Just rediscovered why I like Mimi & Eunice – check out this one on copyright reform
This one’s going into the book.
Update: I’m going to try to write a haiku for every Mimi & Eunice comic this week. Today’s:
Real artists don’t wait
For lawyers and officials
To give permission.
The Swedish cartoonist Mattias Adolfsson has now published “The First in Line: From the sketchbooks of Mattias Adolfsson” it can be ordered directly from the publisher: Sanatorium förlag. Order before the 1 of June and you will get it signed with a small doodle.
I am fortunate to have a wonderful small original Adolfsson (Beatnik dragon) at home
I only wish that I had explained Creative Commons to him…
The problem with technological change is that the original technological stage creates business possibilities, followed by the creation of business models based upon established technology.
Not all technological change needs to be great. Some small changes in socio-technical arrangements just create shifts that end sustainability in business models. A beautiful elegant example of this is the nylon stocking vending machine in use in Stockholm in 1956.
Life Magazine has a fantastic photo essay In Praise of the Automat
The CC Salon in Stockholm was a very enjoyable affair. The presentation by Gabriel Shalom & Jay Cousins was highly inspirational as were the discussions afterwards. My presentation was entitled The Role of Commons in Relational Economies and was an attempt to explore the intersection between economy, copyright and technology.
I began by describing the move from the barter system to the monetary system and focused on the situations where uneven contributions take place. I described the situation where someone needed toothpaste and had a pig. By contributing the pig to the marketplace the returns must have been a lifetime of toothpaste. Obviously I am not an expert here but the value relationship between pig and toothpaste must be radically different. How do we value a single important contribution compared to a lifetime of regular small contributions? How can we compare a lifetime spent editing grammatical errors in Wikipedia to writing the most read article on Wikipedia. Which contribution will be the most famous? Which contribution is the most important?
What I was trying to do was to explain that the barter system is a long term trusting relationship were economic value is not the focus. By moving to a monetary transactional system we no longer need to trust or build relations. We focus solely on transactions and trust abstract systems.
Within these systems money becomes the autonomous manifestation of exchange relation.
However, early money was more than this and even had intrinsic value (i.e. value in itself) as examples of this I explained the dewarra (row of cowrie shells) to plåtmynt (image below)
The heaviest could weigh almost 20 kg. Image from Kungliga Myntkabinettet
Money quickly came to play an important role and began to be used as a form of social sanction in the form of fines (e,g, weregild) or forms of compensation that are oddly strange: Dowries as proof of wealth and buying partners, blackmail: a situation of information inequality, bribery: unjust friendliness.
As the goal of the lecture was to connect this discussion to copyright it was time to bring in the role of technology. It is often overlooked that copyright is all about technology. This is because copyright is all about the fixation of an idea. Ideas that are not expressed in a fixated form are unprotected. Its when the ideas become fixated (on paper, video, audio) that they are copyrightable.
Now the problem occurs when we have fixation as a focus and the law is about fixating the social agreement upon which society has arrived at a fair balance. In the case of copyright the modern system of copyright law was created/fixated in the 1950s. But what was the understanding of copyright in the 1950s? Well to demonstrate this I used this image of a vision of the future. This is what they thought the home computer would look like in 2004…image removed (see comments below)
So this was the visionary view of technology shared by the creators of copyright law. Naturally the law has been amended and adjusted but it is fundamentally the same. The visions of technology of the 1950s control the use of technology today and the future. All law is about the fixation of social agreements and copyright law reflects the understanding of an equitable use and protection of cultural products – based upon the technological possibilities in existence. When the law fixes a social agreement it fundamentally comes into conflict with the evolution of technology.
In the past 50 years technology has brought us (amongst many things) digitalization, connectivity and a multitude of devices.
These developments are interesting as they inadvertently provide an increased focus on the relational economy. Think about the work of Stallman and the Free Software movement that provides us with ample empirical proof that economic returns are not the necessary motivation for providing labor and enthusiasm. Or what about the Wikipedia project? Seriously people spending large parts of their lives in correcting articles other people write? And they do it, almost anonymously, for free. Transactional economics struggles to find a valid reason for these activities. We have heard them all… for example: youthful enthusiasm (i.e. it will pass soon whenthey realize the error of their ways), reputation in groups (i.e. you cannot be good – you have devious motives)
The problem with understanding the relational economics becomes more interesting when organizations like museums and archives begin putting their works online. Allowing users to interact and to add metadata. I showed this image by Carl Curman that has been lying in an archive for over a century but in the last two years has been viewed over 27 000 times.
