Recently in Free Culture Category

Free jam:

http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/news/the-four-freedoms-two-rules-and-one-jam

Theory book piracy:

http://turbulence.org/blog/2010/06/05/scanners-collectors-and-aggregators-on-the-%E2%80%98underground-movement%E2%80%99-of-pirated-theory-text-sharing/

Crowdsourcing as wage saving and as workforce disempowerment:

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/crowdsourcing-and-the-new-alienating-nature-of-work/2010/06/05

"Piracy has increased my book sales 700%":

http://www.pirateparty.org.uk/blog/2010/jun/5/piracy-has-increased-my-e-book-sales-700/

A second-generation performance artist calls for copyright on performances so they can enclose the performance commons:

http://www.artfagcity.com/2010/06/05/marina-abramovic-afterthoughts-willpower-control-copyright/

I love books. At art school we learnt how to print and bind them, but I was reading them long before that and I'm one of those people for whom death by bookpile is not an unrealistic threat. So it's the physicality of books as artefacts as well as the knowledge and fantasy they contain that has always appealed to me.

Fair Use Gets a Fair Shake in Second Life

Why I won't buy an iPad (and think you shouldn't, either) - Cory Doctorow

Enforcement of the GNU GPL in Germany and Europe

Wall wart / plug servers - A UK-based seller of devices fitting Eben Moglen's "wall wart" internet server description

A landmark decision of the Italian Constitutional Court: granting preference to free software is lawful

http://foocorp.net/foobar/ With a lot of people in town for the LibrePlanet conference, we decided to have a little event of our own. 

http://www.copyrightaction.com/forum/uk-gov-nationalises-orphans-and-bans-non-consensual-photography-in-public?page=1

"The end game is now in sight. The Digital Economy Bill is now expected to become law within the next 6 weeks. It introduces orphan works usage rights, which - unless amended, which HMG says it will not - will allow the commercial use of any photograph whose author cannot be identified through a suitably negligent search. That is potentially about 90% of the photos on the internet.

Copyright in photos is essentially going to cease to exist, since there is no ineradicable way of associating ownership details short of plastering your name right across the image. Photographer's organisations have pressed hard for mandatory attribution to deter orphans being manufactured. Early in the consultation process the IPO accepted the irresistible logic that it was completely unreasonable to permit orphan use without a balancing requirement to not orphan photos in the first place. However, the IPO recognised with dismay that this would mean "taking on Rupert" (Murdoch).

Publishers have a long history of opposing our moral rights. They were responsible for the feeble and unenforceable moral rights clauses in the 1988 Act. They want their branding, not ours, and they want maximum freedom to exploit our IP at minimum cost and inconvenience.

The IPO avoided confrontation with Murdoch, who does have something of a rep for being a vital friend in an election year. The Bill contains no deterrent to the creation of orphans, no penalties for anonymising your work, no requirement for bylines. It is a luncheon voucher for industry hungry for free and cheap content.

So Flickr, Google Images, personal websites, all of it will become commercial publishers' photolibrary. A fee will have to be deposited with a collecting society in case the owner spots the usage. The author who discovers his work has been used as an orphan can then make a claim and receive a percentage of the peanuts, after the collecting society has had its share, and the government its share. [...]"

I disagree with this argument for two reasons.

"DACS, the Design and Artists Copyright Society, today welcomed the Government's publication of the Digital Economy Bill, in particular the provisions for the modernisation of the copyright licensing system and access to orphan works.

The bill paves the way for the introduction of extended collective licensing which will make it simpler for visual works to be made available, while ensuring creators' rights are respected."

I do not welcome the Digital Economy Bill, due to its illiberal and economically harmful "three strikes" legislation and other detrimental measures. But if the bill is passed then the responses by organizations like DACS to the orphan works measures that it contains will help photographers, illustrators and artists to see their work used without payment or attribution much less, rather than much more.

