- "This paper on digital art and intellectual property has been commissioned and published by Canadian Heritage Information Network CHIN),"
September 2006 Archives
Former self-appointed "leader of the Free Culture Movement" Lawrence Lessig writes:One of the most important conclusions that can be drawn from the work of Benkler, von Hippel, Weber (my review of both is here), and many others is that the Internet has reminded us that we live not just in one economy, but at least two.How is this conclusion reached? Why is this split identified? Why is it considered useful?One economy is the traditional “commercial economy,” an economy regulated by the quid pro quo: I'll do this (work, write, sing, etc.) in exchange for money.This is the economy. Attempting to expand the ideology of economics to non-economic spheres is neoloiberal cretinisation.Another economyA metaphoric economy at best. Metaphor should not be confused with reality when constructing arguments.is (the names are many) the (a) amateur economy, (b) sharing economy, (c) social production economy, (d) noncommercial economy, or (e) p2p economy.This is a false dichotomy based on confusion of a metaphor with reality. You also seem to have decided to cast things entirely in terms of simplistic market economics.In fact the existence of this “second economy” is a product of creative freedom. As Open Source advocates fail to understand that they can only do things “just for fun” because of the freedoms that Free Software has won for them, so you seem to fail to understand that “Open Content” (a terrible name that Stallman rightly argues against), or rather Free Culture, is the product of freedoms, not a mysterious spontaneous phenomena that must be explained by the market.This second economy (however you name it, I'm just going to call it the “second economy”) is the economy of Wikipedia, most FLOSS development, the work of amateur astronomers, etc. It has a different, more complicated logic too it than the commercial economy. If you tried to translate all interactions in this second economy into the frame of the commercial economy, you'd kill it.And if you described your brain as an economy and tried to force your neurons to pay for firing you'd reach brain death quickly. The metaphor is not the reality. But let's say just for a moment that we tried to bring this “second economy” (actually the social space created by cultural freedom) under the regulation of the market economy. We would need a way of monetising each identifiable work and preventing its exploitation in the “first economy” (the economy).One way of doing this would be to lock work that is deemed to be a product of this “second economy” (and how do you determine this economically?) out and to demand monetary compensation if it is used by the “first economy”.The situation that you describe as death for the “second economy” is therefore precisely that created by the NC Begging License that you recommend below.Having now seen the extraordinary value of this second economy,This monetary value is the product of the ethical value of the causes of this” economy”. By trying to treat this “economy” as a mysterious phenomena rather than as an effect, then trying to create it (when it has already been created!!!) using ham-fisted economics rather than the ethics that actually create it, you are making the classic economist's mistake.Prostitution is better for the economy than marriage after all. And public goods are better privatised.I think most would agree we need to think lots about how best to encourage itI repeat: protect the rights that create it. Do not try to erase the history of phenomena to create a false lack of causes for them that must then be addressed with the ideology of market economics. Do not try to become the Bzzzagents of “open content”. - what techniques are needed to call it into life,Give people the rights, let them create. This happened, it works. It is only by sending the history that produced the phenomena we are examining down the memory hole that we can be mystified enough by their operation to panic that they must need more money or they will disappear. how is it sustained, what makes it flourish.I don't think anyone knows exactly how to do it well.Ask Jimbo. Ask Richard. Ask anyone who actually does it.Those living in real second economy communities (such as Wikipedia) have a good intuition about it.They are making it a spectacular success if that's what you mean. But what they are making a success of is a space for human culture, not a failed attempt at DRM.But a second and also extremely difficult problem is how, or whether, the economies can be linked. Markets float on commons. The business model of reproductions as reputation, monetized by performance is common to Free Software (not “FLOSS”) and Free Culture. This is well known.Is there a way to cross over from the commercial to second economy? See previous sentence.Is there a way to manage a hybrid economy - one that tries to manage this link.Trans.: how can we reduce people's freedom in order to make more money? This is a false dichotomy. This entire plea for a reduction in freedom to serve the market is a false dichotomy. The model for monetising free culture is well established.The challenge of the hybrid economy is what Mozilla, RedHat, Second Life, MySpace are struggling with all the time. MySpace and Second Life aren't a “hybrid economy”. They are enclosures. And Mozilla's management are not very good, which is hard to address with a license.Red Hat make money, I believe. IBM, Apple, SuSE, and many others you have forgotten to mention all do as well.How can you continue to inspire the creative work of the second economy, while also expanding the value of the commercial economy? By protecting and encouraging the ethical framework that causes that “economy” to come into being as a subset of its benefits. Not by attacking and undermining that ethical framework and destroying the very conditions that create the value you feel isn't being monetised in the correct way.This is, in my view, a different challenge from the challenge of how you call this second economy into being,Wouldn't it be great if America had roads? How can we build roads across America? I think the government should sieze houses across the continental US in a grid pattern to ensure that roads can be built.What do you mean America already has roads? We're talking about how to ensure that it has roads. We have to ensure America has roads otherwise it won't. but obviously, they are