/edu/ - Education

no matter how flexible you make copyright laws, the problem remains unsolved of how you actually reward content creators for contributing to culture.
the only reason copyrights/patents existed in the first place is for creativity to justify itself in the system which ordains profit off of property as the guiding principle of real success. but as people work longer hours, pay and pensions vanish, and social institutions are being overturned and cut because they don’t justify themselves through profit, the very commons by which we reflect upon our reality to society is shrinking because it lacks the labor time and resources to sustain itself. we as a society will inevitably need to find a way to attribute resources to the labor time of culture that falls outside the logic of profitability.

shouldn’t this be on /tech/ though?

>>5216
So open culture would be like utopian socialism to draw a comparision?
>shouldn’t this be on /tech/ though?
I think not since this movement was about bringing the values of libre software to general culture, maybe it could go on /hobby/ but still won't be completely fitting

>>5216
>the only reason copyrights/patents existed in the first place is for creativity to justify itself in the system which ordains profit off of property as the guiding principle
Idealist horsepiss? In my nu-leftypol? It's more likely than you think. Copyright was invented as a censorship tool by the British Crown.

It still exists and keeps going, though under the radar. I've thought about integrating it into this community somehow but I've not figured out an approach yet
One example is radio shows hosted through GNU Social right now (which is part of the same network as Mastodon)

If you consume a lot of youtube or twitch content take note of how many times those streamers voice complaints to themselves or fellow streamers about a desire for knowing how to find/use good music to enhance their channel without the fear of getting copyright-stricken. You'll quickly start to realize there's a lot of untapped potential right here.

>>5220
Cont.
Also shout-out: autonomism (the theorists are behind a drive for open access to academic papers and autonomist theory has previously been an inspiration for the free party / teknival movement which was kicked off by Spiral Tribe in the 90s, a movement which is still ongoing in France and Spain today).
I think today, for us, we should think deeply about the potential for spreading free culture radio domains and archives/filesevers into the popular consciousness of everyday internet users. Could there be a "Free Culture Spotify"? I think so.

>>5217
Idk what it should be.
>>5219
Please explain how and why that’s the same as the copyright that exists now.

>>5215
Gavin Mueller's concluding remarks from his 2019 book, Media Piracy in the Cultural Economy: Intellectual Property and Labor Under Neoliberal Restructuring seems especially relevant here. He talks about the failures or limitations of the free software and free culture movements from a mostly autonomist marxist perspective; highly recommend.

You cannot adapt Free Software onto cultural products as they are about completely different situations. The language is a bit confusing. Proprietary software is not software; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by software. Free Software is not about the freedom of software, but the user's freedom from the developer of the software. Or rather, it is about control. With proprietary software, it is someone else who controls you through the software, with Free Software you are in control of your own computing. There is no analogous issue with books, music or other cultural products.

>>5219
Could you explain why is that idealism?
>>5220
Integrating it how and why?
>>5237
tl;dr it for me
>>5242
Everything you said about software is perfectly applicable to any creative media
Your post is so bad it's enraging

>>5256
>Everything you said about software is perfectly applicable to any creative media
So we should be able to compile our own paintings and be able to audit the source code of the latest Hollywood movie?

>>5258
That's a false equivalence and a really loaded argument
Those things do not compare and if you want a similar equivalence it'll will be copying paintings and reediting movies
By the previews post you seem to be one of those turbo nerds who makes software for other programmers and never thinks about the general user and so you can't grasp why would anyone need libre software beside compiling it and editing it to their needs and why will anyone use something with some quality of life improvements instead of some obscure and complicated script.

>>5260
>That's a false equivalence and a really loaded argument
You talk like a really annoying faggot, you know?

>>5256
How does someone control your computer though media?

>>5264
This link does not address the parent comment.

>>5242
>Proprietary software is not software; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by software
You are correct in that it is a social relation but it is mediated through intellectual property and copyright law, by which software (or code) is one in a laundry list of commodities this applies to. As you well know, Free Software emerged as a consequence of the growing PC market of the 1980s and corporate interest in stopping hobbyist groups from sharing code. Richard Stallman established the FSF and GNU license as a way to preserve the labor practices he enjoyed while working at MIT, where he was insulated from capitalist pressures of profit maximization through copyright monopoly. Free Software proponents sought to maintain programmers' skill and independence in the face of tendencies to deskill and control the production of software inside large firms. This resulted in alternative forms of productive relationships (which, most notably gave us Linux!) that existed parallel to capitalist management, but ultimately was not explicitly opposed to their enclosure. At the end of the day, the Free Software Movement wasn't so much interested in escaping capitalist social relations so much as it was in maintaining a degree of autonomy from within.

