In an apparent misunderstanding of what encompasses “fair use” the Associated Press has sent out take down notices to some prominent bloggers who have used quotes from articles they have published.
Posts Tagged ‘Free Culture’
Superheroes: Not for Those Who Need Them Most
May 14, 2008I remember reading an article a long time ago about how ridiculous Superman was: an invincible humanoid who can fly anywhere in an instant, has almost infinite strength, heat vision, etc.; but what does he do with those powers? Protect capitalism and continually save one incredibly stupid woman from death. While he could potentially be stopping wars, working to end world hunger, and supporting many more far-thinking humanitarian causes, he instead chooses to stop a few bungling criminals from causing general property damage in and around Metropolis. Whoop-de-fucking-doo.
Well, in an interesting turn of events, Superman is once again protecting capitalism in the way only he can, apparently – by being the center of a copyright lawsuit levied by Warner/DC against a man who attempted to hold a charity auction for kids with cancer. Read the article here at BoingBoing.
Thank you, Warner/DC, for being a truckload of douchebags. You’re helping to remind everyone how fucking ridiculous our current copyright laws are.
Remix and Share!
May 7, 2008Trent Reznor will not stay out of the free culture spotlight! remix.nin.com takes a sizable portion of Nine Inch Nails’ back catolog and allows registered users to download original multi tracks, which they can then remix however they want. The only “rules” are that users share their creations on the site and that they not include any copyrighted material (unless they own the copyright). According to the FAQs on the site, users may include any Nine Inch Nails song (which I’m assuming includes songs not included on the site) in their remixes.
The band has done this on a smaller scale in the past – the release of “The Hand that Feeds” in Garageband format was something of a first, although they experimented with a flash-based music editing system on a previous project (according to the note from Trent included with the download of “The Hand that Feeds”).
The band is also collecting geographical statistics from users (not required, but encouraged) for future “visualizations” that they claim will be “really cool.” We’ll see what that means. I’m hoping they’re planning on showing the record industry just how many people are willing to be a part of culture when they’re allowed to participate, instead of being treated like slaves and criminals.
Anyway, here’s a band who is not only giving away their music for free, but letting people remix and share it. I’ll be paying close attention to how well “The Slip” does when they finally release the physical CD… I’m going to propose, as a hypothesis, that it’s going to do really well, in spite of the millions of people who will have already downloaded it for free. We’ll see how the RIAA feels about that.
RIAA and MPAA Send Out a Slew of “Graduation Gifts”
May 2, 2008This news corresponds to the following mass email sent out by the DIrector of Security Services and Information Privacy at the University of Illinois just last week:
The end of every academic year can be hectic with finals, graduation, moving out and wrapping up loose ends before leaving campus for break. Copyright holders are also staying busy by using this time to put in extra effort to track down people that are illegally sharing and downloading files online. At the end of every semester, groups like the RIAA dramatically increase the number of copyright notifications that they send to the campus to investigate. In the past few days the security office has received more copyright infringement notices than it received in the previous year. Clearly, the RIAA is watching the University of Illinois network closely right now.
If you are caught downloading or sharing files illegally, not only do you face the very real possibility of being sued for thousands of dollars this summer by groups like the RIAA, but your connection to the campus network will be immediately shut off. Access may not be restored until a formal disciplinary process has been completed. Take a moment to think about your finals study schedule and think if you can afford in these final weeks to lose your ability to access your email, Illinois Compass and even your ability to surf the web.
Music and videos can be obtained at no or low-cost and legally at sites such as Ruckus and iTunes. Please use these or similar services instead of limewire, bit torrent or other peer to peer programs.
Who knows what kind of game the RIAA and MPAA are trying to play? I find it extremely disturbing that they are not only focusing their attention on universities, but that they are apparently sending out falsified information. I can only hope that the fact that many of these notices are turning out to be false will somehow undermine their efforts in the long run.
All I can say is, “Bravo, you fucking fascists.” What better way to congratulate students for their hard work and perseverance in making it through another school year than to slap them with potential lawsuits.
Writer vs. Writer vs. Writer
May 2, 2008My apologies for the silence recently. I’m in full-throttle essay-writing mode right now. I’m currently 12 pages into 35 pages worth of writing, all of which is due next week! Once that’s done though, I’ll be posting here fairly regularly regarding $P@MM3R!!1! and other creative projects, as well as the progress in designing the Writing Across Media class and redesigning my Desktop Publishing (now called Information Design) class for next semester.
Anyway, I read this today and wanted to share:
The controversial science fiction writer, Orson Scott Card, posted an editorial blasting J.K. Rowling for her lawsuit regarding the Harry Potter Lexicon published by a fan without her consent. If we can disregard some of the highly problematic opinions OSC has expressed on various subjects in the past and his overly pathos-ridden rhetoric, I think he makes some interesting points about copyright. Read the article and see what you think.
A Fair(y) Use Tale
April 1, 2008This video (created by prof. Eric Faden of Bucknell University) presents an amusing criticism of fair use and copyright law from the mouths of popular Disney characters. Let’s all take a moment to thank the Walt Disney Corporation for being the fascist bastards they are. 
Billy Bragg Says His Piece about Royalties
March 31, 2008I found this op-ed piece by Billy Bragg (musician) today while perusing the intarwebs. I think that he makes several very interesting but contradictory points regarding free culture that I would like to contextualize with my own previously stated ideas.
