Open Licences in Cultural Production

Thursday April 29 | 17.30hrs.

Lecture: Lawrence Liang: A Survey of Open Licences In Cultural Production

The Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) movement has emerged as a strong alternative to the totalizing imagination of copyright law, and ironically the mode through which this counter imagination has responded has been to creatively use the dominant tool of copyright, namely licensing. This counter imagination which seeks to promote an alternative mode of conceptualizing knowledge production has also spread to the domain of cultural production, with the emergence of open licenses outside the domain of software. (For instance the open content license, the creative commons, the various EFF licenses etc).

This presentation seeks to critically analyse these licenses in terms of their philosophical premises, the manner in which they conceptualise the public domain, the legal innovations that they rely on and most importantly to pose the question of how we may approach / read these licenses beyond their status as legal documents.

The presentation will also attempt to critically evaluate the emerging language of universality in the critical debates on copyright, especially from the US. For instance what are the limitations of the liberal discourse of the public domain that lies at the heart of the creative commons project, and what are some of the ways through which we locate open licenses within larger social imaginaries of cultural production.

Entry | Free, All Welcome.

Collegezaal 1.001 | Piet Zwart Institute | Overblaak 85 | Rotterdam Nearest NS | Metro and Tram 1 stop: Blaak

Lawrence Liang is the current Research Fellow in the PZI Media Design Research programme. He is a member of the Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore.