Culture

Defamation on Twitter

It should be pretty straightforward. Telling people that someone is a thief, a drug-pushing prostitute with a history of assault and battery who lost custody of her own child. But this case involves two complicating factors.

  • The case involves celebrities. It’s Courtney Love making these claims about her designer Dawn Simorangkir.
  • She did it using Twitter

The Hollywood Reporter writes:

So on March 17, 2009, Love took to her Twitter account and began hurling a stream of shocking insults at the designer known as the “Boudoir Queen.” Love’s tweets, which instantly landed in the Twitter feeds of her 40,000 or so followers (and countless others via retweets), announced that Simorangkir was a drug-pushing prostitute with a history of assault and battery who lost custody of her own child and capitalized on Love’s fame before stealing from her. “She has received a VAST amount of money from me over 40,000 dollars and I do not make people famous and get raped TOO!” Love wrote.

That tirade, along with others the Hole frontwoman unleashed on social media platforms including MySpace and Etsy.com during the next four days, form the basis of a unique lawsuit headed to court in January: the first high-profile defamation trial over a celebrity’s comments on Twitter.

So now its off to court which will first look at the truth in Love’s claims – telling the truth is the best defence in defamation – then the court will value if Love’s statements are protected opinions and then they will see if the protections afforded to journalists may apply in the case of twitter users.

The court in the present case may firstly address whether these comments are truthful (which is the most obvious defense to a claim of defamation), are protected opinions of Ms. Love or rise to the level of defamation. Then the court may wade into the issue of whether Twitter users are bloggers with rights akin to journalists.

Apparently Love’s defence is also planning to include a medical expert to support the argument – if none of the other defences work – that she was not subjectively malicious: in other words she could not understand how her tweets would be understood by others.

Posted on by mklang

Is information scarce or abundant?

The little I remember of basic economics was some pretty abstract curves that were supposed to depict supply and demand. Or at least the idea that the real cost of something was at the intersection of supply and demand. The simplistic arches of the curves always bugged me. One of the more annoying features is that attempting to map supply and demand is never as easy as it seems.

Take information. Information is important. Information is a resource. But are we in an age of information scarcity or information abundance? We are taught that information used to be scarce. Information is the basis of knowledge and knowledge is power according to Francis Bacon. We are also taught the simple story of Gutenburg who through certain technological developments revolutionized printing, created the market for cheap books and changed the world forever.

But was information scarce? There weren’t many books but did the market lack books?

Complaints about information overload, usually couched in terms of the overabundance of books, have a long history — reaching back to Ecclesiastes 12:12 (“of making books there is no end,” probably from the 4th or 3d century BC). The ancient moralist Seneca complained that “the abundance of books is distraction” in the 1st century AD, and there have been other info-booms from time to time — the building of the Library of Alexandria in the 3d century BC, or the development of newspapers starting in the 18th century. (Blair, Information Overload: the early years, Boston Globe)

One thing seems to be sure: in the post Gutenburg world the number of books and the number of readers increased. The inventions and business models did not only provide cheaper products but led to an increase in readers. The increased number of readers meant that there was a profitable market for more cheap books. And yet the overriding idea of the scarcity of books remained with us. In 1710 the basis for the first modern copyright legislation The Statute of Anne was to create monopolies to writers so the number of books on the market would increase.

Providing incentives for production is done in times of scarcity. Three hundred years later we have surely moved from scarcity to abundance and yet the only changes to copyright legislation has been to increase the incentives by adding more products the law protects and radically increasing the span of protection.

But we live in a time of information abundance. Information overload. Our impulse is to laugh at Seneca and wonder what he would make of an inbox filled with mail. So maybe its not a problem of overload? Clay Shirky presented at Web 2.0 Expo NY a talk: It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure. Or maybe I am mixing things up? Comparing two different things? Is the market for books and information really one market?

Or to make things even more interesting: is there one market for information? I don’t care about the price of a bus ticket in Cleveland, the rise or fall of IBM stock, how to make bricks in Sweden and a million other things. To me all this information may as well be abundant since it is (now) irrelevant. Does this mean that we have a Schroedingers Cat of information? Its both scarce and abundant simultaneously? So information is both scarce and abundant? Then how do you make rules…

Its bad enough that the rules focus not on the information but on the packet that carries it. The form but not the content. In a world were content has become less relevant. However can we regulate a resource that is both scarce and abundant simultaneously?

Posted on by mklang

Visualizing the (invisible) archive

The Swedish National Heritage Board is an excellent example of an authority with a mixed archive of miscellaneous content. Among their content are old photographs and among the photographs are the works of the Swedish physician (and prominent balneologist) Carl Curman (1833-1913). His photographs found their way into the archives and have spent an uneventful century mainly gathering dust.

