Grey Commons

The Grey Commons = that part of the commons that is created by ignoring the restrictions of copyright legislation, as the easiest and most logical way to create and remix content.

Concept promoted and used by the Piratbyran movement.

Background

What is the Grey Commons

Citation from Rasmus Fleischer:

"DJ Danger Mouse took the vocals from Jay-Z's The Black Album and re-mixed it with the Beatles' White Album and in his creation, The Grey Album, he was ignoring copyright law. The whole circulation of the Grey Album would never have been possible without P2P file-sharing. These networks exists in the same space as remix or mash-up culture; a space of production, of inspiration, obtaining, downloading – remixing and reinserting distribution and up-down-loading of data. This grey zone is fading in and out of historically dominant forms of circulations, slowly tearing them apart and replacing them with new ones, through rapidly multiplicating small habits. It is not a grey commons in terms of the law, but inscribed in the technical habits we use every day. The grey is not optional, it is not here by an effort but rather as the shortest way to make life work with technology. The test, the query, the shading, the tuning and twisting is omnipresent; it is not something you can wish away. This is the way we live and come alive.

The copyfight is raging on a conceptual level, where the permanented crises of copyright is masked by images grounded in a one-way mass-medial logic, images with no room for greyscales. In this dislocated situation piracy is about reestablishing connections that has been lost or cut-off. By developing the tools and discourses of file sharing, we try to expand the grey zones and make room for the unforeseeable. Instead of talking about things in the copyright industry’s universal terms, and instead shift the focus to the diverse reality of cultural circulation: what we call The Grey Commons." (http://copyriot.blogspot.com/2006/06/piratbyrans-speech-at-reboot.html)

Why the Grey Zone should be protected and extended

"Maybe what is most important now, is to bypass the urge for solutions, for victory in battles or for compromise and stability. For example, talking about how to "compensate the creators" is to obscure the truth about the social production of culture. Such talk establishes the myth of copyright as some kind of "wage" for artists, and the strange idea that real-time performative aspects of culture are secondary or unimportant. And while some of the Creative Commons licenses can of course be usable sometimes, it would also be a wrong to believe in that a “some rights reservedâ€?-approach would do anything to cool down the three anomalies mentioned before. Instead, that approach sometimes just seems to move the problem to another field: Instead of the producer/consumer-dilemma, you get something quite similar, namely the commercial/uncommercial dilemma. Making general statements about the alternative to copyright always brings the danger of strengthening copyright's universality claim. On the contrary, trying to keep the grey zone as open and wide as possible will almost automatically produce better conditions for cultural production to go beyond prevalent economic imperatives. We think that our projects have generally succeeded in escaping the most obvious re-territorializations, like explaining file-sharing just as a response to expensive records. Instead, they aim is to open up and explore new grey zones. The Pirate Bay is one example – a grey zone currently under attack. Much of the mass-medial reporting are still blind to the grey. Paradoxically, they represent the binary world in an all-too-binary way. In their black and white picture, the conflict is about certain "content"; the picture is painted with The Pirate Bay on one hand and "the rights holders" on the other. Everything that is not juridically plain white like a penguin, is in that picture black. But we would like to direct the attention to the grey zone, that is all the movies and music and text on The Pirate Bay that no rights holder ever thinks about trying to stop, either because they affirm it as a possibility or because they really don't care or because the works are actually orphaned. The attack on Pirate Bay is an attack on that grey zone. Rather than securing their own copyrights, the movie industry are attacking an infrastructure that is needed for many kinds of independent production. They are not attacking piracy in general, as the sharing of digital files can always take its physical routes. They are attacking the very possibility to interconnect metadata of private archives. But while intellectual property will surely continue to be a battleground for major clampdowns in our society, there will always be enumerable lots of open ways. The drive of discovering, thinking and inventing alternative processes of production is the affirmative power of life as a vital experiment of complexity. Internet piracy is all about desiring-production, and its long-term effects are beyond our human capacity to compute." (http://copyriot.blogspot.com/2006/06/piratbyrans-speech-at-reboot.html)