related. But this challenge too is one I don't think anyone yet understands fully.This is argument from personal incredulity and ignores the existing examples of successful models for monetising the products of people's freedoms.As I watch Creative Commons develop, I've been encouraged by the experiments that try to find a way to preserve this second economy, Trying to limit this “second economy” for the benefit of the first one is a bizarre way of trying to preserve it. Destroying the village doesn't save it.while enabling links to the first. I wrote before about Yehuda Berlinger who had set IP law to verse. In that post, I nudged him to adopt a CC license. He did, but he did so in a very interesting way. As his site now reads:This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. Attribution should include a live link to this blog post, whenever possible; text link otherwise. License for commercial usage also available from the owner.How fortunate for him that the work he has derived from is in the public domain. How much would he have been willing to pay in order to make this work?So the answer to “how do we encourage free riders on the commons” is: tell them to make their derivatives of public domain work into noncommercial nagware.This idea is one we're experimenting with at CC - a NC license that explicitly includes a link to another site to enable commercial licensing.Commercial licensing is not the passing on of freedom.It is one way to preserve the separation of these separate spheres. Wait. Before you were asking how we move value from the “second economy” into the first economy. Now you are talking about ensuring that they remain separate. You seem to want a one-way trap door from cultural freedom to economics. A catflap of the commons.I'd be eager to hear about other ways you might think better.The ways that work now, and that people need support to extend into more examples of Free Culture.But the important point to recognize is that this effort to preserve the separation is fundamentally different from the effort of many in the “free software” or “free content” movement who want all “free” licenses to permit any sort of use, commercial or not. This effort is indeed fundamentally different. It is ideologically and practically broken, and should not be carried out under a banner of free culture.Imho, they are simply ignoring an important reality about the difference between these two economies.Which reality is that? And who has set the terms that we are establishing this “reality” of two different social contexts by?Indeed, they're making the opposite mistake that many in the commercial world make: Just as many commercial rights holders believe every single use of creative work ought to be regulated by copyright (see, e.g., the push to force what are plainly “fair uses” of copyrighted work on YouTube to pay the copyright owners), so too these advocates of “free content” would push everyone to treat everything as if it is free of copyright regulation (effectively, if not technically).And if you have a position on the death sentence and I have a position on the death sentence, we both have positions on the death sentence. Therefore neither of us is right.I'd also question the mischaracterisationof copyleft as “effectively free of copyright regulation”, and your failure to consider trademark and moral rights law. Second economy sorts believe differently - that some uses should be free, and others should be with permission.There's a book you should read that argues against the idea of a “permission culture” at length. It's called “Free Culture”, by Lawrence Lessig.I notice that the link from Yehuda's work to the licensing page does not mention Fair Use. Creative Commons would do better to promote Fair Use than to promote NC Nagware.It is because I have enormous respect for those who make the latter mistakeThe mistake of understanding the cause of the phenomena you are trying to re-create with an economics that will undermine and destroy them?(and believe their motives are more likely pure)I am not under NDA to any large media corporations, and am not beholden to Microsoft for my funding, no.that I urge them to consider the radical simplification of social life they insist we push on the world.Don't say social when you mean economic.I like the dynamics of the second economy. Benkler has given it a theory. I think we should be working to support it, not pretending that it is not there.This is a straw man argument. We should be working to support creative freedom, not pretending that it is not there and that we have an economic mystery to solve.The obvious reply (and the real puzzle for me) is FLOSS.This is because the economic success of Free Software is not a product of economics. Freedom is an externality that you destroy by trying to create through markets.Economics doesn't do irony. I said at the start it effectively operated in the second economy. But the “free content” movement that I'm skeptical of is simply trying to push the norms of FLOSS into the content space. How could it then be any different?“Free Content” is as nonsensical as “Open Source”. Remember Free Culture and Free Software instead. Consider the causes, the ethical framework. Not the effects and the cashing out.In my view, the difference comes from the difference in nature of the stuff. You have yet to explain this difference, leaving an unexamined assumption at the heart of your argument.Some cultural production can be collaborative in exactly the way FLOSS is - Wikipedia. But you need an argument to get from some to all. No doubt, I too need an argument that some is different from some. I don't have that yet. But it is here that I think the really important discussion needs to happen.Try this.Culture as a whole is a collaborative project. To look at a single part of it such as Wikipedia and say “well that works but I can't see how wre could generalise it” ignores Shakespeare, Homer, The Renaissance, Elvis Presly, in fact it ignores the entirity of Human culture.The question is not can Wikipedia scale or continue without the blessing of economics. The question is how do we prevent Wikipedia becoming the last outpost of a culture that badly thought out economics is destroying.Oh, and by the way, Yehuda has added Trademark Law to his verses.Good for him. I hope you are getting a cut for advertising his work so prominently on a site that must cost a considerable amount in bandwidth charges each month, otherwise you might distort the economics of his venture.