Photograph by: Carl Curman (1900) Persistent URL: Read more about the photo database
By digitalizing the photo and making it available the image has “come back to life” and has been given a new relevance in a social setting. By allowing the audience to tag, comment and add meta data the Swedish National Heritage Board has developed a relationship with a larger audience. The benefits for everyone are obvious but attempting to decipher transactional costs and benefits are too complex to make an act like this interesting or maybe even profitable.
At this point I turned to Creative Commons and explained the role of licensing in the relational economy. While copyright has been fixed in the 1950s – when technological barriers made it difficult (next to impossible) for a larger group to create and spread material to a larger audience – the world today is different. “Everyone” has a phone in their pocket that can take pictures and record sound (even video). “Everyone” has computers and internet that creates the ability to create and share material. We the amateurs of the world are creating and communicating on a level unheard, or undreamt, of in the 1950s. The transactional costs and benefits of applying copyright law are too complex to work out on this level.
Here is where Creative Commons comes in. CC licenses are there to support the relational role in copyright. What does the creator want and how does he/she want her work to be used or abused.
In my early days as project lead for CC Sweden I was met with an accusation that CC is a band-aid on the brokenness of copyright law. By creating and supporting a system like CC we were simply applying artificial respiration to a dying system. From a transactional economics point of view this is understandable criticism (if you believe that copyright should die) but from the point of view of relational economics the licenses have nothing to do with aiding copyright – they are there to aid the creator and the relationships between the creator and his/her audience. They display the wishes and hopes of the creator and ask to be respected.
Like it or not, Andres Serrano image of a plastic crucifix in urine Piss Christ (1987) is a powerful anti-religion statement, not so much the belief system but the abuse by the organization.
Naturally powerful art makes enemies. From the Guardian (18 April)
On Saturday, around 1,000 Christian protesters marched through Avignon to the gallery… But on Palm Sunday morning, four people in sunglasses aged between 18 and 25 entered the exhibition just after it opened at 11am. One took a hammer out of his sock and threatened the guards with it. A guard grabbed another man around the waist but within seconds the group managed to take a hammer to the plexiglass screen and slash the photograph with another sharp object, thought to be a screwdriver or ice-pick. They also smashed another work, which showed the hands of a meditating nun.
After all the complaints and attitudes that it is only repressive regimes or Islamic movements who repress and censor it would be nice if all those who pointed fingers at those people now stood up and claimed about Catholics attempting to suppress free speech, art and culture. But somehow I doubt that this will happen.
Andres Serrano Piss Christ (1987)
If the Catholic church wants to stand up as a agent of good – then a quick and clear condemnation of the destruction in Avignon should be presented from the highest authority. But somehow I doubt that this will happen.
Its not that easy supporting free speech when you disagree with the content. But it is weak when you condemn the suppression of speech by others just because you don’t disagree with the content.
One of the greatest hinders to access and reuse of cultural material lies in the long terms of protection. The way in which copyright law works today is that it automatically protects (almost) all forms of cultural production (mainly) for a period of the life of the author plus 70 years. The effect of this is that nothing produced in my lifetime will be free in my lifetime.
This extension of the time of copyright is a major shift in the original idea of the bargain of copyright. The bargain was that the creator receives a limited monopoly and in return society will eventually receive the products of his or her work. Today the bargain is that the creator is protected and then his or her heirs take over the monopoly. This results in the situation where the children or grandchildren of the creator have the exclusive rights to the work.
My criticism is that the grandchildren of the creator should not have better rights to the work just because they have a genetic link to the author.
One area where the term of protection has remained shorter is the time span under which sound recordings are protected. But now the argument is why should sound recordings be discriminated against? Instead of arguing that the terms of protection are too long.
We all now have a chance to send a message and prevent this progress. Check out this attempt from the Open Rights Group to prevent this development. Read! And work for your rights.
The disastrous proposal to extend the term of copyright protection for sound recordings to 70 years is back on the European Council’s agenda.
There is a chance to stop this. You can help by writing to your MEPs now to tell them about your concerns, and ask them to make sure the Directive gets proper scrutiny from the European Parliament.
The economic evidence is stacked against the proposal. It will result in large parts of our cultural history being locked up. And it will benefit only a small number of artists and businesses. Leading IP professors, the UK government’s ‘Gowers Review’ of IP, and independent analysts commissioned by the EU have all said that extending the copyright term is unwise. You can read more about the evidence here.
You can help to make sure European decision makers look again at this damaging proposal by writing to your MEP now.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
