Zoology of dreams: 'Floating islands are invariably Krakens.' Sound advice in this full-text
version of Jorge Luis Borges' The
Book of Imaginary Beings.
Moving pictures: Without
copyright term extensions, old films wouldn't get distributed, argues
the entertainment industry. 'Indiscriminate
exploitation' by public domain copyists would reduce the flow of
cash to Big Media and hence the motivation Big Media needs to 'publish' films. [CS Monitor].
Intellectual property lawyers Lawrence Lessig and Jason Schultz say
that's so much baloney. Digging around the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), Schultz
finds that out of the 37,000 or so movies released between 1927 and
1946, only 2,480, 6.8%, are commercially available. [Lessig
Blog].
So, why not place the whole lot in the public domain and see what
happens?
Copy this: It's the beginning of the end of the big media monopoly,
argues Robert X Cringely. The big media corporations may have succeeded in
making copying illegal. But even Microsoft is starting to acknowledge that
there's been a total failure in stopping the growth of a culture of copying.
Big media's next step will be to employ hacking techniques against peer-to-peer
file sharing systems. Then, as consumer PR hits rock bottom, the corporates
will introduce their own pretty peer-to-peer systems.
With corporate peer-to-peer - two incompatible ideas - likely to fail, big
media will increasingly concentrate on media projects, like blockbuster films,
requiring large amounts of cash. Text and music will come from individual
writers and artists operating outside the old media loop.
If the corporates don't accommodate this new media, they may find their game is over. [Cringely's
Pulpit].
Belushi, Hegel and you: It's sharing ideas that leads to innovation. The Romantic idea of the artist as a lonely genius? It's more like Newton and Oasis and the rest of us jostling for position on the shoulders of giants.
According to Malcolm 'Tipping Point' Gladwell, innovation happens when people egg each other on. Group social interaction results in radical ideas. He looks at how Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, how Darwin, Watt and Priestley, how TV comedians Saturday Night Live got together and got down - in John Belushi's case to coke snorting and everybody's wife - to produce, in the end, pure genius.
Of course, innovation needs heads-down time too. The trick is to 'combine the right kind of insularity with the right kind of homogeneity' and create an environment that's safe and yet stimulating. [New Yorker].
Glib? Sure, everybody nowadays loves innovation, creativity and thinking out of the rectangular container. Just needs a little singing from the same hymnbook. Buzzword bingo!
But Gladwell has a point. Creativity requires collaboration. It also requires the ability to rework ideas taken from a common stock.
What should send us scurrying to the law books at this point, Gladwell's tipping or even, judging by the number of newspaper stories around about copyright issues, tipped point, is that not everyone thinks the creative process should happen freely - not in the sense of 'free beer' and not, sometimes, in the sense of 'free speech'.
It sounds dramatic, but he's right. As a result of the ease with which files can be shared across the internet, the informal common sense approach to sharing ideas, to innovating, is crashing against the corporate belief in the sanctity of copyright.
Business is ready to accept innovation, is ready to let us make content, is ready to give us access to walled gardens where collaboration can happen - but only at a price, if it can be costed, worked into a business plan.
Zittrain says we need a compromise between the profit motive and the urge to create. Given the current political climate, that's unlikely unless there's a general recognition of what we stand to lose. Zittrain ends: 'freedom of trade must not trump freedom of mind'. [Boston Globe].
Rip, burn and desist: Develop an existing idea so that it becomes
something new and you'll be applauded for your creativity and genius. Unless
you're hit with a cease-and-desist letter first.
The images and sounds in Illegal Art,
currently at New York's 313 Gallery, broke copyright law and so media corporations
and their lawyers dragged the artists responsible to the courtroom.
Not a familiar
cartoon character by Ashley Holt
Highlights include:
Brian Boyce's State of the Union:
George W Bush giggling above the Teletubbies
Wally Wood's Disneyland Memorial
Orgy: Team pushups by Goofy and Minnie and the rest of the Disney gang
Ray Belder's How Mao: Andy
Warhol's Chairman Mao portrait remade out of money
The JAMs' The
Queen and I: Abba's Dancing Queen forced to shimmy to Bill Drummond's kopyright liberation beat
The rights of Pooh: There was once a corporation called Disney and a
corporation called Slesinger and they didn't know how to share. They argued
and they argued over who owned the rights to a fat and oh-so juicy piece of
intellectual property called Winnie-the-Pooh. Despite their differences, however,
they both agreed on one fundamental point. Pooh should never ever be allowed
to wander off into the great big public domain by himself. If that happened,
who would enjoy all the lovely, sticky, runny revenue that Pooh was so good
at generating? [CNN].
Stopped press: No surprises that Burma, China and North Korea come
bottom in a new index of worldwide press freedom
drawn up by Reporters Without Boarders (RWB). Or that Finland, Iceland, Norway
and the Netherlands head the 139 countries in the index.
