by Mary Anne Francis

Open Congress and its questions
As its title indicates, this section is concerned with an event at Tate Britain, Open Congress, which took place across two days in October 2005 and was organized by the Critical Practice Research Cluster at Chelsea College of Art and Design, London. It addressed the possibility of taking the rapidly expanding phenomenon of Free/Libre [and] Open Source Software (FLOSS) and seeing how its methods could apply to art especially, and cultural production more generally. Whereas FLOSS refers to computer programmes/codes that are freely available for anyone to copy, improve and redistribute, we wanted to explore whether and how the ‘transport’ of FLOSS to cultural production would challenge the ruling paradigms of cultural production. Clearly, the enquiry would centrally engage issues of authorship or creativity, along with issues of the ownership of art. But questions of how a FLOSS (Art) practice affects knowledge (what is known and who knows) and governance (who rules, or wields power and how) were also crucial topics. Indeed, the themes of ‘creativity’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘governance’ organized the Congress’ concurrent strands, while plenary sessions addressed topics that cut across all three.

by The Free Software Foundation

We maintain this free software definition to show clearly what must be true about a particular software program for it to be considered free software.

‘Free software’ is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of ‘free’ as in ‘free speech’, not as in ‘free beer’.

by Bruce Perens

Source: http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php

The indented, italicized sections below appear as annotations to the Open Source Definition (OSD) and are not a part of the OSD. A plain version of the OSD without annotations can be found here. http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition_plain.php

by Toni Prug

Ideas Can Not Be Free
The Free Software and free culture movements are today’s loudest opponents of the wide introduction and implementation of patents and copyright, the main tools of intellectual property regimes. At the heart of their arguments lie the values of sharing and creativity. Yet, obsessed as it is with novelty, innovation and the possibility of bursting creativity, theory coming from and around these movements has remained largely free from an engagement with the history of technology and its role in the development of current civilization. Whatever historical reflection does take place is usually limited to the consideration of US history, and works through a re-examination of American documents, events, organizations and processes. Rare exceptions are partial inclusions of French and British histories and cultures, which are read selectively so as to compliment the dominant US discourses that theorise Free Software/culture movements. In British academia, the same has been said about international relations studies,^[1] where “most of the rest of humanity is rated according to its degree of importance to ‘western interests’”. (Pilger, 2002, p 160) No wonder then, that when economy is mentioned within and around Free Software theory, discussion hardly ever moves beyond free markets, and trade and any kind of production are assumed to be beneficial. The logic of growth through creation is unquestioned and its value inflated. As with history, such narrow theorising falls apart under a global view of economics, as we know from ecological studies: U.S. levels of consumption are unsustainable for the rest of population of the planet, and economic growth (Rivero, 2001, p 87), as currently defined, is neither possible or desirable globally without a complete reconceptualisation.^[2]

by Jamie King

Preface
In this essay, originally produced for Mute magazine http://www.metamute.org in 2004, I was attempting to answer some specific problems. During this period, I had been very involved in the ‘anti-capitalist’ or ‘anti-globalisation’ movement, and had noted the intense excitement and expectation accruing around the organisational idea of ‘openness’. We in the social movements, we told ourselves and others, were ‘open’; we used all the virtues of networked organisation to our advantage, and we didn’t need ‘their’ closed-ness, just as we didn’t need ‘their’ proprietary attitudes.

by Matteo Pasquinelli

Source:
http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/pasquinelli.html
(from Journal of Hyper(+)drome.Manifestation, September 2004)

Everyone of us is a machine of the real, everyone of us is a constructive machine. - Toni Negri

Technical machines only work if they are not out of order. Desiring machines on the contrary continually break down as they run, and in fact run only when they are not functioning properly. Art often takes advantage of this property by creating veritable group fantasies in which desiring production is used to short-circuit social production, and to interfere with the reproductive function of technical machines by introducing an element of dysfunction. - Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, L’anti-Oedipe

by Critical Art Ensemble

Chapter 5 from The Electronic Disturbance by Critical Art Ensemble (abridged)
Source: http://www.critical-art.net/books/ted/ted5.pdf

Plagiarism has long been considered an evil in the cultural world. Typically it has been viewed as the theft of language, ideas and images by the less than talented, often for the enhancement of personal fortune or prestige. Yet, like most mythologies, the myth of plagiarism is easily inverted. Perhaps it is those who support the legislation of representation and the privatization of language that are suspect; perhaps the plagiarist’s actions, given a specific set of social conditions, are the ones contributing most to cultural enrichment. Prior to the Enlightenment, plagiarism was useful in aiding the distribution of ideas. An English poet could appropriate and translate a sonnet from Petrarch and call it his own. In accordance with the classical aesthetic of art as imitation, this was a perfectly acceptable practice. The real value of this activity rested less in the reinforcement of classical aesthetics than in the distribution of work to areas where otherwise it probably would not have appeared. The works of English plagiarists, such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Sterne, Coleridge and De Quincey, are still a vital part of the English heritage, and remain in the literary canon to this day.

by Jon Ippolito

Source: http://www.nothing.org/osc/WhyArtShouldBeFree.htm

The text is presented here in abbreviated form: only its final sections. (The full text is available at the site above.) Most of the essay is concerned with the way in which the current economy of art production benefits the artist last and least. We take up the argument as Ippolito considers the value of Creative Commons licences – which might be seen to favour the artist more than current copyright legislation, but as Ippolito proposes, could beneficially be replaced by a far more radical arrangement.

“Where there is no gift there is no art”. Lewis Hyde
[…]

Weaknesses of the License Approach
Voluntary licensing doesn’t require any changes in intellectual property law; this is both its strength and its weakness. As the name ‘Creative Commons’ suggests, open licenses have the potential to demarcate a public space immune from the restrictions of intellectual and physical property – in the same sense that a public park like the Boston Commons is a communal territory available to all citizens equally. But the rest of the digital world is already functionally a commons anyway – it’s just not legally one. Software piracy is rampant; Napster and its variants permit unlimited music sharing; and Web designers routinely pilfer code from other online sites whether it’s copylefted or not.

by Felix Stalder

How would culture be created if artists were not locked into romantic notions of individual authorship and the associated drive to control the results of their labour was not enforced through ever expanding copyrights? What if cultural production was organized via principles of free access, collaborative creation and open adaptability of works? As such, the practices of a collective and transformative culture are not entirely new. They were characteristic for (oral) folk cultures prior to their transformation into mass culture by the respective industries during the twentieth century, and as counter-currents – the numerous avant-garde movements (dada, situationism, mail art, neoism, plagiarism, plunderphonics, etc.) which re-invented, radicalized and technologically up-graded various aspects of those. Yet, over the last decade, these issues – of open and collaborative practices – have taken on an entirely new sense of urgency. Generally, the ease with which digital information can be globally distributed and manipulated by a very large number of people makes free distribution and free adaptation technically possible and a matter of everyday practice. Everyone with a computer already uses, in one way or the other, the copy & paste function built into all editors. This is what computers are about: copying, manipulating and storing information. With access to the internet, people are able to sample a wide range of sources and make their own works available to potentially large audiences.

by Mary Anne Francis

Unfinished Business From The Congress
This text develops an enquiry that I started at Open Congress, but for reasons of time was left in limbo, with the questions that I wanted to put to the event’s participants unanswered. The discussion related to a question that was key for the Congress: the question ‘how does open source (trans)port to art?’^[1]