In Two Bits, Christopher M. Kelty investigates the history and cultural significance of Free Software, revealing the people and practices that have transformed not only software, but also music, film, science, and education.
Free Software is a set of practices devoted to the collaborative creation of software source code that is made openly and freely available through an unconventional use of copyright law. Kelty shows how these specific practices have reoriented the relations of power around the creation, dissemination, and authorization of all kinds of knowledge after the arrival of the Internet. Two Bits also makes an important contribution to discussions of public spheres and social imaginaries by demonstrating how Free Software is a “recursive public” public organized around the ability to build, modify, and maintain the very infrastructure that gives it life in the first place.
Drawing on ethnographic research that took him from an Internet healthcare start-up company in Boston to media labs in Berlin to young entrepreneurs in Bangalore, Kelty describes the technologies and the moral vision that binds together hackers, geeks, lawyers, and other Free Software advocates. In each case, he shows how their practices and way of life include not only the sharing of software source code but also ways of conceptualizing openness, writing copyright licenses, coordinating collaboration, and proselytizing for the movement. By exploring in detail how these practices came together as the Free Software movement from the 1970s to the 1990s, Kelty also shows how it is possible to understand the new movements that are emerging out of Free Software: projects such as Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that creates copyright licenses, and Connexions, a project to create an online scholarly textbook commons.
Christopher M. Kelty is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rice University in Houston, Texas. (In the fall of 2008, I will start a new position at UCLA in the Center for Genetics and Society and the Department of Information Studies).
COMMENTS / 5 COMMENTS
Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog » Around the Web on Jun 09 08 at 3:09 am[…] Chris humbly claims that the moment of free software, the subject of his new book, may be untimely, the press coverage of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)’s begrudging […]
Ebook: Two Bits, by Christopher M. Kelty, on the Cultural Impact of Free Software | Matt's Cuppa on Jun 12 08 at 3:12 am[…] Two Bits » About In Two Bits, Christopher M. Kelty investigates the history and cultural significance of Free Software, revealing the people and practices that have transformed not only software, but also music, film, science, and education. […]
Smart Mobs » Blog Archive » Christopher Kelly opens Two Bits to modulation on Jun 25 08 at 4:20 pm[…] Christopher M. Kelly has opened up his book, Two Bits, to modulation beginning a collaboration to reach beyond the knowledge presented and allow […]
Charlotte on Nov 02 08 at 12:50 pmDear Mr. Kelty,
I’m taking a graduate class (”Global Internet”) at the American U. of Paris, and our assignment for Tuesday is the Intro and Chapter 8 of your book to read, along with reviewing your site, as well at the GNU Manifesto.
Each week we post our comments on our course message board and discuss them in class. In my comments I wrote that the GNU Manifesto brings up the issue of sharing and how this is accomplised. In Chapter 8, I found similarities here, where instead of the idea of sharing, you use the word coding. You write about who has access to the code, who can modify it, and under what conditions. The advent of the Creative Commons Attribution provides access to anyone who wishes to engage interactively with others’ works. (These are watered down versions of what I wrote.)
I understand the purpose of Two Bits, and the thesis behind the other assignments, however, I found a fundamental problem with the idea of “sharing” as promoted here. At the bottom of your About page there is a link “Material on this site released under a Creative Commons By-NC-SA 3.0 License. On this page, you are encouraged to “share” and “remix” the work, but only if you “attribute” it, and that the work you create is “noncommercial” and “shared alike.”
I understand that there is the element that you can change a text, but you still have to refer back to the original and as the Two Bits site indicates, leave the author’s name on the work. Given this then, how is the Creative Commons Attribution basically any different than citing a work that you write about? Also, who has the right to be writing about things that they may not have official training in? I found that to allow this would undermine the work that individuals have accomplished in order to receive the title, and the right, to be circulating information (based on their acquired knowledge/diplomas) in published works.
Looking forward to a possible response!
Best regards,
Charlotte
AUP, Global Communications 2009
Christopher Kelty on Nov 03 08 at 5:36 pm@Charlotte
This is a good question, but requires that you know something about how copyright law normally works to understand it.
If I had put the site and book online without the CC-BY-NC license on it (i.e. relying only on the full power of copyright), you would have no rights whatsover to do anything with it. Arguably, you would only barely have the right to read it, since in doing so you would be making an unauthorized copy. You would certainly have no right to re-distribute it, change it, or remix it, whether for commercial or non-commercial purposes.
So the CC license gives you the right to do that, and yes, it does that subject to certain restrictions– that you attribute the source work to me (though you would own the copyright on the modified work), and that you refrain from competing with Duke. You retain your “fair use” rights (which generally covers the right to cite a work in another context) regardless of whether there is a license or not… but fair use is a tricky and limited doctrine… it should cover more than just citation, and in some ways the CC license is just a clear and explicit legal green light to you to exercise, at minimum, your fair use rights.
A more radical gesture would be to dedicate the book and the writings here to the public domain, which would in principle mean that you could do whatever you want with it, no restrictions.
However, and this was one reason Creative Cmmons was created, US legal doctrine has no specific rules about when something is in the public domain, and so even if I say “This is in the public domain” it isn’t necessarily legally valid. If I were evil i could turn on you… after you used my work I could say “no, no, I didn’t really mean it, I own the copyright” and I would probably win in court. So, CC is necessary in order to legally defend my right to share this work… otherwise the law forces me to keep it to myself.
SPEAK / ADD YOUR COMMENT
Comments are moderated.
Recent Comments