses are explicitly social and  
political, aiming to radicalise and uncover the basis of commonalty  
and shared life. Where Creative Commons is seeking hegemony and  
representative status, becoming an obligatory passage point for  
creativity, the Libre Commons rejects bureaucratic attempts to  
overcode the social through law. They affirm the most important part  
of shared creativity, namely the intersubjective recognition and  
affirmation that commonalty provides. As such, it is hoped these  
licenses will help to avoid the claims of 'experts' who seek to  
assist us in our production and creativity. We hope that you will use  
the Libre Commons licenses to contribute to these practices and to  
set in motion an enormous capacity for innovation that can transform  
reality itself.

Another world is possible, a better more democratic world and this  
project aims to contribute towards fostering desire for that world.


Background

The development of information and knowledge as important new  
economic resources differs from previous uses which were embedded  
within the commodity itself. There has been a move away from the  
importance of material inputs (which previously were critical  
elements in production) to ideas and knowledge as contributing  
significant value to the product, often referred to as trade-related  
intellectual property. Immaterial Labour is based on things held in  
common being commodified in order to generate profit. Changes in  
capitalism, mean that profit is increasingly reliant on intellectual  
property, dividing different forms of social relationship so capital  
can benefit.

Intellectual property is a site of global struggle between those who  
wish to own what is currently free and held in common between us, and  
those that wish to commodify all areas of our lives.

Choosing a License

Offering your work under a Libre Commons license does mean giving up  
your copyright. It means offering contributing the work to the  
commonalty and towards radical social practices.

What conditions? That you together with your work contribute to a  
shared resource of radical democracy and collective social  
transformation through affirmative and positive social production.  
There are currently two Libre Commons licenses to choose from.

Note: These licenses reject state and international law and are  
predicating on ethical and political practices not on lawyers and  
state violence.

Libre Commons Res Communes License

This license declares your work to a common that is shared between us  
as human beings. It is therefore owned in common with others.

Libre Commons Res Divini Juris License

This license declares your work to the realm of the gods. Where as a  
moment of clearing it contributes to a permanent state of exception  
rejecting state law and liberal conceptions of the nation state.



Libre Commons Res Communes License

Welcome to the Libre Commons Res Communes License
The commons is usually defined as that which is shared in communally  
with others. This can, for example, by a resource, such as land or  
water, and it is owned by the members of the community. The commons  
has traditionally been limited to a local community right and to a  
physical resource, such as a forest, but has been used to refer to  
the space of intellectual thought, ideas and concepts as an ‘ideas  
commons’, an ‘innovation commons’, an ‘intellectual commons’, a  
‘digital commons’, an inevitably an ‘e-commons’, ‘the public domain’  
or ‘Intellectual Space’. This license commits the work that is  
inscribed with this Res Communes license to the shared common that  
all can draw from and reuse.



License text

The Res Communes license is designed to reject a state-centred legal  
construct of a commons (or commons without commonalty) in order to  
concentrate on creating a common which is shared between us in  
collective practices (a commons with commonalty).

The 'Commune' or the 'Commonalty' originally meant 'the people of the  
whole realm' or 'all the King's subjects' as opposed to the King, the  
Nobles or the 'Commons' in Parliament. We here refer to the  
commonalty to refer to the global multitude, the people of the whole  
world.

1. This work is outside of all legal jurisidiction and takes its  
force and action from the constituent radical democratic practices of  
the global multitude against the logic of capital.

2. All work that is so inscribed should bear the text '(L) Libre  
Commons Res Communes License'.

3. As a user of this license the work is available to be shared and  
used as part of a common substrate that is shared between us.



Libre Commons Res Divini Juris License

Temples, tombs, religious statues and places were considered to  
belong to no one because they were in the service of the gods, the  
impediment to being turned into property was not natural but divine.  
Following Heidegger's call that only a God can save us, the God in  
question is that that can produce a clearing, the possibility of  
another place, making a different world. Drawn from a concept of  
Specis Being, works that are contributed to the Res Divini Juris are  
commited to the human specis as a whole. Beyond Temporal Law and the  
liberal legal system, we could think of it as a space of the  
permanent state of exception.

License text

The Res Divini Juris license is designed to so that spaces can be  
opened up, and offer the possibility of contestation and debate which  
can discuss matters of public importance as a practical activity.  
What is endangered under modern capitalism is a source of resistance.  
Treating everything as resources makes possible endless  
disaggregation, redistribution, and reaggregation for its own sake.  
This can be seen as a period of deindustrialisation and growth in the  
communicational and semiotic as generators of surplus value in the  
period after the second world war, the informational economy has  
emerged as a moment where capitalism seeks to enclosure cultural  
texts to maximise profit, the shift from the consumption of goods to  
the consumption of experiences.

Alternatively, background practices work by gathering and so bringing  
things into their own. The gathering of local practices around things  
produces temporary, self-enclosed local worlds that can resist the  
totalising and dispersing effects of the flexible and efficient  
ordering under capitalism.

1. By using this license you are agreeing to allow your work to be  
shared as a step on the path of revealing. Within the realm of the  
gods, the work will contribute to a shared new world of collective  
practices and networks of singularities operating within a non- 
instrumental and communal life.

2. All work that is so inscribed should bear the text '(L) Libre  
Commons Res Divini Juris License'.

3. This license operates under a permanent state of exception. It is  
a result of radical democratic practices beyond the state.

4. Users of the license are committed to political action and social  
struggle.







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