- "Flowing in the baroque wilderness of fleshy forms, diving into the realm of whatifs and whynots, is a delicious project called pixelnouveau"
- "Perhaps most troubling, though, was the way in which the Da Vinci Code story was so often covered without a clear statement of the operative principle of copyright: one cannot protect facts and ideas, only specific expressions of ideas."
- "FAVE is an event for people who are interested in free and open source creative software on Linux and other computer platforms. "
DRM isn't code, it's law.
How to Use CC-Licensed Work On "DRM" DevicesDVD - View on non-CSS DVD.iPod - Install unencumbered file using iTunes. No DRM is added.PSP - Add to memory stick then play or view normally.PS2 - Play from CD or DVD.PS3 - Boot in Linux and play or view.Wii - Use unprotected media.Devices From The Above List You Can Install GNU/Linux OnAll except non-CSS DVD, which can be played by GNU/Linux, PS3, which allegedly come with GNU/Linux pre-installed, and Wii, which has not been released yet but has a GNU/Linux port in progress.DRM For Artists And ConsumersNone of the devices we have discussed need DRM permission to use CC-licensed cultural works. All can run a free operating system. Artists and consumers can use CC-licensed media on these devices without hitting the TPM restrictions.DRM For Game DevelopersSoftware developers for these platforms cannot allow their work that uses CC-licensed materials to be DRM-encumbered by the hardware platform vendor. Since this is a classic case of making work proprietary, using more modern copyright law than that which existed when the FSD or DFSG were drafted, this is no worse than copyleft. And given that all listed devices can run GNU/Linux, developers have the option to target this Free operating system instead.In ConclusionAll the systems that have been mentioned during discussion of the CC-3 licence drafts as case studies for CC licences conflicting with DRM do not need DRM for media, and can run Free Software that doesn't need DRM to use CC-licensed media in games.
The problem with the Linux Kernel Developers position on DRM (and this can be seen in Debian-Legal's attitude to the Creative Commons anti-DRM language as well) is that they view DRM as a technology, not as an extension of copyright law. DRM has power only through law: it would not be illegal to remove or reverse-engineer DRM otherwise. But too many hackers idealise DRM systems as code and DRM-laden files as data. They ignore the legal dimension, and this leads to confused reasoning.To cite the FSD or DFSG freedom to modify code in support of this new excess of copyright law is an example of that confused reasoning. You cannot modify BSD-licensed code to remove the copyright header for example, and you cannot add the string “all rights reserved” to the top of a GPL-2-licensed file, yet despite restricting your freedom in this way neither license breaks the FSD or the DFSG. If the BSD license said “you may not write a script to remove this header”, would that break the DFSG?DRM is an extension of copyright law that can prevent computer users from exercising their freedoms. Those who support DRM seem to view code, rather than human beings, as the subject of Free Software's freedoms. This is an impoverished understanding of freedom. But if you must write DRM code, the GPL-3 will not prevent you. It just removes the legal privileges that such code would otherwise have to remove users' freedom.(Originally posted as a comment on Luis Villa's weblog, reproduced with minor edits for clarity).
Free your iPod! iPodLinux or Rockbox are both Free operating systems for iPods. iPodLinux is easier to install and supports all your existing software but may not handle as many formats. Rockbox is harder to install but supports more free formats and a wider range of players.So there really is no excuse for not having Free Software on your iPod.Thanks to Matt Lee for suggesting Rockbox to me!
Guide to the new drafts of documentation licenses — GPLv3The first discussion draft of the GNU Free Documentation License version 2 was released on 2006 September 26, along with a draft of the new GNU Simpler Free Documentation License.The SFDL is much better than the FDL, and you can move FDL work with no invariant sections to it. The FSF should use it as the main FDL. And not do a Wiki Licence either. Even CC didn't do a Wiki Licence. ;-)
- Weblog for Free Culture Dundee.
- "As a campaign is launched to get the nation drawing, writer and keen amateur sketcher Diana Athill explains how nudes changed her life"
- "Art attributed to Adolf Hitler goes on sale in Britain tomorrow, but would the Führer really paint like this? Jonathan Jones is deeply sceptical"
Writing Minara has been a positive, if occasionally frustrating, experience for me. It's precisely the wrong way to write a graphics program but it works surprisingly well. I've gained a lot of insight, and made something unique.But it's that uniqueness that limits its utility to others and means that I'm unlikely to find support for it. So I'm looking at switching to Inkscape. Hopefully the experience I've gained writing Minara can help add some interesting stuff to Inkscape and create something like the interactive environment for graphics coding that Minara was designed to be.
I'm working on a vector graphics equivalent to Latham & Todd's mutator. The first (trivial) stage is to create random vector scribbles.
These can then be evolved into something better over successive generations of mutation and visual evaluation. At the moment the scribbles are just lists of drawing instructions, but transformation and iteration functions will make the images more structured.