This fact was exploited by Bruce Perens and Tim O’Reilly at the turn of the millennium who, with the help of investors, went on to rebrand and popularize an alternative to the alternative: Open Source—right around the same time people were beginning to challenge copyright in the cultural realm. Free and Open Source Software as a productive process is dependent on voluntary / unpaid / decommodified labor (whatever you want to call it) which isn't exclusive to programming at all. Ask any artist what it's like to work for free and they'll gladly tell you: it sucks, man. Producing commodities for the sake of use rather than exchange is something that the modernists of the 20th century experimented with to great lengths (as was the case at the Soviet VKhUTEMAS), but when divorced from new social relations it gets individualized and reduced to what we now know as tech-brained solutions (see: the German Bauhaus and it's legacy among Silicon Valley's elite). Open Source and by extension the Creative Commons were liberal reformist projects that succeeded in recuperating what interesting ideas the Free Software Movement were unable to coherently muster.

>>5256
>tl;dr it for me
The screenshot is basically the tl;dr. You could just read the book; it's pretty short. The introduction summarizes each chapter. I think Gavin Mueller is principally interested in why 40 years of media piracy has yet to produce a coherent (dare I say) praxis. What makes him interesting to me is that he acknowledges marxists have been dragging their feet when it comes to discussing how the internet is affecting labor. It's nice to read a perspective that isn't tainted by the techno-utopian brainrot of McKenzie Wark or post-autonomist thinkers like Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt.

>>5268
You can ignore copyright law and pirate software. Does that make the pirated software Free Software? Not in the sense we are talking about. Proprietary software can exist without intellectual property. It is about the software developer's control over the user. Cultural products don't exercise this power or anything similar. When you are watching a movie, you don't surrender your TV set to the producers of said movie, but when you run a proprietary software you surrender your computer to its producers.

>>5272
>Proprietary software can exist without intellectual property.
No, proprietary software cannot exist without intellectual property. Under capitalist society, programmers are compelled to become wage laborers same as everyone else. So software, proprietary or not, becomes intellectual property no matter how much programmers distance themselves from that productive process, no matter how much they relish in the parallel, unpaid spectacle that is FOSS development. This is why the GNU license is so strict, and for decades was such a clever subversion; but it's nothing more than that. Like Gavin Mueller said, we need a critique of intellectual property as private property.
>It is about the software developer's control over the user.
Copyright law is what enables a software developer's control over the user; it also determines how said user consumes "cultural products"—what commodities they must purchase in order to watch a movie, listen to music, or read a book. The music industry is a great example; the RIAA has been bitching about technologies of new social relations since the 1970s! From cassette tapes to p2p file sharing. If they had their way, the masses would still have a record player in every home. The MPAA is no different; they've been bitching since the first VCR left store shelves. They're methods of control all the way down.

>>5273
Suppose copyright law and intellectual property was abolished overnight. People would still be able to distribute software in binary form and withhold its source code. By all definitions, that is proprietary software.

>>5271
I see now, so by coming up with new property relationships like creative commons we solved nothing. It all makes sense now, good stuff.
>>5272
You don't surrender your TV but you're still surrendering some rights. When you buy the DVD of a movie you're licensing it from the copyright owner for home use, public showing, redistribution, reediting and sampling are forbidden. It's not the same as closed source software but is the same type of relationship and this is what open culture wanted to address.

>>5277
But you can just easily pirate media, even with DRM.

>>5258
>So we should be able to compile our own paintings and be able to audit the source code of the latest Hollywood movie?
Open source studios release all the raw footage and cgi source files. Other directors edit the movie source material and release alternative movie-cuts.

>>5277
But the difference is that the rights you surrender are legal fiction while your computer is material reality. See the post above yours.

>>5286
your ISP threatening to blacklist you and withhold service is also material reality

>>5237
>Gavin Mueller
In a recent interview he compares the FOSS movement to the Luddite movement. While this is a take I've never heard before, the more I think about it the more it makes sense. https://novaramedia.com/2021/03/26/luddites-hackers-saboteurs/

>>5316
Apparently Johan Söderberg shared similar sentiments in his 2008 book, Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software Movement and later from Mueller's colleague, Maxigas in the Journal of Peer Production. Both are/were associated with the P2P Foundation.

So in the end is an free culture still worth fighting for?