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Sandbox Culture a Study of the Application of Free and Open Source Software Licensing Ideas to Art and Cultural Production

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Sandbox Culture A Study of the Application of Free and Open Source Software Licensing Ideas to Art and Cultural Production Aymeric Mansoux Supervisor: Matthew Fuller Thesis presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London, February 2017 I, Aymeric Mansoux, confirm that the work presented in this thesis ismy own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. Date: February 19, 2017 Signed: Abstract In partial response to the inability of intellectual property laws to adapt to data-sharing over computer networks, several initiatives have proposed techno-legal alternatives to encourage the free circulation and transfor- mation of digital works. These alternatives have shaped part of contem- porary digital culture for more than three decades and are today often associated with the “free culture” movement. The different strands of this movement are essentially derived from a narrower concept of soft- ware freedom developed in the nineteen-eighties, and which is enforced within free and open source software communities. This principle was the first significant effort to articulate a reusable techno-legal template to work around the limitations of intellectual property laws. It also of- fered a vision of network culture where community participation and sharing was structural. From alternate tools and workflow systems, artist-run servers, net- work publishing experiments, open data and design lobbies, cooperative and collaborative frameworks, but also novel copyright licensing used by both non-profit organisations and for-profit corporations, the impact on cultural production of practices developed in relation to the ideas of iii free and open source software has been both influential and broadly ap- plied. However, if it is true that free and open source software has indeed succeeded in becoming a theoretical and practical model for the trans- formation of art and culture, the question remains at which ways it has provided such a model, how it has been effectively appropriated across different groups and contexts and in what ways these overlap ordiffer. Using the image of the sandbox, where code becomes a constituent device for different communities to experience varying ideologies and practices, this dissertation aims to map the consequent levels of diver- gence in interpreting and appropriating the free and open source techno- legal template. This thesis identifies the paradoxes, conflicts, and contra- dictions within free culture discourse. It explores the tensions between the wish to provide a theoretical universal definition of cultural freedom, and the disorderly reality of its practice and interpretation. However, despite the different layers of cultural diffusion, appropriation, misun- derstanding and miscommunication that together form the fabric of free culture, this dissertation argues that, even though feared, fought, and crit- icised, these issues are not signs of dysfunctionality but are instead the evidence of cultural diversity within free culture. This dissertation will also demonstrate that conflicts between and within these sandboxes cre- ate a democratic process that permits the constant transformation of the free and open source discourse, and is therefore something that should be embraced and neither resisted nor substituted for a universal approach to cultural production. iv Table of Contents Abstract iii List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgements xi Introduction xiii What Is Free Culture? . xiii Research Question ........................... xxi Methodology ..............................xxii Limit of the Research . .xxviii Structure of the Argument ......................xxx Prologue xxxiii Part 1: Free as in… Culture 1 1 Paradigm Maintenance and User Freedom 6 1.1 Questioning the Revolution ................... 6 1.2 Source Code and the Individuation of the Programmer . 11 1.3 Engineering Freedom and User Groups . 19 1.4 UNIX Connects the Dots, People and Pipelines . 26 1.5 The Growing Unix Fellowship . 33 1.6 Controlling Software Development . 38 1.7 Fratricide Software ........................ 45 1.8 The Need to Define ........................ 49 1.9 Software Licenses ......................... 59 1.10 From Machine Instructions to Community Rules . 63 Interlude 73 2 In Search of Pluralism 76 2.1 Diffusion and Appropriation . 76 2.2 Prototyping Free Culture .................... 83 2.3 Defining Free Culture and the Decay of Pluralism . 91 2.4 The Political Denial of Open Everything . 96 2.5 The Liberal Democratic Industries of Freedom and Openness 103 Part 2: Free as in… Art 113 3 Art Libre 120 3.1 Free Art Incentives . 