These can then be evolved into something better over successive generations of mutation and visual evaluation. At the moment the scribbles are just lists of drawing instructions, but transformation and iteration functions will make the images more structured.
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/6072 Valleywag: Record companies, it's finally time for the Creative Commons license Practically every online downloading system already comes with a Digital Rights Management lock that limits its use. That same technology could mark music as "pre-approved for performance" -- a song that users can play with, dance to, re-record, and post to the Internet with impunity.Hint: Fair Use.
I blogged a little while ago about How to Make Money From Free Culture.Richard Fairhurst has an excellent post on this subject in the context of cartography. I don't agree with his conclusions, though:Art and Open Data (or, paying the mortgage)The Red Hat model works well for people who can be employed as technicians. During the day, you get paid for supporting Linux; you go home, under the roof paid for by your day job, and hack on the kernel during your free time. That's great. That doesn't work for art. If you want to earn a living from art, you can either become a gun for hire - working to patrons' commissions - or you can have the brave faith in your own abilities that, some day, someone will pay for the art that you are compelled to make. Either way, you can only keep up with the mortgage so long as people are prepared to give money to own, or use, your artistic creation. There is no equivalent of the Red Hat technician.In fact most artists (musicians, painters, sculptors, writers, poets, etc.) are exactly the equivalent of the Red Hat technician. They make money from residencies, competitions, technician jobs, evening classes, lecturing, readings, performances, tutoring, commissions, and other payment for services. Just making and selling art doesn't pay the mortgage until you have a reputation or an audience. To get paid until then, and to build your reputation and audience, you need exposure. Copyleft helps you to get this, and it keeps that work for you later.For autographic art (painting and sculpture), there is always the original object to sell. For allographic art (music, literature), there is always performances and deluxe signed editions. There isn't getting rich from selling reproductions (unless you sell them yourself; if bottled water can compete with free there's no reason why art shouldn't), but then very few actual artists get rich from reproductions. CDs and paperbacks make lawyers and executives rich, rarely the artists. So artists either get paid using the Red Hat model, or use that model to become Red Hat executives, er, well-known artists.The problem that Richard identifies of artisan cartographers not being able to pay their mortgages because people can copy their BY-SA maps if they are derived from Open Streetmap data (a scenario I'm not sure will work given the copyright status of map data) is solved by the details of how the Red Hat model works. Artisan cartographers commissioned to make maps are paid by the third parties that commission and print the maps. People will photocopy small maps anyway, and will not take the time to copy large maps. In these circumstances the only problem is that BY-SA may put the map commisioners off, but this assumes that they dislike freedom (and don't think its network effects will protect them from competition) more than they dislike paying for data from the Ordinance Survey or elsewhere.
- "Our corporate art model needs to change. I, for one, ama tired of the power of the Chelseans."
- Drawing lessons
- It's true.
- "a fluxus development blog, and work-in-progress gallery"
Yochai Benkler describes Open Source as a methodology of "commons based peer production". This means work made collaboratively and shared publicly by a community of equals. For Eric Raymond the virtue of Open Source is its efficiency. Open Source can create better products faster than the old closed source model. Many of the most successful software programs in use today, particularly on the internet, are Open Source.Applying the ideas of Open Source to other projects, be they political, philosophical or artistic, is more difficult than it might seem. The idea of Open Source as a more efficient means of production has nothing to say about what Open Source politics or art should be like.To take the example of the Open Congress event at Tate Modern, artists struggled to find an Open Source ideology to apply to their art, activists struggled to find an Open Source ideology to apply to their organisations, and theorists grinned and invoked Deleuze and Spinoza to cover the gaps.This confusion is not a problem with the idea of Open Source. Rather it is the intended result of it. The name "Open Source" was deliberately chosen for its meaninglessness and ideological vacuity. This was intended to make the results of a very strong ideology more palatable to large corporations by disguising its origins. That ideology is Free Software.Free Software is a set of principles designed to protect the freedom of individuals to use computer software. It emerged in the 1980s against a backdrop of increasing restrictions on the use and production of software. Free Software can therefore be understood historically and ethically as the defence of freedom against a genuine threat.Once software users freedoms are protected the methodology that we know as Open Source becomes possible and its advantages become apparent. But without the guiding principles of Free Software the neccessity and direction of Open Source cannot be accounted for. Open Source has no history or trajectory, it cannot account for itself or suggest which taasks are neccessary or important. Free Software requires freedom, which is a practical goal to pursue.Free Software is a historical development, a set of principles, and a set of possibilities. Free Software projects have converged on the methodology that Raymond describes as Open Source because of this. To describe this methodology as "commons based peer production" causes further confusion. There are no peers in a Free Software project. If contributions are deemed to be of acceptable quality, they are added to the project by its appointed gatekeepers. If not, they are rejected and advice given. This methodology is a structured and exclusive one, but it is meritocratic. Any contribution of sufficient quality can be accepted, and if someone makes enough such contributions they themselves may gain the trust required to become a gatekeeper.This confusion leads to projects such as Wikipedia trying to create an open space for anyone to use as they wish. This leads to social darwinism, not freedom, as the contents of that space is determined by a battle of wills. Wikipedia has had to evolve to reproduce many of the structures of a real Free Software project to tackle these problems. But people still regard its earlier phase as a model for emulation, whereas it should serve as more of a warning.It is therefore the condition of Freedom rather than the condition of Open Source that art should aspire to. Prior to the extension of copyright to cover art as well as literature, art was implicitly free. The physical artefacts of art were expensive to own and difficult or impossible to transport. But the content of art was free to use. Michaelangelo could rip off christian and pagan imagery to paint a ceiling, generations of artists could riff on the theme of the cruxifiction, and anyone could carve a statue of Venus. The representational freedom of artists, part of which is the freedom to depict and build or comment on existing culture, to continue the conversation of culture, is the freedom of art.With photography and now electronic media, copyright and trademarks have increasingly restricted the artists freedom to continue the conversation of culture. Where once artists could paint gods and kings, they must now be careful not to paint chocolate and the colour purple or they will infringe Cadbury's trademark. And new computer technology makes it possible to physically lock artists out of mass media imagery, closing off part of the world from art's freedom of representation.In this context artists are not volunteers when they take on issues of cultural freedom. They are exemplars. Free art, a free culture, is of vital importance for a free society. Part of this freedom may be ideas of "commons based peer production". But it is important not to confuse the results of an ideology with its principles. It is these principles that artists should pursue.How then can art learn from Free Software?* Artists should campaigning to oppose the extension of copyright and trademark law and the reduction of fair use.* Artists should use copyleft licensing to ensure the free circulation of ideas.* Artists who are interested to do so can investigate the use of collaborative project management.* Artists who are interested to do so should produce work to show the value of fair use and the public domain.* Artists who are interested to do so should challenge copyright maximalists and censors by using mass media imagery and transgressive imagery.* Artists should use Free Software and free (or "open") file formats for accessibility, and help drive improvement of them.What mistakes of Open Source can people avoid?* Read "Free Software Free Society" and "Free Culture", not "The Cathedral And The Bazaar".* Don't try to organise your organisation in an "Open Source" way. That methodology is for content, not structure.* Don't try to emulate early Wikipedia's world-writeability. Emulate the meritocratic model that Wikipedia is converting to instead.* Don't hide your ideology. Renaming "Free Software" to "Open Source" has cost the people who have done so the biggest software market in the US, as the military are much more comfortable with "freedom" than they are with "openness".What are good examples?* Joy Garnett.* Kollabor8.* Open Clip Art Library.* Remix Reading.* Me. ;-)
- "a symposium/salon about open source art on September 24 in Tokyo." Wish I could be there.
- Banksy shows how radical he is by removing a recursive Banksy from his show within 15 minutes. Fight the power.
- "I'm wondering if Brazil's socially based production and distribution of music might serve as a kind of R&D for the developed world."
Does anyone else find it funny that theorists have a word that means "actually doing something about it"?
I've installed Debian (sid) on my iBook again. it's much better than when I tried the previous version a year ago. It supports suspend and resume, and after some fiddling even the built-in wireless card.Now I just need to install Rockbox on my iPod and my software is all free.
Last month I was meant to be getting Minara ready for release. I have to admit that I didn't touch the code all month, and I haven't been blogging all that much either.
I spent the month writing a catalogue essay for the excellent MANIK and reading novels. Hopefully my MANIK essay will help convince a few more people that MANIK are quite simply How Art Should Be Done. When not worrying what to say about two of my favourite artists I finished a couple of Jeeves & Wooster anthologies and I am now halfway through Steppenwolf.
I have been drawing though, both in sketchbooks and on the A1 business pad I have attached to the back of my bedroom door using self-adhesive hooks. The indexicality of drawing materials, especially business drawing materials, amuses me and I am enjoying subverting them to make my art. I must find my digital camera and upload pictures of what I have been doing.
I also helped map Reading, had meetings for Free Culture UK and Still River, and 'Pataphysically attended a 'Pataphysics book launch. Which is to say I didn't.
If anyone else wants a catalogue essay any time soon the answer is no. Anyone who tells you that writing about art is easier than making it is lying. I should be getting back to work on Minara soon, and draw-something, and even paintr. Just as soon as I finish another review for Furtherfield and finish a couple of flame wars on Rhizome, and find out what happens to Harry Haller...
