Technologies of Collective Authorship

(i) Creative Commons (ii) Scientific Signatures (iii) Polyphonic video

Background

The GNU project began twenty years ago and built upon the religious dedication of its founder combined with a novel legal instrument which allowed the work to be decentralized, parallelized and sequential. The name of the invention is the General Public License of course. The GPL's novelty lay in its subversion of copyright law (a system of exclusive private rights) by means of a licensing assemblage.

Synchronically, the world of music was undergoing its first Indie revolution on the back of the rupture initiated by punk, expressed in a galaxy of fanzines, independent record labels and distribution systems. This movement of "Rock Against the Majors" rejected the campaigns of the music industry against Home Taping (Is Killing Music!) and more generally cultivated a disrespect of the property of the dominant labels and their property rights.

The Midi was one of the products whose massification at the beginning of the 1980s made it easier than ever to establish an independent production facility - its commodification, alongside that of the video recorder (whose crucial legal battle was won in 1980 in the US Supreme Court), provided an early marker of the future diffusion of media-production technologies amongst an initial prosumer niche and then a consumer mass. The Midi, sampler and sequencer was to enable the emergence of the decades next great cultural movement, which would strike a much harder blow initially against the industry using the tool of appropriation: Hip Hop. Major industry interests took note and began a series of massive legal actions against the appropriationists, concluding in multiple seven figure compensation awards for the unauthorized sampling of their property - tunes for which they had often paid the original artist peanuts such as James Brown. Similar if less dramatic clashes had been taking place in the worlds of literature and visual arts in the post-war period (Warhol himself was the defendant in an action taken by Heinz beans for use of their trademark in his multi-colour prints.)

As a consequence of this emergence to visibility of conflicts around copyright there emerged an 'anti-copyright' attitude in wildly distinct milieus, most of them having some sort of anti-property libertarian ideas or linked to milieus of artistic appropriation. Linux Torvalds completion of the kernel to the GNU operating system in 1992 not only created the first functional non-proprietary system but also allowed the 'coming out' of the free software's different model of authorship beyond the esoteric public familiar with the GPL. The time for hybridization had arrived and from this point on regular attempts were made to 'port' the GPL model into a form capable of delivering the same objective for traditional creative works.

No Copyright versus Copyleft

The rhetoric of 'anti-copyright' denoted an attitude rather than a methodology. The marks were meaningless legally although they certainly had importance in fashioning ethical relationships between people involved in the DIY music scene.

GPL and the later copyleft licenses make a decisive break with this trajectory - rather than rejecting its corpus, the licenses are based on copyright law.

The fundamental move expressed in each subsequent 'copyleft license' has been the same: one section of the license will grant other users 'rights' habitually reserved to the owner and another will require that the work be distributed to others 'downstream' on the same terms. The result is that whilst individual benefits of the work may be privately appropriated, the work itself cannot be privatised.

What is a license and what is the difference with a contract:

- License is an irrevocable offer to the world in general. Licenses give people rights to do certain things with a work on certain terms provided that 'conditions' specified by the rights holder are observed. Contracts, on the other hand, are negotiated individually so as to take account of specific circumstances and allow differential treatment. Contracts are formed when there has been 'offer' and 'acceptance' and a counterpart ('consideration') is given to the party conceding rights or property.

Non-revocable: "Notwithstanding the above, Licensor reserves the right to release the Work under different license terms or to stop distributing the Work at any time; provided, however that any such election will not serve to withdraw this License."

Copyleft v Other non sharealike licenses:

License that do not include a "share alike" provision are non-copyleft licenses.They do not requires licensees to offer derivations back to the public on exactly the same terms they were offered.

Creative Commons CC has been the most high profile attempt to disseminate the alternative licensing model in the world of cultural production. Its success can be attributed to both its timing (coming on the heels of a series of exhausting and ultimately failed legal challenges to copyright expansions), and being both well-resourced and promoted by some very high profile players on the critical IP scene (such as Larry Lessig).

The Licensing Engine The CC site contains a licensing engine designed so as to as extract the information necessary so as to assemble a license in accordance with the author/producer's wishes/intentions. There are in fact only three questions, two of which are binary.

- Is attribution required (y/n)

- Is Commercial Use allowed (y/n)

- Are derivatives allowed (Sharealike)? (y/n/sharealike)

Having answered these questions the engine spits out a summary of the effects of your decisions in simple language. Behind this document there is another, which you can click through to, conmtaining the 'legal code', ie the full legal text of the license.

In the following section I'll make an anatomical breakdown of the license contents.

License Dissection

0. Disclaimer CC is not a law firm; they are clarifying that the use of this document does not constitute a counsel-client relationship which could render them liable for w=hat happens in the future.

1. Definitions

2. Fair Use Rights The license does not take away rights which you would have under the normal terms of copyright law. Copyright is a limited right; it does not encompass everything.

3. License Grant List of the Freedoms given to the user under the license

4. Restrictions

The combination of 3 & 4 effectively grants rights and then makes it impossible to restrict them downstream. "....a grant to third parties with a required grant-back to us under the same terms."

