Everything published in Hyperspekulation appears under Anti-Copyright. In this we follow Mattin’s essay “Anti-Copyright: Why Improvisation and Noise Run Against the Idea of Intellectual Property” in Noise and Capitalism (2009).
The Berne Convention, in force since 1886, grants copyright automatically, the moment a text is fixed, with no declaration or registry required. To remain silent is therefore to consent: the work stays within the legal order of property, and wherever a profit can be drawn from it, it will be drawn in the author’s name.
To declare Anti-Copyright is a rhetorical and not a juridical gesture. It refuses the language of the law, which Creative Commons licenses adopt, and affirms instead an unconditional freedom to copy, distribute, translate, cite, alter, and reissue the work without permission.
This is what separates us from copyleft and from Creative Commons. Such licenses render copyright gentler and more contemporary while leaving its logic untouched; in reserving some rights they continue to administer control. We do not seek a more habitable form of property. We seek to be done with it.
Behind copyright stands the figure of the author, and that figure has a history: it did not always exist. It is a modern construction, bound to the printing press and, as Foucault observed, to the need to establish who had said what so that someone could be held to account and punished. Yet a text, once released, ceases to belong to the one who signed it. It carries its own discourse, and to bind it to the voice of its author is only to diminish its force. Ideas are not persons; they cannot be injured, only taken up and worked through.
There is, further, the question of production. No work earns its politics through content alone; it must prove them in its technique, in the position it assumes toward the means of its own production. A philosophy that declares itself emancipatory while distributing its texts as guarded merchandise is undone by its own form. To publish under Anti-Copyright is to give the text an organizing function before the status of a finished object, turning the reader from a consumer into a collaborator.
Hyperspekulation 