Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/35

 prominence took place within commercial paradigms. From Multics, through to Unix, Windows and Mac OS, there has been a raft of closed-source operating systems that are licensed to users for corporate proﬁt and which have formed the basis of most people’s interaction with computer systems. However, in response to this corporate practice, a counter-discourse of ‘free culture’ was also born. Free culture in this context does not exclusively mean monetarily free but more often refers to freedom of action; the freedom to reuse material. This movement ﬁnds its meeting point with academia in the proposed removal of reuse barriers under open access and the modiﬁcations to the practicalities of copyright that this would require.

One of the most important ﬁgures in the history of this movement is Richard M. Stallman who, in 1989, wrote a document called the GPL (the GNU Public License) that radically redeﬁned thinking about copyright. Copyright is, in almost all global jurisdictions, an automatically conferred, time-limited, exclusive right to distribute an original work. Copyright, which is covered more thoroughly below in Chapter 3, is the legal mechanism through which any notion of control over one’s academic or artistic work comes into being. Without copyright, anybody could do anything to anybody else’s work, from redistributing to altering, and there would be no obligation to acknowledge the original source. While most software licenses are designed to use copyright to restrict the end-user’s freedom to modify the underlying source code and/or redistribute the program, Stallman’s license reverses this, using the authority of copyright to stipulate, explicitly, that the source code for applications must be made public to allow anybody else to view, redistribute and, most importantly, modify the program. The license further speciﬁes that anybody else’s modiﬁcations to the software must be redistributed under the same terms, thereby ensuring that this freedom is extended to future users. In other words, the GPL license is ‘viral’, sticking to future works, a phenomenon which is called CopyLeft.40

Of perhaps more direct interest to those in the humanities, Stallman argues that in the past thirty years or so a tacit understanding of copyright has been adopted that sits badly with its original intent and that is now damaging the ability of others to create new,