First off, I want to assert that when I talk about “free culture” I don’t mean free in a monetary sense – I mean freedom from corporate control and regulation. Corporations use the laws of supply and demand to attempt to determine the maximum amount of money anyone would be willing to pay for a specific item, then charge the same price for all similar items. The problem is that cultural objects (art, music, etc.) do not have intrinsic value – their value is determined by the response of the culture in which they are created. The value of an object is established by how much people are willing to sacrifice in order to enjoy it. That value can also be perpetuated by the opinions of well-respected people (we generally call them critics) who share those opinions with the public. In the end, the value of a particular cultural object is determined on an individual level: if you are not willing to pay $18 for the newest album by Mr. Bragg, then you don’t have to. Your refusal to buy something indicates your opinion on the value of that object. Perhaps several months later you find the same album in a used CD bin for $5, and you buy it. Once again, your decision has communicated your personal opinion on the value of that cultural object.
As Bragg points out in his op-ed, technology is not just something that has the capacity to free culture, it also has the capacity to be exploited by corporations who are smart enough not to fight it (I’m looking at you RIAA and MPAA!). The point at which I disagree with him is in regards to his comparison between radio and a band’s music appearing on a social networking site. Radio is an inherently selective medium, but social networking sites are not. If a band’s music is played regularly on the radio, it can be almost guaranteed that their song will be heard by a relatively large number of people. If a band starts a Myspace page, there’s no guarantee anyone will even look at it!
The fact is, a large part of the Internet economy works on a sort of networking “barter system.” In other words, if someone has a social networking site that has x number of users in its network, the value of that site is based on the network. Individuals and artists have the opportunity to take advantage of that network by adding themselves to it, thereby increasing the value of the network for everyone and allowing the owner of the site to rake in more ad revenue and potentially sell the site for an exorbitant amount of money. Essentially, by being part of a social network, you make use of a particular service that someone else (advertisers) pay for. I think this formula becomes problematic when people let the sites fall into corporate control (it’s like local store owners happily selling their businesses to Wal-mart so that a new “superstore” can be built), but on the other hand, I can’t really blame someone for accepting millions of dollars for something that probably didn’t take them that long to make in the first place (relatively speaking)! Based on the article, it seems that this is more the problem that Bragg is decrying, and I agree with him ideologically; however, I disagree with his statement that the owner of the networking site he mentions owes the artists a cut of what he made off of the site. It’s a nice thought, but the problem is that every user of a social networking site is like a customer. Even bands (I should probably clarify by saying “good” bands) are customers who are making use of the site’s network. If someone sells their business in the physical world (vs. online), do their customers get a cut of the profit?
I respect Billy Bragg as a musician and gladly support his art, but there’s an inherent contradiction in his statements: he plays the morality card in reference to Bebo.com sharing profits with musicians on the site (a blatantly socialist statement), while taking a very capitalist stance regarding music. He fails to consider the fact that Bebo.com is someone else’s “intellectual property.” If it is morally right for the owners of Bebo.com to share the wealth when they capitalize on their intellectual property, then shouldn’t the same be true for artists? If, as I stated before, the value of art is external and culturally-based, don’t popular musicians owe their critics, their fans, and anyone else who supports them for helping establish the value of their art?
There’s a lot to think about here, and I’d of course be interested in hearing how Mr. Bragg would respond. In the meantime, I will side with him in encouraging people to spend some money and support independent artists. Go to an art show, go to a local performance (play, concert, dance), go to an art theater, buy an independently published album or film, donate to the open-source movement, etc. Remember that your decision to consume these things helps to establish their cultural value.
ADDENDUM: I just wanted to add one more quick thought. If you consider the nature of new media, royalties are actually extremely difficult to assess. The idea of paying an artist royalties every time her/his music is played publicly worked well because media was difficult to duplicate. Now, not only is media infinitely duplicable, but it is also possible to have thousands of people streaming the same audio file at once. This makes the whole idea of royalty-based pay more and more implausible. This is part of the problem with the current state of the music industry – their entire economic system has been undercut by the technological advances over the last decade. Rather than fighting to maintain the viability of a pay system that has become outdated, artists should be striving for something new to match the needs of the culture. As I’ve stated before, artists like Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, Chuck D, etc. have all made positive moves in this direction. This is what the industry needs to focus on; and by industry, I don’t mean conglomerate corporations – I mean the artists.
Putting My Money Where My (Big) Mouth Is…
March 23, 2008I decided today to become an official member of both the EFF and the ACLU and to put my money where my mouth is, so to speak. As I’ve stated many times in this blog, I’m an avid supporter of free expression and free culture, and I believe that it would be remiss of me to not offer financial support to two of the biggest organizations that are fighting for those rights.
Of course, being an underpaid graduate TA doesn’t give me much financial wiggle room, so I won’t be able to donate regularly until I’m a little more financially secure. Until then, I’ll continue to use this blog as a platform for free expression and free culture.
Free Culture
March 11, 2008A colleague here at the University of Illinois pointed me in the direction of this presentation by Lawrence Lessig (professor at Stanford Law) from the 2002 Open Source Conference (OSCON). In this presentation, Lessig makes the same arguments I’ve been trying to make on this website regarding intellectual property, copyright law, and the advancement of culture.
One of his most interesting points here relates to the hypocrisy of some of the corporations that are the most dogged defenders of copyright and intellectual property law. Lessig calls out the Walt Disney Corporation, Microsoft, and various politicians and lobbyists in the presentation. The picture he paints is one of corporate greed and a consolidated attempt by small groups of wealthy people to maintain a stranglehold on cultural and technological advancement in order to amass more wealth for themselves. In my opinion, this is the ultimate perversion of capitalism and the “free” market economy.
In my Blogroll, I’ve included a link to Lessig’s original presentation (including an audio recording, a flash version of his powerpoint presentation, a full transcript, and various other goodies) as well as a link to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which is a group dedicated to the protection of freedom of expression and culture in the information age. I encourage everyone to read more about this issue and form your own opinion.
