Recently in Free Culture Category

Two of my least favourite things come together-

"Thomas Kinkade's apparent attempt to establish broad intellectual property rights "over a style and manner of painting and image-crafting""

http://theartlawblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/copyright-in-painting-style.html

I did the graphic design for some new tshirts from the FSF -


 
Order them, and many other fine GNU and FSF products, here -

http://shop.fsf.org/category/gnu-gear/

http://www.pawfal.org/forum/

A forum for artists coding and free software to make and be art, especially the fluxus livecoding environment.

Sign up and ask away!

The excellent Open Source Publishing, who did the design for the FLOSS+Art book that my revised "Open Source Art Again" essay appears in have used some quotes from it (or the older version reblogged by the P2P Foundation) as part of a thoughtful and insightful blog post on their name and what "freedom" might mean for design here. Highly recommended for anyone interested in free culture and/or graphic design.

I have previously argued that we should talk about "freedom" rather than "openness" because the former provides a guide for action whereas the latter ultimately just confuses people.

Openness is not the only term to be wary of. There has been a proliferation of other terms to describe the secondary effects of freedom. These are usually economic in origin, and can be useful in their own domain. But they can be as confusing and counter-productive as "openness" when they displace talk of freedom.

The Commons

Commons are regarded as inefficient, outmoded and even unethical by economists. The lie of "the tragedy of the commons" needs constant refutation. And people argue that you cannot enclose (privatize) intangible goods, despite the fact that you can remove people's freedom to use work where they encounter it.

Gift Economies

Since it would be irrational under microeconomics to give anyone a gift, gift economies appear economically irrational. The use of custom rather than law to enforce gift giving is also misleading. Gift economies appear simply to be random acts of kindness. Focusing on the economic value of gifts and on the absence of law in customary gift societies can be used to make copyleft appear restrictive and coercive.  

Quid Pro Quo

Giving your own work away in exchange for other people's work, sharing and sharing alike, seems fair and can be socially and economically beneficial. But when the resources being shared and the act of sharing become the focus rather than the people using them and their ongoing relationship to the work, that can mislead decisions that must be made to support the rights of those people.

A related problem is people discussing how to ensure that derivative work is returned to a project, rather than discussing how the freedom of downstream users of the project can be protected.

Reputation Economies

In order to be able to cash out of the reputation economy, people must be able to afford to create reputational value and to protect it. This raises the problem of how to economically induce the creation of reputational work and how to protect it until such time as the creator is in a position to exploit its value. But this value is an epiphenomena of freedom and restricting that freedom will not increase that value.

Peer Production

Production is only part of the lifecycle of a work. Copyright law is already hopelessly skewed in favour of producers, and peer producers will be consumers as well.

Freedom is For People

All of these metaphors or frameworks turn the conversation from individual freedom to supra-human systems. This inevitably privileges those systems over the individual and when decisions must be made to protect the system individual freedom will suffer as a result.

This can be seen happening in real-world projects. Too many people are confusing the idea of gifts as random acts of kindness, or of the "needs" of corporations, with the subject of freedom. That subject must always be human individuals.

The products of freedom can be regarded as forming commons, and gift economies, and reputation economies. But privileging these secondary phenomena over the thing that creates them will stifle freedom.

The subject of freedom must be actual people, not abstract economic models that can lead to the freedom of actual people being compromised.

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/puredyne-a-linux-distro-for-artists-by-artists/2008/10/29

The excellent P2P foundation blog is well worth adding to your feed reader if you are interested in the theoretical and political aspects of peer production.

OSP's Libertinage font is now available here.

Libertinage was commissioned for the FLOSS+Art book. It's licenced under the OFL, which is emerging as the standard licence for fonts.

OSP say -

Libertinage is a remix of Linux Libertine and was designed in August 2008.
For more detailed information: ospublish.constantvzw.org

We built Libertinage by copying and pasting parts of Linux Libertine glyphs. There are 26 variations, one for each latin letter in the alphabet.
Libertinage.ttf is the 'Full' version, containing all modifications.

Single letter versions are named Libertinage-a, Libertinage-b, Libertinage-c... depending on the letter that was changed. All 26 are gathered in the Libertinage package as .ttf files.

'La vie est triste comme un verre de grenadine'
Mylène Farmer, Libertine (1985)

OSP have an excellent blog on using Free Software for design work here.

pure:dyne is made by artists for artists. It is used by artists to create and display or perform their own work, and to run workshops and events at galleries, educational institutions and media labs. This means that its design has had to meet the needs and tastes of artists in real-world situations.

Which means that:

• It's based on a robust base GNU/Linux distro, Debian. Anything that the standard pure:dyne installation lacks can usually be found available for Debian.
  
• It has a real-time kernel and a lean and resource-light window manager. This means that the system is faster and more responsive, which is vital for live music and video or for intensive media editing.
  
• It includes all the most popular media art packages, some from Debian, some packaged by the pure:dyne team. The pure:dyne packages will be pushed back upstream to Debian.
• It has a minimal desktop UI that is intuitive and empowering while taking up the minimum of screen real estate and avoiding distracting, resource-draining visual bling.
  
• It is available as a very reliable live CD or USB system as standard. This is important for workshops, where the hardware available may be old, heterogenous, flaky or all three.

pure:dyne may not be for the likes of Jeff Koons or Damian Hirst, but it has the support of the Arts Council in England and an international team of developers for whom it is part of their practice and livelihood as artists. It has evolved through real-world usage into a very usable tool that looks, feels, and performs well for its chosen user base.

http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=322

Marc invited two team members of the GOTO10 collective, Heather Corcoran and Aymeric Mansoux to discuss about pure:dyne on the Netbehaviour.org list.

The discussion took place between October 16th - 23rd Oct 08. An interview and an open discussion was joined by other list members of Netbehaviour.

This is an excellent insight into an art computing project.

I've now switched to pure:dyne based on this discussion.

http://goto10.org/flossart/

FLOSS+Art critically reflects on the growing relationship between Free Software ideology, open content and digital art. It provides a view onto the social, political and economic myths and realities linked to this phenomenon.

With contributions from: Fabianne Balvedi, Florian Cramer, Sher Doruff, Nancy Mauro Flude, Olga Goriunova, Dave Griffiths, Ross Harley, Martin Howse, Shahee Ilyas, Ricardo Lafuente, Ivan Monroy Lopez, Thor Magnusson, Alex McLean, Rob Myers, Alejandra Maria Perez Nuñez, Eleonora Oreggia, oRx-qX, Julien Ottavi, Michael van Schaik, Femke Snelting, Pedro Soler, Hans Christoph Steiner, Prodromos Tsiavos, Simon Yuill

Compiled and edited by Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk.