Alternative licensing
and the free culture
community in
São Paulo
Jhessica F. Reia
GPOPAI
USP
Grupo de Pesquisa em Políticas Públicas para o Acesso à Informação
Universidade de São Paulo
2010
Universidade de São Paulo
Professores:
Gisele Craveiro
Jorge Machado
Pablo Ortellado
Pesquisadores:
Alcimar Silva de Queiroz
Amanda Rossi
Ana Paula Bianconcini Anjos
Arakin Queiroz Monteiro
Bráulio Santos Rabelo de Araújo
Cíntia Medina de Souza
Cristiana Gonzalez
Eduardo B. Barbosa
Elisa Klüger
Everton Zanella Alvarenga
Felipe B. Sentelhas
Jamila Rodrigues Venturini
R347a
Escola de Artes, Ciências
e Humanidades
José Paulo Guedes Pinto
Leonardo Ribeiro da Cruz
Marcelo Tavares de Santana
Márcio F. Araujo Jr.
Maria Caramez Carlotto
Oleno Spagolla Volpi Netto
Raquel Gammardella Rizzi
Volker Grassmuck
Apoio:
Projeto gráfico e diagramação:
Canal 6 Projetos Editoriais
www.canal6.com.br
Reia, Jhessica F.
Alternative licensing and the free culture community in São Paulo /
Jhessica F. Reia. - - São Paulo: Universidade de São Paulo. Grupo de
Pesquisa em Políticas Públicas para o Acesso a Informação; Bauru,
SP: Canal 6, 2010.
17p.; 21cm. (Cadernos GPOPAI; v.10).
ISBN 978-85-7917-106-2
1. Programas de computador – licenças de uso. 2.Programas de
computador – direito autoral. 3. Direito autoral – cultura. I. Título.
CDD – 346.048
Sumário
5
The research
7
Some of the results
14 Closing Remarks
15 Main findings and challenges
16 Hypotheses and suggestions
16 Reference list
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licença de direito autoral.
Alternative licensing and the
free culture community in
São Paulo
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1. The research
This research was carried out for two years at the University of São Paulo,
and basically had two parts: a theoretical one, which focused on the reconstruction of the trajectory of alternative licensing from the emergence of free software as a concept, with Richard Stallman in the 1980’s, to Creative Commons
and beyond; and an empirical investigation attempting to map free culture initiatives in the city of São Paulo, to understand what they do, what licenses they
adopt and what they think about those licenses and free culture in general.
The theoretical research was based on readings of conceptual texts and
documents about the main licenses adopted by the free culture community.
The empirical study was based on the analysis of a survey sent to 256 allegedly
free culture initiatives that were identified trough the years 2007 and 2008.
This mapping was made through monitoring web 2.0 platforms adopting ‘free
licenses’ (Wikipedia, Flickr, Overmundo and Trama Virtual), through monitoring self-acclaimed free culture events, through web searching for free licenses
1
Jhessica F. Reia is a student of Public Policy Management at the University of São Paulo (USP),
and Intellectual Property researcher, working in emerging themes of free culture, in addition to themes like the history and consolidation of copyright, and alternative licensing.
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Alternative licensing and the free culture community in São Paulo
(such as Creative Commons and GPL), through identifying Culture Hotspots2,
through web searching for academic groups defending open access, through
web searching for self-acclaimed free culture and free software activists, and
through the indication of free culture practitioners by others already identified. So the criteria for building the sample was: self-identification as a free
culture practitioner or adopting a free license. Those 256 identified initiatives
were then grouped into several categories – visual arts, music, free software,
university/research groups, communication, literature and culture hotspots.
A survey was then prepared and put online, and the initiatives were asked
through e-mail to reply. The percentage of replies was 20% (51 answers).
SAMPLE
UNIVERSE
INTERVIEWED
SAMPLE
% OF INTERVIEWED
OVER UNIVERSE
Communication
12
3
25%
Free software
15
12
80%
Visual arts
58
8
14%
Music
48
8
17%
Literature
95
11
12%
Culture hotspots
15
5
33%
University/research groups
13
4
31%
TOTAL
256
51
20%
Category of groups:
2
Culture Hotspots are initiatives developed by civil society that receive funding from the
Ministry of Culture and became responsible to articulate and promote the cultural initiatives that already exist in the community they belong. They are encouraged (but not
required) by the Ministry of Culture to use free software and release what they do with a
free license.
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2. Some of the results
The first part of the survey showed some key aspects of the free culture community in São Paulo. Initiatives are mostly collective (73%) and unlike
common sense they have existed for a while (51% over three years and 37%
over five years)3
Chart 1. Kind of activities
Chart 2. How long the activity has been developed?
3
Survey was done in 2007 and 2008.
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Alternative licensing and the free culture community in São Paulo
In order to determine in what kind of activities those initiatives were involved they were asked to choose from a set of given categories while having
the option of creating new ones and choosing more than one. Results are as
below:
Chart 3. Types of activities
They were then asked how users access their work and, not surprisingly,
most initiatives provide for Internet access to their work.
Chart 4. Work is made available on the Internet?
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Chart 5. How users access work?
Chart 5.1 Other
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Alternative licensing and the free culture community in São Paulo
Most repliers use some kind of copyright license. However, many don’t
know what they mean or how they connect to free culture. Also remarkable
is their allegation of adopting simultaneously two contradictory licenses which seems more related to confusion than to self-aware dual licensing.
Chart 6. Do you use any kind of copyright license?
Chart 7. Use of licenses4*
4
* You can not put a work in the public domain under Brazilian law.
