geof

The following is the text of my oral presentation of my MA thesis.

I am going to talk about how we produce ideas – specifically, how we produce intellectual and creative works. Most published works – novels, films, songs, and so on – are treated as the exclusive property of individual creators or owners. There are flaws with this proprietary approach. I argue that an approach grounded in community addresses many of these flaws, while strengthening community and furthering the self-development of its members. I call this the creative community.

This is how science works. Science is not owned: sharing it is one of the central values of the community. Thomas Kuhn described scientific paradigms as “mode[s] of community life”. Historically, such nonproprietary production was the rule, not the exception. But my main example is more recent: open source software.

Open source software is freely available to be used, modified, and distributed by others. The phenomenon of open source is sometimes explained in economic terms. It has been compared to a gift economy – developers gain a reputation for their work; they can then trade on that reputation to acquire status and employment. Empirical research, however, suggests that reputation is less important than membership in a community and identification with its values.

Participants in open source describe themselves as members of a community. That community is not limited to programmers: it also includes users, who can contribute by reporting bugs, writing documentation, or simply sharing and increasing the popularity of software. The values that community members share range from pragmatic claims that open source is a better way to develop software, to moral claims that software should be shared, not owned. Identification with these values can be very strong: some developers have expressed great sadness when employers have obliged them assign proprietary control over their work.

As a programmer who has used and developed some open source software, I agree with both the moral and pragmatic claims for it. I also find working on open source very satisfying. When I have developed proprietary software for an employer, I must sever my relationship to the software at the end of the job. It belongs to someone else – I am obliged to move on without it. When I have developed open source, however, I know that the software reflects on me, but I am also pleased when others find it useful. I feel a continuing connection to it and a responsibility for it.

Economically, I can also benefit. Most software is developed for use by specific clients, rather than to be sold as copies. If I have no intention to sell copies, sharing costs me little. But it might offer a significant benefit: if others find my software useful, they can contribute to it, increasing its value to them, to me, and to my clients. Rather than being exhausted by use, the value of the software is increased.

While open source developers may not be attempting to maximize their reputations, there are a number of similarities to actual gift economies. In particular, Marcel Mauss's illustration of gift-giving practices by the Trobriand Islanders provides a remarkable comparison to open source – one that also emphasizes community.

The Trobriands are a ring of islands in the South Pacific. The inhabitants of these islands engage in the exchange of special armshells and necklaces called kitoum. These objects are given in a definite pattern. When a necklace is given, it is always passed in the same direction around the circle of islands. Armshells are passed in the opposite direction. These artefacts are believed by the islanders to possess spiritual or healing powers – yet recipients of the gifts cannot keep them for too long. They are obliged to pass them on. Each time they do so, the action increases their esteem and that of the original giver. The gifts, in other words, are inalienable: they remain connected to whoever first gave them away. As Maurice Godelier explains, they can be kept – but only if they are exchanged with an equivalent gift of the opposite type (armshell for necklace or vice versa). The importance of the direction of circling is then clear: the exchanged gift circles back around the islands, hopefully until it reaches the original giver, who keeps it in exchange for the original gift.

This practice of gift-giving cannot be seen simply in terms of the reputations of individuals. The relationships gift-giving constructs and reinforces are not zero-sum. Gifts are, at the same time, both connected to the original giver and possessed by someone else. The relationships they construct bind the community together – not only the original giver and the eventual recipient, but also the others who have passed the gift along. Similar to open source software, these gifts acquire value through exchange, and through that exchange the community is reinforced. These phenomena – inalienability, shared possession, and contributions to community – are shared by other intellectual works. To illustrate this, I must turn from anthropology to authorship and history.

Three centuries ago, intellectual work – like much of human activity – was collective. In England, this was the time of the historical commons, in which villages subsisted on collectively managed lands. This arrangement was the model for Garrett Hardin's “Tragedy of the Commons”. Hardin described a shared pasture for cattle. Anyone could use this pasture. If you had a cow, you could pay for your own pasture, or you could use the common one. Each person using the pasture contributes to its upkeep, but everyone contributes the same amount – no-one counts how many cows a contributor sends. Thus it is in the interest of each individual to “free ride” by grazing as many cows as possible. Inevitably, Hardin explains, the pasture will be ruined from overgrazing.

One solution to this problem is private property. And so the commons of England were dismantled by the enclosure laws which required owners to fence their lands. But in truth the commons had not succumbed to tragedy. Enclosure was a deliberate policy aimed at forcing subsistence farmers onto the labor market. As it happened, the commons were extinguished just in time to supply workers for the factories of the industrial revolution.

The trauma of industrialization led to a collapse of the existing moral order. Thinkers sought an alternative reservoir of values: they found it in art. At that time, artists were seen as artisans, not creators: God was the only creator. But now art and artist took on a special role. Art provided access to a realm of transcendent truth; it became a path to human perfection – to self development. Over the course of the 18th century, art became a special sphere: together with the artist it was detached from the hurly-burly of everyday life. In the 19th century, art came also to be detached from conceptions of universal truth, and was increasingly understood as an expression of the individual subjectivity of the artist. It was the “divine spark” of the romantic artist's creativity that gave rise to original genius and the expression of her unique personality. Art had been alienated from the business of living, but it was inalienable from the artist.

But ideas are not only connected to authors and artists. It is characteristic of ideas that they are interdependent. Creative works are not like other goods. They are not created from nothing; nor are they made of ink and paper and candlelight. They are made of other ideas. An artist depends on a common store of symbols, language, stories, and so on for the raw materials of creation. Once a work has been created, it is not static: its meaning and significance are subject to reinterpretation and recommunication. Creativity, therefore, takes place in communities. It is a joint enterprise of the community, the artist, and the audience. The ideal of the romantic artist recognizes the ties between the artist and her work, but it pulls that work from the larger context of community on which it depends.

