Author: mklang

Bad artists copy. Great artists steal

Visited the Picasso exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum and was totally inspired. When I got back to the laptop I remembered the often repeated Picasso quote that: “Bad artists copy. Great artists steal.”

His words were probably uttered as a short cool statement but in a digital environment they are even truer than ever before. Simple copying of other peoples material is just boring and unimpressive. Copying is plagiarism – it’s taking credit for the work someone else has done. At best it’s false marketing.

When great artists steal they take the ideas of others and rework them into something new. The result of the theft is their in front of your eyes but reworked and reinterpreted to a new level of communication. One of the best examples of this was an idea taken from Goya’s work The Shootings of May Third 1808.

The works are similar, obviously so. And yet the differences were intense and total. Nobody could mistake the work of Picasso for that of Goya. Picasso was obviously deeply influenced by his predecessor, but his interpretation of the scene was moving and challenging.

Picasso was challenging the war in Korea in his work Massacre in Korea and maybe did not need Goya. But by building upon the work of Goya he created a work which both becomes a critique of the war and the continuation of an artistic meme. This is why it is fair to say that Bad artists copy. Great artists steal.

Posted on by mklang

The importance of not losing

Each time free copyright licenses such as the GPL or the suit of Creative Commons licenses go to court and win we confirm that the legal theory behind the licenses is correct. In a strange way the courts take the position that they agree with the practice of law and licensing being established in practice. Naturally they would not agree if the practices were totally outlandish so in actual fact what we have is the establishment of a school of thought – a consensus. Or what Ludwik Fleck called a thought collective. In the thought collective an idea is proposed and eventually gains momentum until it becomes an established norm.

This is what happens every time a free license is tested by the legal system.

This is because despite their theory and their use the free copyright license remains a different school of thought – a modification of the past thought collective of the established copyright regime. The problem is that often established regimes are seen as laws of nature. Permanent and everlasting. We know that copyright has not always been and does not always have to be – and yet many modifications are viewed with intense suspicion.

There is a snappy quote attributed to Henry Kissinger on the differences between conventional forces and guerrilla forces:  the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.

So free copyright licenses win in court but in reality they do not lose. We know when we have established them as a conventional norm not only when they keep winning in court but when they fact that they lose a day in court they are still seen as viable, valuable and an ordinary part of the copyright ecosystem.

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Happy Public Domain Day

The first of January is Public Domain Day. The purpose of celebrating this day is to remember the wealth of culture that enters into the public domain every year. The list this year includes notables such as  Walter Benjamin his The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is incredibly thought provoking, Mikhail Bulgakov – yes its time to reread The Master and Margarita, the artist Paul Klee and the Swedish Selma Lagerlof.

The Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University has a webpage dedicated to the day. The Center also points out that while in Europe works are entering the public domain changes in US law are preventing this from happening:

What is entering the public domain in the United States? Sadly, we will have nothing to celebrate this January 1st. Not a single published work is entering the public domain this year. Or next year. Or the year after. Or the year after that. In fact, in the United States, no publication will enter the public domain until 2019. And wherever in the world you live, you now have to wait a very long time for anything to reach the public domain. When the first copyright law was written in the United States, copyright lasted 14 years, renewable for another 14 years if the author wished. Jefferson or Madison could look at the books written by their contemporaries and confidently expect them to be in the public domain within a decade or two. Now? In the United States, as in most of the world, copyright lasts for the author’s lifetime, plus another 70 years. And we’ve changed the law so that every creative work is automatically copyrighted, even if the author does nothing. What do these laws mean to you? As you can read in our analysis here, they impose great (and in many cases entirely unnecessary) costs on creativity, on libraries and archives, on education and on scholarship. More broadly, they impose costs on our entire collective culture.

“We are the first generation to deny our own culture to ourselves. Almost no work created during your lifetime will, without conscious action by its creator, become available for you to reproduce or build upon.”

We have little reason to celebrate on Public Domain Day because our public domain has been shrinking, not growing. Samuel Beckett’s English-language version of Waiting for Godot, his existentialist play in which two characters wait for a Godot who never appears, was published in 1954 and would once have been entering the public domain on January 1, 2011. To quote Vladimir from the play: “But that is not the question. What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come—” 56 years later, we are still waiting.

Posted on by mklang

My gadgets and I

Its difficult not to think about digital culture after reading Jaron Lanier‘s book You are not a Gadget. He captures me at once with his discussion on how we are locked into our technological settings by previous design decisions. These decisions may not be the best but they might have been the best at the time. To overcome their flaws we build work-arounds and use more power but at the heart of the system lie flaws which are limiting us and controlling our ability to develop.

The problem, according to Lanier, is that we continued to develop our gadgets and became so impressed with them that two things happened. First we began to think that the gadgets we actually doing the work (computer beats chess player) and not realizing that it was the programmers et al doing the work (programming team & chess experts together beat chess player). Second the popularity of gadgets and applications were not increasing our freedom and development. The iPad & Facebook (just to pick 2) are not freeing us but limiting our choices of action.

