The politics of the libre commons

First Monday ◽  
2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Berry ◽  
Giles Moss

The project of ‘free culture’ is committed to the creation of a cultural space, rather like the ‘public domain’, seeking to complement/replace that of proprietary cultural commodities and privatized meaning. This has been given a new impetus with the birth of the Creative Commons. This organization has sought to introduce cultural producers across the world to the possibilities of sharing, co–operation and commons–based peer–production by creating a set of interwoven licenses for creators to append to their artwork, music and text. In this paper, we chart the connections between this movement and the early Free Software and Open Source movements and question whether underlying assumptions that are ignored or de–politicized are a threat to the very free culture that the project purports to save. We then move to suggest a new discursive project linked to notions of radical democracy.

2022 ◽  
pp. 298-314

In instructional design, there are a number of common “use cases” for acquiring open-source shared visuals and images: breaking up gray text, driving attention, sparking the imagination, illustrating concepts, providing examples, explaining phenomena, representing reality, depicting models, and others. The instating of licensure and open-source releases has meant that there are literally hundreds of millions of such visuals available online, with varying levels of releases (with variations on the following dimensions: editability, [non]crediting, [non]commercial usages, [non]required sharing, all the way up to full release into the public domain with no restrictions). The federated Creative Commons Search (old) enables exploration and acquisition across a range of web-based platforms for digital images based on text search. When pursuing actual images for particular usage, the abundance of shared imagery suddenly becomes small-set and limited. This work explores this phenomenon and provides some ideas for mitigation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 80 (4) ◽  
pp. 202
Author(s):  
Lindsey Gumb

Academic libraries around the world are leading the way to support the adoption, revision, and creation of open educational resources (OER), both saving students money and encouraging pedagogical innovation in the classroom. While there are varying definitions depending on the organization, it is generally accepted that a resource used for teaching, learning, or research can be considered an OER if it is both free and openly-licensed under Creative Commons (CC), general public license, or is in the public domain.


Author(s):  
Sabyasachi Bhattacharya

The archives are generally sites where historians conduct research into our past. Seldom are they objects of research. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya traces the path that led to the creation of a central archive in India, from the setting up of the Imperial Record Department, the precursor of the National Archives of India, and the Indian Historical Records Commission, to the framing of archival policies and the change in those policies over the years. In the last two decades of colonial rule in India, there were anticipations of freedom in many areas of the public sphere. These were felt in the domain of archiving as well, chiefly in the form of reversal of earlier policies. From this perspective, Bhattacharya explores the relation between knowledge and power and discusses how the World Wars and the decline of Britain, among other factors, effected a transition from a Eurocentric and disparaging approach to India towards a more liberal and less ethnocentric one.


Author(s):  
Álvaro Andrade Garcia ◽  
Lucas Santos Junqueira

In the Ciclope atelier, what moves us is the creation of new languages for the digital medium. In this text I present a synthesis of our research and experimentation work: a free digital publishing software called Managana; the first poetry eBook authored with it, Grão [Grain], launched along with the software in 2012; and our latest release, Poemas de Brinquedo [Toy Poems], launched in 2016. Grain and Toy Poems are good examples of publications that use Managana. Resulting from prolonged research in dictionaries and linguistics’ texts, etymology and mythology, Grain proposes to recreate the world through the word. Its poems experiment the evolution of James Joyce’s verbivocovisual to the possible interanimaverbivocovisual in a digital publication. The application-book-performanceToy Poems is a publication that addresses the possibilities and difficulties of today’s transmedia poiesis.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ante Mandarić ◽  
Goran Matijević

