[p2p-research] On Creative Commons and sharing

[Matt]

"Creative Commons has published an extensive interview with Lewis Hyde,
author of the modern classic 'The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the
Modern World
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0307279502/downandoutint-20> ' and a
brand new, deeply historical book on the cultural commons, 'Common as Air:
Revolution, Art, and Ownership
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374223130/downandoutint-20> '." 

It is surely the case that the GPL has antecedents in gift cultures. As I
explain in The Gift, one old ethic asks that gifts be "kept in motion"; they
ought to be passed along in the same spirit with which they were received.
Put another way, in a gift culture one is not supposed to capitalize on the
generosity of others or of the community. 

That said, such ethics belong to custom rather than law; the wit of the GPL
was to give legal footing to the gift ethic of the software community. As
for antecedents in that line, I note in Common as Air that I found one other
example of a gift norm that got grounded in law: Pete Seeger and his friends
secured the copyright on "We Shall Overcome," then set up a trusteeship to
donate the money earned to support "African-American music in the South."
That trusteeship has a "claim and release" structure not unlike the one
built into the later GPL. 

As for links between the Creative Commons license suite and my sense of
copyduty, I'm not sure these need be limited to the "Share Alike" option.
Many are the duties that arise from a person's sense of both self and
community. One might, for example, feel a duty to contribute to the public
domain with no strings attached, in which case "copyduty" would be best
expressed by the CC0 tool. That was Benjamin Franklin preferred mode, by the
way. He believed that any claim to own his ideas and inventions could only
lead to the kind of disputes that "sour one's Temper and disturb one's
Quiet." He never took a patent or registered a copyright. 

Lewis Hyde, author of Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership
<http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/23204>  

 

 

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