TECHNOLOGIES OF COOPERATIONS: DERIVATIVE WORK

LIKE SAILORS ON THE OPEN SEA

"There is no way to establish fully secured, neat protocol statements as starting points of the sciences. There is no tabula rasa. We are like sailors who have to rebuild their ship on the open sea, without ever being able to dismantle it in dry-dock and reconstruct it from its best components. Only metaphysics can disappear without a trace. Imprecise ‘verbal clusters’ [Ballungen] are somehow always part of the ship. If imprecision is diminished at one place, it may well re-appear at another place to a stronger degree."
Otto Neurath Philosophical Papers 1913-1946, R.S. Cohen and M. Neurath, eds., Dordrecht: Reidel.

“Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929)

"Situated knowledges require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent, not a screen or a ground or a resource, never finally as slave to the master that closes off the dialectic in his unique agency and authorship of 'objective' knowledge. The point is paradigmatically clear in critical approaches to the social and human sciences, where the agency of people studied itself transforms the entire project of producing social theory."
Donna Haraway, Situated knowledges http://www.appstate.edu/~stanovskydj/situatedknowledges.html

"Lastly, without forgetting here those valuable traffic signals, dual voltage outlets, bus passengers, friends and relatives of the bus passengers, friends and relatives of the makers of the components for the traffic signals, workers on the ship that transported our costumes from China, Chinese worker slaves who made the pieces for the beds of the other Chinese worker slaves so that these Chinese worker slaves could rest and be prepared for the next day to make the props without which this performance could not be possible, and the Thai prostitutes who sucked the dicks of European businessmen owners of large automobile companies and inspired them to design cars that we use to come and go from the rehearsal space, and the mothers of the Thai prostitutes that sucked the dicks of great European businessmen, who always find a way to live with things that if we stopped to think about it, are things that not just anyone lives with, and that maybe, probably, they still had the tenderness to make cookies for their daughters to eat before setting off for work, our thanks to all."
Elisa Band, Thank You Note

FROM FREE SOFTWARE, FREE CULTURE

*Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose.
*Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.
*Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
*Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release  your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so  that the whole community benefits.

Freedoms 1 and 3 require source code  to be available because studying and modifying software without its  source code can range from highly impractical to nearly impossible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software#Definition_and_the_Four_Freedoms
The freedom to distribute derivative works: In order to give everyone the ability to improve upon a work, the license must not limit the freedom to distribute a modified version (or, for physical works, a work somehow derived from the original), regardless of the intent and purpose of such modifications. However, some restrictions may be applied to protect these essential freedoms or the attribution of authors.
http://freedomdefined.org/Definition

HOW DEEP IS YOUR SOURCE

"And so without noticing it, the frustration deriving from the lack of definition of artistic sources makes us drift into the analysis and  recording of the artistic practice itself. Defining an artistic source is as problematic as defining art, yet our access to increasingly  sophisticated legal and technological tools, which can enforce a  fine-grained versioned capture of the artistic creation, directly feeds  into our desire to sample and make tangible the “participation mystique” of the poet."
Aymeric Mansoux, How deep is your source http://texts.bleu255.com/how-deep-is-your-source

"Free Software provides a radical form of openness which is, perhaps, a  very American way of constituting a public (suspicious of the state and  corporations, obsessed with ideas of balance and fairness, and a weird  mix of individualism and populism). The question I think it raises is  whether, as a politics it has a content. Free Software as it exists has  an insanely refined focus on form over political content (and this is  the source of the suspicion about the dominance of the technical)."
Geert Lovink interview with Chris Kelty http://networkcultures.org/geert/interview-with-christopher-kelty-on-the-culture-of-free-culture/

STANDING ON THE HANDS OF GIANTS

I came across an open-source cola recipe and wanted to give it a go. Kayle joined me, we tried the online recipe and our firrst batch kind of worked, but took a whole day to make. Then we tried again and again, for in fact three years, but the emulsion of the water and the essential oils, the flavour oils kept on failing. In the end, after having asked lots of people for advice, a friend’s cousin high-level food scientist from India came to the UK and we had a meeting with him. This was extremely illuminating and we finally broke through the knowledge barrier and started being able to produce Cube-Cola on demand. Every month or two, Kayle and I meet and make a batch of cola concentrate, something like 300ml. This is very concentrated so is enough to make about 120 litres of cola. It’s the reverse-engineering of a major commodity. It has been a really instructive project for us, and every now and then we are invited somewhere to do it as a workshop to take people through the process with us. With this project, we’ve been turning over just enough to pay for our in-gredients, but for 2012, we’re planning to gear our distribution up a bit, expand the business experiment and become more like a small, hand-managed cola factory. We are not proposing that you go home and make eve-rything in your house on your own, but it is a hopeful tunnel to another world.
Kayle Brandon, Kate Rich: Cube Cola http://www.feraltrade.org/cgi-bin/package/2package.pl?action=display_product&new_sort=goods&criterion=Cube-Cola

BERNE CONVENTION or: the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1971)

Derivative Work
In copyright law, the term “derivative works” refers to the translations, adaptations, arrangements and similar alterations of  preexisting works which are protected under Article 2(3) of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works  (1971) as such without prejudice to the copyright in the preexisting  works.  Sometimes, the term is used with a broader meaning, extending to  the compilations/collections of works protected under Article 2(5) of  the Convention, (as well a under Article 10.2 of the World Trade  Organization (WTO) Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, 1994 (the TRIPS Agreement), and Article 5 of the WIPO Copyright Treaty,  1996 (WCT)).  (WIPO Guide to the Copyright and Related Right Treaties  Administered by WIPO and Glossary of Copyright and Related Rights Terms,  WIPO.)
In this sense, a “derivative work” includes compilations of data or  other material, whether in machine-readable or other form, which, by  reason of the selection or arrangement of their contents, constitute  intellectual creations.  (Art. 2(5) Berne Convention, Art. 10(2) TRIPS  Agreement, Art. 6 World Copyright Treaty.)
Some jurisdictions have adapted the definition of derivative works in  the field of traditional cultural expressions.  According to the  Pacific Regional Framework for the Protection of Traditional Knowledge and Expressions of Culture  (2002), the term refers to any intellectual creation or innovation  based upon or derived from traditional knowledge or expressions of  culture.  (Pacific Regional Framework for the Protection of Traditional  Knowledge and Expressions of Culture, 2002, Part I. 4.)

Adaptation
Adaptation is the act of altering a pre-existing work (either  protected or in the public domain) or a traditional cultural expression,  for a purpose other than for which it originally served, in a way that a  new work comes into being, in which the elements of the pre-existing  work and the new elements—added as a result of the alteration—merge  together.  (WIPO Guide to the Copyright and Related Right Treaties  Administered by WIPO and Glossary of Copyright and Related Rights Terms,  WIPO, p. 264.)
Article 12 of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works  (1971) provides that authors of literary and artistic works shall enjoy  the exclusive right of authorizing adaptations, arrangements and other  alterations of their works.  Black’s Law Dictionary provides that  copyright holders have the exclusive right to prepare derivative works,  or adaptations, based on the protected work.
http://www.wipo.int/tk/en/resources/glossary.html#19