(Real) Piracy funds terror

This came across my RSS feed this morning.

Piracy, in this case, equals counterfeit products. I think this is a worthy distinction. Diabolical amputation of pinkies indeed...

When we discuss "piracy," I think it's important to discuss it with that distinction in mind. I'm, personally, often not talking about counterfeit handbags, but rather the people in the corner of the creepy flea market on Kishwalkee (sp) Street in Rockford, selling copies of movies not even out yet. A for-profit enterprise...

But no boats, at least in Rockford. Johnny Depp will have to wait for the CGI train to hook up to reality.

Feed: Ars Technica
Posted on: Monday, March 31, 2008 1:12 AM
Author: nate@arstechnica.com (Nate Anderson)
Subject: US Attorney General: Piracy funds terror

The Attorney General gives a speech on intellectual property in which piracy and counterfeiting turn out to fund—wait for it—terrorism. Bet you didn't see that one coming. Fortunately, the AG understands who the pirates really are.

Read More...

University of Texas Student Honor Code Plagiarized?

Heard about this story on NPR this morning. Wow.

Paying for a Download of a "Free" Broadcast

A few weeks ago, I was watching a political show and thought that one of the guest commentators made some interesting remarks. I wrote myself a note to look online for the video later. Several weeks had past before I got to this task, and when I checked the show’s website, the video was moved to an archive page where I would have to pay for the transcript.

I just saw the entire broadcast for “free” on my television set, and I could have recorded the broadcast without any cost per the Audio Home Recording Act--if I understood the reading for this week correctly. Yet, I thought downloading the information online would be quicker, and better yet, accessible. How can companies get away with this? Are they right? Am I wrong?

Links for Tonight's Presentation: Copyright and the Digital Knitting Community

The Internet Knitting Community
Knit Picks Patterns
Green Apples -- A Knitting Blog
Knitting on Impulse
knitalong.net
Fitted Knits Along
Ravelry (subscription required)

Awareness of Copyright
b natural. c sharp (blog post dealing with copyright)
Knitting copyright personal web page

What Knitters Are Saying about Copyright
Ravelry posting (knitter will not share work as often now)
222 pages of Ravelry posts on "copyright" (at 30 posts per page, that's 6,660 posts!)

Copyright Infringement vs Creative Evolution

I’m not sure we can blame the professors of composition courses—who encourage single authorship and emphasize the consequences of plagiarism—for our outlook on copyright. I don’t claim to have a crystal clear understanding of all the aspects that surround and separate copyright, patents, trademarks, etc. (Even Logie points to criticism of Judge Stevens’ use of patent law language in a copyright ruling on p. 133.) What does seem to be clear is the audacity of those who take (or attempt to take) literary, lyrical, and/or digital compositions and pass them off as their own. That act seems very different from those who credit the “original” authors’ work and then add to it to create something new.

Apples and oranges!?

Is the Internet a P2P Network?

I have little to no experience with P2P networks, but Logie struck a cord with me when he implied that the Internet as a whole is essentially P2P file sharing (145). I often attach files, send links to articles and websites, and copy/paste text into other documents such as email. Don’t we do that here on this blog, too? Why can’t the courts see the similarities and rule in favor of the people? They need to force the music and movie corporations to “get with the digital program!”

"free" books still under copyright

Would have posted this under Lynn168's excellent post about LibraVox, but I think this is the other side of the coin. Anyway:

Wowio allows users to download from their collection of ebooks still protected under copyright, with some limitations:

1. Users must register in order to gain access to their library.
2. Users are limited to three downloads per day.
3. Although Wowio claims they feel that "technology-based DRM is essentially a fraud," publishers/content owners may still restrict use of texts via Adobe Reader controls [see Lessig's Free Culture, 148-53]. I'd be willing to bet $10 that some of these controls are exercised on works in the public domain.

So, this is somewhere in between Netflix and a library, which--to me--is great. But I'm not sold enough to give it a try yet. From the FAQ:

Does WOWIO use any kind of digital rights management (DRM)?

Since anyone can defeat the most "sophisticated" DRM with the print screen button, we believe that technology-based DRM is essentially a fraud. Our approach takes the market incentive out of misbehaving, rewards people for doing the right thing, and tries to stay out of the way of honest users.

