David M. Berry and Giles Moss

“ This development is an absolute disaster for creativity, whose health depends on a free and ongoing conversation and confrontation between concepts and ideas from the past and present. It is shameful that the creative multitude is being excluded from using the concepts and ideas that they collectively produce. Creativity is never solely the product of a single creator or individuated genius. ”

“ Informational, affective and knowledge-based labour has now become a central driver of profit. Indeed, immaterial labour is increasingly replacing industrial manufacture as the main producer of wealth in the age of technological capitalism. With these developments in the productive processes, a new embodiment of profit emerges. Alongside the landlords that controlled agriculture and the capitalist factory owners that controlled manufacture, vectors— the owners of the distribution, access and exploitation of creative works through valorisation— have emerged. ”

“ The vectors and their representatives will make immediate objections to all we have said. The profiteers will turn proselytizers and exclaim, “If there is no private ownership of creativity there will be no incentive to produce!” The suggestion that the ownership of knowledge and ideas promotes creativity is a shameful one, however plausible it may seem from the myopic perspective of profit. To say that creativity can thrive while the creative lack the freedom to reuse concepts and ideas is clearly upside-down. ”

“ It is very different to say, “I am your true friend because I need you”, than to say, “I need you because I am your true friend”. But how are we to settle this issue? How do we distinguish the true friend from the false? In any relationship between friends we should ask, “Are both partners mutually benefiting?” ”

“ It always owes debts to the inspiration and previous work of others, whether these are thinkers, artists, scientists, paramours, listeners, machines or friends. Creativity, as a fusion point of these singularities, cannot subsist in a social nothingness. Concepts and ideas depend upon their social life — and it could not be otherwise. ”

“ The fact that the profiteers are now so protective of creativity, jealously seeking to control concepts and ideas, ought to rouse suspicion. While they may claim to be the true friends of creativity, we know that friendship is not the same as dependency. ”

“ In other words, a permanent state of exception, a political emergency, was declared, which, together with the disciplinary norms of a propertised control society, was then used to justify and extend the coercive use of state power and repression against an increasingly criminalised culture of creativity. But as we will soon discuss, a growing number of the creative have now moved beyond both conformity and rebellion, through an active resistance to the present and the creation of an alternative creative field for flows of non-owned concepts and ideas. ”

“ A constellation of interests is now seeking to increase its ownership and control of creativity. We are told that these interests require new laws and rights that will allow them to control concepts and ideas and protect them from exploitation. ”

“ An artificial scarcity of concepts and ideas can then be established. Much money is to be made when creative flows of knowledge and ideas become scarce products or commodities that can be traded in the market place. And, increasingly, intellectual property law is providing profiteers with vast accumulations of wealth. ”

“ Spoken language is shared between us. A meaningful utterance is only made possible by drawing on the words that freely circulate within a linguistic community of speakers and listeners. Language, then, is necessarily non-owned and free. ”

“ This countervailing force finds its form and strength, not through any individual nucleus or singularity standing alone, but through broader relations and alliances. More accurately, therefore, we are talking here of circuits of counter-power – machines of struggle in creative alliances. ”