What freedoms do people need to work with culture? Or, to phrase the question another way, what human rights exist as a result of the existence of culture?These freedoms may be disparate. Art may not need the same freedoms as journalism. But different areas of cultural endeavour need access to each other to continue the conversation of culture. Art draws on literature and criticism, and vice versa. Even if one artist may not use advertising imagery another may, or a musician the first artist enjoys listening to (or is inspired by) may. This means that an individual may not benefit from specific instances of use of their work, but will benefit from the general ability to use others' work. This is not to privilege society over the individual, rather it is to give the individual the broadest general freedom.The concept of "use" of culture is contentious, and failure to understand it leads to bad conclusions being drawn. Playing a song on your iPod is use. Playing the same song on your guitar, singing the same song in the shower, writing down the lyrics, ripping the song from your iPod to your new MP3 player, using part of the song to illustrate a video and mixing samples from the song into a new composition are all use of the work.It is important not to privilege "creative" uses of work over "consumer" uses of work. This is important because doing so harms consumers (the vast majority of the population) and it also actually harms "creators". Creators are consumers too, their education and ongoing production are based on consumption of other work. And their leisure time will consist of consumption like anybody else. There are no creators who are not downstream of other creators, both as creators and consumers.If we privilege creators over consumers then DRM and NonCommercial restrictions become acceptable. These harm creators directly, by preventing them from using work creatively, and indirectly, by depressing consumption of their work. And they harm consumers as well. Regard creators as a sub-group of consumers, creation as a form of consumption (even if only in the sense that an artist is their own first audience), and this generalisation informs the idea of use.The boundaries of use that people seem to understand intuitively are those of Fair Use. Artists seem to understand Transformative Fair Use, and I will call the combination of Transformative Fair Use, peer to peer sharing and other modern generalisations of fair use Generalised Fair Use.It is Generalised Fair Use that makes sharing songs on peer-to-peer networks the same as making tapes for friends. Research shows that kids regard noncommercial copying among friends as acceptible but commercial piracy as unacceptible. Artists often regard using fragments or transformed copies of work as acceptable but wholesale copying as plagiarism. Generalised Fair Use is best captured in a licence by Creative Commons's Sampling Plus license, written to incorporate the ideas of the band Negativland.If Generalised Fair Use is the generally held view of the boundaries of cultural use, Richard Stallman's Four Freedoms are the generally held view of the boundaries of software use, or of the freedom of users of software.Stallman's Four Freedoms are broader than Generalised Fair Use, in particular they allow wholesale re-use and commercial copying. If we try to apply the Four Freedoms to culture rather than to software this may seem to clash with intuitive understandings of use of culture. It may seem to be a mis-match. Stallman himself does not advocate the Four Freedoms for all cultural works.The Four Freedoms can be explained psychologically and historically. They can be seen as Stallman's attempt to recreate his personal nirvana, the MIT AI Lab of the 1970s. This explanation is not a dismissal. The MIT AI Lab at that time, funded by the Cold War American military, was indeed an ideal model of computer usage. And the Four Freedoms are an ideal expression of the human rights that come into existence with the ready availability of computing machinery, they give the most general freedom to users of computers. There were no human rights before there were humans, and there were no computing freedoms before there were computers. But the historical emergence of a truth does not invalidate that truth.Fair Use has its problems. Lawrence Lessig describes Fair Use as "the right to hire a lawyer". Fair use is not experienced as a general right in practice, it varies in its application even between instances of the same use. This is a strong flaw for Fair Use. No rights are certain in practice, but Fair Use is so uncertain, and so dependent on being able to pay for access to legal defence, that it can be a hollow "right".The contradictions of Fair Use's indirect effects make the case for Fair Use as opposed to The Four Freedoms less clear cut. It is possible to make money from copying indirectly under Generalised Fair Use if you are a P2P company or a blank tape manufacturer. You just cannot make money directly. It is possible to copy an entire work. You must simply do so non-commercially or in a form that doesn't compete with the original.You can copy all of a work non-transformatively in some circumstances. It is rare that Fair Use gives equivalent freedom to the Four Freedoms simultaneously, but this creates more uncertainty and may not restrict other users any more at any given moment.The Four Freedoms are a superset of Fair Use. Compared to Fair Use they offer clarity and certainty in the form of a generalised set of rights. They solve every specific problem that "orphan works" protesters, p2p protestors, fair use protestors, and other specific campaigners seek to address. And they solve it not with a long list of exceptions but with a single inclusive strategy.Opponents of The Four Freedoms for culture generally cite reputation or monetary remuneration as harmful losses to copyleft. These are serious complaints and deserve serious consideration. ND and NC are responses to the potential of such losses. But ND users generally want stronger restrictions than even normal copyright, and have Moral Rights to defend them anyway. To enforce ND effectively would require draconian anti-user technology that cannot be less harmful than any loss of reputation. And NC does not prevent everyone else making money from licenced work. P2P networks and MP3 player manufacturers can profit handsomely from NC work. It is true that other record labels cannot re-sell it. But it is also true that the author cannot compete economically with their own work made available universally at no cost. NC is therefore a hollow victory at best. This is not to say that economic or personality rights are unimportant. It is to say that the way they are approached here is self-defeating and overly harmful to other rights.The Four Freedoms are not without their problems, but these problems are more subtle than people taking quotes out of context or people not being able to get rich from a novelty single. Alternatives to the Four Freedoms give less general freedom, are unclear or unfair, or are self-contradictory and ineffective despite seeming less harmful in some special cases. The Four Freedoms are the only general enough and powerful enough model of human rights concerned with the freedom to use creations of the mind that we have today. In as much as any discovery of human ethics can be, they are true.
