At the end of last week, I dedicated five years of writing, art and music to the Public Domain. Why did I do this?
- The preservation of public spaces, folk knowledge and collective intelligence feels to me to be an extremely important issue.
- My writing consists only of electrically arranged dots appearing on a screen. Trying to ‘own’ something of that nature is an absurdity.
- The idea that I “owned” my writing (these arranged dots) lead me into lots of interesting but counter-productive research about how to “protect” something that didn’t need protecting in the first place.
- I write so that I can communicate with others and to inspire and encourage them to communicate effectively. I go into that in the spirit of giving: I don’t expect or need anything in response to my writing.
- Spammers copy everything I do instantly anyway regardless of whether or not I license it to them formally. I figure why swim upstream on something like this? Why not find ways to adapt to and benefit from how conditions really are on the ground?
- I don’t need to own the things that I say so much as I need to master my communication.
- My work may be more effective and inspiring by acting as an example of how, not only can an artist survive financially thanks to the internet, but you don’t even need to tightly control or limit access to your work - or even own it at all - to do so.
- I like being the subject of my own experiments.
- Whether or not I own all rights to my work does not impact my ability to make money off of it under my current business model.
- I’d like to encourage others to make derivative works from my own work, building on what I’ve done here. Everything I’ve done has been thoroughly built on other people’s efforts, research, and love. What goes around comes around, giving back, etc.
- Other people now not only have the right, but also a huge store of sample content and a simple business model to emulate in order to make money online like I do. Or at least to test the waters. I may at some point soon make public copies of my database (minus identifying information about people who have commented here though: that information is *not* public domain and never will be).
- I’d love to see other people put together book collections and other products for sale featuring my content. Please do so, make money off them, market them well and let me know. I will help you promote them and get the biggest bang for your efforts.
- Dedicating my work to the public domain is a promise to myself to continually re-dedicate all of my efforts to the betterment of others. It’s my equivalent of taking a religious vow, you might say.
Any other thoughts on this matter from readers would be most welcome!
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9 Comments
Semi-related:
Feature film made from surveillance footage:
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/70257/
The “Evil Twin” on public wifi networks:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20071...houtfortheeviltwinwhenusingpublicwifi
And:
14. FUCK IDENTITY THEFT!
The top points reminded me of what Ran says on one of his FAQs: “I give my writing away free, because no matter how much I give away, I still have it!” Writing is such a beautiful gift.
15. In a sane world, there could be no such thing as IDENTITY THEFT!
15. (i) WTF is “identity theft” anyways?
Totally Hegelian it is. Which is what makes it scary. Eventually their solution will turn into a problem. 5 years max. Then we’ll have this identity theft, Mr. Buttle.
Some parts of the world, however, it already happens. You’re an idiot for thinking it is. Hence the thoughtcrime, the “identity theft”.
One world. One identity. All fear. No identity, once all identities have been “stolen”. Do you have your ID? Pretty amazing.
I’m inclined to think that well-crafted words stand by themselves in the big wide world. But achieving this is a kind of magic.
The concept of ‘Identity theft’ aims once more to confuse the signifier with the thing signified.
(Brion Gysin, The Third Mind).
What you just did is cross the threshold into the New Renaissance and slam the door behind you, for dramatic effect.
Very cool. Very ‘mutually inspired abundance’ in action. I hope you also plan to make some money off these types of things yourself. That’s the great thing, is that you can benefit as much as you could have anyway, if not more so, but now others can too. And it potentially encourages new forms of innovation as far as using / combining / presenting / deriving from / profiting from a body of material.
Delicious thought juice.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the Renaissance lately, actually - and how these things seem to go BOOM! in distinct cultural pockets, and then you have people who connect the players in the mini-renaissances happening all over to one another, and then suddenly things get taken to the next level as people gain exposure to one another’s work.
it is useful to write for a variety of reasons. i find most of the reasons i write are transient, temporary and ephemoral, so therefore, why would i want to cling onto them once the time for creativity has past?
now, some of my meatworld paintings are a whole different animal and i wouldn`t relinquish “ownership” in quite as readily.
Maybe that’s the problem then, trying to hold on.
Nice quote from that Gysin fella, Brooke! Must go find out more…
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[...] Blogger Tim Boucher has made his entire work part of the public domain as he seems to be embarking upon an interesting experiment. Click here. [...]
[...] Some cool news which has had my mind bouncing all over the place lately, is the infamous Tim Boucher’s recent announcement that he has released all of his work (at least his entire blog contents, past, present and future) into the public domain. Pretty awesome. He encourages derivative works, and it’s a great (as in vast, and as in awesome) body of work to draw from, so go to it, creative people. [...]
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[...] It’s a similar tactic I took with licensing of my web content via the Timboucher.com domain, which I still retain active and exclusive authorship and admin control over. Last year around this time, I decided to formally donate the contents of this domain to the Public Domain. Part of it was altruistic: to give other people the ability to benefit (even financially) from the experiences and research I have compressed, digested and rebroadcast here for others. Part of it was pragmatic: the observable fact that content online simply cannot be 100% protected from copying, spamming, etc. My tactic there is, if there’s something so strong that it’s practically a force of nature (plagiarism on the internet), then there’s no point in trying to fight it or to swim upstream. Time to find a new method of approaching the situation. [...]