Free and Open

To be free means to be open to commercial appropriation, since freedom is defined as the nonrestrictive circulation of information rather than as freedom from exploitation.

Other content providers and book publishers (Verso, for example) have expanded this restriction by claiming that copying, modifying and redistributing should not only be non-profit but also in the spirit of the original - without explaining what this “spirit” means.

Romanticism was born as a contradictory response to these developments. It was an opposition to capitalism, but one expressed through the language of private property and the assumptions inherited from the philosophical discourse that legitimated capitalism’s mode of production. Romanticism denounced the alienation and loss of independence spawned by industrial production and market relations, and portrayed the artist in heroic opposition to the drive for profit.