EO1 is a collective for literary-artistic scholarship, working toward the commons as the common good. It is developing a framework for attribution without ownership: a shared record of works and their relations, held in common and open to all. Below is the architecture in cross-section.
The Ethos
“No Rights”
dissolve the author-work-property nexus
Each cluster is a project of artistic-scholarship, formed around a shared inquiry. It governs its own members, funds, and rules. Its works enter the register under the “No Rights” rule, dedicated to the cultural commons.
Select a layer to read what it is. The Ethos, the clusters, and the register link to their pages.
A cultural work is relational, collective, and event-based.
Copyright law rests on a conceit: that a work is a substance, an exchangeable asset rather than a shared inheritance. This conceit is not neutral. It makes culture alienable: the kind of thing that can be owned, priced, and transferred — and so enables its capture by commercial platforms. It normalises possessive individualism, discourages sharing and collaboration, and reduces the circulation and transformation through which works live. The result is impoverishment: of the commons, of collective flourishing, of the life that works carry when they move.
The conceit runs deeper than ownership. Copyright binds the work to a commodifiable temporality: it stabilises the gap between creation and market life, and in doing so it converts creative time into market time. This is how commodification erases works-based agency — the capacity of works to act, to travel, to be taken up again.
The alternative is a shared record of works and their relations, held in common and open to all. This is what “No Rights” means: the dissolution of the author-work-property nexus, so that authors and works are freed from the constraints of commodification. Copyright makes use depend on the owner's authorisation as its default position. In this shared record, a contributor declares that they will not enforce exclusive rights over their own work. A work circulates: it is read, copied, remixed, performed. Its relations — its origins, its derivatives, its re-editions, its lineage — are recorded alongside it.
A work lives through its relations. Severed from them, it becomes an orphan in the register's sense — a work whose origin is not recorded — and so is available for capture. The record exists so that the life of the work remains visible and traceable. Blockchain is the mechanism for such a record: public, persistent, and independently inspectable, so that no single platform controls what the record shows.