Creative Commons licences and design Are the two compatible?

This article analyses whether Creative Commons licences are applicable to and compatible with design. The first part focuses on the peculiar and complex nature of a design, which can benefit from a copyright and a design protection. This shows how it can affect the use of Creative Commons licences. The second and third parts deal with a specific case study. Some Internet platforms have recently emerged that offer users the possibility to download blueprints of design products in order to build them. Designers and creative users are invited to share their blueprints and creations under Creative Commons licences. The second part of the article assesses whether digital blueprints can be copyrightable and serve as the subject matter of Creative Commons licences, while the last part assesses whether the right to reproduce the digital blueprint, as provided by Creative Commons licences, extends to the right to build the product.

Hugo Steiner-Prag and unidentified man discussing blueprints; Leipzig.

Photographers imprint bottom left

The Coming of Post-reflexive Society: Commodification and Language in Digital Capitalism

Language is a unique aspect of human communication because it can be used to discuss itself in its own terms. For this reason, human societies potentially have superior capacities of co-ordination, reflexive self-correction, and innovation than other animal, physical or cybernetic systems. However, this analysis also reveals that language is interconnected with the economically and technologically mediated social sphere and hence is vulnerable to abstraction, objectification, reification, and therefore ideology – all of which are antithetical to its reflexive function, whilst paradoxically being a fundamental part of it. In particular, in capitalism, language is increasingly commodified within the social domains created and affected by ubiquitous communication technologies. The advent of the so-called ‘knowledge economy’ implicates exchangeable forms of thought (language) as the fundamental commodities of this emerging system. The historical point at which a ‘knowledge economy’ emerges, then, is the critical point at which thought itself becomes a commodified ‘thing’, and language becomes its “objective” means of exchange. However, the processes by which such commodification and objectification occurs obscures the unique social relations within which these language commodities are produced. The latest economic phase of capitalism – the knowledge economy – and the obfuscating trajectory which accompanies it, we argue, is destroying the reflexive capacity of language particularly through the process of commodification. This can be seen in that the language practices that have emerged in conjunction with digital technologies are increasingly non-reflexive and therefore less capable of self-critical, conscious change.