Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/121

 of the logic around the creation of the licenses can help to provide a rationale. Lawrence Lessig, as the founder of Creative Commons, describes these provisions as circumventing what he sees as the unnatural provisions of copyright: ‘The extreme of regulation that copyright law has become makes it difﬁcult, and sometimes impossible, for a wide range of creativity that any free society – if it thought about it for just a second – would allow to exist, legally. . . I then want to spotlight the damage we’re not thinking enough about – the harm to a generation from rendering criminal what comes naturally to them.’30

This is an interesting stance because Lessig clearly predicates his belief in free culture on the fact that creativity requires the reuse of preceding works. He also explicitly here signals that this desire to create and to build upon the work of others is, in his worldview, the natural state of humankind. Richard Stallman often uses exactly the same logic: ‘people have been told that natural rights for authors is the accepted and unquestioned tradition of our society. . . As a matter of history, the opposite is true. The idea of natural rights of authors was proposed and decisively rejected when the US Constitution was drawn up. That’s why the Constitution only permits a system of copyright and does not require one; that’s why it says that copyright must be temporary.’31 At least part of the controversy over open licensing can probably be attributed to different ideas of natural and moral rights with regard to copyright.

It is also within such contexts that claims for protection of scholarly integrity should be considered in the humanities. Clearly, it remains important that protections against libel or utterly false attribution remain and all of the Creative Commons licenses continue to provide these. Rather, however, these provisions are thought of in terms of allowing others to build upon and modify scholarly works to create new versions. The analogy that Lessig uses for this is another from technology: he suggests there is a paradigm of ‘read only’ (RO) culture and a coming wave of ‘read/write’ (RW) that is to do with democratic participation in production.32 While critics often argue that people should work creatively from scratch, advocates would counter that most humanities work is already based upon the scholarship of others and ‘derivative’ readings of culture/history.33 Furthermore, that ‘critical editions’ of certain texts are already