5.Representation, Warranties and Disclaimer

If you are licensing the work you must be able to demonstrate that you enjoy the ownership that would entitle you to license it.

Warranty - A statement or representation that the goods and/or services will perform as promised in the agreement; a guaranty. For example, a License Agreement relating to a database of samples of musical compositions may contain a Warranty that the Licensor has obtained permission from the composers and performers of the individual musical works to provide access to the database to the Licensee.

disclaimer - (law) a voluntary repudiation of a person's legal claim to something

6. Limitation on liability

Should anything happen of a negative nature arising out of the use of the license the licensor will not be responsible for anything except for that contained in the section on warranties in paragraph 5.

7.Termination

What happens where licensing conditions are breached

Miscellaneous

- Severable clauses should one be found to be inapplicable. - No exceptions to be presumed in the absence of an explicit waiver

8. - removal of the cc license will not change the rights conceded to licensees during the period whilst the license was in vigor. One can change the terms of the license, but not he terms of the deal agreed with people who accepted your offer: Clause 8(a) states: "Each time You distribute or publicly digitally perform the Work or a Collective Work, the Licensor offers to the recipient a license to the Work on the same terms and conditions as the license granted to You under this License."

a. Founders Copyright The initial duration of copyright in the US was 14 years, although it could be extended

b. Public Domain Dedication

Problem of non-commercial clause

Rischi di mordere la tua propria coda

Why do you want to use a license? - Dilemma for independent producers of culture: as the sustainability model is not constructed around retail sales, there is no reason to restrict the redistribution by individuals. There are also practical reasons why copyright is difficult to exploit: * there aren't the means to satisfactorily monitor for violation * there may not be means to finance the protracted legal proceedings required so as to ensure and enforcement of rights * many of the defendants will not have financial resources to make themselves attractive targets in the sense of any anticipated windfall.

On the other hand there are good reasons to allow free circulation: - helps to build a community of supporters and admirers whose interest is monetized in other situations: concerts, film showings, collaborations - generates publicity and familiarity with the cultural work that can open up other revenue possibilities - in the context of p2p architectures it transfers the cost of distribution from the individual or corporate author to the community of users/fans.

Where might refusing to allow derivative works be appropriate? Minuses - Ethical question about the use of film footage of migrant children (wastun.org) - copyright laws can function unwittingly to protect the subjects of representation.

- This poses a problem where the recycling is carried out by an organisation/individual which you do not approve of, or in a context which perverts the original intention.

What benefits flow form the widespread adoption of the license? Pluses - Cultivation of a community ethic of sharing footage or other media enlarges the base of common materials available to all. In a situation where corporate media production benefits from having the exclusive rights over a vast quantity and range of material, this form of aggregation of user material may be the only way to compete on the level of materials: e.g. September 11th and the fall of the trade towers will be used for innumerable future documentaries, many of the m made by independent film makers. Most of that footage is owned and will have to be licensed. Yet scores of indy camera operators shout images of the calamity.

*distinction between the public domain and licensing

* problem of the definition of commercial: "monetary compensation or financial gain," in terms of building a community capable of sustaining itself economically whilst nurturing a different normative basis, it will be desirable to allow them to receive some financial remuneration, e.g where they take video to produce a derivative work and want to sell it, or charge a fee to screen or to attend a screening. *cc license waives p2p exchange provisions of NET, removing those exchanges from the broadened conception of compensation (which in the law now apparently extends to the receipt of other works) *severable clauses in case of jurisdictional differences

However, if someone pays your fee and gets a copy, the GPL gives them the freedom to release it to the public, with or without a fee. For example, someone could pay your fee, and then put her copy on a web site for the general public.

- Is there a roll of honour required for derivative works? Apart from the initial attribution. - Important to underline that none of these licenses have been tested at trial thusfar.

Monitoring License Compliance - Not done by CC - Not done by NGV/V2V (as Void says, why should we become the intermediaries?); responsibility of individual author, will become more significant a question if the plans for a 'left" tv materialize (Acroris, EmiliTV)

Collective Authorship in Science "... the name of the scientist can document not only the instability of its logic, but also the sociabilities, the geographies, and the materialities of the communities in which it is deployed." (26) - Scientists Names As Documents, Mario Biagioli, 11/1/1999

Several factors lie behind the frequency of multi-authorship in science, linked both to the specific function that the act of naming is intended to fulfill and the changing circumstance of scientific production with the deepening of the trend towards "Big Science". Responsibility is still a key ingredient of authorial assignation in science (intensified by some spectacular recent instances of fraudulent scientific claims, and not simply credit. The names amount to a package rather than a source ('well-demarcated name within a chain'). Epistemological. Authoritative. Entry pouint to the grievance process. A scientific text, like a book published in 16th century britain, needs to have ".... a real name.... a real address... it must refer to a physically traceable body."

The economy of science works with a different coin; originality is to be doubted rather than admired. The premises that underwrite the intellectual property system can not be transported into this new context.

