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| 187 14 Giving Things Away Is Hard Work Three Creative Commons Case Studies Michael Mandiberg Open-source software and the free-culture movement have created vibrant and thriving sharing-based online communities. These communities and individuals have created an enormous quantity of open-source and free-culture projects. Many examples of these are well-known and much heralded : Wikipedia, Linux, WordPress, and the like. These success stories primarily revolve around code- and/or text-focused projects and are much less common among other work whose medium is not code or text. While one could disagree from a semiotic or a materialist perspective, code and text are effectively immaterial in relationship to other forms of physical creation. A copy of the original is merely a keystroke’s effort, and the basic tools to create or modify the original are so commonplace as to be universal: a keyboard and a mouse. Obviously one also needs fluency in the human or computer language of the project, but one does not need access to expensive or specialized materials or tools; nor does one need the physical skills of a craftsperson in the medium. Unlike code- or text-based practices, art, design, and other creations that are manifest in nondigital forms require production outside of the keyboardmouse -language toolset. While there may be a code- or text-based set of instructions, the final form of the project usually must be transformed into a physical object, either through a machine like a printer or laser cutter, a physical technology like a circuit board or paint, or an offline social process like agreements and collaborations with people or business entities that have the tools or knowledge to realize a project. It seems that this additional step often makes it more difficult to realize a physical project. Despite this difficulty, or maybe because of this challenge, there are examples of artists, designers, and engineers working in this model, myself included. After producing three years of art/design work with open licenses, I want to look back and consider the results.1 The central question I seek to answer is if and how an art or design 188 | Michael Mandiberg idea/project/product is helped, hindered, or not affected at all by its open licensing model. I have chosen three key examples from my creative practice and explore their successes and failures as a way of assessing this question. A Genealogy “Open source” is a term used to refer to computer software for which the source code can be viewed, modified, and used by anyone. As the story goes, once upon a time all software was open source. In 1980, MIT researcher Richard Stallman was using one of the first laser printers. It took so long to print documents that he decided he would modify the printer driver so that it sent a notice to the user when the print job was finished. Unlike previous printer drivers, this software only came in its compiled version. Stallman asked Xerox for the source code. Xerox would not let him have the source code. Stallman got upset and wrote a manifesto, and the Free Software movement began.2 Later, Eric Raymond, a fellow computer programmer, published The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which popularized the term “open source.”3 The two terms are frequently referred to by the acronym I use in this essay: FLOSS, which stands for “free/libre/open-source software.”4 More recently this concept has been extended from code to other forms of cultural production via Creative Commons licenses and what has become known as the free-culture movement.5 The Creative Commons licenses provide a legal tool for applying FLOSS licensing to media other than computer code: text, image, sound, video, design, and so on. Many websites that are focused on fostering creative communities, like Flickr or Vimeo, incorporate this license into their content-upload process. Creative Commons estimates that there are 135 million Creative Commons–licensed works on Flickr alone.6 While this has been a very successful initiative, most of these millions of works are digital. They are infinitely copyable, quickly transferable, and easily distributable. What I seek to answer is what happens when this license is applied to works that are not exclusively digital. What happens when the license is applied to cultural objects whose materiality prevents them from being effortlessly copyable. Inside this larger free-culture community, there are groups of engineers, artists, and designers using open licenses for physical objects which are not...

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