Anne Nigten on Tue, 24 Apr 2001 10:36:22 +0200 (CEST)


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[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> [CODE] [Free Art Licence] about Florian Cramer'spoint of vue & my speech.


sorry for the delay, i'm just very busy, more will come up later..

Antoine, if I understand your point about the concept of Free art licenses well, you’re referring to stable media / art mainly, (static or dynamic media /art which has a final or a predefined form). This reminds me a lot on the publications of Joost Smiers, who made several strong points in his plea to leave copyrights out of the arts and cultural practice.
There’s more similarity among these theories / concepts, both leave me puzzled at the point where it becomes interesting (for me): how does this all relate to current movements and attempts in the interdisciplinary code based art practice? What happens to the income of the artists when copy rights are left out?
So far at the V2 lab we’ve been working with existing licenses, mainly GPL and for an upcoming project we’re looking at GNU copyleft. The choice of the most suitable licenses depends a lot on the project and the intentions of the artist, our preference for existing licences is an attempt to stay open for collaboration with the outside world. For sure these licenses are not written for art or scientific purposes per se, but turned out to be useful anyway. It would be good to know why people come up with alternatives. Do you all plan at all to make a match or connection to the software based licenses at all, or do you think that the world of artists and software designers should really be kept apart? It can be foreseen a connection between your ideas and the situation will make sense in the near future, here I’m referring to the remark in my former mail about the mixed situation where ‘tools’ and code based work are being mixed up among artists/researchers/technicians etc.
In his posting Antoine mentions it impossible to change the world in one day, the way I read it now it will take us in a reverse time travel… In this context you should also look at the mails of martin, in which it is indicated that things are about to change soon.

About the other similarity: what happens with the income of the artist when copyrights are left? There was somebody who suggested something from a different angle, according to his theory about free software Richard Stallman presented his idea of free contribution. At the Wizards of OS in 1999 Richard presented these ideas, and due to his very emotional way of lecturing I didn't get to discuss these ideas up there neither did I during CODE. I have the impression that these days ( almost ) nobody will ever pay for art / cultural content on line. Besides this, there is a hippie flavor to the idea, which really reminds me to street musicians with a hat  collecting money. After several talks and discussions with artists about this idea, it turns out not to be meeting the profile of contemporary artists/researchers/programmers etc. For sure this is in no way a statement from the art world or well worked out survey, but an indication from our environment. So this made me think about other possibilities of income for artists using open source and / or copyleft. The services based model which is being used by companies to earn form open source (like Red hat as the most clear example) is not really suitable for art practices it looks like. Our so-called ‘core business’ is creativity, art Research & Development, content and interdisciplinary collaboration. Some ideas for marketing creativity, aRt&D, content, interdisciplinary collaboration etc., without leaving our mission could be established by acknowledgment of art research and development as an interesting and important addition to scientific research e.g. by means of inclusion of aRt&D in the research programs (international, European, national). Other options I see are workshops for corporate business, demonstrations and  our daily work environment could be real interesting as testbeds for scientific research, education etc. etc. just to name a few.
 
Back to CODE (and my notes)
Some other food for thought popped up in my mind during the CODE conference which was held in Cambridge, the UK. For two days we discussed real interesting issues related to openness, sharing, free this and free that while being in a country where gay people are NOT free to express their feelings in public due to clause 28 ….. we might need to work on some reverse engineering here!!

ANne