Think of how "eponimy works as a form of symbolic capital, because monetary capital or material property cannot translate into scientific authorship." (18)

"Because the peculiar logic of scientific credit and responsibility prevents the construction of the scientific author either as the holder of intellectual property rights or as a worker paid for his/her work, it is hard, perhaps impossible, to find appropriate legal or economic categories to manage the function of that name. Scientific authorship, then, is a vast "underground economy" regulated by practices that are inherently administrative and private because they cannot be explicitly articulated in legal or economic terms. Despite the vast epistemological gap between art and science, scientific authorship bears more than tangential analogies to the figure of the artist, and to the untangible quality of artistic value." (22)

"In sum the 'workers' tend to think of authorship in corporate terms, that is, as stocks in a company that carry credit and responsibility in proportion to their share of the total value of the enterprise."

Attempts to hold onto traditional notions of authorship fail to confront the functional; mechanisms of big science whereas the workerist fragmentation of credit makes individual responsibility impossible.

Proposals: - contributorship/guarantorship (modularization of the functions think film credits)

Default Author List From 1998 a new approach to the problem emerged from the unexpected field of particle physics, specifically the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) to be later extended to the biggest physics laboratory in Europe: CERN. Recognizing the number and interdependent quality of contributions to the work done there, the lab specified that all publications should carry the names of all those on a default author list, revised twice a year. In order to become a default author, individuals must fulfill basic thresholds of participation in the labs work (50% of one's research time over three years). Essentially attribution functions upon the basis of a labor theory rather than in accordance with a concept of he individual genius of the inventor/scientist; time off can be taken without losing one's author status. Biagoli suggests that such a system may function in this area of physics because of characteristics particular to the field: peer-esteem is the most valuable form of cultural capital and the key to later employability; all activity takes place around one physical space making denial/ignorance of others contributions more difficult interesting events take place during long experiments and can occur under anyone's observation almost randomly.

Organizational Ramifications - The limitations of the consensus model can be addressed by dispensing once and for all with the grasping for representativity inherent in the concept of the group that needs to "consense". Instead the multi-authorship model offers the option for those in disagreement to simply step outside, distance themselves from the decision taken and the visibility to render that meaningful. Instead of starting from a point of seeking agreement on a text this method may also be more capable of creating a record of what is held in common.

"The author's byline is a tribal inscription, not the primary source for individual vitae." (32)

Each publication goes through three levels of scrutiny. First there is a basic approval process by a publication committee whereas the other two revolve around the submission of comments online. Up to three days before the submission date members of the DAL can decide to retract their name from this document as a means of distancing themselves from such a conclusion.

The community is able to function also because it has a means of sanctioning because it is global in effect (there aren't too many particle colliders around to run to).

Specious Parallels This capacity to sanction is a bit taboo in political circles despite the fact that sanctioning takes place all the time. Once there, after all, there were purges and show-trials. On a more banal level there was expulsion, which often amounted also to excommunication. Tiny sects indulged in this rather heavily. These things have their analogues in today's supposedly network based political culture ; people are cut loose, or individuals simply seek supplying the information necessary in order for things to go on in a form of active non co-operation. On a more banal level punishment are inflicted through the spreading of malicious gossip in a primitive form of character-assassination. Aside form the unpleasant personal consequences of these things the other problem is that they bequeath little to those who would later seek to address similar problems and overcome previous blockage-points.

Some of us have experimented with wiki's for exactly this reason - their capacity to function as documents that contain their own critics, as roadmaps to contested terms and strategies, as a way of rendering conflict visible rather than allowing the fictitious unity which is contained in edited compositions flatten the dissenting voices. The difficulty is that without starting from a moment of the common, the wiki never really reflects the process of rupture as people come and go, editing in a free-flow of openness. Departures never need to be explained because they are not inscribed as names/avatars on the text itself. A process of attrition from fifty names to five would posits the question: why did the other 45 leave?

Traces of a conversation So i think it's not a matter of colllectiveness or individuality but of subverting the command of the signatire

"On the whole, at any rate, I have achieved what I set out to achieve. But do not tell me that it was not worth the trouble. In any case, I am not appealing for any man's verdict, I am only imparting knowledge, I am only making a report. To you also, honored Members of the Academy, I have only made a report." - Kafka, wrote in report to the academy

Many of the people that we work with have a background as much in the art or academic world, as thei domestic economy, as they do in forms of confronational adventuring and reflection that we consider the political

But basically the outcomes aren't privatised in the same way as in art/academy.

I mean i come from a political culture that accounted it as insane to sign smth by name. at a certain moment i also realized a certain liberatorial moment in being able to say: yes it was me who said this -- so what... but that's a totally different perspective, it has nothing to do with today

leo loewenthal who wrote a text about the astonishing fact that after a movie everyone who was contributing at least a lttile bit to the project is mentioned by name and in a certain hidden hierarchy

The collective identity and 'magazine' of multiple origins stuff was pretty interesting at the time, but it had a somewhat superficial treatment of identity.

because in a banal way, you could ask what is the GPL from for authoring political projects/ideas

as a spinozist i'd say: it's a question of composition and decomposition i write a text and i compose it from different elements which suit and don't suit to the thoughts i have but neither the elements nor the thoughts belong to me. i can only report them ... so it's about the relations..... good is what is useful or helpful for me and others, creates and composes new relations

Signatures in Free Software BSD attribution.