^ emphasis mine. I like their ethos here, and took note of the morality approach there at the end. But:

To help keep everyone honest, however, readers must authenticate their identity and agree to a licensing agreement when they set up their account. Then, each ebook is serialized with the reader's authenticated name and a unique serial number, as well as other less visible markers. WOWIO will immediately terminate the account of anyone caught illegally distributing ebooks, and will prosecute serious offenders.

Again, emphasis mine. Why not call a spade a spade and just recognize that some of us cannot be trusted? I'm not railing against Wowio--it seems like they have good intentions--but it's clear that somebody, somewhere, has a different definition of "free" than I do, and is worried that this free experiment will run out of control.

In the very next question in the FAQ, Wowio explains their business model that is awfully close to what Lessig and Logie are talking about--basically, that this business model might lead people to go out and buy the print versions.

So what are we to make of this? On one hand, I feel like it's a step in the right direction. I don't mind that it's ad-supported so long as someone isn't trying to sell me another Baconator on page 146 of Cat's Cradle (available on Wowio, actually). And I can see where this distribution method might benefit aspiring authors willing to allow their work to be available for free, as well as established, "I've heard of her but never read any of her stuff" writers.

But on the other hand, why not go all out and slap a CC license on your work? That would get rid of the hassle of signing up (as well as make an end run around those pesky privacy concerns). My guess is that it eliminates the ad revenue from the equation. And we can't have that, now, can we?

This has to be related somehow...

This is a different take on what we've seen so far regarding the music industry and lawsuits. Some in the music industry are proposing to charge consumers a tax that basically says "pay us not to sue you as you download our music." Interesting and frightening at the same time.

Discovery Perpetuates Rhetoric

I decided to rest my eyes from Logie for a bit and surfed television channels only to find Download: The True Story of the Internet appearing on the Discovery Channel. Despite the series' episode title of "People Power," originally airing on March 4, 2008, the production falls into just about every rhetorical cliche that Logie highlights, ultimately missing the episode's own assertion of the public's power (dare I say rights?) over the Internet.

The episode focuses on P2P, and its description lures viewers with "Teenager Shawn Fanning invents Napster and forever changes the way music is shared on the Internet." Indeed, in interviews with Fanning, the show casts him as the same teenager from nearly 10 years ago when he created Napster. They interview him in a Guitar Center retail outlet in between quick edits of him playing around on an unplugged electric guitar. I was disappointed to see the "perpetuation of [Fanning's] hacker/undergraduate persona well past its expiration date" (Logie 146) rather than an experienced innovator who can shed light on the current P2P debate.

What was more disappointing was the dichotomy between the episode's spot-on title (that could have reflected the Internet's ability to reframe the copyright debate toward the original foundational intent of the public's right to access) and the producers' clear misunderstanding of (or should I more aptly say the producers' gullability for the rhetoric involved in) the legal/public debate. For example, as the host explained RIAA's claim against Napster, he literally stuffed CDs down his pants while standing in a record store. Clearly, as Logie so adeptly describes, file-sharing as theft has been well positioned and engrained in our culture. And even as the host decried RIAA's short-sightedness for not "embracing the future," he followed up with the question, "Did [the Napster case] stop illegal file-sharing? Did the amount of pirated tracks decrease?" Again, the assumption is that all file-sharing is illegal and the act is one of piracy.

I know. I know. Shame on me for expecting anything complex and nuanced out of the boob tube.

Focus! Focus!

Okay, so I have a hard time focusing. Especially at work. I mean, I can close twitter, and my instant message client(s), and even my e-mail, but I still can't seem to focus on the words in front of me.

I guess I'm not alone.

Here are some text editors which, basically, black out the entire screen except for your text. Dead-simple.

• Q10 (Windows, Free)
• Dark Room (Windows, Free)
• WriteRoom (For Mac OSX, Free Download, but a buy button, too?)

I figured I'd share this hear because while we're talking about authorship on-line, sometimes that constant ability to communicate and getting information, well, gets in the way of getting stuff done.

Hackers and Their Hats

White, Gray, Black: obviously this is more nuanced than usual media coverage of, well, anything. It gives us the possibility of at least a middle ground between good and evil. As if reality were anything like the 1s and 0s of a computer world. As in all cases, perspective is vital here.

Let's put a white hacker example here, which I'll contrast in a bit.

This past week, I was able to demonstrate a security flaw in a new (to me) computer system. I did it at work, and even showed the developer of the software directly what had happened. This circumvented all the security measures put in place in this system. Exploiting this oversight, someone could execute "arbitrary code" on the system. This means that the person could do whatever they wanted. Literally. Delete, corrupt data, render the system useless, install "spyware," etc.

