Author: mklang

Barriers to Cultural Participation

Last week I completed my draft contribution to the Exploratory Workshop on Consuming the Illegal: Situating Digital Piracy in Everyday Experience which will be held in Leuven (17‐19 April 2011). The draft paper is called Barriers to Cultural Participation: Cultural Innovation and Control Online and attempts to go deeper into the problem of borrowing or appropriating earlier works in the creation of new cultural material.

What I am attempting to do is to point to the problem that while the law is a useful tool of regulation a great deal of regulatory power is in the hands of norms. The result is that amateur remixing is discriminated against and often runs the risk of being lost, instead of being encouraged as an important source for growth of cultural material.

So the paper looks at different forms of re-use (and gives examples of each). So in the end it looks like this… The thing to be discussed is therefore not the law but the ways in which certain types of remixing/borrowing/appropriation are tolerated while others seem not to be…

The end needs to be sharpened but here is what I have written so far (full draft is on scribd)

The topic of this paper was to take a closer look at some of the different ways in which cultural material is used and reused. In particular this work wanted to widen the discussion by not limiting it to being either a legal, technical or social topic. The production of innovative cultural material relies on a healthy access to earlier material, the creativity to expand on that material, the legal leeway to share that material and the technical platforms with which to reach other users.

For most of the history of copyright the most limiting factor for a large scale participatory cultural sphere has been limited by the lack of technical means with which to create and share the results of the work. Today these technological limitations have been reduced and are easily surpassed by most users wishing to participate in a cultural exchange.

We should therefore be entering into an unprecedented production of cultural material. One the one hand this is exactly what is happening. The amounts of copyrightable material being produced and spread today are far greater than in any other period in history. However, on the other hand, the legal risks and the regulation through licenses discussed here show that the material being produced and spread is discriminated against and is under risk of being removed, and its authors punished for their productions.

These issues need to be addressed. The original purpose of copyright, and its often legitimizing reason put forward today, is that by protecting the rights of the creator there will be an increased incentive to produce more material. Society offers a monopoly in return for an increased level of cultural material. However this bargain has been steadily eroded and is, at the point where it is technically possible for a wide scale participation in danger of being lost.

 

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Designing for actual use

The law tends to regulate as it ought to be not as it is. This means that often the law spends a lot of energy attempting to correct real behavior to be closer to the idea of what a certain behavior should be. When the law does this in ridiculous circumstances the guardians of the law glow with pride and refer to higher principles.

The problem is that he regulator should create laws and other regulatory systems not only with “ideal behavior” in mind. But it should take into consideration what people want. Unfortunately the law rarely asks: is this the hill I want to die on? But struggles to fight for principles in the face of overwhelming odds.

With this in mind it is fun to see that a mayor in Germany has created this bench for young people where the design promtoes sitting on high.

Dieter Mörlein demonstrates young peoples bench. Photo: PS Geschwill

Yahoo News writes

A mayor in Germany is attracting interest from other cities after he installed a special park bench for town teens who refuse to sit properly.
After residents of the southwestern city of Eppelheim complained teenagers always sat on the top of benches, rather than on the seat itself which they dirtied with their shoes, Mayor Dieter Moerlein came up with the idea of putting the seat on top.

Instead of continuing a rather pointless battle between different user groups about the “correct” use of the bench this Mayor has realized that more may be gained by accommodating the needs of different users.

Posted on by mklang

Removing civil rights without appearing to be a dictorship

Many of the civil rights that we today claim to be “natural” or “fundamental” have their roots in an ideology of the individual which dates back to the 18th century. The importance of a free press, free speech, democracy and the fundamentals of integrity can be traced back to the enlightenment period which believed that all were created equal and that people – not systems – were valuable and important enough to be in control.

Since then these ideologies have been slowly been implemented into law. Not uniformly nor quickly but still the ongoing process of bringing implemented, real civil rights has been measurable. But lets not get carried away. One thing lacking in our (for example) right to expression has been our ability to express ourselves to a wider audience. Sure we have the right to do so – but do we have the ability to do so?

The fact that not everyone could speak was seen as unfortunate but inevitable and this scarcity created a marketplace of ideas. Well, in reality, it created a marketplace of platforms from which to speak from. If you fit the profile of the platform you may (still if you are lucky) exercise your right to speak to a larger audience.

In this way many of our rights are strongly linked to the platforms which give us the ability to carry out these rights. And what are the Internet, the Web & Web2.0? They are a form of easily accessible platforms. The barriers to entry to these platforms are widely reduced (compared with old or traditional media). With the lowering of barriers to entry millions (?) of people have been exercising rights which have previously only been theoretical.

Unfortunately this does not suit everyone. What we have seen is that with the removal or reduction of technical or economic barriers to entry the law is often being used to create an artificial barrier to reduce or minimize the impact of our rights.