The epidemic of the disease COVID-19, in Požeština in relation to China, where it originated in other parts of Croatia, appeared somewhat later, while Požega-Slavonia County in terms of total share in relation to other counties in Croatia remained relatively well , 16th place, out of a total of 20 counties, ie a smaller number of patients was recorded. In the conditions of public health danger to the health and lives of people with expressed uncertainty, citizens around the world were flooded with numerous information, about the disease, ways of prevention, treatment that at one point threatened to turn into an infodemia, as warned by the WHO. The importance of crisis communication in such conditions is of great importance, and how governments and headquarters communicate messages about the crisis to the public, which is discussed in the first parts of the paper and points out several inconsistencies and illogicalities in the actions of the state headquarters. prohibition and permission to make recommendations contrary to the epidemiologist’s recommendations. But more important than the recommendations of headquarters and governments, today are the recommendations and news transmitted by digital media, and especially the local ones that bring news and recommendations for the area where we live. Therefore, the aim of this paper was to investigate in the central part the significance of the local 034 Portal in the Corona crisis, and its monitoring of the crisis and its impact on the public. Research through several segments, it was found that the portal maintained the level of reporting on regular events and adjusted reporting on the Crown to the conditions and situation in the county, not leading to sensationalism, concern, fear, but was a carrier of preventive activities and a good ally in the fight. against the epidemic, that is, he followed the guidelines for informing the WHO and did not contribute to the creation of an infodemia.


2007 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 55-62
Author(s):  
Kgomotso H Moahi

This paper considers the impact that globalization and the knowledge economy have on the protection and promotion of indigenous knowledge. It is asserted that globalization and the knowledge economy have opened up the world and facilitated the flow of information and knowledge. However, the flow of knowledge has been governed by uneven economic and political power between the developed countries and the devel-oping countries. This has a number of ramifications for IK. The dilemma faced is that whichever method is taken to protect IK (IPR regimes, documenting IK etc) exposes IK to some misappropriation. Protecting it through IPR is also fraught with problems. Documenting IK exposes IK to the public domain and makes it that much easier to be misused. However, not protecting IK runs the danger of having it disappear as the custodians holding it die off, or as communities become swamped by the effects of globalization. The conclu-sion therefore is that governments have to take more interest in protecting, promoting and using IK than they have been doing.


Author(s):  
Leti Volpp

The line dividing citizens and those excluded from its promise was long shaped by the public/private dichotomy, consigning women to the private, while reserving citizenship’s sphere of the public domain for men. Feminist theorists, in criticizing this dichotomy, have examined the relationships between citizenship, dependency, and reproduction. While those considered sexually deviant have suffered exclusions from citizenship, gay and lesbian subjects in some sites currently enjoy a role as model citizens. This shift has accompanied a transition in the role of the citizen from producer of work to consumer: the privatized, self-governing, and sexually free individual is today’s prototypical citizen. This new sexual citizen is contrasted with illiberal others, who are cast outside as unfit candidates for citizenship. Queer citizenship does not provide a more encompassing vision; citizenship is not available to be queered, given how it inevitably splits the world into those who belong and those left outside.


2018 ◽  
pp. 183-221
Author(s):  
Thomas H. Conner

This chapter looks at the longer aftermath of WWII and traces the creation of the second generation of ABMC sites. Focusing on the process of securing grounds overseas, allowing family members to decide where their loved ones would be buried, and obtaining US government clearance on designs, the account is reminiscent of the start of the ABMC and its first project. By 1960, fourteen cemetery memorials had been dedicated. This chapter also highlights the leadership of the agency’s second chairman, General George C. Marshall, and his direction of the building of memorials in eight countries to remember the 400,000 Americans who had died and the 16 million who had served in WWII. Marshall’s high standing in the US government and in the public esteem, just as was true of Pershing, greatly helped the agency to fulfill its renewed mission. The special treatment shown the grave of General George S. Patton in the Luxembourg American Cemetery is also detailed.


2005 ◽  
Vol 114 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Moore

Changes to Australian copyright law introduced under the Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement will diminish the public domain, criminalise common copyright infringing practices and locally introduce significant portions of the controversial 1998 American Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This paper examines these imminent changes to Australian copyright law, with specific attention to the potential effects of the extended duration of copyright protection and the introduction of technological anti-circumvention measures. It argues that public domain-enhancing activities are crucial for sustaining cultural creativity and technological innovation, and discusses the potential role of the Creative Commons movement in establishing economically viable and legal alternatives to the current model of trade-oriented copyright reform.


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