Obviously digital culture, web2.0 and social media are not high on Lanier’s list of popular ideas. The hive mind lacks intelligence and the collaboration is all about remixing bits of information without producing anything new. Individuals produce – the hive iterates.

But this is where he loses me. Critiquing the masses for not being innovative or exiting smacks of arrogance – they (the mob) just dont get the sophistication of what the web could be? Sure, we (the mob) are controlled by our iPhones and Twitter. Our communications are not totally free – but when were they ever free? Was there ever a period where the mass was more exciting than it is now? The mass collaboration of Wikipedia may not be producing new knowledge but encyclopedists never did. They are however providing information more efficiently than ever before.

Critiquing bloggers for not being memorable writers is equally unfair as 99% of all writers either never got published or are now out of our memories. Critiquing twitterers for not being deep is also to forget that 99% of all human communication is shallow and pointless (Hello, how are you? nice weather we’re having). The point is to establish relationships (real or imagined) and occasionally pass information of importance.

Sure we are not gadgets and I totally agree with the dangers of the lock-in and the fact that people not networks are the most important – but simply because we are controlled by our infrastructure (as was the medieval scribe) does not mean that we are pawns of our infrastructure.

We are not gadgets – but we may be too fond of them… but thats a different problem.

Read the book its an important addition to our understanding of how technology forms us. Read The Independent & New York Times review of Lanier’s You are not a Gadget

Posted on by mklang

Why call him god?

Reminded today of Epicurus – in particular the “Epicurean paradox” which attempts to deal with why there is evil in the world when there is such a thing as an omnipotent god:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”

Tis the season to re-read the classics.

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Moral Courage & censorship

Its easy to lose your faith in institutions and so its nice to read that Cambridge University refused to censor a masters thesis. This is my favorite part of the letter (via BoingBoing):

Second, you seem to think that we might censor a student’s thesis, which is lawful and already in the public domain, simply because a powerful interest finds it inconvenient. This shows a deep misconception of what universities are and how we work. Cambridge is the University of Erasmus, of Newton, and of Darwin; censoring writings that offend the powerful is offensive to our deepest values. Thus even though the decision to put the thesis online was Omar’s, we have no choice but to back him. That would hold even if we did not agree with the material! Accordingly I have authorised the thesis to be issued as a Computer Laboratory Technical Report. This will make it easier for people to find and to cite, and will ensure that its presence on our web site is permanent….

Read more about the whole back story A Merry Christmas to all Bankers and the full Letter to bankers (PDF)

Nice to see an act of moral courage coming from the university. I know that they are supposed to be like this but its nice to see that they sometimes act this way too.

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Information overload

It seems that ever since we began with computers the term information overload has been with us.

However the concept is not new. In The Chronicle Review Ann Blair writes in the article Information Overload, Then and Now

Early negative responses include Ecclesiastes 12:12 (“Of making books there is no end,” probably from the fourth or third century BC) and Seneca’s “distringit librorum multitudo” (“the abundance of books is distraction,” first century AD). But we also find enthusiasm for accumulation—of papyri at the Library of Alexandria (founded in the early third century BC) or of the 20,000 “facts” that Pliny the Elder accumulated in Historia naturalis (completed in AD 77). Though we no longer care especially about ancient precedent, we hear the same doom and praise today.

In addition to this in 1755 Denis Diderot wrote in Encyclopédie

As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes.

The issue gets more problematic by the fact that our computing powers have been increasing over the past decades. This increase in computing power tends to cloud the problem of information overload by alleviating the problem but it does nothing to resolve the fundamental problem.

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Where plagiarism comes from

The idea of property is a social construct and it varies both in places and in history. But is there a point where property is a given? In an interesting study at Yale Kristina Olson and Alex Shaw have been studying at what age children recognise that plagiarism is wrong?

By contrast, three- to four-year-olds did not rate characters who copied as any less likeable or any more bad than characters who came up with their own ideas. In a control condition, children of this age gave negative ratings to characters who stole physical property, thus showing that the the null result for stealing ideas wasn’t because the children didn’t understand the rating scale or weren’t paying attention.

Obviously it is important to try to understand where their values come from. But this is an interesting starting point in the discussion. Read more Olson, K., and Shaw, A. (2010). ‘No fair, copycat!’: what children’s response to plagiarism tells us about their understanding of ideas. Developmental Science DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2010.00993.x

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XKCD on Creative Commons

As both a fan of Creative Commons and XKCD the combination is almost impossible to resist. Right now XKCD t-shirts “doing science” t-shirts are available at the Creative Commons store. This is from the CC blog:

The icing on the cake is the most recent addition to our CC Store: this super-cool science-themed CC shirt, for which the world-famous XKCD was gracious enough to let us re-use a variation on a classic cartoon. Many of you may already read and enjoy the delightful webcomic of “romance, sarcasm, math, and language” which is under a CC BY-NC license. Now you can show your love for Creative Commons and science at the same time by buying one of these t-shirts, available for $20 over at the CC store.

Huge thanks to XKCD for being such a wonderful and creative member of the CC community, and for freely sharing that creativity with the world.

Science@creativecommons by Creative Commons / CC BY

Posted on by mklang