Copyleft activism

Topics

open access, intellectual property, copyright, copyleft, public domain, creative commons, access to knowledge, free culture, licensing, digital rights management (DRM), digital rights, culture flat-rate, software patents, Pirate Party, ACTA, SOPA, PROTECT IP Act, etc.

Activists, initiatives, events

• Sunil Abraham
• Philippe Aigrain
• Authors of the Future
• Constant
• Copy/South
• Copycult
• Copyfight
• Disclosures
• Lloyd Dunn
• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Rick Falkvinge
• Rasmus Fleischer
• FREE
• Free/Libre Culture Forum
• International Pirate Conference
• Mathias Klang
• Kopirájt
• La Quadrature du Net
• MaMa
• Aymeric Mansoux
• Mattin
• Modern Poland Foundation
• Eben Moglen
• Piratbyrån
• Femke Snelting
• Aaron Swartz
• The Tape-beatles
• The Oil of the 21st Century
• Work 2.0 - Copyright and Creative Work in the Digital Age
• Jérémie Zimmermann

Projects, services, resources

• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), launched in 2003 at Lund University, Sweden.

• Open Library, an open, editable library catalog, building towards a web page for every book ever published. Launched 2006. An initiative of the Internet Archive.

• OApen, online library and publication platform for humanities and social sciences monographs. Developed in 2008-2010. Based at the National Library in The Hague, The Netherlands.

• Radical Open Access, a community of scholar-led, not-for-profit presses, journals and other open access projects; founded in 2015.

• Humanities Commons, nonprofit network where humanities scholars can create a professional profile, discuss common interests, develop new publications, and share their work. A project of the office of scholarly communication at the Modern Language Association (MLA). Launched 2016.

• Open Access in Media Studies, informs about and promote open access publishing in the field of media studies. Maintained and curated by Jeroen Sondervan and Jeff Pooley, and in close collaboration with the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS). Launched 2016.

• Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), a service of OAPEN Foundation.

• ScholarLed Open Access Presses, launched 2018.

• Open Access Overview by Peter Suber.

• Not for Any, Varia, Rotterdam, 2020.

Declarations, statements

• "Licence Art Libre. Copyleft Attitude. Version 1.1", 2000; upd. as "Licence Art Libre 1.3 (LAL 1.3)", 2007. [1] (French)
  • "Free Art license. Copyleft Attitude. Version 1.1", 2000; upd. as "Free Art License 1.3 (FAL 1.3)", 2007. [2]

• "Budapest Open Access Initiative Declaration", Budapest, 14 Feb 2002.

• "Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities", 22 Oct 2003. Signed by 200 universities, research institutions, funding agencies, foundations, libraries, museums and archives from all over the world. The declaration states that "our mission of disseminating knowledge is only half complete if the information is not made widely and readily available to society".

• FCForum, "Sustainable Models for Creativity in the Digital Age", 2010.

• FCForum, "Charter for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge", 2010.

• CC4r * Collective Conditions for Re-Use. Copyleft Attitude with a difference - version 1.0, Unbound Libraries Documentation, 2021 ff. [3] (English)/(French)/(Dutch)

Books, articles

• Mikael Pawlo, "What’s the meaning of “non-commercial”"?, 2004.

• Dmytri Kleiner, "The Creative Anti-Commons and the Poverty of Networks", 2006.

• Florian Cramer, "Anti-Copyright in Artistic Subcultures", n.d. Filtered version.

• Florian Cramer, "The Creative Common Misunderstanding", 2006.

• Aaron Swartz, "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto", Jul 2008.
  • "Guerilla Open-Access Manifest", n.d. (German)

• Lawrence Lessig, "Google Book Search Settlement: Static goods, dynamic bads", 2009. Audio. Talk given at the Berkman Center workshop "Alternative Approaches to Open Digital Libraries in the Shadow of the Google Book Search Settlement" held July 31, 2009.

• Gaëlle Krikorian, Amy Kapczynski (eds.), Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property, Zone Books, 2010, 646 pp. [4] [5]. Review: Mason (Online Info R). [6]

• Rick Falkvinge, "Origins of the Pirate Party: Privacy, Sharing, Innovation", Falkvinge.net, 7 Nov 2011.

• Aymeric Mansoux, "How Deep is Your Source", in Digital Art Conservation, Preservation of Digital Art: Theory and Practice, ed. Bernhard Serexhe, Karlsruhe: ZKM, 2012.

• Aymeric Mansoux, "Morphology of a Copyright Tale", in Future of Copyright Anthology, ed. Paulina Choromańska and Marta Niedziałkowska, Modern Poland Foundation, 2013.

• Alexandra Elbakyan, Legal defence in Elsevier v. Sci-Hub, 15 Sep 2015. [7]
  • "Diffuser librement la science, vital et pourtant illégal", 4 Nov 2015. (French)

• "In solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub", 30 Nov 2015. Open letter. (English) Translations.

• Aymeric Mansoux, Sandbox Culture: A Study of the Application of Free and Open Source Software Licensing Ideas to Art and Cultural Production, London: Goldsmiths University of London, 2017, xxxviii+486 pp. PhD thesis.

• Journal of Peer Production 13: "Open", eds. Mathieu O’Neil and Steve Collins, 2019.

• Élodie Mugrefya, Femke Snelting, "Collectively Setting Conditions for Re-Use", MARCH, Spring 2022. On the CC4r license.

• Samuel A. Moore, Publishing Beyond the Market: Open Access, Care, and the Commons, Michigan University Press, forthcoming 2025. Publisher.

more

• Publications on copyright on Monoskop Log
• Publications on open access on Monoskop Log

Film

• Paywall: The Business of Scholarship, dir. Jason Schmitt, Sep 2018, 65 min. Feat. Alexandra Elbakyan (Sci-Hub). Documentary. IMDB.

See also

File sharing, FLOSS, Data activism, Internet activism, Commons, Digital libraries, Privacy, Open design