- Copyleft hip hop.
- "Teeline shorthand is an essential skill for all journalists. The course at Westminster is based on the teeline system, specially adapted by Vivien Saunders to the needs of journalists (as opposed, for example, to secretaries and clerical workers)."
- "We're CNUK - we're a bunch of creative people working on a bunch of cool stuff that you can use in your own projects."
- Excellent subjective data visaulization.
- Excellent generative art.
- I call these "enclosures".
- " "I slowly became fascinated by the idea of a contemporary reinterpretation of the sea chantey," Verbinski says. "
The Value Of Freedom
Tom in the comments raises a question that I will recast as the issue of which "freedoms" are more important. In abstract all freedoms are equally important if we have some concept of human dignity or worth, it is only when these freedoms collide in practice that we should seek to prioritise them. But there is a temptation to regard some freedoms as obviously more important than others, especially in a crisis. The idea of feeding people first then worrying about their freedom seems eminently practical.
Ignoring freedom in the name of immediate need can be counter-productive though, and can be engineered to serve other people's ends. To take a common example, women's rights may seem a shibboleth when faced with the need to deal with patriarchal community leaders to feed the starving. But denying women's rights is immensely harmful to society and the economy in general, never mind to the half of the population they apply to, and may well not lead to everyone getting fed whether today or in the long run. It will serve patriarchal power structures though.
In trying to prioritise freedoms one must be wary of unintended consequences and self-undermining actions if one believes that freedoms have social value. If one believes that freedoms are part of human dignity or absolute in some other way, then again one must be very careful that one's sentiment does not undermine the very ends one is seeking to achieve, and that it is not exploited to serve the ultimately oppositional and un-free or un-dignified ends of others. And If freedoms are of value in themselves, they may be worth suffering for.
More Reification
The idea of a "commons" is reification. It privileges the objects of human activity over that activity (and humanity). It also leads to calling people "commoners", which implies a king and a feudal society.
The idea of "Free Software" looks like it again confuses human subjectivity with the products of that subjectivity. It should perhaps be "Hacker Freedom", and "Free Culture" should be "Cultural Freedom" or "Freedom of Culture". The latter two may be useful labels to get away from the secondary permission culture of NC anyway. But the principles of Free Software are human freedoms, not "freedom" of the products of human activity. This is another reason why the BSD fanatic view of the world is wrong. Selling the products of human activity is not as important as the freedom to continue that activity.
- "Top 25 Censored news stories of 2007"
- "I'm getting pretty tired of hearing the line "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about" "
- "PM examines the evidence and consults the experts to refute the most persistent conspiracy theories of September 11."
- "The Guardian and the Saatchi gallery's Your Gallery project are joining forces to create a unique contemporary art show, featuring exciting new talent from across the globe - and we want you to curate it."
- "This is a general category of Creativity and Innovation Techniques, simply listed in alphabetical order"
- "A new touring exhibit called "Spymaker: The Science of Spying" has issued a novel call for participation: they're looking for ideas for speculative, near-future surveillance and counter-surv[...] The quirk is that all submissions have to be licensed unde
- “Mass-Observation develops out of anthropology, psychology, and the sciences which study man,” the letter read, “but it plans to work with a mass of observers.”
- Osmarender is a rule based rendering tool for generating SVG images of OSM data.
- JOSM is the "Java Open Street Map Editor" developed by Imi.
- The following are some Standards and Conventions for editing the maps.
- Having created your nodes, segments and ways you'll want to tag them with additional information, for example the road name, the road number and type (whether it's an A road, B road, footpath, railway, and so on).
- This page aims to provide an introduction to OpenStreetMap, from the point of view of those new to the project and wishing to join-in.
- "Real Freedom is a term coined by the political philosopher and economist Philippe Van Parijs. It is a concept of freedom that expands upon notions of negative freedom by incorporating not simply institutional or other constraints on a person's choices, b
- "The philosophical concept of negative liberty refers to an individual's liberty from being subjected to the authority of others. In this negative sense, one is considered free to the extent to which no person interferes with his or her activity."
- "Positive liberty is an idea that was first expressed and analyzed as a separate conception of liberty by John Stuart Mill but most notably described by Isaiah Berlin. It refers to the opportunity and ability to act to fulfill one's own potential, as oppo
- "networked sociality, media art education, sociable web media, activism"
- "Explains pretty succinctly the concept of the ‘wisdom of the crowds' / ‘crowd sourcing' / ‘collaborative projects'. It's been difficult trying to sum up the problems with this sharing dynamic, because on the surface it's a great way of ac
- "a set of photographs that collects matches between Pantone color codings & real world objects."
