Hash: Culture iMakeContent

Thu, 12 Dec 2002 18:33:37 GMT

Zoology of dreams: 'Floating islands are invariably Krakens.' Sound advice in this full-text version of Jorge Luis Borges' The Book of Imaginary Beings.

Wed, 04 Dec 2002 17:11:24 GMT

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?

Mon, 02 Dec 2002 17:34:57 GMT

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].

Tue, 26 Nov 2002 22:53:18 GMT

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'.

Jonathan Zittrain, director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, says we're at the start of a culture war.

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].

Mon, 25 Nov 2002 17:44:36 GMT

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

Tue, 05 Nov 2002 20:41:52 GMT

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].

Mon, 04 Nov 2002 19:13:27 GMT

Meaning more: Some eye amusement, beguilement, distraction with a cleverly designed optic, ocular, visual thesauraus.

Wed, 30 Oct 2002 18:45:34 GMT

Art attack: With the help of David Rees's jive-talking clip art, even Newsweek is finally getting its war on.

Tue, 29 Oct 2002 18:26:41 GMT

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).

Fri, 25 Oct 2002 16:42:29 GMT

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].

Tue, 22 Oct 2002 23:46:13 GMT

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].

Mon, 14 Oct 2002 18:27:02 GMT

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].

Fri, 11 Oct 2002 15:14:55 GMT

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].

Fri, 11 Oct 2002 13:42:01 GMT

[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.

A Washington Post video journalist with a handheld camera catches the mood of police and protestors in Washington on 27 September.

'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].

Some more video verite worth watching:

Scott Ritter's speech from the Stop the War march in London, September 28
John Pilger at the Stop the War march in London, September 28
Canadian squatters preparing for a police raid, September 21 [Background info]

Wed, 09 Oct 2002 21:07:09 GMT

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].

Mon, 30 Sep 2002 21:39:20 GMT

Free for all: Wikipedia, the collaborative encyclopedia anyone can edit, now contains over 50,000 articles. The entry on the anti-globalisation movement has a revision history that's a good illustration of how Wikipedia works.

Thu, 26 Sep 2002 18:12:21 GMT

Gobsmacked: iMakeContent is placed in the 'highly commended' category in the Guardian's Best British Blog competition. Thanks!

Congratulations to the winner: Scary Duck.

Hurrah, cheers, congrats as well to GreenFairy, also highly commended, and the runners up, blogjam, LinkMachineGo and Plenty of Taste.

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].

Wed, 25 Sep 2002 23:40:27 GMT

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].

Mon, 23 Sep 2002 18:30:46 GMT

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].

Fri, 20 Sep 2002 18:44:31 GMT

Know your place!: Propaganda posters from 'unMurrkan' graphic novelist Micah Wright.

Tue, 17 Sep 2002 19:05:47 GMT

Today's front pages: What the print papers look like. [Newseum].

Tue, 03 Sep 2002 17:38:43 GMT

News hack: The top three most censored news stories of 2001/2, according to Project Censored [via Wood S Lot]:

1. FCC Moves To Privatise Airwaves [Guardian]

2. New Trade Treaty Seeks to Privatise Global Social Services [Ecologist]

3. United States' Policies in Colombia [Counterpunch]

Fri, 30 Aug 2002 13:50:29 GMT

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].

Wed, 28 Aug 2002 09:21:13 GMT

[Flash with sound] Turn up the volume: And the struggle continues.

Thu, 22 Aug 2002 10:33:52 GMT

Copyright wrangling: It's ironic that both these articles, first in early June in Salon and then yesterday in the Washington Post examine the illegal copying of music, the stealing of intellectual property. Compare and contrast the two articles. Is the similarity in the pieces just a coincidence? Is David Segal guilty of stealing Dan Levine's ideas or is he creating something new from them? Segal adds facts and figures to Levine's more subtle piece. Does that put him in the clear? I think it does. . .

My take on the Post article: having finished off Napster through the courts, the music industry is now going guerilla. It's planting spoof files on p2p networks like Kazaa and Morpheus to stop what it considers is the theft of over two billion songs a month.

There's an increase in CD-R sales as new releases reach the shops and this reveals the extent of music piracy, it claims.

But Eric Garland, president of BigChampagne, a company that measures online file-sharing traffic, says what the industry is doing smacks of desperation.

'When you've got a consumer movement of this magnitude, when tens of millions of people say, "I think CD copying is cool and I'm within my rights to do it," it gets to the point where you have to say uncle and build a business model around it rather than fight it.' [Washington Post].