Please find a copy of Lawrence Lessig’s lecture on “Aaron’s Laws – Law and Justice in a Digital Age“, which he held a few days ago at Harvard Law school.
slides:
http://vimeo.com/60093875
“We are not self-made. We are dependent on one another. Admitting this to ourselves isn’t an embrace of mediocrity and derivativeness, it’s a liberation from our misconceptions.”
Kirby Ferguson
Nothing is original, says Kirby Ferguson, creator of Everything is a Remix. From Bob Dylan to Steve Jobs, he says our most celebrated creators borrow, steal and transform.
Kirby Ferguson explores creativity in a world where “everything is a remix.”
Source: TED
Cory Doctorow talked about “The Politics of Copyright and the New Cultural Economy” last Tuesday. Here’s the recording.
Direct link:
Cory Doctorow – The Politics of Copyright and the New Cultural Economy MP4 (469 MB)
Cory Doctorow – The Politics of Copyright and the New Cultural Economy OGV (409 MB)
… worth reading:
Copy me: Technological change and the consumption of music
CC-by-sa 3.0 2009 by Nick White
For those who worry about the cultural, economic and political power of the global media companies, the dreamed-of revolution is at hand. The industry may right now be making a joyful noise unto the Lord, but it is we, not they, who are about to enter the promised land. (Moglen 2001)
Introduction
Technological changes have political implications. Changing the way we interact with things encourages a reconsideration of the rules and institutions that have governed previous interactions with them.
The current debate about copies of recorded music using the Internet is an excellent example of this, and by examining it one may better understand the relations between people and recorded music, and between listeners and the traditional publishers of music.
While undoubtedly a great deal may be usefully said and examined in other technological changes in music recordings, I will here focus primarily on filesharing, as it is something I have been somewhat involved in myself, and hence I have significantly more knowledge ‘from the inside.’
I will begin by discussing traditional definitions of ‘commodity,’ and then move on to a very brief overview of historical trends in copying and music recording. I will also touch upon the printing press in order to discuss the creation and rationale behind copyright laws, which form a major part the present filesharing debate. I will then go into greater depth into the current practises of people who share music on filesharing networks, and the response by the recording industry, before embarking on an analysis of the meaning and significance of some of these new practises and dialogues.
It should be noted that I’m speaking primarily of England and the United States of America, and the situation will be somewhat different in other parts of the world.
[…]
Download the paper
or visit http://njw.me.uk/pubs/2009-copyme
This week Cory Doctorow gave a great talk about this (*sigh*) boring old issue of Freedom and Human Rights in the age of the knowledge society at the ACM Siggraph Conference in Vancouver.
For further reading:
EFF
Cory’s Blog
Marcus Boon: “I am uploading my new book onto the internet. Yes, I am. The book is not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of commodification … OK, I’m copying again, from the introductory lines of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “Unpacking My Library”, which media theorist Julian Dibbell riffed on in his dawn of the downloading age essay “Unpacking My Record Collection”. Those two excellent essays were concerned with the figure of the collector. But what concerns me here is, to use the title of another of Benjamin’s essays, “the author as producer”, and the act of donating a book, “my book”, to a library, if library is the right word for the place where my text is being deposited.
While I was finishing In Praise of Copying, I became interested in the circulation of texts. I wondered whether it was hypocritical to write a book that celebrates copying, while still slapping a copyright notice to the front of the book. There are easy ways out of this: I could say that what I’m doing is presenting a critique of contemporary society but that obviously I have to work pragmatically within existing economic conditions, even though I disapprove of them. There’s some truth to that. In fact, the copyright notice to many academic books is in the name of the publisher, not the author. When I talked to people at Harvard, they pointed out to me that in signing a book contract, I had already signed away most of the rights to the book, and that it was therefore more honest for the publisher to claim and look after the copyright. I could have requested that I retain the copyright, as I did with my first HUP published book, but I thought there was something persuasive about their argument. And that I don’t need to own the copyright in order to feel some sense of agency in relation to what I’d written.
But I still wanted to explicitly allow people to make copies of my book about copying. I asked Harvard whether this was possible and they said yes. As of October 1, 2010, the book has been available from Harvard’s website as a pdf, free to download, but with a creative commons license that restricts the uses of the copy. I wrote the following text to accompany the web page:
“Given the topic and stance of In Praise of Copying, I wanted the text to participate openly in the circulation of copies that we see flourishing all around us. I approached Harvard to discuss options and they agreed to make the book available as a PDF online. The PDF is freely available to anyone who wants to download it, but it does come with a creative commons license that sets some intelligent restrictions on what you can do with it. Although generosity is a wonderful thing, this isn’t especially intended as a utopian gesture towards a world in which everything is free. It’s recognition of the way in which copies of texts circulate today, a circulation in which the physical object known as the book that is for sale in the marketplace has an important but hardly exclusive role. A PDF of a book is not an illegitimate copy of a legitimate original but participates in other kinds of circulation that have long flourished around the book-commodity: the library book; the photocopy or hand-written copy; the book browsed, borrowed or shared. We all know these modes of circulation exist, as they continue to do today with online text archives.
Perhaps these online archives just make visible and more “at hand” something that was happening invisibly, more distantly, but continuously before. At the same time, something new is going on. The physical book today is one copy, one iteration of a text among others. What that means for publishers, writers, readers and other interested parties is something that we are working out – on this webpage and elsewhere.”