Now the interesting thing is that no politician today would dare to challenge the enlightenment ideal. No politician today can openly say that they want to reduce our fundamental freedoms even if they are tempted to. What happens instead is the interesting removal of rights by creating levels of control in our communications intermediaries. What this means is that instead of telling people that they will reduce their rights governments are applying burdens of surveillance and control on the companies that provide our infrastructure.

And what can we do? Well not much really. Most of our infrastructure use is voluntary. If we want to use the net we are forced to play along with the conditions of the companies that provide the net to us.

A recent example of this process (one of many) reported by Wired is that the Obama administration is urging Congress not to adopt legislation that would impose constitutional safeguards on Americans’ e-mail stored in the cloud.

As the law stands now, the authorities may obtain cloud e-mail without a warrant if it is older than 180 days, thanks to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act adopted in 1986. At that time, e-mail left on a third-party server for six months was considered to be abandoned, and thus enjoyed less privacy protection. However, the law demands warrants for the authorities to seize e-mail from a person’s hard drive.

A coalition of internet service providers and other groups, known as Digital Due Process, has lobbied for an update to the law to treat both cloud- and home-stored e-mail the same, and thus require a probable-cause warrant for access. The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on that topic Tuesday.

The companies — including Google, AOL and AT&T — maintain that the law should be changed to reflect that consumers increasingly access their e-mail on servers, instead of downloading it to their hard drives, as a matter of course.

But the Obama administration testified that imposing constitutional safeguards on e-mail stored in the cloud would be an unnecessary burden on the government. Probable-cause warrants would only get in the government’s way.

The process is an excellent example of the cynical application of power. On the face of it government still maintains its support for rights, while in reality slashing the practical application of rights at the point of the technology upon which the rights stand.

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Virtual Economies

Dr. Vili Lehdonvirta & Dr. Mirko Ernkvist have written a very interesting report on virtual economies under the sponsorship of the World Bank and the IFC entitled Knowledge Map of the Virtual Economy: Converting the Virtual Economy into Development Potential. To get a small taste, here is the final paragraph of the executive summary:

Besides microwork, development interventions could help promote the development of new digital networks and services that have potential to provide jobs in the virtual economy in the future. In the same way that access to high speed Internet backbone connections helped India develop its business process outsourcing (BPO) industry in the 2000s, so the development of mobile broadband networks (so-called 3G and 4G networks) could assist a wider range of developing countries to create jobs and generate wealth from the new opportunities that the virtual economy brings.

This is naturally just a small taste. The authors identify “two major areas of the existing virtual economy”

1) thirdparty gaming services and

2) microwork.

But still:

This report will focus largely on these two distinct but conceptually related areas. Gaming services is an established industry that provides a rich set of evidence for analysis, while microwork is an emerging industry with apparently significant development potential. Other existing activities within the virtual economy are categorized as 3) marketing related paid-for connections in social media (“cherry blossoming”), and 4) user-created virtual goods in virtual environments.

This report is definitely interesting reading and an important development on the early work of Edward Castronova.

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The cost of borrowing

Of course I was naive. I guess if I thought about it I would have known that I was naive. But when I heard that a museum has lent a collection or a work to another museum, I got a warm fuzzy feeling. This was cultural altruism. I know, I know… Naive.

In a fascinating article in The Art Newspaper, the director of Musée Picasso reveals the true cost of borrowing.

Baldassari revealed the museum raised between €1m and €3.5m a year since 2008 from the touring exhibition “Masterpieces from the Picasso Museum”. It has visited eight cities so far, including Madrid, Helsinki and Tokyo. “We have made [in total] €16m,” she said, adding that the museum levied different charges for loans. “The tariffs vary according to the number of works, the team [involved] and the expertise.”

Brings a whole new meaning to the word to borrow. But then I guess art lease would sound a bit to0… mercenary?

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Great Net Delusion Animation

Over on the IT Law in Ireland blog TJ McIntyre has posted about a great new RSA Animate called The Internet in Society: Empowering or Censoring Citizens? This one is based on Evgeny Morozov‘s great book The Net Delusion were he argues that the Internet and Web2.0 do not make democracy inevitable.

When writing his review in The Guardian Cory Doctorow was critical of The Net Delusion for his pessimism in the power of the Internet for promoting democracy. But I don’t think its so easy to ignore Morozov’s critique of the cyberutopian vision. I highly recommend The Net Delusion.

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Jeff Koons Must Die!!!

Of course computers and computer games have had an impact on art. There are fields that study art and video games, or indeed even art in games, but I was particularly amused by this twist to the theme. It’s art in the form of an old style arcade video game. The game is created by Hunter Jonakin and is called Jeff Koons Must Die!!!

The game is a first-person shooter and the goal is to destroy as much of Koons’ artwork as possible. If the player does not destroy the game ends.

