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Extract

As both James Emmott's and Martin Eve's contributions to this roundtable take an historical approach to the advent of open access publishing, I offer an alternative historical narrative in reply. It has at least four layers.

The first dates from the early 2000s when digital artists, participating increasingly in a ‘mash-up’ culture which valued art forms derived from the combination and recombination of existing digital materials, and irritated by the restrictions on the use and reuse of much of the existing material by powerful corporate rights-holders, joined with some liberal American lawyers to form Creative Commons (CC). In addition to fighting corporate rights-holders' efforts to extend their copyright control of creative material (symbolized by the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998), the alliance brought together in CC also set out to facilitate the creation of new content that was not under copyright control at all – that is, created with the intent that it would be used and reused by others. Thus the CC BY licence, which not only gives permission for but actively celebrates the use and reuse of content by others to make new products (‘derivatives’) that may be compounds or mash-ups of old and new material. The CC culture was joyful, somewhat anarchic and highly voluntaristic; its initial impetus was given by the drive to hold its corporate enemies in check, but not to develop a new regime of non-copyright that would be imposed on others. Indeed, CC founder Lawrence Lessig insisted in his 2004 manifesto Free Culture that their goal was ‘balance’ – ‘a sensible copyright policy [that] could endorse and strongly support a copyright system without having to regulate the spread of culture perfectly and forever’.1

Issue Section:
Digital Forum
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