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When asked about the self-attribution (or non-attribution) of free licensing
and free culture to their own works, 75% considered their license “free”, while
82% considered their activity “free culture”.
Chart 8. Do you consider the license you adopt is free?
Chart 9. Do you consider your activity is free culture?
In yet another group of questions, initiatives were asked about their intentions in licensing regarding allowing copying, distribution, modification and
commercial use. About 94% said they permit free access to their whole work
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Alternative licensing and the free culture community in São Paulo
in the Internet, and 82% permit other people to freely copy and attribute the
work. An important point to be highlighted is that 57% of the initiatives refuse
to allow reproduction of their work for commercial purposes. Another salient
point is the permission to modification and production of derivative works by
78% of the initiatives.
Chart 10. Do you allow free access to the work’s full version through the Internet (or
by other means)?
Chart 11. Can people copy and distribute it freely?
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Chart 12. Can people modify your work and/or incorporate it into another one?
Chart 13. Do you allow commercial copies of your work?
The last question of the survey was open, and asked “What does free culture mean to you?”, in order to allow a more qualitative assessment of what
free culture means to these groups and individuals. To make the analysis of
the answers clearer, keywords were inferred. Answers that included key elements in the conceptualization of either Lessig (2004) or Stallman (2002) were
counted as “in accord with one of the standard definitions of free culture”.
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Alternative licensing and the free culture community in São Paulo
Among the 51 responses, only 3 people (6%) said to know nothing about
free culture. From the remaining total, 11 people (22%) provided responses
that contained keywords that could be clearly related to the definitions of
Lessig (2004) and Stallman (2002), such as: reference to the four freedoms of
free software, free culture as a middle ground between “all rights reserved”
and infringement of copyright, and free culture as free use, distribution,
copying and modification.
Lastly 37 people (72%) provided answers that diverge more or less from the
key theoreticians. A few examples of frequent keywords: democratic access to
works (4 replies); use the Internet for dissemination (2 replies); culture as intangible property (2 replies); free speech (8 replies); unrestricted access to works (5
replies); writers / producers properly paid / recognized (1 reply); works without
commercial value (2 replies); gave the definition of culture (1 reply); free access
to works (1 reply); work that is opposed to intellectual property (1 reply); evolution of species (1 reply); new focus on copyright, usually without intermediaries
(4 replies); allusion to popular culture and public domain (5 replies).
3. Closing Remarks
In order to compare free culture standard theory to free culture’s practitioners’ self understanding as verified in this research, it is useful to systematize the
three main theoretical definitions and to ask: what is, indeed, free culture?
For Richard Stallman (2002) - pioneer of free software and influential not
only in software, but also in free culture debates - free software is basically “a
matter of the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.” Lawrence Lessig, in a very simplified way, believes that
free culture is in between the extreme regulation by the law over creative
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works, and the lawless use that does not respect the author’s rights (2004).
It is basically culture adopting any of a set of flexible licenses allowing for
greater freedom to copy and adapt. However, more recently Creative Commons defined ‘Free Cultural Works’ “as works or expressions which can be
freely studied, applied, copied and/or modified, by anyone, for any purpose”
- closer to Stallman’s free software definition. These definitions are in contrast
with the self-understanding of the free culture community of São Paulo, since
only 22% of the answers are in accord with these definitions.
4. Main findings and challenges
There seems to be divergence between licensing intent and license actually adopted by free culture practitioners in São Paulo; and inconsistency
between the concept of free culture held by practitioners and theoreticians
(Stallman, Lessig).
Another finding, is that theoreticians’ strong definition of free culture
(such as Stallman’s and Creative Commons Free Culture seal’s) excludes 57%
of São Paulo free culture community, since most practitioners do not want to
allow for commercial use.
Another relevant finding, is that although practitioner of free culture in
São Paulo diverge on what they understand as free culture, core practical agreement rests on making work available on the Internet [94% of practitioners].
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Alternative licensing and the free culture community in São Paulo
5. Hypotheses and suggestions
Although these results from the free culture community in São Paulo may
not be extensible to the whole global free culture community, some hypotheses
and suggestions can be drawn preliminary:
•
Theoreticians’ understanding of free culture does not reach average
user, but impact use through large platforms such as Wikipedia;
•
Web 2.0 platforms’ licensing schemes are not fully understood by user,
who sometimes seem forced to adhere to the license to use the tool this use of license seems to be often unaware.
•
Platforms should include more flexibility in the offering of licenses to
catch up with the community’s self understanding of free culture.
•
Divergence between practitioners and theoreticians may not be due
to lack of knowledge of theory, but to a different understanding of
what free culture is.
6. Reference list
Chapter: The GNU Operating System and the Free Software Movement. O’Reilly, 1999.
GRASSMUCK, V. Towards a New Social Contract - Free-Licensing into the Knowledge
Commons. 2008
LESSIG, L. (2004). Free Culture: How big media uses technology and the law to lock down
culture and control creativity. New York: The Penguin Press.
LINKSVAYER, M. Approved for Free Cultural Works. Available at http/creativecommons.
org/weblog/entry/8051.
PERENS, B. Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. Chapter: The Open
Source Definiton. O’Reilly, 1999.
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RAYMOND, Eric S. The Cathedral and the Bazaar. USA: Unidos: OREILLY AND
ASSOC, 2001.
STALLMAN, R. M. Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution.
STALLMAN, R. M. (2002). Free Software, Free Society: selected essays of Richard M. Stallman (Edited by Joshua Gay). Boston: Gnu Press.
WILLIAMS, S. Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for the Free Software.
O’Reilly, 2002.
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Sobre o livro
Formato 14x21 cm
Tipologia Frutiger Lt Std (texto)
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