Autonomous Commons: Difference between revisions

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=Description=
 
For a number of authors, the [[Creative Commons]] does not create a real [[Commons]], and therefore, they propose an alternative [[Autonomous Commmons]] approach.
 
From: Matteo Pasquinelli: [http://www.rekombinant.org/docs/Ideology-of-Free-Culture.pdf The Ideology of Free Culture and the Grammar of Sabotage]:
 
"After an initial honey-moon the Creative Commons (CC) initiative is
facing a growing criticism that comes especially from the European
media culture. Scouting articles from 2004 to 2006, two fronts of
critique can be distinguished: those who claim the institution of a
real commonality against Creative Commons restrictions (non-
commercial, share-alike, etc.) and those who point out Creative
Commons complicity with global capitalism. An example of the first
front, Florian Cramer provides a precise and drastic analysis:
 
To say that something is available under a CC license is meaningless
in practice. [...] Creative Commons licenses are fragmented, do not
define a common minimum standard of freedoms and rights granted to
users or even fail to meet the criteria of free licenses altogether,
and that unlike the Free Software and Open Source movements, they
follow a philosophy of reserving rights of copyright owners rather
than granting them to audiences.
 
Berlin-based Neoist Anna Nimus agrees with Cramer that CC licences
protect only the producers while consumer rights are left
unmentioned: "Creative Commons legitimates, rather than denies,
producer-control and enforces, rather than abolishes, the distinction
between producer and consumer. It expands the legal framework for
producers to deny consumers the possibility to create use-value or
exchange-value out of the common stock." Nimus claims the total
freedom for consumers to produce use-value out of the common stock
(like in Free Software) but more important to produce even exchange-
value (that means commercial use). For Nimus a commons is defined by
its productive consumers and not merely by its producers or passive
consumers. She claims that CC licences close the commons with many
restrictions rather than opening it to a real productivity. In a new
nickname, they are "Creative Anti-Commons."
     
Both Nimus and Cramer's critiques remain closer to the
libertarian tradition with few accounts of the surplus-value
extraction and big economy behind IP (in any form: copyright,
copyleft or CC). On the opposite among post-Autonomist Marxists a
stronger criticism is moved against the ideology implicitly pushed by
CC and other forms of a digital-only commonism. For instance activist
Martin Hardie thinks that "The logic of FLOSS seems only to promise a
new space for entrepreneurial freedom where we are never exploited or
subject to others' command. The sole focus upon 'copyright freedom'
sweeps away consideration of the processes of valorisation active
within the global factory without walls."23 Hardie criticise FLOSS
precisely because it never questions the way it is captured by
capital and its relations with the productive forces.
     
In conclusion a tactical notion of autonomous commons can be
imagined to include new projects and tendencies against the hyper-
celebrated Creative Commons.
 
 
In a schematic way, autonomous commons
 
1) allow not only passive and personal consumption but even a
productive use of the common stock - implying commercial use by
single workers;
 
2) question the role and complicity of the commons
within the global economy and put the common stock out of the
exploitation of large companies;
 
3) are aware of the asymmetry
between immaterial and material commons and the impact of immaterial
accumulation over material  production (e.g. IBM using Linux);
 
4) consider the commons as an hybrid and dynamic space that dynamically
must be built and defended."
(http://www.rekombinant.org/docs/Ideology-of-Free-Culture.pdf)
 
 


=Discussion=
=Discussion=

Revision as of 11:15, 15 August 2008

XmgUQ3

Discussion

Towards an Autonomous Commons

From: Matteo Pasquinelli: The Ideology of Free Culture and the Grammar of Sabotage:

"Among all the appeals for "real" commons only Dmytri Kleiner's idea of 'Copyfarleft' condenses the nodal point of the conflict in a pragmatic proposal that breaks the flat paradigm of Free Culture. In his article "Copyfarleft and Copyjustright"24 Kleiner notices a property divide that is more crucial than any digital divide: the 10% of the world population owns the 85% of the global assets against a multitude of people owning barely nothing. This material dominion of the owning class is consequently extended thanks to the copyright over immaterial assets, so that they can be owned, controlled and traded. In the case of music for example the intellectual property is more crucial for the owning class than for musicians, as they are forced to resign their author rights over their own works. On the other side the digital commons do not provide a better habitat: authors are sceptical that copyleft can earn them a living. In the end wage conditions of the authors within cognitive capitalism seem to follow the same old laws of Fordism. Moving from Ricardo's definition of rent and the so-called "Iron Law of Wages"25 Kleiner develops the "iron law of copyright earnings."

The system of private control of the means of publication, distribution, promotion and media production ensures that artists and all other creative workers can earn no more than their subsistence. Whether you are biochemist, a musician, a software engineer or a film- maker, you have signed over all your copyrights to property owners before these rights have any real financial value for no more than the reproduction costs of your work. This is what I call the Iron Law of Copyright Earnings.

Kleiner recognizes that both copyright and copyleft regimes keep workers earnings constantly below average needs. In particular copyleft does not help neither software developers nor artists as it reallocates profit only in favour of the owners of material assets. The solution advanced by Kleiner is copyfarleft, a license with a hybrid status that recognises class divide and allow workers to claim back the "means of production." Copyfarleft products are free and can be used to make money only by those who do not exploit wage labour (like other workers or co-ops).

For copyleft to have any revolutionary potential it must be Copyfarleft. It must insist upon workers ownership of the means of production. In order to do this a license cannot have a single set of terms for all users, but rather must have different rules for different classes. Specifically one set of rules for those who are working within the context of workers ownership and commons based production, and another for those who employ private property and wage labour in production.

For example "under a copyfarleft license a worker-owned printing cooperative could be free to reproduce, distribute, and modify the common stock as they like, but a privately owned publishing company would be prevented from having free access". Copyfarleft is quite different from the 'non-commercial' use supported by some CC licences because they do not distinguish between endogenic (within the commons) commercial use and exogenic (outside the commons) commercial use. Kleiner suggests to introduce an asymmetry: endogenic commercial use should be allowed while keeping exogenic commercial use forbidden. Interestingly this is the correct application of the original institution of the commons, that were strictly related to material production: commons were land used by a specific community to harvest or breed their animals. If someone can not pasture cows and produce milk, that will not be considered a real common. Kleiner says that if money can not be made out of it, a work does not belong to the commons: it is merely private property." (http://www.rekombinant.org/docs/Ideology-of-Free-Culture.pdf)

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