The Rule
“No Rights”
dissolve the author-work-property nexus
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.
01 What “No Rights” is, and how it differs from adjacent practices.
“No Rights” is easy to mistake for one of the open-access or public-domain instruments that have grown up around copyright. It is not one of them. The difference is worth stating precisely, because the register’s architecture depends on it.
Public domain is a legal status. A work enters the public domain when its copyright expires, or when its holder dedicates it through an instrument like CC0. “No Rights” is not a legal status. It is a declaration by a contributor that they will not enforce exclusive rights over their work.
CC0 is a public-domain dedication and waiver instrument with a fallback licence. It operates within a jurisdictionally recognised framework. “No Rights” is not a licence. It is a form-of-life: a stance a contributor takes toward their work and toward the commons in which it circulates.
Open access concerns access to published scholarship: who may read it, and under what terms. “No Rights” concerns the ontology of the work: not only who may read it, but what it is. It treats the work as relational and event-based rather than as a bounded object held by an owner.
Copyleft uses copyright against itself—it asserts ownership in order to enforce openness. “No Rights” does neither. It renounces the assertion rather than wielding it. The work is offered to the commons without the machinery of licensing behind the offer.
02 How “No Rights” propagates.
A contribution is a work of literary-artistic scholarship — a text, an edition, or a multimedia dossier — together with the relations that connect it to other works. If you remix a work attested under “No Rights,” and attest the remix in the register, your remix enters as a contribution.
When you attest it, you also accept “No Rights.” The renunciation is not a licence condition (there is no licence) but a form-of-life. It binds the contributions you attest. It does not bind what you cite or what you decline to attest.
If you remix a work that is merely referenced (a source work, an external work, a publication under its own licence) your remix may still be subject to that work’s terms. The register records the relation. It does not resolve the legal status of the source. Your remix is attested under “No Rights” as your contribution, but the derivation from a non-“No Rights” source is recorded as a separate relation, and the asymmetry is displayed wherever the work appears.
The register records both contributions and references. Contributions carry the “No Rights” declaration; references to external works carry their own terms. The register accepts every attestation that meets the schema. This means the register does not gate admission of works, but acceptance of “No Rights” remains a condition of contributing one's own work under EO1.
The collective’s statement
The ethos described here is the EO1 collective’s. The account above is the site’s own reading of it. The collective’s statement is quoted on the About page, in its own words.