By the end of the week, this hole was fixed and, while I haven't had a lot of time to play with the program, I am confident that the problem was resolved and a non-authorized user would not be able to exploit the system with that particular method. My example is mundane and, as I see it, common.

I do not claim the title "hacker," nor is what I did a hack. Primarily because what I showed was so damn easy, but secondarily, as I do not want to announce myself as "committed to transgressing the boundaries established by a combination of corporate practice and convention" (Logie 32). I, actually, was nervous about discussing this in case I were to get in trouble. As of this date, I have not.

But let's give that kind of action a "White Hack" name.

Now, consider you are on the other side of the table; you are the established coder who just, in front of a client, had a security exploit demonstrated in 4 mouse clicks. By the client's "Technical Writer," none-the-less. What color hat am I wearing now? Gray, I guess. What if I had published that same exploit in 2600: The Hacker's Quarterly? Surely black.

But, the trouble is, I'm not wearing any hat, actually, in my opinion. My hair would even be more messed up if I did. I did what I thought was morally correct with that particular information. I am not a X at hacker. I'm a person, damnit. "I am vast. I contain multitudes," etc.

Assigning hat colors to hackers is inaccurate at best, and slanderous at worst.

What I am willing to call myself is, essentially, lazy about things I do not want to do.

In a book referenced by Logie, "The Hacker Ethic," Himanen contrasts the hacker ethic with the Protestant work ethic and emphasizes the nature of work as play. Playing hard, yes, but essentially play because it is mixed with passion. A "hacker," in Himanen's text, as well as in the "hacker" culture at large, is defined more generally than computers. A previous version of the Jargon File (referenced by Himanen) indicates carpenter hackers (current is Astronomy Hackers) (and the hacker ethic). How can one be a gray hat carpentry hacker? Do black hat carpenters passionately build gallows and guillotines?

They build what they want to. Just as I code what I want to. They're intellectually stimulated by it.

Things are morally neutral, however they may enable a transfer of power. In this case, it can mean that another person's perspective is lost, especially in a morally vague place such as copyright infringement. "No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood."



Re-reading that, it feels like a cop-out there. I really don't have an answer to that toolmaker philosophy problem. In short. I don't know.

Short response regarding the quote appearing on pg 109, "I move a Roman Legion of Walls Street Lawyers[...]": Did anyone else think that the Wall Street lawyers were more like a phalanx while the hackers of the world were more like maniple system? Sorry, too much History of Rome podcast...

Note: A more dramatic, and much more fun version of the "white" hacker is in place in the movie "Sneakers." I heartily recommend it. A bad version thereof is the movie "Hackers," which I have attempted to purge from my memory.

LibriVox free public domain audiobooks

Here is a really interesting website and project that I stumbled upon today. Through strictly volunteer work, LibriVox has set out to record all of the books in the public domain and make them freely available online. Ambitious project! Many of the recordings are quite good too.

There are several elements of this project that interest me:

1) I commute from the suburbs, so I fly through audiobooks and am always looking for affordable sources of audio entertainment.

2) The very fact that LibriVox has set as a goal to record all of the public domain speaks to the shrinking nature of the domain. If the domain were as large as it could be, this would be nearly impossible. Should this be a red flag?

3) By spreading word of this and other similar projects that specifically discuss the public domain, we help spread the word about the copyright debate. When someone asks why a more recent author's work isn't recorded, a conversation on the extended copyright and the problems that it creates can promptly ensue.

At the bare minimum though, it's a good place to look for a free (and legal) audiobook.

Logie/Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion - reading response

The Inaccessibility of a Proper Dense Whorled Creamy Mie in DeKalb, Illinois*
In thinking about John Logie’s argument, I was reminded of my teenage years, when I lived in a tiny hamlet in the middle of nowhere, staaaaarving for Adrienne Rich and Willa Cather and the Marquis de Sade and P.G. Wodehouse. Finally, we joined a library in a nearby town, and when their resources staled and palled, I discovered interlibrary loan. We discussed the concept of the library briefly last class, and I believe, while limited, it is in fact a decent analogy for the rational value and use of P2P networks. Libraries are public institutions, supported by tax dollars. There is a strong case to be made for the librarization of technology (or the technologification of libraries, which is already proceeding apace). This is Logie's alternative to "piracy" in the war of words. I would just like to submit to you that I cannot imagine my life without libraries. It’s not like I can buy (or want to own) every book I want to read.

