2026-08-18 · On Moral Rights
I've used the term 'moral rights' loosely on this site, saying that BLACKBOX offers a moral rights inspired approach. However I think this phrase fundamentally fails to communicate what is at stake. I need to be clearer about what I mean. So, to explain I need to cover a bit of background context.
Moral rights (droit moral) entered positive law through the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1886). They protect the author's paternity (the right to be identified as the author) and integrity (the right to object to derogatory treatment). In civil law jurisdictions, these rights are often inalienable and perpetual. In common law systems, they are more limited and waivable.
The concept of droit moral can be traced back to the eighteenth-century struggle over copyright in Britain. The Statute of Anne, enacted in 1710, was the first copyright legislation to establish a limited term of protection. It granted authors a fourteen-year term, renewable once, after which works entered the public domain. This was a deliberate intervention by Parliament: it created a temporary monopoly to incentivise production, but it also guaranteed that works would eventually return to the commons.
The London booksellers, who had effectively controlled the book trade through perpetual copyright claims under common law, saw this as a threat to their business model. They had long operated as a cartel, acquiring authors' manuscripts through outright purchase and then holding the rights in perpetuity. To maintain this control, they mounted a creative and aggressive common law argument. They contended that copyright was a natural property right, existing independently of statute, and that an author's perpetual right to their work passed to the bookseller at acquisition. This was a strategic claim: the Statute of Anne, they argued, had only supplemented this common law right, not extinguished it. On this basis, they continued to assert perpetual control over works regardless of the statutory term, effectively circumventing the limitation Parliament had imposed.
The battle was fought in the courts over several decades, culminating in the landmark case of Donaldson v Becket in 1774. This decisive showdown was triggered when Thomas Becket, a prominent London bookseller, sought an injunction to protect his lucrative share in James Thomson’s poem The Seasons from cheap Scottish reprints. Defending their market monopoly, Becket and his London cartel argued for a natural property right that existed independently of statute and could never expire. The Lords ultimately rejected the London booksellers' claim, holding that copyright was not a perpetual common law right but a statutory entitlement of limited duration, after which works fall into the public domain.
This history embodies a persistent idea, one that would later inform the concept of 'moral rights': an author's relationship to their work outlasts both its market value and the statutory term. But, in the contemporary legal context, the term 'moral rights' is doctrinally specific. In its positive-law sense, it is a sub-category of copyright, a right granted to a rights-holder within the proprietary order.
Whilst evoking the 'War of the Booksellers' captures a tradition of resistance against publishing monopolies, the term 'moral rights' introduces ambiguity because it collapses three distinct registers: the historical conviction that an author's connection to their work cannot be entirely severed; the statutory doctrine of paternity and integrity; and the broader philosophical claim about creativity and personhood.
So I am moving away from using the term even when qualified as 'moral rights inspired'. As I see it, what needs to be implemented is a framework for relational stewardship, or 'user obligation', where 'use' of a work generates an obligation to the originator and to the wider cultural commons. This operates, then, as a liability rule rather than a property rule. Fundamentally, however, this liability is more than a legal or monetary one because it is measured, ultimately, in socio-cultural terms.
2026-05-01 · Call for Papers
Call for papers now open I have launched a call for papers with guest editor Gavin Keeney for a special section of Amicus Curiae titled Law and Cultural Production. The call is open to scholars across disciplines – law, economics, anthropology, critical theory, art history, and beyond – provided the work engages substantively with law. Full details, including the timeline and submission instructions, are on the dedicated call page.
As a secondary experiment, accepted essays may also be archived on a planned BLACKBOX platform, testing smart contract registration and blockchain‑based relational links. Participation is optional and does not affect the journal’s CC BY license.
2026-05-07 · Recent infrastructure updates
The site got a few upgrades this week.
First, I finally eliminated the Google Fonts dependency. The 3 typefaces I use (Inter, Libre Baskerville
and IBM Plex Mono) are now self‑hosted WOFF2 files served directly from this
IPFS directory. So, no more requests to fonts.googleapis.com or
fonts.gstatic.com. Google Fonts isn’t exactly a privacy disaster but it's nonetheless satisfying to fully deGoogle the site ;-).