120 3.2 Licence Art Libre . 130 3.3 Usefulness of Legal Constraints as Safe Haven . 137 3.4 Artistic Freedom versus Software Freedom . 148 Interlude 154 4 The Practice of Free-Range Free Culture 161 4.1 Mattin - Production . 161 4.2 Nina Paley - Product . 167 4.3 Stéphanie Villayphiou and Alexandre Leray - Process . 175 4.4 A Note on the Artistic Appropriation of the Free Cultural Discourse ..............................185 4.4.1 Save the GNou! . 186 4.4.2 Fibre Libre . 191 4.4.3 CC Ironies . 195 Interlude 201 5 Free Cultural Misunderstandings 205 5.1 The Double Misunderstanding with Copyleft . 205 5.2 The Enduring Debate over the Commercial Exploitation of Free Culture ............................221 Part 3: Free as in … Trapped 235 6 The (Almost) Endless Possibilities of the Free Culture Template247 6.1 Free Software Art Publishing . 247 6.2 The Source of Free Cultural Expressions . 259 6.3 Sharing Is Caring but How Many Files Are Enough? . 270 Interlude 280 7 From Techno-Legal Templates to Sandbox Culture 285 7.1 Deceptive Participations in a RO/RW Remix Culture . 285 7.2 The Early Days of Mixes Between Operating Systems and Social Systems . 297 7.3 Policies, Jails, Chroot and Sandboxes . 304 Interlude 311 8 The Mechanics of Sandbox Culture 316 8.1 A Day in the Sandbox Life . 316 8.1.1 RjDj .............................318 8.1.2 Fuck the System . 328 8.2 Fork the System . 339 8.3 On Forking Homes, Sandboxes and Software Exile . 354 Conclusion 368 Summary of the Argument . 369 A Model for the Transformation of Art and Cultural Production? 374 Remark on Sandbox Culture and Future Research . 379 Appendix: Selection of Proto-Free Culture Licenses 382 References 453 List of Illustrations 1.1 UNIX license plate ........................ 32 3.1 Reuse and appropriation between FAL/LAL artists . 136 4.1 Mattin at make art festival . 165 4.2 Sita Sings the Blues . 169 4.3 Snapshots from OSP design process and tools . 181 4.4 Dépôt marque Française COPYLEFT . 188 4.5 Fibre Libre .............................193 4.6 CC Ironies (sample from a series of 42) . 197 5.1 RIP!: A Remix Manifesto . 210 5.2 Copyleft (L) sticker . 215 5.3 Cover of 1985 copy-left issue #3 . 217 6.1 self3[cpu] .............................256 6.2 A maybe free and highly compressed thumbnail . 261 6.3 How deep is your source? . 264 7.1 Community Memory walkthrough . 299 8.1 RjDj promotion . 321 ix In memory of Christine Mansoux Acknowledgements Des bisoux, Des bisoux, Des bisoux, Des bisoux, Des bisoux, Des bisoux, Des bisoux, Des bisoux, Des bisoux, Des bisoux, Des bisoux, Des bisoux, Des bisoux, Des bisoux, Des bisoux. — Philippe Katerine, Des Bisoux Dušan Barok, Maja Bekan, Casper Bentinck, Paul Brossier, André Castro, Ana Isabel Carvalho, Ruth Catlow, Jeroen Chabot, Ben Chang, Constant, Florian Cramer, Yves Degoyon, Annet Dekker, Kevin Driscoll, Quinn DuPont, Julien Deswaef, Eightycolumn, Bridget Elmer, Andy Farnell, Laura Fernández, Matthew Fuller, Marcos García, Marc Garrett, Anne Goldenberg, Olga Goriunova, Eleanor Greenhalgh, Dave Griffiths, Christoph Haag, Jean-Philippe Halgand, Graham Harwood, Sachiko Hayashi, Claude Heiland-Allen, Benjamin Mako Hill, Don Hopkins, Kennisland, Danny van der Kleij, Eric Kluitenberg, Kunsthuis SYB, Anne Laforet, Ricardo Lafuente, Chun Lee, Alexandre Leray, Libre Graphics Research Unit, Geert Lovink, Alessandro Ludovico, Nicolas Malevé, Alexia Mansoux, Bernard Mansoux, Christine Mansoux, Mattin, Chris McCormick, Bonnie Mitchell, Modern Poland Foundation, Antoine Moreau, Michael Murtaugh, Rob Myers, Sally Jane Norman, Eleonora Oreggia, Nina Paley, Simon Pummel, Uschi Reiter, Raquel Rennó, Leslie Robbins, Jaron Rowan, Steve Rushton, Eric Schrijver, servus.at, Femke Snelting, Manfred Vänçi Stirnemann, Michael Stuz, Bruno Tarin, Renee Turner, Marloes de Valk, Florian de Valk-Mansoux, Noam de Valk-Mansoux, Mirko Vidovic, Stéphanie Villayphiou, Dave Young, Simon Yuill. Thank you all so much! xi This research received financial support from Willem de Kooning Academy and Research Centre Creating 010 of the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences. The thesis was written using the following software and operating sys- tems: acme, Debian, evilwm, Firefox, FreeBSD, git, hunspell, jabref, meld, pandoc, recoll, WordNet, XƎLATEX, zathura, zsh. xii Introduction What Is Free Culture? According to the website freeculture.org, developed by a “non-partisan group of students and young people who are working to get their peers involved in the free culture movement,”1 the term free culture was origi- nally coined by American law professor Lawrence Lessig in his 2004 book Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity.2 Lessig’s book is an elaborate collection of anecdotes, that together form a critique of the increasing discrepancy between,
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