* Try Inboden’s Meat Market, near the NE corner of 1st and Hillcrest


Medvedevian Merovingians
Logie analyses corporations’ and public use of negatively-loaded rhetoric like “piracy” to propagandize public opinion about P2P sharing – which (“sharing”) I now recognize also to be a rhetorically laden term, more positive, if less melodramatically excessive.

Logie mentions in his acknowledgments “the musicians whose work I listened to as I wrote. I hope this work helps fuel a move toward Internet-based music distribution that fairly and fully compensates you for your tremendous contributions to our culture.” So, like Lessig, Logie is not advocating piracy, and does want to see the artist/creator receiving fair and full compensation (in his language).

What in fact is the rhetorical effect of comparing P2P to Jack Sparrow (possibly rather positive post-movie)? It’s hubristic hyperbole, a betrayal of meaning. P2P is a culture-wide movement to increase access to material, not to hoard it away on a desert island or drink it away on Tortuga, just like libraries. I suppose the difference is that libraries are tax-supported and actually pay for their access to materials, so the equivalent would be a P2P site supported by taxes that actually did pay something for access to materials (though someone always has bought the initial copy of material on any P2P exchange).

Logie (p. 4): “the kind of expansive electronic library that copyright laws typically preclude . . . everything in no particular order, all day, all night, and in stereo.” The library metaphor is a far more neutral one than piracy, theft, hacking, etc., in fact it’s a positive one. The battle of the metaphors!

Is there any national discussion of “intellectual property rights and responsibilities in digital environments”? Are we just assuming that Grokster et al. infringe upon copyrights? Why is there the assumption that innovations in digital technology that permit people to share files of music (and why is there not the same MAJOR issue with books? sad comment on our culture in a way) = bad? Why the decline of any current public domain? linked to the decline of the US political system? linked to wiretapping and waterboarding and W’s in general?

I remember in Tori Amos’s memoir Piece by Piece (interesting in connexion with P2P term) she says that Atlantic Records decided to throw her away and she had to fight to make it out of her contract artistically viable. I could just go back to touring with me and a piano, Tori Amos said. It’s not like I need you corporate losers. You do hear some artists echoing the dogma of their corporate overlords.


Logie Money Quote
"I do not call or wish for the end of copyright. Rather, I seek copyrights calibrated not to print delivered by ponies, but to the torrents of information now spanning the globe via broadband peer-to-peer networks." (146)

"With a measure of initiative, and a collective commitment to an ethical and equitable rebalancing of our nation’s copyright laws, the rich storehouses of information within this, the world’s second largest library, could be available not only to those who have $150 an hour to spare, not only to those who have the opportunity to search at the Library in person, but to anyone with a networked computer." (148)


Wavelengths
Web 2.0, Web 3.0; first-wave, second-wave, third-wave feminism, postfeminist world . . . what’s up since Logie published in 2006? I think a lot, no? Raises a few questions for us, no?

- GoogleBooks success

- RIAA.com still using term “piracy: online and on the street” (calling “piracy” a “too benign term”)

- RIAA chair and CEO Mitch Bainwol on the DOJ approving Sirius-XM merger: “The merger’s approval serves as a powerful validation that competitors should play by the same set of rules. On the heels of this decision, the logic for a performance right for terrestrial radio has never been clearer. Terrestrial radio – unlike satellite, Internet and cable radio – continues to reap special interest subsidies in the form of free government spectrum and an outdated exemption from compensating artists and record companies. It’s time for that to change and for Congress to provide an economic marketplace where there is parity amongst all delivery platforms.”

- RIAA also claims: “Record companies have licensed hundreds of digital partners that offer a range of legal models to fans: download and subscription services, cable and satellite radio services, Internet radio webcasting, legitimate peer-to-peer services, video-on-demand, podcasts, CD kiosks and digital jukeboxes, mobile products such as ringbacks, ringtunes, wallpapers, audio and video downloads and more.”

- Youtube.com (where, for example, the full What a Girl Wants movie is available for viewing, though what tremendous contribution to our culture this is, I don’t know)

- TV shows available online at their own websites (like The Hills woohoo)

FW: Plagiarism screener gets passing grade in copyright lawsuit

From Ars Technica is this article on a plagiarism screener:

Do students have rights to the material they hand in as class assignments? Is plagiarism detection a form of fair use? These and a number of other intriguing questions were answered in a decision (PDF) handed down by a US District Court in Virginia recently, which threw out a lawsuit filed by students whose school compelled them to use an automated plagiarism detection system.

