The following text belongs to an article describing how the INPI put pressure on the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie to censor it. This text about open-source licences was supposed to be part of the exhibition «Contrefaçon : la vraie expo qui parle du faux», which doesn’t seem to provide any informative website at the time.
Copyleft : Isabelle Vodjdani, 20th of april 2010, this text is "libre", you can copy it, broadcast it and modify it following the terms of the Free Art License 1.3.
Free, a growing phenomenon
Within the framework of the author’s copyright that protects literary and artistic works, a growing number of authors choose to make their works available to the public with contracts of a very specific type called free licences. These licences allow anyone to distribute or perform copies of the work. They also permit the release, under their own author’s responsibility, of modified versions of the work. These permissions are granted on two conditions :
- Firstly, mention must be made of the author of the original work and specify where to access the originals
- Secondly, copies or modified versions of the work must be distributed or performed under the same or a compatible licence.
Free works are necessarily disclosed with a licence which guarantees these conditions. Examples of such licences include the GNU GPL for software, and the Free Art Licence for creative works. So the area of free works is not an area in which there are no rights, nor is it the same as royalty-free. English-speaking countries use the word “free” for the original French “libre” to avoid confusion, because there are royalty-free works that are not at all free, and there are free works on which royalties are payable.
People also talk about the “free world” to refer to all those involved in the promotion and development of the free area. This movement is inspired by customary practices governing the circulation of knowledge in the academic world. But since 1983, software developers have been in the forefront of this movement and its legal formalisation, because in this business sector there is a constant need for innovation and users have every interest in getting hold of the work to rectify defects in software or adapt it to their own requirements. So they in turn become authors.
This development model reflects the aspirations of a democratic society of citizens who make a constructive contribution to public life and are not content to simply be governed. So the interest taken in Free is first political. This interest is heightened by the fact that increasingly restrictive legislation on author’s rights is moving against the public interest and is becoming a constraint on creative activity. Against this background, free licences seem to be a legal and pragmatic solution to establish an area in which obstacles to the distribution and creative use of original works are lifted.
In the area of artistic creation and scientific publication the free model also reflects a social reality. This is the emergence of a society of amateurs who, thanks to better access to education, leisure time, the means of production and communication, have worked their way on to the scene sometimes shaking up established positions. These amateurs are the vectors, activists and transformers of the culture, they are its living body ; without them works would remain unread, unused and unperformed.
Since the 19th century, with the creation of museums and the birth of author’s rights, our culture has favoured conservation as the means of ensuring the lasting survival of works. Today, the digital media and the internet are becoming the principal means of distributing works. Certainly the internet is a powerful means of communication, but it has not yet proved itself as a means of conservation. What is taking shape with the free model is that in parallel with conservation efforts, the principle of which is not in question, is a different form of ensuring lasting survival is finding its place in our culture ; this is transmission, which is also the basis of tradition. Yet the act of transmission takes place through a process of appropriation (you can only pass on what you have already acquired or absorbed), and this implies transformations that make works evolve. This is a condition of a living culture, a culture carried by actively involved people rather than supported by subjects.