I know, for better and worse, how the GNU Free Document License that makes Wikipedia possible came to be: Richard Stallman and I wrote it in his mother’s apartment on West 89th Street and in a conference room at the MIT AI Lab before the building was taken down and the building named after Bill Gates was put up instead (it leaks, as you know, and MIT is suing Frank Gehry about that; the GFDL still works as designed).

But that was back in the middle of Stage One, after free software had become technologically ineradicable (though still almost entirely unknown to almost everybody). There were not yet any transnational productive communities to negotiate with, and the license could be written without meaningful consultation or broad collaboration, as Stallman and Jerry Cohen had written and released the second version of the GNU General Public License in 1991.

Then Larry Lessig joined up, wrote Code, and created the Creative Commons. This virtual structure (whose shadow on the radar of capitalism is imperceptibly faint, as the published form 990 would show), became in half a decade a factory producing factories: national chapters, open access movements, then free publishing houses, recording companies, news services, video production companies and art galleries around the world.

Lessig’s Creative Commons is at heart a license manufacturer, built around a freedom technology in the guise of a webform. “Here’s a website you can talk to in your own terms about what you want for the future of your creative works, and it will give you the legalese you need, as well as marking your digital products so that people who want to make use of your works will know what the terms are.” From its inception, CC used this technology to enable artists to raise questions about the “betterness” of sharing over ownership.

The success of Creative Commons and the free software movement linked tens of thousands of technology producers to tens of thousands of culture producers in a community of communities, a diverse society containing a legal system without a state—anarchism, as I proposed in 1999, quite literally triumphant.

A functioning legal system without a state must be able to alter existing relationships in ways consistent with current public policy decisions—an activity equivalent to “making decisions about ownership” and “regulating use rights” in the presence of a property system. This is the contemporary cutting edge of transnational contracting: Communities without governments trying to strengthen and modify their existing constitutive arrangements while avoiding incautious interference from domestic legal systems.