Plagiarism. Transformative? Fair Use?

What if you disagreed with the terms of service? Should you be forced to comply? A related article on Ars indicates that, at the Plaintiff's school, a score of "0" is recorded if you don't submit your text.

While plagiarism seems bad, is the alternative here--forcing people to submit to a contract from a third party--any better?

Early Pop Culture Intertextuality

It's interesting how things seem to come together. Recently a couple of things have converged for me in a way that highlights the issues we've been discussing. If nothing else, the following story serves as yet another example of what Lessig is talking about.

As I believe I've mentioned before, I'm a comic book nut -- have been since I was a wee slip of a thing. Just this past week I finally got around to reading Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a fictional account of the early career of a writer/artist team during the Golden Age of comics (which ran from the late thirties through the mid-fifties). I've also been reading the big coffee-table biography of Jack Kirby (who co-created, among other things, Captain America, the Fantastic Four, and the Hulk). I'm sure it stands to reason given the nature of comic book art (or, as I suppose I really ought to start calling it, graphic fiction), but I somehow never realized how important the concept of intellectual property is to the industry.

Chabon's novel tells how the title characters, writer Sam Clay and artist Joe Kavalier, created a comic book superhero specifically to capitalize on the success of the National Periodical Company (later to be known as DC, after one of its most successful titles, Detective Comics, in which, incidentally, Batman was introduced in 1939), who had created a pop culture phenomenon in 1938 with the introduction of Superman in Action Comics #1 (the obvious sidebar here is that the actual creators of Superman, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, owned none of the rights to their creation and reaped very little of the monetary rewards that made their employers rich). Now, despite the fact that the character created by Kavalier and Clay --the Escapist -- bears very little resemblance to Superman (they're both super-powered costumed crime fighters), National/DC, in the novel, sues the company that owns the Escapist (not the creators, which is an important point) for copyright infringement. This is based on actual events: National/DC actually sued the publishers of Wonder Man, Master Man, and of course Captain Marvel; though, so far as I know, they were unsuccessful in the case of Captain Marvel, who is quite clearly a Superman knock-off, and who is still very much with us (largely because DC finally bought the character in the 1960s).

Although National/DC was by far the most successful comic book publisher of the thirties and forties, and certainly the most prolific with regard to the creation of costumed superheroes (from 1938 to 1941 they introduced, in quick succession, Superman, Batman, the Flash, the Spectre, Dr. Fate, Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Aquaman, the Atom, the Sandman, Hourman, Hawkman, and Wonder Woman, as well as several others not nearly so well-known), they were only one of a number of comic publishers in New York, all of whom were eager to jump on board the bullet train of Superman's popularity. And the relationships that developed strike us today as rather incestuous: Superman inspired Captain Marvel and others, Captain America (introduced in 1941 with a blockbuster cover illustration that showed him punching Hitler in the face) was the source of a whole battalion of similar patriotic heroes, Aquaman is a direct descendant of the Sub-Mariner. Batman brought together elements of earlier heroes from literature and radio like Zorro, the Shadow, and the Green Hornet, and even inspired National/DC to create an obvious knock-off in the figure of Green Arrow (another billionaire playboy with a mask fetish and a taste for revenge). And speaking of Batman, when Robin was introduced in 1940, suddenly every superhero had to have a sidekick (Green Arrow had Speedy, Captain America had Bucky, and so on). Superman and Batman had secret identities, so everyone else had to have one too.

The point? Superhero comics -- comics generally -- developed in the way they did because everyone was copying everyone else. The whole superhero genre was born because all these creators and publishers were busily trying to outdo each other. If the culture of fear we live in now had existed 70 years ago, it's hard to imagine that there would have ever been a Golden Age of comics, or a Silver Age (it began in the mid-fifties when DC started re-imagining old characters like the Flash and Green Lantern, and continued in the early sixties when Marvel introduced the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man, among others). I can't imagine that a character like Captain Marvel would ever have been permitted to continue -- he's too clearly a Superman ripoff. Come to that, Batman clearly steals from Zorro, the Shadow, and the Green Hornet, so probably he would have had to go. The mingling, borrowing, and outright stealing that went on in the late thirties and early forties was exactly what allowed the genre to develop with such variety and creativity.

