Glossary

Revisit Reuse

Revisit Reuse was a small-scale exhibition and two day worksession that took place in Brussels, May 2024. It brought together questions and provocations addressing universalisms in Free Culture and Open Access and to build resources for collective practices of reuse. How to deal with issues of cultural appropriation, power differences and the limits of conventional citation and acknowledgment?

The space and the exhibition were designed in collaboration with artist Flo*Souad Benaddi and included a series of prompts by ​​​​​​Erri Ammonita, Bye Bye Binary, Séverine Dusollier, Andrea Francke, Gary Hall, Jennifer Hayashida, Cathryn Klasto, Nkule Mabaso, Nicolas Malevé, Dubravka Sekulić, Winnie Soon, Christopher Ba Thi Nguyen, Marloes de Valk and Stephen Wright. We also included a collection of cases that showed the complexities of reuse, and a library of materials published under the Collective Conditions for Reuse (CC4r), in collaboration with Constant. Flo*Souad Benaddi, Clara Bougon, Castillo, Sarah Magnan, Chae Kim, Cathryn Klasto, Gerrie van Noord, Femke Snelting, Litó Walkey, Eva Weinmayr took part in the worksession.

New Performative Practices

For two subsequent years, participants in the Master program for New Performative Practices (NPP) at Stockholm University of the Arts provided a stimulating context to work through ways that we can practice reuse while considering and challenging power relations, making communities thrive, and contributing to the pool of common knowledge.

https://www.uniarts.se/english/courses/master-programmes/new-performative-practices-master/

Limits to Openness Reading Group

The bi-monthly Reading Group Limits to Openness took place online in 2023. Together with a diverse group of participants we explored issues of universalism related to the idea of openness, as often presented in Open Content, Free Culture and dominant Open Access publishing. We selected texts, drawn from different fields, including philosophy, black studies, free culture, critical race studies, and critical IP. The texts were always contextualised through with a specific question. The reading group became a way to keep the path and the edges of the Ecologies of dissemination research porous. It allowed others to enter, populate the research and to test or destabilize our assumptions.

"Limits to Openess"

Creative Commons licenses (CC)

Creative Commons (CC) licenses were introduced in 2002 and became the most used Open Content licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license assumes a legal author, which then can give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that they claim. This license is popular because of its flexibility, and because it alows individuals and large institutions to grant the public permission to use their creative work in a standardized way, while respecting conventional copyright law. There are several types of Creative Commons licenses and each license differs by several combinations that condition the terms of distribution. CC can allow so-called authors for example to choose for only non-commercial uses of a given work. CC is helpful because it protects reusers who use or redistribute a work licensed with CC from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified.

https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/cclicenses/

Collective Conditions for reuse (CC4r)

Collective Conditions for reuse (CC4r) is a collectively written document that can be included in any publication as a way to reorient conventional copyright. It is based on the Free Art License (FAL), but reformulates the position of the author as an individual, to recognize that authorship is "situated in social and historical conditions and that there may be reasons to refrain from release and re-use". In an important deviation from FAL and other Free Culture licenses, it asks reusers to "take into account that the defaults of openness and transparency have different consequences in different contexts” and introduces the possibility of not-sharing.

https://constantvzw.org/wefts/cc4r.en.html

Free Art Licence

The Free Art License is a Free Culture license created in 2000 in France, based on contributions from artists and legal scholars to the mailing list copyleft_attitude@april.org, including Melanie Clément-Fontaine, David Geraud, Isabelle Vodjdani, and Antoine Moreau.

This particular license has been an inspiring project because, in contrast with more mainstream projects such as Creative Commons, FAL maintains its enthusiasm for F/LOSS ideology and reformulates the interrelated mechanisms of “use, copy, distribute, transform, and prohibition of exclusive appropriation” in its own poetic way. The writing of this license and the collective practicing of its implications are part of an ongoing artistic project with explicit anti-capitalist politics.

https://artlibre.org/

Authors of the Future

Authors of the Future (Brussels, 2019) was a studyday organised by Constant. With contributions from Severine Dusollier (SciencesPo, Paris), Aymeric Mansoux (XPUB, Rotterdam), Eva Weinmayr (Pirate Library/And-And Publishing, London) and Daniel Blanga Gubbay (KFDA, Brussels) it made a start with articulating and addressing some of the problems with and omissions in Free Culture licenses. Together with a group of participants, we wondered if we could invent licences that are based on collective creative practices, in which cooperation between machine and biological authors, need not be an exception. How could attribution be a form of situated genealogy, rather than accounting for heritage through listing names of contributing individuals? In what way can we limit predatory practices without blocking the generative potential of Free Culture? What would a decolonial and feminist license look like, and in what way could we propose entangled notions of authorship? Or perhaps we should think of very different strategies?

https://constantvzw.org/site/Authors-of-the-future-Re-imagining-Copyleft.html

First Times Do Not Exist

First Times Do Not Exist was an event that took place in Literaturhuset Gotenborg in 2023. In conversation with translator Jennifer Hayashida, curator Nkule Mabaso and theoretician Cathryn Klasto, Eva Weinmayr and Femke Snelting attempted to rethink translation and citation as dispersed economies of re-use. We proposed that feeding, digesting, excreting, negotiating and transforming – citation and translation are knowledge ecologies where authorship is distributed, because a multiplicity of agents are at work to create a nutrient-rich milieu.

https://www.goteborgslitteraturhus.se/event/first-times-do-not-exist/