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

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)