"All rights reserved" - an obstacle in creating the Open Society

To fully realise a society based on the open principle, every individual must have the opportunity to create art and entertainment without any legal restrictions on the use and re-use of other artistic works. Thus the whole concept of intellectual property have to be questioned. In a society where it is unlawful for individuals to re-use artistic works to create new ones and freely distribute them, there is no true artistic freedom. Corporations like ASCAP and TONO claims that they are "protecting their members rights" when attacking the sharing culture and Creative Commons, which represents a legal alternative to the "all rights reserved" based system that goes back to pre-WW2 (in Norway). The systems for free sharing of artistic works in both professional and consumer quality are already here (i.e.archive.org and jamendo.com), but cannot be utilised to the full extent as long as both users and the services themselves run the risk of lawsuits due to copyright issues.

Why Oskar Hansen did not publish "Towards Open Form" with a Creative Commons license remains a mystery. Both Hansen (in his latest written works) and numerous others officially promoting the Open Society signed contracts with publishers prohibiting their works to be shared and re-used noncommercially.

A couple of years ago the norwegian architects' association (NAL) sent their members information on "copyright for architects". They did not even mention the Creative Commons option. Maybe we should all send NAL an email asking them why?



"All rights reserved" - an obstacle in creating the Open Society by Sølve N.T. Lauvås is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Norway License.