David M. Berry, Giles Moss (eds.): Libre Culture: Meditations on Free Culture, 2nd ed. (2008)

“Libre Culture is the essential expression of the free culture/copyleft movement. This anthology, brought together here for the first time, represents the early groundwork of Libre Society thought. Referring to the development of creativity and ideas, capital works to hoard and privatize the knowledge and meaning of what is created. Expression becomes monopolized, secured within an artificial market-scarcity enclave and finally presented as a novelty on the culture industry in order to benefit cloistered profit motives. In the way that physical resources such as forests or public services are free, Libre Culture argues for the freeing up of human ideas and expression from copyright bulwarks in all forms.”

Publisher Pygmalion Books, Winnipeg, 2008
Res Divini Juris Libre Commons Licence
172 pages
via archive.org

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Melanie Dulong de Rosnay, Juan Carlos De Martin (eds.): The Digital Public Domain: Foundations for an Open Culture (2012)

Digital technology has made culture more accessible than ever before. Texts, audio, pictures and video can easily be produced, disseminated, used and remixed using devices that are increasingly user-friendly and affordable. However, along with this technological democratization comes a paradoxical flipside: the norms regulating culture’s use — copyright and related rights — have become increasingly restrictive.

This book brings together essays by academics, librarians, entrepreneurs, activists and policy makers, who were all part of the EU-funded Communia project. Together the authors argue that the Public Domain — that is, the informational works owned by all of us, be that literature, music, the output of scientific research, educational material or public sector information — is fundamental to a healthy society.

The essays range from more theoretical papers on the history of copyright and the Public Domain, to practical examples and case studies of recent projects that have engaged with the principles of Open Access and Creative Commons licensing. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in the current debate about copyright and the Internet. It opens up discussion and offers practical solutions to the difficult question of the regulation of culture at the digital age.

With a foreword by Charles R. Nelson
Publisher Open Book Publishers, Cambridge, UK, 2012
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license
ISBN 978–1-906924–46-1
220 pages

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Eduardo Molinari: Walking Archives: The Soy Children (2012)

Who are children of genetically modified soy production? What disowned bastards are produced by the hybridization of agri-business, biotech, capital, and culture?

To answer these questions the Archivo Caminante (Walking Archive) embarks on a trip through the opaque and strange world of genetically modified soya plants in Argentina in search of its inhabitants, forms and structures, languages and narratives: the forces that swirl around the soya rhizome. In the style of Gulliver’s Travels it makes visible some of the routes in the soya chain giving shape to a new international division of labor food policy in global semiocapitalism.

More than 50% of the cultivated lands in Argentina are for soya production, with 90% of that area covered by Monsanto products and representatives. This agrarian system and its results are only possible using Roundup herbicide, the brand name of Monsanto’s glyphosate. The rhizome formed by soya production dives deep into the Argentine society: it organizes new political alliances, and, above all, modifies the social and cultural structure of the country. Is there a transgenic culture inside semiocapitalism? Does the soyazation process modify culture and society, or is it the other way around, and soyazation is only possible in a transgenic culture?

Publisher Minor Compositions, an imprint of Autonomedia, Spring 2012
ISBN 978-1-57027-244-8
82 pages

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