Open Access

So I’ve been avoiding the copyright like some sort of medieval plague in the past week. My eyes just glazed over every time I read the phrases ‘fair use’, ‘commons’ or ‘incentive’ and instead of wallowing in my thesis-avoidance I managed to tear out a three thousand word essay on the ethics of open access. Bitchin’.

I originally got turned on to this phenomenon through danah boyd. Her essay/article/rant/post on open access is here. It sounded awesome and all anti-establishment and I was well and truly angry. However having done no actual study on the topic I couldn’t be pissed off. I had no real concept of who I was supposed to be angry at or why. An essay later though, and now I’m down with this movement. I am righteously angry. 

Free scholarly research for the world is the plan allowing for greater intellectual sharing between disciplines and universities, a greater wealth of information for the interested public and an ability for more informed research personally. It also will help libraries to no end considering that currently their budgets are being gutted by a few large and sufficiently hardass commercial publishers. I think this has got way more scope than a lot of copyright related issues.

Scholarly research is the backbone of society and is publicly funded - by the people. It’s also really interesting stuff which people either don’t know about or don’t have the resources to access because journals cost money to subscribe to. So you have people being unable to afford to pay more to access something they’ve already paid for in taxes. Add on to a situation where academics usually work for free to edit and peer review these papers, the only winners are commercial publishing houses whose quality of citation rates (important for any self - respecting academic) are no better than cheaper non-profit or university published journals, despite their prices being drastically higher.      

Here are some sites to check out for open access 

First Monday - Open Access Journal. I love this thing like it’s a brother. Except our fraternal bonding is limited by the face that it’s an online open access journal. 

Peter Suber’s Open Access Overview - The title sounds like it’s some sort of bad Public Television Show. “The Open Access Overview bought to you by Peter Suber!” But it’s actually all you need to know about open access. 

Directory of Open Access Journals: What it says.

 

Non-Rivalrous Goods

This article has a great take-down of the concept of non-rivalrous goods not requiring copyright protection in the comments section, an idea which I was struggling to get around. The entire site is actually very copy-right [LOLZ (I've just picked this up, I don't understand the US's need to split the world into left and right)] and a real kick in the balls to some of my arguments which is good.

The actual post is on an internet music tax though and despite the author’s exposé of the numerous copyright activists who’ve supported this idea, I still think it’s horrendous. I can’t imagine why an industry, who currently have a lot of capital but are struggling to maintain a decent business model should be subsidised by the government. I’m not arguing that the content industries should simply grin and bear the digital age but what is needed is an actual reform of copyright law and greater education. This idea to simply tax everybody just seems like the biggest quick fix ever.   

 

another retrospective on creativity: thx fugazi

I’ve finally managed to find two quotes which establish my issues with this notion of ‘incentive to create’. Here’s a quote from James DeLong, Senior Fellow at The Progress & Freedom Foundation

My personal preference would be for a system of micro-payments, so that you could put a sort of creators’ tax on everything as it flows around the Internet, and creators could get rich and produce even more content.

and here’s Joe Lally from seminal DIY band Fugazi

You know if mp3’s or the downloading off websites and all that stuff is to destroy our record sales then so be it; it would not stop me from wanting to make music or record music with this band as long as everybody in the band wants to do it, I wanna do it; or with anyone else who I could make music with; its just beside the fuckin’ point. It’s a miracle that I’ve been able to live off the band for this long.

from loserdom

The quote from the progress and freedom foundation assumes that money must be produced for creators to get off their arses and create. What Joe knows is that creativity happens, whether or not there’s a cheque in it for the creator. While I agree creators should be paid a fair wage for what they produce, it’s wrong to infer that creativity will die a horrible death if creators aren’t millionaires. 

‘you could put a sort of creators’ tax on everything as it flows around the Internet, and creators could get rich…’

It’s this section which annoys me the most, the assumption that one must be rich to produce. It’s picky and merely semantics but it shows the mindset some people have when it comes to copyright - one of pure economics.  

Another free book!

I’m going to keep with the giving tradition of this morning when I linked to Yochai Benkler’s work, The Wealth of Networks:how social production transforms markets and freedom, released under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sharealike license.

I just found out that

Lawrence Lessig’s seminal work The Future of Ideas has now been released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence and can be freely downloaded off the Internet. Read more on Lessig’s blog here or download the book here.

   

Yochai Benkler - The Wealth of Networks

Reading this awesome pdf book on the layout of the internet, non-commercial creativity and things. Benkler hangs at the Berkman Center.

In other news, this is possible the wittiest thing I’ve read in sports writing for a while.

And yet again, Barcelona had failed to win a game against opposition who brought less to the party than a tight-fisted agoraphobic. 

Football365.com

 

Soz Lessig

I went on a rant yesterday. Most of what I said I still stand by, even if it’s poorly worded and I’m still trying to work out what I meant by it all. I guess it’s basically a rail against scorched earth writing on the death of creativity which thrives on hyperbole rather than reasoned argument. 

However I want to exonerate Lawrence Lessig. I’ve been reading a lot of his work through secondary sources and other quotes and considering I read his books at the start of my research, it’s easy for his work to get distorted and twisted by others.   

