Notes on: "Copyright, Copyleft and Creative Anti-Commons" (by Anna Nimus)

As an affiliate of the Creative Commons, I feel this text contains important criticisms that any CC related person should consider seriously. To initiate this effot, I will try to comment on and over-ride, if not counter, three (+1) specific points Nimus is standing upon.

0) Revolution and Evolution differs:
The very natures of the Free Software Movement and the Creative Commons are different. As Lessig has been repeatedly stating publicly, Stallman and his colleagues' invention of the copyleft has inspired him to give birth to the CCPL. But no one has ever stated that CC tries to become identical to FSF. The GNU GPL was born in a specific context in history, different to that of CC and to that of the Open Source movement (I was intrigued by the lack of mentioning to the Open Source Software in Nimus' text, but my guess is that she would negate OSS too as being compromised by economy also; I would be happy to find out I'm wrong on this assumption). Copyleft is actually revolutionary in the sense it is the root ideology that seeded many fruituous antecedors after it; Creative Commons is just one realistic deployment that is aware of its compromises. The antagonism recently opened by RMS to Lessig (or the innacceptance of GPLv3.0 by Linus Tovalds) can be seen as a fight between a father and son: the first believes in unilateralialism, and the latter is seeking multilateral means. Or we might be able to say that the battle ground and its corresponding strategies have mutated since the 1980's. CCPL is an array of diverse licenses, not only one, and also includes a very similar one to the copyleft (CC:BY-SA). CC is another interpretation of freedom that focuses more on efficient practice inside a real-world society than the GPL. This is why the labeling of CC as "Anti-Commons" seems to be a bit pitifully sensational and interesting shows the ressentiment emotion of the labeler. Standing on her point of view and arguments, "non-Commons" or "a-Commons" might had been a more convincing and appropriate calling.

1) validity of criticism of the capitalist economy:
Today, at least in the corrupted advanced regions of the globe, it is quite easy and inefficient to criticize the negative drawbacks of the neo-liberal capitalist economy. Of course, as we are more or less derridien, we shall say niemand ist entschuldig. At the same time, we should construct affirmative strategies, if we are more or less deleuzian. But shouldn't the nature of criticism/activism be mutating as our ecology is shifting more radaically into a networked society? Elitist revolution differs from emerging evolution; if the term revolution signifies distributing equally ecological(including politico-economical) power to the mass, classical method that appeals to individual subjectivity and autonomy by verbal means seems quite obsolete. Rather, gradually over-riding current premises could persuade and invite more participation to the evolution process in this ever-diversified world.

2) the Neoist strategy and the human nature:
The very essence of abandoning identity as seen in the Neoism movement is quite interesting, and indeed contain much philosophical apolia to discuss about. But one can point out that this movement also depends on a deliberately chosen name (i.e. Monty Cantsin, Wu Ming) that is shared as a common attribution. Why have a name at first? Because maybe the participants of the Neoism have mutually been reassured by the fact they all merged into one same individuality. However, if they were to truly realize their cause of erasing property (and by doing so, responsibility of any act by that name is also blurred), shouldn't they abandon names individually rather than collectively?
One can always doubt whether this kind of serialization of human minds can really be validated as a ideal state of humanity (and this can only be verified by the realization of neural connection between diffferent human bodies) Isn't this another form of leftist Romanticism, emanating from the falsified dreams of communism? Why kingdom and empires were born, and why are we still crowning our presidents and our ministers? Why the names RMS or LL so important? Isn't it because we need attributions, properties and ownerships in order to organize ideas and history? Why do texts we write have authors' names? Why bother if it's you or if it's me or somebody else? This question is left unanswered in Nimus' text, as she points out the dilemma between Anticopyright and Copyleft. And I also doubt whether RMS himself would agree to Anticopyright (similar to the initial BSD license) that would collide the propagation of freedom copyleft assures. In this sense, shouldn't Anticopyright be included in the Anti-Commons party instead of Creative Commons?

3) Commons and Levi-Strauss' account on social creativity:
As Hiroo Yamagata (friend and translator of Lessig's books into Japanese) is pointing out righteously, a Free Culture where any content can be accessed without any type of constraint might kill creativity. Yamagata cites Levi-Strauss arguing that social creativity might be related to the degree of restriction to freedom (of expression, of access, etc). In short, more hardle for access might relatively raise the desire of access. This idea is a profound question when considering the relation of creativity and competition (preferrably a peacuful one), and in this sense it pierce through the bareer between copyleft, copyright and creative (anti?)commons categorizations. A simpler way to understand and evaluate this argument would be to describle concretely the state of Commons=Free Culture (as in Free Software) and the way people communicate inside it. There are two distinguished Commons: the one described by Nimus as a culture of non-ownership (I'm still doubtful Copyleft is really included here), and the one where Creative Commons would install (again, this is a pseudo-environemntal simulation).
Inside the non-ownership society, I would be able to access any source information including the totality of the current proprietary domain. Instead of depicting every action possible within this state, I will sum up the problem quite shortly; non-ownership culture would lack any kind of mutual respect between fabricators of informations, let it be mental or monetary. If every one shares the fact that any cultural work one publilsh could immediately be accredited, falsified, maliciently utillized by other people without any legal protection, the incentive for creation would only be seductive to those who would have the means to secure and monopolize their production paradoxally. This is a world where only the strong survives, in a constant state of information war.
Inside the state of over-ridden copyright like the CCPL as one example, there exists legal protections for any individual who participate in the cycle of creation. Instead of being confiscated these personal rights, these people would yield them subjectively to unknown others depending on their contexts - monetary or psychological reward. When this rule is shared by all constituants of the society (again, it's a simulation!), the more proprietary driven content provider would lose credibility and respect, as any one would know how less he is contributing to the Commons.

Or maybe not. Again, this is an incomplete note and definitely lacks the density and deepness of Nimus' paper. I would like to thank her for triggering the chain of thoughts that drove me to write this note.

Reminder: This text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.1 JP license.
The author, Dominique Chen, invite its readers to build upon this note in case of such interest, and to inherit and propagate this same freedom attributed to it on its derivative work.