The aim of the Creative Commons licenses is to authorize the use of copyrighted works for purposes that would constitute infringement under traditional copyright law, thereby fostering wider use of creative content. The tool upon which Creative Commons relies to promote the sharing and spread of creative content is very well-known in copyright: the license. Nonetheless, the new role of the author under Creative Commons also differs from the traditional position of the author in copyright law, and it may, to some extent, undermine the author's relationship to her work. By grounding the justification for a Creative Commons license in the expectations of the users rather than in the desires of the creators, the agenda of Creative Commons is to make the norm of free access to works the norm of a free culture, the politically correct way for a creator to exercise her property right. In a feminist perspective (the title is borrowed from Audre Lorde), this paper analyses the new role CC licenses put on authorship and the tools it uses to dismantle the traditional copyright regime.

Copyleft, open source, and other forms of freely available art have at times been announced as the death of copyright. Short of resorting to such extremes, however, one may question the major transformations that this alternative legal model of creation poses to copyright. This paper aims principally to consider authorship in the open source movement. Its hypothesis is that the copyleft licenses espouses and put in practice the new form of authorship that was announced by Foucault in his seminal paper ‘What is an author’. The author is not anymore the unique source of meaning but is a founder of discursivity. As the initiator of an open discourse, of an ever-evolving work, the author of an element of a collective creation in copyleft finds her particular contribution diluted by the whole of successive contributions. The “work” in the copyleft regime is software in constant (re)-formation; it is the production of meaning from different convergent or successive artistic practices. This exercise of copyright in open access licenses is a first attempt to experiment authorship in a way closer to distributive and contemporary artistic practices, and not in the more rigid meaning conferred by copyright to that notion.

The European institutions are highly concerned by the evolution of the electronic commerce. To encourage that phenomenon, the y try to set up a legal framework as suited as possible. This article intends to provide the reader with an overview of that framework that will actually be the basis of the national ones. The subjects covered are the applicable law, the distance contract s, the electronic signature, the electronic payments, the VAT, the copyrights and the legal protection of databases.