I still don’t agree with everything he says or his Creative Commons love-ins but his arguments are still awesome. His final talk on the issue of Intellectual Property given in January 2008 is a great summary of what he’s on about.   

 

Empire Strikes Back Sweded

Sweding. A great DIY creative concept from an otherwise terrible movie.

And what a rad movie to pick.

 

What is weird is that George Lucas reckons Empire was the worst movie of the lot. I’m not saying that the God of the Star Wars Universe is like, wrong. No wait, actually I am.

Worst Movie? Pfft!

The Financial Incentive to Create

It’s time to get philosophical on garage networks so sit down, grow a beard, put on a black turtleneck and try and maintain some world weariness ferchrissakes.   

The blog’s title The Financial Incentive to Create is one of the central underpinnings of copyright (the concept that is, not my actual post title - that would be weird). This concept is best put forward by the U.S constitution.

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

from wikipedia

Or in other words, allowing for significant financial gain for the creator of the work to encourage further creation.

This is a favoured area of study for particularly sadistic economists I imagine they become terrible dinner party conversation as a result.   

I’m being mean.

It’s a fine notion to try and find out the exact incentive needed for creators to continue to create effectively, especially when discussing things like copyright extensions and the like (Milton Friedman thought so when he weighed into the Eldred v Ashcroft case and he’s no-one’s bitch). But I feel it’s just weird. And this whole copyright thing is kind of weird. Because it’s left in the hands of people like Milton Friedman and Lawrence Lessig and Jack Valenti and Metallica (try as you might, after seeing Some Kind of Monster you can’t convince me they’re artists).

• What the protectionist wave of copyright (RIAA, Valenti etc.) likes to argue is that unless there’s a big fat paycheck at the end of road, people aren’t going to create.
• What economists do is make complex graphs of how people create and how long they need to be creating for under certain socio-economic conditions before they can’t create any longer or something like that.
• What Copyright activists put forward is a Helen Lovejoy ‘Won’t somebody think of the children!’ approach to creativity which sends people off into imagining an Orwellian future where the RIAA will tear into your house and drag you away for sampling Ben Lee’s latest album (I have no idea why you’d be doing this by the way. Maybe that does give them cause to drag you away). Making creativity therefore dead.         

I feel that’s what being lost in this web of laws, legislation, cases and graphs is that people just create. For no incentive, often with no idea that their little song or movie will make money and usually only for the benefit of a few friends. No-one expects a pay check, when one comes it’s nice and when a record executive knocks on your door, you generally freak the hell out and then wake up twenty years later in drug induced haze. At least that’s what movies have taught me.

Copyright is a system of laws to regulate how people distribute their ideas. But, normal people (as opposed to the entertainment industry) don’t give a shit. Most people when they write a song don’t immediately call up a lawyer, or demand a statutory license if someone wants to cover their song or even consider these issues when they create.

Creativity and its incentive is the issue here. I’m not denying that there’s an economy for creative works, far from it. But it’s wrong to naturally tag on an economic incentive to people making things and then argue that unless their argument gets through creativity will just stop dead in its tracks. I call bullshit.

 

EDIT: I didn’t get really philosophical but more ranty - I’ve read to much.        

The Copy Fetish

This is more of a cultural argument and only marginally has something to do with copyright but I found it interesting.

I ran across this concept in an article I was reading on the cultural transformation of Mp3s.

Walter Benjamin argues that mechanically reproduced art destroys the sense of authenticity, and dissolves the rituality historically attached to traditional arts…

Originally the contextual integration of art in tradition found its expression in the cult. We know that the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual - first the magical, than the religious kind…but the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic reproduction, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice - politics.

This concept of original art being subservient to the copy is a great analysis of the digital age. Both the music industry and the public originally craved the production and consumption of ‘the copy’. Indeed these arguably false realities - etching in time forever what was either a once off recording or a meticulously crafted and distant layered piece of musical art- can be seen to be deified in the acts of vinyl collecting where the mere physical presence of copies lends a certain aura and prestige to the music listener. But this is merely a certain cultural point in time as Kasaras argues.

Perhaps now MP3s are merely the ‘ultimate copy’. Something which can be stored, replenished and copied at will - the ultimate warholian one upmanship of an industry which thrives on selling copies of things. Therefore following Benjamin’s argument one would have to argue that using mp3s is the ultimate political act.

Once again the notion of ‘the spectacle’ rears its head. The ritual is played out in concerts, movie theatres and festivals. Although I remember rituals involving buying albums, flicking through covers and listening to it in one hit, that ritual (for me anyway) has gone. So I guess that proves that rituals aren’t absent from consumption of the copy (see movie theatres and listening to albums) but are perhaps more susceptible to change than consumption of original works like visiting galleries and seeing concerts.

Zombie Computers Decried As Imminent National Threat

 

Is it the uprising? Are there PC’s tearing off the shackles placed by their humanoid masters, ripping cables out of their back and walking down the streets of London, Paris and New York, eating humans and generally causing havoc on a large scale? Are macbooks scorching their interior designer owners with their just purchased cafe latte’s and pushing over the one piece of furniture in their minimalist warehouse lofts? Has technology finally won? It’s Blade Runner isn’t it? It’s Motherfucking Blade Fucking Runner.

No.

It’s a Wired story on spam and botnets. Best news title of the morning. Biggest let down ever.