Yet the ideal of the romantic artist is embedded in the privilege assigned to a creator by copyright and patent law. James Boyle, in his exploration of individual court cases involving these and related laws, identifies a number of inconsistencies. These, he argues, can be understood in terms of a romantic artist whose individual genius creates original work from nothing. This provides what he calls a “moral and philosophical justification for fencing the commons” of ideas. But as he says, the justification is false: the romantic author is a myth.

By nature, ideas are not like physical objects. Copying them does not use them up. Once they have been communicated, controlling further access to them is difficult. In economic terms, they are nonrival and nonexcludable. Like Hardin's tragic commons, they are likely to suffer from free-riding. Treating them like property appears to be a good solution. This the economic intent of copyright: to create an incentive for creators by controlling the creation of copies in the market.

But ideas are not like pasture. Excessive grazing uses pasture up: it imposes negative externalities on the other users. Not so for ideas: in many cases, copying improves them. They acquire new meanings and interpretations. These externalities are positive. Property captures externalities for the owner. In the case of land, this imposes responsibility. In the case of ideas, it limits the benefit to others. As Mark Lemley argues, the ownership of ideas can be economically counterproductive.

Perhaps more importantly, ownership cuts ideas off from their context. In order to be property, the ideas must be transformed. They need fixed forms; they need clear boundaries to distinguish one idea from another. They are cut off from each other and from the process of their creation. They are alienated. This changes the ideas, their meanings, and their relationships to community.

As science and open source show, intellectual works can be created in communities without exclusive ownership. Community is not simply a factor of production. It is an end in itself, and it is necessary for the freedom and self-development of individuals. John Dewey writes:

Liberty is that secure release and fulfillment of personal potentialities which take place only in rich and manifold association with others: the power to be an individualized self making a distinctive contribution and enjoying in its own way the fruits of association.

Copyright is justified because it promotes the creation of works. But not all works are good. I argue for the production of works in community because it furthers community and the self-development of individuals.

By community, I mean a non-instrumental bounded collection of participating members who are conscious of their membership in the community, and who are connected to other members within the community by relationships that extend over time. The relationships between members are often mediated by works. Shared activities promote relationships between people. This was the case for the shared use of the English common. Benedict Anderson credits the daily ritual of reading the morning newspaper with helping to unite nations of individuals who did not know one another.

Hannah Arendt argues that we need durable objects against which to define ourselves. She writes, “Men . . . can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same chair and the same table”. Borgman places such objects at the center of what he calls “focal practices”, around which people form bonds. But physical things are not necessarily the most durable. Things wear out – but ideas persist beyond their physical embodiments. In fact, the best guarantee of the survival of ideas is their relevance to a community that sustains them, copies them, communicates them, interprets them. They too are focal things; like Anderson's newspaper, they center focal practices.

In this role, ideas and works are not alienated from their context – they are part of it. The distinction between author and audience is not clear cut. Both contribute to a work and its meaning; both contribute to community. In a sense, works can be seen as members of the community in their own right.

Bruno Latour's actor-network theory proposes that technological artifacts be treated this way: as actors on par with human beings. We create these objects and encode scripts in them. These scripts prescribe (but do not force) the activities of people. In the language of Stuart Hall, these scripts are like the preferred reading of a text: readers interpret the text according to their own context and meanings, but they are not free to do so in just any way.

If works are members of community, then they too engage in self-development. Works in the context of community are not fixed in time: they also change. They are interpreted by the audience; they form the basis for further creativity. In this way they fulfill the pursuit of perfection promised by the romantics. Wrote Matthew Arnold,

Perfection, as culture conceives it, is not possible while the individual remains isolated. The individual is required, under pain of being stunted and enfeebled in his own development if he disobeys, to carry others along with him in his march towards perfection, to be continually doing all he can to enlarge and increase the volume of the human stream sweeping thitherward.

Works and people contribute to the development of each other and to the community of which they are all members. People create works, but works also contribute to people – and to community.

This understanding of works in community highlights the problem of exclusive ownership. Creative community can coexist with ownership, but it is at risk. The boundaries around an owned work limit its interaction with community. It is no longer a member like the others: the prerogatives of ownership preserve its scripts and meaning against reinterpretation and recommunication. The owned work is less an equal participant in community and more a proxy of its owner.

For most published works, despite the original goals of copyright, the owner of a work is not its author. The barriers created by copyright encourage the increasing accumulation of works by fewer owners. It is in their interests to enclose as many works as possible. “Copyleft” licenses, by permitting sharing but requiring derivatives to be shared, help to resist appropriation. This is common in open source software, and in the Creative Commons movement. This legal component is important. Commoners in 18th century England were stripped of their rights without compensation because without formal ownership, parliament did not recognize their common right. Yet the law is not enough. The public domain, recognized by copyright law, has been weak in the face of copyright expansion.

Communities, however, have powerful noneconomic incentives to sustain an alternative to ownership. The construction of community is not simply an instrumental means to economic production: it is an end in itself. It goes hand-in-hand with the self-development of individuals, which is also desirable in and of itself.

This is the creative community as I understand it. The value of the works is not only in the ideas themselves, but the expressions and relationships that take place through them. Community and creative activity reinforce each other. Take away the ideas and you diminish the community; take away the community and the ideas are empty husks. The relationships of community are mediated through the production, exchange, and reproduction of shared intellectual works. Individuals express their individuality and commonality through these works. Works, individuals, and community grow together.