Then last year the heritage board joined Flickr Commons and began adding Curman’s images to the pool. The results were spectacular to say the least. Today the heritage K-Blogg reports

I was quite thrilled this morning when I had a glance at the Flickr statistics for views on our account on Flickr Commons. The magical limit of 1 000 000 views since the launching on 2009.03.17, was reached – actually the number was 1 000 100 when I looked, a nice sight.

Digitalization brings with it many interesting problems and, at times, we focus too much on these negative issues. But as these results show, by opening up the archives in this way the almost forgotten works have been revived and made relevant again.

Posted on by mklang

Koons stikes back

A couple of days ago I mentioned the Jeff Koons lawsuits in a post on the problem of copyright in appropriation art. Usually people are angry with Jeff Koons for using and abusing their work in his creative process. Interestingly now it’s Koons who is attempting to use copyright to stop other people using his art.

Art and Artifice write

just before Christmas Koons decided to take the initiative… His lawyers sent a cease and desist letter to Park Life a San Francisco shop for selling balloon dog book ends.

Besides the confusing fact that Koons is now the infringed the case is stranger by the fact that the shop is not the manufacturer or sole reseller of the product. Artinfo writes

The bookends, in fact, are manufactured by Toronto-based imm Living. They retail for $30, and are supposedly available in some 700 stores in the United States, according to an article on the dust-up in the Bay Citizen. The Park Life representative said that the original cease-and-desist letter demanded that the store hand over all remaining balloon dog merchandise to representatives of the artist.

Finally lets not forget what we are talking about: copies of balloon dogs…

New York Trip: Jeff Koons on the roof show by luccawithcheese

image: New York Trip: Jeff Koons on the roof show by luccawithcheese (CC BY NC SA)

is this then also copyright infringement?

Posted on by mklang

Lawyers vs Artists: Who defines copyright?

In texts there is a right to quote. In music there is not. In art – its complicated. One of the reasons is that text has always been easy to quote, music sampling has been discussed commercially for a long time but art has been slower. But what about now? With our digital toys the ability to create mashups and remixes is not in the realm of a limited number. How should copyright react to image quotes?

Artists have traditionally quoted themes and compositions. This copying has filled many roles: it has been part of the process of learning the craft, a homage to inspirational artists and a way to further a discussion by referring to, and re-interpreting, the past.

A recent exhibition at Tate Britain aimed to show that Turner quoted widely from the past. Michelangelo’s quoting of Laocoön in parts of the Sistine Chapel have even led to a theory that he in fact sculpted the work.

Pop artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol regularly quoted from popular culture. But this time copyright law had begun to react and the process of quoting in art was being brought before the courts. Warhol settled out of court after appropriating an image from the photographer Patricia Caulfield in his work Four Foot Flowers but his famous soup is generally seen as non-infringing.

When Jeff Koons took a photo and created the sculpture String of Puppies the photographer successfully sued for copyright infringement (Rogers v. Koons). But in 2006 Koons won a case were he quoted from the photographer Andrea Blanch in his work Niagara. The court found that he had sufficiently transformed the original so as to be considered fair use. For an interesting discussion on an important subsection of quoting: the appropriation of traditional/indigenous art read Rimmers Four Stories About Copyright Law and Appropriation Art.

How should quoting be understood?

From an artistic (or non-Copyright) perspective the issues of plagiarism and exclusivity seem to be more central to the artists. The general perspective seems to be that artists view copyright limitations to quoting as a free speech issue but there are no artistic licenses to use copyrighted images (beyond fair use). Landes makes the argument that – from a transaction cost perspective – the law should take into account the number of copies involved.

In contrast, when the appropriation artist makes many copies, he should be treated no differently from a firm that incorporates licensed images in products such as calendars, coffee mugs and beach towels.

Overexposure of a work can lead to loss of value. Wayne Hemingway writes in Just Above the Mantlepiece that mass-production is the enemy of art and supports his argument by giving the example of Tretchikoff:

Within two years of the paintings being reproduced in print form, Tretchikoff became relegated to lowbrow status. In fact, Tretchikoff’s decision to reproduce his prints . . . transformed the relationship between artist and purchaser to one between artist and a hundred-thousand purchasers.

Unfortunately attempting to discuss this from the point of view of number of copies does not really work in digital environments where 200 000 views of a YouTube clip is not a large number. There is an additional problem as much of the remixed works are free – or at least not sold by the creator.

Are artists the problem?

Another interesting problem is attempting to define “the artist”. Its easy enough to say that Jeff Koons is an artist. But is the creator of an image mashup an artist? And nomatter if you answer yes or no to that question: Will the creator of a mashup be seen as a artist in the future? How important is it really that copyright is there to help promote the production of works? And should limitations really be viewed as threats to culture and free speech?

Posted on by 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.

Posted on by mklang

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