- "As the world bids good riddance to bad blog, a chance to look back at Lee Siegel's art critical legacy."
- "A program that works out the meaning of newly coined words using the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia"
- "The Ethics of the Free Culture Movement - Lawrence Lessig" (sic)
- "The discipline of behavioural economics gives an explanation as to why the contemporary art market has developed in the way that it has, in particular why such things as relationships seem to matter more than money."
- "The J. Paul Getty Trust has announced it will publish detailed financial and governance information on its website (www.getty.edu) this month in an effort to restore its tarnished reputation."
- monochrome paintings in history
- Excellent postmodern mix of old and new iconography and flat patterns.
- "Use 5 basic principles to create an outstanding flag for your organization, city, tribe, company, family, neighborhood, or even country!"
- "A comprehensive overview of the four types of photo fraud committed by Reuters, August, 2006"
- An oldie but goodie. Emotive words of decreasing size fitted together in white on black
- "Ron Mueck's art has been called both big and clever. In fact, says Jonathan Jones it's blank, empty, brainless - and upstaged by several other shows in Edinburgh"
- Image averaging in Lisp. For anyone else wanting to rip off the "every playboy centerfold" guy. ;-)
- "Printed on Agfa Sensatis paper, our prints are famed for their high quality - many customers choose us over cheaper labs purely on quality alone!"
- Dia clamp down on fair use. But don't worry, you can pay them for your right to private academic study.Idiots.
- "FAAN is an online network, which uses a gift economy to connect artists and potential collectors."
- "In a nutshell, HDRI allows for virtually unlimited colors and lighting in imagery. It turns standard concepts about bit depth on its head."
- "Nazi agents relayed sensitive military information using the dots and dashes of Morse code incorporated in the drawings."
- "Welcome to Google Image Labeler, a new feature of Google Image Search that allows you to label random images to help improve the quality of Google's image search results."
- "Michelle S posted the work of Hong Kong Artist Tsnak Kin-wah to .org and he has some amazing work on his site. It reminds me of the way Hirschfield would hide his name and words in his ink drawings, only theses are far more obvious - but there's somethin
- "Dealing with emails can be a nightmare, especially when you have hundreds of unread emails which keep growing by the hour, and dozens of flagged messages which need following-up on. Here are a few simple actions you can take to clear that inbox."
- "all3 allows you to quickly create mashups and meta-content from your blog and consume other RSS content on the web."
OnTheCommons.org | The Language of the Commons
After I commented that sharing did not involved any loss on the part of the sharer, Lessig pointed out that if I share atoms, then there is, in fact, a loss.
If Lessig has red atoms and I have blue atoms and we share them we each have access to twice as many atoms as we would otherwise. We can also make purple atoms (or molecules...), which we couldn't before.
This isn't a loss unless we very carefully look at sharing as a single act in a single moment undertaken by a single instance of homo economicus, in which case we can make it look like a loss if we really want to (any economic exchange can be presented as a loss in the same way).
- "the line is both a graphic entity and an exploratory tool"Wendy taught me at KIAD.
- "Welcome to the Icehouse community wiki. This site is NOT affiliated with IcehouseGames.com (http://www.icehousegames.com) or Looney Labs, Icehouse's inventors. This site is by and for those who enjoy pyramid games."
- "WebCrow uses four techniques in parallel to find possible answers to a clue. Two involve looking for the clue or a near match in a database of solved crosswords or using a dictionary. Another uses rules known to work on a kind of Italian clue with two le
- "Search the full text of books and discover new ones."
- "Pimm's No1 is the essential ingredient in the Pimm's Cup (normally known simply as a Pimm's cocktail, according to the company's website), which mixes one part Pimm's No1 with three parts lemonade or lemon soda (sometimes ginger ale or Indian tonic water
- "For a special occasion - a wedding, or when you've had a bit of luck on the gee gees, try PIMM'S® topped up with champagne, in a small champagne flute and garnished with a slice of strawberry. "
- "Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation has prepared an excellent wiki page that sets forth a rough taxonomy of different forms of “non-coercive methods of governance" in peer production."
- "AC in 'decadent' mode London December 2005 - glass of absinthe just out of shot"
- Scans of old illustrated biology textbooks. Wonderful classic etchings.
- "If you want an inside track on the future of free content licenses you could hardly do better than watch or listen to recordings of two Wikimania sessions -- Lawrence Lessig on The Ethics of the Free Culture Movement (particularly the last twenty minutes
I spent Saturday mapping Reading for OSM. This consisted of walking around an estate with a GPS and Matt Lee from CNUK. We did a depth-first search of the roads, and you can see our trace here in puce (I think it's puce, I thought it was purple but that doesn't look right. Tom?):
OSM is a brilliant project. I must see what needs doing around Peterborough.
Matt and I talked about the need for a Free Culture Foundation, which I think he may be doing something about now, although in a slightly different form.