However, if one or more pieces are destroyed, an animated model of Jeff Koons walks out and chastises the viewer for annihilating his art. He then sends guards to kill the player. If the player survives this round then he or she is afforded the ability to enter a room where waves of curators, lawyers, assistants, and guards spawn until the player is dead.

The motivation for the game is given on the website:

Jeff Koons is one of the most polarizing and well known contemporary artists living today. He attempts to elevate the banal by constructing large metal sculptures that resemble balloon animals, oil paintings that contain subject matter derived from digital collage, and large-scale pornographic photographs featuring the artist and his former wife, to name a few. All of Koons’s art is constructed by assistants. In general, viewers love or hate Koons and his work, and that is why he was chosen as the subject matter for this piece.


Recently Jeff Koons – who has himself been sued for copyright violation – sued for copyright violation (see Koons strikes back) but eventually backed off. It’s going to be interesting to see his reaction both to seeing his works replicated in digital format, used (abused?) in this manner and then the fact that he himself is portrayed in the game.

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Liar and lying

This post has been removed. The post linked to a site. The site owner nagged me to remove the link. Literally a post per day. It wasnt even a particularly interesting post. It was nothing, it was humor.

Whatever. I pulled a post. This is the first time. 5 December 2012.

 

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What libraries should protect

In the digital age the idea of being concerned about someone knowing which books we read may seem strange. But as a matter of principle I feel it should be important that this kind of information is not saved. Very often we hear the argument: if you have done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to hide.

That argument is so stupid that its incredible. It shows that a pithy statement will turn peoples intelligence off. Think about any persecuted minority and then repeat the statement one more time. I dare you.

So back to the library.

The books I read can tell you a lot about me. But the problem is that you cannot know what books I read and how they have impacted my life from a list of books I have borrowed from the library. This list will tell you nothing about whether I read them, how I understood them, if I read them to criticize or to admire… or just to impress someone else. All you know is that I have borrowed them. Unfortunately, in times of stress, such data will be used as “proof” of something. And not only in times of stress.

In January this year the Swedish Justitiekanslern (Chancellor of Justice) found that the university library in Göteborg (my uni) was not wrong to save data on borrowed books and the borrower even after the books were returned. (case 2356-09-42: Personsuppgiftslagen (1998:204) är inte tillämplig på personuppgifter i ett låntagarregister som förs fortlöpande vid ett universitetsbibliotek decided 2011-01-17

Their reasoning is that the information about the books and borrower fall under the well established Offentlighetsprincipen (principle of public access) and would be saved – and made accessible to anyone who wants it. Information that falls under Offentlighetsprincipen may be removed from the archives under certain conditions.

In the case of the books individual borrowers have borrowed this data is removed two years after the library card expires.

Since I have had a library card at my library since 1997 or maybe even earlier all the books I have every borrowed from my university library are a matter of public record and can be extracted by anyone.

So I am dismayed, but not surprised, by the outcome of the decision by the Chancellor of Justice. But what really gets me annoyed is the attitude of the libraries. This is not the kind of data they should be collecting. This is not the attitude they should be having towards their readers. Their behavior does not promote openness, but rather will decrease the likelihood of people reading “suspect” material – whatever that may be. I thought libraries were all about open mindedness and learning. Now I am sure that what they are doing is convenient for them – and we have come to expect companies selling the souls of their employees and customers for their convenience.

But libraries? For shame.

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Passion and perseverance, not poetry, make a PhD

Sad, but unfortunately not uncommon, news today… yet another bright young colleague has dropped out from his PhD. The easy reaction was to throw out the obvious question: Why? But in reality it does not really matter. The reasons for people dropping doctoral studies are as varied, as there are people and even if you asked could you ever get the true reason for people’s actions?

But I still want to comment on the doctoral process. In 2006 I wrote a post called Advice to a shiny new PhD student which still contains some good advice.

What I want to add is that the work of the PhD is not a sprint it’s more like a marathon on a bad day. Its seems endless and thankless when you are doing it – sure some people wave to cheer you up on the way but in reality nobody cares about your work – but it’s the end that makes it worth it.

In a marathon you don’t want to be a specialist… You want to be the beige super generalist.

The PhD student will be surrounded by people who are brighter, more poetic, more prolific, more intelligent, better read, more beautiful, etc. In fact no matter what trait you can imagine there will be someone who is better than you. And this is not a depressing thought!?

To survive a PhD is not about being the best in those ways. It’s about become the best at a certain subject. To become the best in academia you really need two things more than anything else. First, a passion for the subject. The reason why your topic is interesting is because it is unexplored. The reason it is unexplored is usually because it is obscure. You will not be loved for you subject, you will be alone with your subject. To survive with little outside stimuli you need passion.

The second thing you will need is perseverance – because it will be boring. No matter how interesting it sounds any topic becomes boring. This does not mean it will never be exciting again – but recognize that you passion for your chosen topic will ebb and flow.

So ignore the poetry and get on with it!

Posted on by mklang