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.
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.
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 necessity and direction of Open Source cannot be accounted for. Open Source has no history or trajectory, it cannot account for itself or suggest which tasks are necessary 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 content 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 artifacts of art were expensive to own and difficult or impossible to transport. But the content of art was free to use. Michelangelo could rip off christian and pagan imagery to paint a ceiling, generations of artists could riff on the theme of the crucifixion, 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. 😉
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.