Second, I built a heartbeat agent — a tiny non‑human steward that resolves the site’s IPNS address every morning and signs a cryptographic attestation that says “I saw this site, at this CID, at this time.” It then publishes the attestation to IPFS. The public log is at /heartbeat.html. The agent is a Python script that runs on a daily GitHub Actions workflow. It has its own Ethereum key.
For visual interest I also added a
relational link graph
— an interactive map of the conceptual and infrastructural connections behind this
website. The graph is powered by D3.js and a plain‑text links.jsonl file,
both self‑hosted.
2026-04-03 · First IPFS deployment test
Uploaded a static version of the page to Pinata. Works, but need to think about updating the log without breaking links. IPNS might be the solution.
2026-04-02 · Research writing in Obsidian
I use Obsidian for almost all my research and fiction writing. Its bidirectional linking and local‑first philosophy align with my own distrust of cloud silos. Obsidian is an opensource note management software, that uses markdown that allows for multiple project vaults, organised by topic. The next step is to automate the project log: write entries in Obsidian and push the markdown files to IPFS via GitHub (using Quartz to convert them to html). This will hopefully keep the writing experience tied to my habitual environment. Actually, the real process starts before I sit down at the laptop: I write the old-fashioned way, away from the distraction of the internet. For this I use a ReMarkable tablet (e-ink) which also functions as my e-book reader. All my handwritten notes, annotations and chapters can be converted to markdown text and directly imported into Obsidian for final processing.
2026-04-02 · AI‑assisted development: reflections
I’ve been tinkering with AI since the first OpenAI API release (around 2021) when I signed up to the developer’s program. My early experiments used the Python based PyGPT desktop app to query an AI-indexed database of texts. I then played with simple agents: the most memorable experiment involving an agent linked to Madhyamaka Buddhist texts, and another to a critical legal studies memoir, who I set to converse. It was entertaining but not ultimately very fruitful!
More recently, I’ve found AI very useful for web development: speeding up CSS (which I’m literate in, but not proficient) and navigating JavaScript (which I’m just barely literate in ;-) ). The BLACKBOX cube and scroll‑reveal js were written with heavy AI assistance. That said, I remain wary of relying on cloud‑based AI. So, I’ve installed a distilled LLM on my own server, which I now use to search, summarise, and organise my document library and Obsidian notes. It’s a lot more limited than ChatGPT (or DeepSeek etc) in that it doesn't have much in the way of generative 'chat' power, but it is local. And tbh I'm getting a bit fed up of the now ubiquitous faux-human machine chat experience (prompting me to finally ditch google as a default search engine).
Ethically, I think using AI to generate code for a site like this is fine – the output is open source, the prompts were my own, and I’ve understood (and often modified) every line. The danger is when AI replaces thinking rather than enabling it. I have seen it likened to a robotic exoskeleton for the mind, in which case overreliance leads to atrophy. I think that captures the issue very well. But, does that danger apply at the macro level and herald the mass atrophy of culture? Hmmm. For now, I treat it as a very patient pair‑programmer who doesn’t mind my stupid questions about flexbox.
2026-04-01 · Canvas cube: rotation + morphing + node regeneration
The BLACKBOX visual is now a rotating, subtly morphing wireframe cube. Clicking on it regenerates the internal node connections (diagonal lines). The holographic fill pulses inside. It is, I think, a neat metaphor for the work’s life – never fixed, always re‑linking.
2026-03-31 · Decision: no code repositories
To keep the site lightweight and auditable, I’m writing vanilla HTML/CSS/JS. The cube and scroll observer are the only scripts. This aligns with the project ethos. But what about serving my favoured typfaces via Google Fonts CDN? I can’t quite bring myself to ditch the typography yet, so may have to look at serving the fonts locally from IPFS.
2026-03-31 · Project inception
Started sketching the BLACKBOX page as a complement to the book proposal. The goal: make the DAO’s concepts tangible via interactive web design.