the limping messenger

While preparing for a first pilot launch of a set of digital documents as part of a ‘casus’ on the site of Het Archiefcomité van de Toekomst (the archive committee of the future) I was working on the file meta-data with tags and icons for displaying the licence status of a file…. So apart from ‘copyright (all rights reserved)’ there are several other one’s, among which the CC (Creative Commons, with different options of sharing), the OA (Open Access) and it’s child OER (Open (Access) Educational Resource) and so on… oh forgot one which I started to use already in 1967 (got it from the International Situationist Journal (1957-1972) that had in the colophon printed ‘anti-copyright’ (AC)… still often there are documents that do not fit this status, documents that you decide to put on-line (and share) irrespective of their legal authorship licence status… This brought me back to a dormant project started 9 years ago: Common Wealth (CW) status (Gemenebest in Dutch) and the radical idea of ownership of things by the English lawyer and philosopher William Godwin (1756-1836) he wrote in his famous work “Political Justice, Book VIII of property”, 1793, this definition of Common Wealth:
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“Human beings are partakers of a common nature; what conduces to the benefit or pleasure of one man will conduce to the benefit or pleasure of another. Hence it follows, upon the principles of equal and impartial justice, that the good things of the world are a common stock, upon which one man has as valid a title as another to draw for what he wants.” (*)
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So hereby a first draft for a definition on ‘Common Wealth status of a document’:
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CW: “Information Item made publicly available, as it deserves to be part of our ‘common wealth’. (*) We have tried our best to make all possible references to the creator(s) of this document, to further everyone’s understanding of the historical context of this particular item. Anybody who has viable arguments that access to this item should be limited or changed – in whatever way – may contact us to ask or demand alteration of the ‘de facto’ on-line ‘public domain’ status of this item.”
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Authorship rights and its sub-section copyright, have from their very start (centuries ago as locally confined privileges and monopolies, more about control and censorship than about the rights of creative authors) be mixed up with state control and censorship. I do not pledge for withholding anyone from exercising their rights as the creator of whatever item, object, or event or situation, but there is also the socially more important notion of publicly sharing information. Once someone makes an item ‘public’ it will become part of public debate, interference and reference. When any such item – using any media – is referred to, because it has been published, shown or performed, restricting access to it on the basis of copyright or other forms of intellectual property protection, we are entering a zone with many shades of grey ranging from ‘limited acces’ to ‘locked away’. Tactile, textual, audio or visual expressions (or combinations thereof) thus may be referenced in public domain debate, but the expression itself is often insufficiently or not at all accessible to main parts of the public. Understanding of argument is thus hampered.
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Most of the products of human creativity that have survived over time are not anymore circulating, neither in their original artefact format, nor in reproduced form. Museums can only display a limited selection, archive and library catalogues may hold references to them, but only specialist ways of questioning of such catalogues will bring such hidden objects or items to the surface again. Publications and archival materials are often not bibliographically disclosed in sufficient detail to be found in main search engines people are using nowadays. Bundles of documents, whole collections that physically can take lots of archive storage space, stored in many boxes and portfolios, may have only one or just a few entries in a catalogue, thus hidden for many potential users. By properly cataloguing pin-point selections of this massive array of material – each time in a well formulated and visualised context – such materials may see the light of public attention again after years, decades of solitary confinement. Copyright claims however firmly supported by law, do nothing for the document-inmates of this global gulag. Also for such items I have in mind this extra licence nominator named: ‘Common Wealth’.
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In our time of ubiquitous reproduction media such a state of affairs often leads to situations where upholding of (copy)rights becomes an anachronism and may even be labeled as ‘censorship’. I can and will not place here the full argumentation about a need for easing of the way in which things/items can be made public. We are facing complex, often contradictory, situations when it comes to what can and what can not be made public.
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The proposed ‘Common Wealth’ status fits the actual practice, like me and you who are reading this on Facebook, know well. Every day we make references, publish and share, without any or much concern for formal authorship licences. The old school method of asking permit before publishing, can well be explained by the media in use decades and centuries ago.. now we live in a time where copies are made and distributed by a single mouse-click or a command from the voice-robots of our smart phones. No more costly processes of printing, typesetting in lead, engraving of photographic cliches, let alone to speak about copper, steel of wood-engraving…
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‘Common Wealth’ (CW) is already here. by the daily practice of billions of people. WC (We Copy)… is implicit with this proposed Common Wealth status. Needed are (better) tools for full reference to title, names, creators, original information-carrier format, of any object or item. References that as part of the digital reproduction stage of the primary artefact, will be attached as meta-data to the digital file or set of files. This (meta) data will be inscribed into the file itself (using the existing standard shemes of XML/XMP, EXIF and IPTC for storing added data in the header of a file).There are already many fast protocols available for retrieving this meta-data for any digital object living on the internet. Brief and full versions of this information can be made available instantly with a simple click, touch or swipe. It is something we are already used to in our daily use of web-facilities.
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I always like an old slogan about the use of what was once called the world wide web…

THE WEB IS ABOUT SHARING

Tjebbe van Tijen 21/1/2018