But, according to the RWB, Costa Rica (15) beats both the US (17) and the
UK (21) while the 'political weakening' of the Palestinian Authority
(82) gives it the democratic media edge over Israel (92).
Correction required: Novelist Jonathan Franzen admits that 911 took
away his certainty that a pacifist, diplomatic approach is always best. However,
he still thinks that Bush is the wrong person to run America:
'He's a silly man. I have nothing good to say about him, really. Nothing
good to say about him. And I think it verges on a disaster that he's the
man in place at this time.
'One places one's hope in his handlers. I've been issuing spiritual life
insurance polices for Colin Powell for more than a year now.' [Today].
About a boy: From Kurt Cobain's journal, summer 1992, in rehab:
'I am the product of 7 months of screaming at the top of my lungs almost
every night 7 months of jumping around like a retarded rheesus monkey 7 months
of an-swering the same questions over and over ... I’m really bored with
everyones concerned advice like: “man you have a really good thing going.
Your band is great. You write great songs, but hey man you should get your
personal s—t together. Don’t freak out, and get healthy.” Gee I wish it
was as easy as that but, honestly I didn’t want all this attention but Im
not freaked out which is something a lot of people would like to see. Its
an entertaining thought to watch a rock figure whos public domain mentally
self destruct. But I’m sorry friends Ill have to decline.' [MSNBC].
Prague autumn: Every day, in every way, Vaclav Havel, president of
the Czech Republic, grows more afraid as his understanding of the gap between
the poetry of freedom and the reality of politics improves:
'There is no more relying on the accidents of history that lift poets
into places where empires and military alliances are brought down. The warning
voices of poets must be carefully listened to and taken very seriously, perhaps
even more seriously than the voices of bankers or stock brokers. But at the
same time, we cannot expect that the world—in the hands of poets—will suddenly
be transformed into a poem.' [NY Review of Books].
What the papers don't say: Not many news stories around today about David Shayler,
the former MI5 officer currently standing trial at the Old Bailey on charges
under the Official Secrets Act.
But Google News' list of recent 'Shayler'
news stories speaks volumes about the UK government's relationship with
the media and, perhaps, the truth.
'After the judge's ruling on Monday, several articles detailing Mr Shayler's
anticipated evidence - and the government's efforts to keep it secret - were
withdrawn from newspaper websites across the country.' [The
Age].
[Realplayer, QuickTime] In camera: Online fly-on-the-wall
video clips can bring a sense of reality, of life, to a news event in a way
narrated TV reports or newspaper articles can't, says William Powers.
'This is no mere passive journalism of the I-Am-a-Camera school. It's clear
the piece was carefully edited. Given that the editing was done on deadline
(the piece was up on the Web site before 6 p.m.), the results are downright
artful.'
Mark Stencel, vice president for multimedia at washingtonpost.com, tells Powers
how his team stumbled on the unnarrated video form during the 2000 presidential
race:
'There were parts of the conventions where it was more interesting to have
the delegates tell what was going on there than for us to tell you what the
delegates were doing.' [Atlantic
Monthly].
Taking digital liberties: As the US Supreme Court discusses copyright protection and whether Mickey Mouse should go free, Brewster Kahle, director of the nonprofit Internet Archive, is outside the Court Building printing off books on demand from his Bookmobile.
Kahle wants an enriched public domain in which universal access to human knowledge is a right:
'We want to have a million books for everyone to use. We can't build a library to hold a million books -- the building would be just too big! So we use the Internet. We download a book from the Internet. We print it out, put a binding around it, you get to pick the book you want.' [Salon].
Simon Waldman, director of digital publishing at the Guardian, says that the
30 listed British blogs 'provide an excellent sample of what is one of
the most exciting media phenomena of recent years'. [Guardian].
Artificial intelligence: Sci-fi writer Wil
McCarthy gets a goodie bag and a flicker of 'nerdy patriotism'
after taking part in a secret CIA panel discussion on the things that might go wrong:
'From those tapes will spring transcripts and minutes, and eventually
a summary document – all of which probably will be classified. The Agency
produces millions of pages every year. But in the way of such things, this
info will filter up through layers of bureaucracy, summarized and resummarized,
until some ghost of it impinges on policy. And in the circle of a few hundred
people who encounter our raw input, decisions will be subtly influenced.
At the very least, the butterfly effect ensures that we’ve made some kind
of difference, rippling out into the future.' [Wired].
An American tragedy: Steve Earle explains why he wrote a song from
the point of view of John Walker Lindh, the all-American Taliban fighter. The Marx-spouting country singer wanted to
tell a typically American story. Lindh looked outside the confines of his
culture and, via hip-hop, found Islam. He was set up 'as a warning to
any American that got out of line'. [Guardian].
Life in Pandemonium: On general release in October, Naqoyqatsi ('Civilised Violence'), the last in Godfrey Reggio's trilogy of non-narrative films about our world falling out of step with nature, describes the expansion of technology, the new digital spaces surrounding us. [QTime trailer]; [Koyaanisqatsi].
