Legal Hacking and Hacking Space: What Can Urban Commons Learn From The Free
Software Hackers?  --  Dubravka Sekulic

Full Citation Sekulic, Dubravka. `Legal Hacking and Hacking Space: What Can
Urban Commons Learn from The Free Software Hackers?' Derive 61-Perspektiven
eines kooperativen Urbanismus (2015): 14 - 18. Print.

 
Notes (note all page numbers based on pdf)

Intro section (pp. 1-2)
- Definition of "Commons" from Yochai Benkler 2003 "The Political Economy of
  Commons": a specific type of institutional arrangement for governing the use
  and distribution of resources with no single person having total control (as
  opposed to property) and any one person among a defined number of persons able
  to use the resources according to specified rules (pp. 1)
- Applies to physical and digital commons, the concept jumped into digital
  sphere to interpret communities, productive models, etc. growing up around
  free software (pp. 1)
- Argues that the concept of commons was enriched by movement into digital
  sphere and may be reapplied to urban space and the making of urban commons
  (pp. 1)
- Commons frequently attached to nostalgic ideas about Medieval commons, but
  the digital implementation of commons requires starting from scratch;
  defining its own protocols of production and reproduction (pp. 2)
- The potential of thinking physical spatiality through what has been learned
  in digital networks; Marcell Mars' assertion that what should be learned from
  "the digital" is a new approach to regulating and defining Land beyond private
  and beyond even property (pp. 2)

Enclosure as the trigger for action (pp. 2-3)
- Moment of turning to urban commons is at the moment when enclosure
  (privatization) of urban space is at its most intense, similar to point of
  Magna Carta introduction (pp. 2)
- Privatized urban space as ultimate commodity at the end of the 20th century;
  every interaction in urban space generates profit for come private entity
  which extracts it from the community; all activity is work (pp. 2)
- Introduces Richard Stallman's GNU/GPL as a response to commercialization of
  code in the 70s and 80s (pp. 2)
- Software is turned into a commodity (pp. 2); professionalization of
  programmers and setting them in competition with each other, programming
  becomes just another way to make money (pp. 3)
- Stallman's push back between 1980-1984 where he intervened in the protocols
  of regulation for the production of code (legal regulation) rather than in
  the code itself (pp. 3)
- Legal hack instead of perfect line of code yielded the digital commons
  against IP over code (pp. 3)
- GNU/GPL is self-perpetuating: anything produced with GPL code must be made
  available for free under the same licence; different from public domain which
  has no limits on use and profiting; made free appropriation legally enshrined
  and the possibility of programming community a thing again (pp. 3)
- The longstanding architectural position of the opposite: that the perfect
  design move can subvert the logic of urban enclosure -- but this position is
  wrong and Stallman understood that no design is strong enough to keep private
  ownership at bay (pp. 3)
- Digital and urban spaces under attack from same "market processes"; monopoly
  power of private property as basis for all capitalist activity (pp. 3)
- "emancipatory task of a struggle "is not only what has to be done, but also
  how it will be done and who will do it" (Stavrides & De Angelis: 7)." (pp. 3)
- Tools necessary for a community to reproduce itself and produce its own free
  "software" (pp. 3)

Renegotiating (undoing) property, hacking the law, creating community (pp. 3-6)
- Property (as an instrument for allocating resources) is constantly negotiated
  and is never given in stone (pp. 4)
- The digital reveals how property is inappropriate for contemporary
  production-reproduction and how to rethink it through its fundamental
  aspects: "non-material, non-rival, and non-exclusive (Meretz 2013)" (pp. 4)
- Though the value of digital information isn't flat, property is not the way
  to protect that value (example of the music industry) (pp. 4)
- Stallman and the movement to another terrain: legal regulations are as
  negotiable as property: the big turn is from treating code as property to
  treating code as SPEECH (pp. 4)
- The digital as an example of how renegotiating regulation can change a
  resource from scarce to abundant (pp. 4)
- Lawrence Lessig's (2012) components of what regulates behaviour in cyberspace
  (and by extension material urban space): market, law, architecture, and norms
  (pp. 4)
- These are not "factors" but constraints that apply to behaviour but also each
  other (pp. 4)
- "architecture" should be understood as the built environment (pp. 4)
- Market has been dominant (constraining behaviour and the other three
  constraint systems) in the last few decades; the constraints need to be
  renegotiated (pp. 4)
- Example of GNU/GPL shows that declaring code speech before the law adds a new
  legal constraint upon market and behaviour that is limiting and generative
  (pp. 5)
- This is "legal hacking" which is the norm, not the exception (example of
  legal hacking to enable private-public spaces through P3) (pp. 5)
- Urban example of Teatro Valle Occupato in Rome (pp. 5)
- To do all this, we need to become politically (and therefore legally)
  literate (pp. 5)
- Saki Bailey notes the offloading of political action to charismatic leaders
  (pp. 5)
- Importance of spending time learning about the constraints in order to divert
  them (pp. 5)
- This kind of knowledge is produced and disseminated collectively and through
  the process of socializing knowledge the community forms and gets stronger,
  rules of self-regulation and decision-making (pp. 5-6)
- The example of Debian: the Debian Social Contract, the Debian Constitution
  (pp. 6)
- The way free software projects are often conceived by individuals but are
  taken up by a larger community; the need to ensure that a community is
  offered a chance to do this and that there is a community to take up these free
  projects in the first place (pp. 6)

Building common infrastructure and institutions (pp. 6-7)
- Expansion of IP law as main mode of enclosing the digital commons, this as a
  component of neo-liberal privatization of everything (pp. 6)
- Digital commons ensures freedom of means of production; consists of
  communication between singularities and emerges through collaborative, social
  production processes (Hardt & Negri) (pp. 6)
- The most important lesson urban commons can learn from the digital: how to
  make a structural hack at the moment of creating the urban commons which also
  makes it self-perpetuating (pp. 6)
- The need to undo property; the realm of the common emerges in opposition to
  state-sanctioned "authorized" public space; its emergence contains
  contradiction (pp.7)
- The big task is producing the core infrastructure for a society where "all
  can speak to all" and participation is universal; an infrastructure that can
  accommodate itself to anyone despite difference (to get around the problem of
  closed communities) (pp. 7)