The Digital Public Domain: Foundations for an Open Culture

Digital technology has made culture more accessible than ever before. Texts, audio, pictures and video can easily be produced, disseminated, used and remixed using devices that are increasingly user-friendly and affordable. However, along with this technological democratization comes a paradoxical flipside: the norms regulating culture's use — copyright and related rights — have become increasingly restrictive. This book brings together essays by academics, librarians, entrepreneurs, activists and policy makers, who were all part of the EU-funded Communia project. Together the authors argue that the Public Domain — that is, the informational works owned by all of us, be that literature, music, the output of scientific research, educational material or public sector information — is fundamental to a healthy society. The essays range from more theoretical papers on the history of copyright and the Public Domain, to practical examples and case studies of recent projects that have engaged with the principles of Open Access and Creative Commons licensing. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in the current debate about copyright and the Internet. It opens up discussion and offers practical solutions to the difficult question of the regulation of culture at the digital ag

Revolution postponed? Tracing the development and limitations of open content filmmaking

Networked information technologies have brought about extensive changes in the production and distribution of creative cultural work. Inspired by the widespread success of Free-Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS), many proponents of open access advocate reconceptualisation of existing legal protection frameworks in creative works. This paper traces the attempted appropriation of Creative Commons (CC) licences by filmmakers and the consequent formation of an Open Content Filmmaking (OCF) movement. OCF proponents articulated notions of technology-enabled transformation in content creation and distribution, similar to those that inspire the visions of FLOSS and CC advocates. It examines how these creators attempted to address the relevance of openness to their own activities and develop practical open models for filmmaking. Difficulties experienced in establishing viable livelihoods with OCF (as FLOSS developers had done), created tensions between those with a pragmatic or more ideological orientation. The initial vision of a consistent OCF movement, enabled by CC, thus became fragmented. In contrast to FLOSS, where many actors were able to find ways to develop sustainable careers within the industry while contributing to Open Source Software, such generic strategies have not readily emerged for OCF. Drawing insights from Sørensen’s (1996) Social Learning framework (Learning technology, constructing culture. Sociotechnical change as social learning: University of Trondheim, STS working paper 18/96) in this paper we untangle the elaborate but often messy strategies deployed by Open Content Filmmakers (OCFs) and trace the multiple and often partial ways they have worked out to utilise CC elements and tools in producing, monetising and distributing their films

Community wireless networks, intermediary liability and the McFadden CJEU case

International audienceThis article focuses on the possible implications of the McFadden decision by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on the development and sustainability of community networks (CNs). CNs provide internet connectivity through open wi-fi, normally based on distributed infrastructure and wireless technologies, that enable users to create an open, community owned and run, network.CNs constitute a grassroots alternative to commercial internet service providers (ISPs): as infrastructure commons, they have the potential to be participatory, democratic, and more respectful of communications privacy.The possibility of offering open wi-fi is one of the main issues at stake in the McFadden case. This article explains how the CJEU decision is likely to affect the fate and the design of CNs. Particular attention is paid to the effect of the decision on the organisational shaping of CNs in Europe and structural changes CNs may have to consider implementing:(a) the donation policy, the fee or absence thereof, as the decision refers to the commercial status of providers;(b) the legal status (network operator, intermediary, internet service provider) and the existence of a legal representative, or the absence thereof in the case of very decentralised CNs;(c) possible warranties and disclaimers contained in the service Terms of Use;(d) the technological decentralised architecture, impacting and impacted by possible password, data retention and registration obligations.After describing what are CNs and how they work (part 2), the article presents the liability challenges for CNs and in particular the hurdles to assign liability (part 3) and the specific situation of the ‘Störerhaftung’, the legal doctrine that provides that a wi-fi operator is responsible for users’ wrongdoings in Germany, the jurisdiction of origin of the McFadden case. The article then analyses in detail the McFadden decision (part 4) and its implications for the organisational shaping of CNs according to selected design features (part 5). It finally draws some conclusions on future scenarios (part 6)

The Digital Public Domain

Digital technology has made culture more accessible than ever before. Texts, audio, pictures and video can easily be produced, disseminated, used remixed using devices that are increasingly user-friendly and affordable. However, along with this technological democratization comes a paradoxical flipside: the norms regulating culture's use — copyright and related rights — have become increasingly restrictive. This book brings together essays by academics, librarians, entrepreneurs, activists and policy maders, who were all part of the EU-funded Communia projetc. Together the authors argue that literature, music, the output of scientific research, educational material or public sector information — is fundamental to a healthy society. The essays range from more theoretical papers on copyright and the history of the public domain, to practical examples and case studies of recent projects that have engaged with the principles of Open Access and Creative Commons licensing. The Digital Public Domain opens up discussion and offers practical solutions to the difficult question of the regulation of culture in the digital age

The heteronomy of algorithms: traditional knowledge and computational knowledge

If critical approaches are to remain relevant in a computational age, then philosophy must work to critique and understand how the materiality of the modern world is normatively structured using computation and the attendant imaginaries made possible for the reproduction and transformation of society, economy, culture and consciousness. This call is something we need to respond to in relation to the contemporary reliance on computational forms of knowledge and practices and the co-constitution of new computational subjectivities. This chapter argues that to comprehend the digital we must, therefore, know it from the inside, we must know its formative processes. We must materialize the digital and ask about the specific mediations that are made possible in and through computation, and the infrastructural systems which are built from it. This calls for computation and computational thinking to be part of the critical traditions of the arts and humanities, the social sciences and the university as a whole, requiring new pedagogical models that are able to develop new critical faculties in relation to the digital