"Orphan Works" are copyrighted works where the rightsholder cannot be located to grant permission for the work to be used, usually some decades after the fact. They are a real and growing problem. One of the several positive features of the Gowers Report was its recommendation that this problem be tackled by the government.

Orphan works legislation was shouted down last year in the US. The reaction against the proposed legislation there was led by minor trade groups and concerned amateurs who stood to benefit financially or psychologically from defeating it.

A similar panic about the Digital Economy Bill's clause 42 has arisen on the Internet here. Any professional illustrator or photographer will belong to an organization such as DACS that administers the copyright of their works. Yet a lot of familiar nonsense about the DEB imposing onerous new registration procedures and costs and "destroying copyright" has suddenly sprung up.

I don't support bad legislation. The DEB needs throwing out. If it is not thrown out then clause 42 needs discussion and revision. But orphan works legislation is needed and does not place an undue burden on the (often soi disant) work-for-hire professionals who seem, frankly, most afraid of it. Since the arguments against orphan works legislation here are the same as in the US so, broadly, are the answers to them -

http://www.publicknowledge.org/issues/ow/overview

http://www.publicknowledge.org/issues/ow/myths-and-facts

Realism in art is the absence of sentiment. Livecoding is writing software in public while presenting the source code and its output along with the programmer as a kind of performance. Hacking (computer programming) is usually a solitary activity and hackers (computer programmers) rarely get to hack on (program) software that they themselves will use for their own ends or benefit directly from. Livecoding turns hacking into a public, social, self-directed activity by turning it into an artistic event.

By doing this livecoding briefly restores the kind of shared social context and the relationship of hackers to the fruits of their labour that Richard Stallman described in his account of life in the MIT AI Lab of the 1970s[1]. As Simon Yuill points out[2] about this account, Stallman describes the proletarianisation of hacking as business interests took over from pure (state funded) research.

If livecoding romanticised hacking or was simply an exercise in professional nostalgia for a lost age of authentic relations between hacker and machine then it would be sentimental. Sentimentalising hacking would add nothing to culture or to the socioeconomic situation of hackers. It would mis-represent its subject to its audience. It would be distraction, a comforter, spectacle.

What protects against this and what makes livecoding realistic is that livecoding involves the solving of technical problems in order to produce aesthetic results that maintain a social encounter between performer and audience. This is not relaxing either for the hacker or the audience. It can involve unexpected results and failure for both performer and audience. The hacker can lose their place in the code, corrupt it, or crash it. The audience cannot fall back on the cliches of rock or classical music appreciation. Both have to work at it.

Livecoding is a form of critical self-representation. It does not simply present the everyday activity of hacking as complete and exemplary. The differences between livecoding and hacking in a cubicle or in an office off of Brick Lane identify and make up for a lack. The heroics of performance are deflated by what is being performed rather than inflating the subject of the performance.

The use of aesthetics (sound and vision) as the subject of tasks in livecoding rather than, say, mathematical or logistics problems is resistant to immediate commodification by corporate information culture. Aesthetics, as Alan Liu points out[3], is resistant to corporate information culture because it is based on the quantitative rather than the qualitative. This isn't to say that the qualitative cannot be commodified, but the culture industry prefers more easily reproduced and less demanding experiences.

Like net.art, Livecoding might be folk art of the hacking (or web and motion graphic designing) class. But its aesthetics are higher than middlebrow, and if it can resist the inevitable attempted putsch by the cultural studies department it will be able to create its own noise within broader cultural life.

Livecoding presents and represents a form of labour through aesthetics. This presentation is socially, aesthetically and technically risky. It requires work on the part of the performer and the audience. Their reward is to experience through an unusual aesthetic event what hackers are missing in society and what society is missing in hacking.

[1] - Richard M Stallman, "The GNU Project", 1998.
[2] - Simon Yuill, comment at the second "Breakfast Club" round-table at MAKE ART 2009.
[3] - Alan Liu, "Laws of Cool", 2004.