Okay, so I'll get to Kirby later....

Web Two Point Naught

As a former copy edit, I love this sort of detail-intensive language study!

Here is a post from the BBC blog that concluded (in February... I'm a little behind the times here) that the correct pronunciation of "Web 2.0" is "web two point oh." I realized that this is how most of us have been saying it (I would love to hear someone in class say "web two dot naught" thought), but I find the alternative pronunciations that the Brits were considering to be fascinating.

What a great point they make about how written characters need to be able to speak authentically. That's what I call justification for polling! But rest assured it is now official: "web two point oh," as O'Reilly suggested, is the "correct" (or at least preferred) pronunciation.

Free use vs. Fair use vs. Fear use

If you're anything like me, at this point of the class you probably know how much you don't know about copyright, fair use, Creative Commons, and the grand media conspiracy to get government to legislate protections for the music industry. I never realized it was so complicated, and the very fact that it is so convoluted is a telling sign that something's not right.

Lessig summarizes his project by claiming a middle ground between "all right reserved" and "no rights reserved" with "some rights reserved" in the guise of the Creative Commons, where individuals can decide how much other people can use their creations. Presumably, if you come across a CC license, the creator of that work is giving you some permission to use that work/tool under certain restrictions. Will this lessen piracy and theft? Not knowing any better, the first time I came across a CC license I thought "Whoa. Hold on there. I don't want to get too close to this thing. I'd better back up nice and slow and everything will be okay." Rather than looking into the license, I thought it was copyright on crack, and I probed no further.

The hope is that by using CC, more work will be available for public consumption and the greater culture will flourish. Individuals will no longer have to "borrow" from corporations/institutions. However, don't forget that corporations "borrow" from individuals as well, as the case of the Chinese Olympic website stealing a game from a graphic designer without asking permission or offering compensation. Would this example had been averted if a CC license were present? Will people steal regardless of the restrictions? I don't know.

So we get to the end of Free Culture when we realize that the problem is alot bigger than we thought. Sometimes ignorance is bliss. What do we do? Take to the streets? Riot? Refuse to buy music? Join a cutting-edge p2p group? Ignore it? Lessig actually endorses this last option in regards to cracking down on illegal downloads when he says the ubiquity and speed of the Internet will soon make p2p file sharing obsolete; why be a content manager when it's easier to just subscribe to a service to listen to whatever you want? Though not exactly the same, Apple has been toying with a similar scenario by allowing new iPod owners to get unlimited lifetime use of iTunes for a one-time fee. Is this the future, all Internet, all the time? Abilene Christian University, that bastion of conservatism, recently announced that they're giving all incoming freshmen free iPhones. Is this the end or just the beginning?

Why Does Charlie Rose Have a Black Eye?

This is just for fun, but I thought I'd share that I was worried about Mr. Charlie Rose when he appeared on my television with a shiner and a Bandaid on his forehead. I was watching a repeat of his original March 17th airing, and was surprised to find that 240,000 matches for "Charlie Rose black eye" appeared on Google within 24 hours. The latest is that he sacrificed his face while trying to save his new MacBook Air as he tripped in a pothole, but my favorite tongue-in-cheek speculation appears on Yahoo! Answers (http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080317204929AADtack). Our fellow bloggers are busy.

Electronic Privacy

This site is a great resource for issues concerning civil liberties. The focus is on electronic privacy but it extends to general government surveillance.

Rights of Photographers

Based on our “is it legal to take pictures of X” discussion, here is a condensed “Ten Legal Rights of Photographers.” The “More Resources” section at the bottom appears very useful, especially “The Photographer’s Right.” (Browse around that site for some more info.)

Via Digg.

Useless.

Following Jesse's lead, I thought I'd spread the free software love that just happened to show up in my RSS reader after class. This one is also for you Windows users, so I obviously haven't tried this program myself, but I couldn't resist based on the name of this application:

FairUse DVD Ripper [Full Edition Free for a Limited Time!] Awesome debates regarding DCMA, corporate shenanigans, and The Grateful Dead Business Model™ not included.


Wait.


You probably don't want this. Apparently, the program will not strip copy protection schemes from DVDs [which we learned tonight is against the law], rendering it unable to help you make those DVD clip compilations for educational purposes or create legal backups of your store-bought movies.

Thanks for contributing to the public confusion over copyright law, FairUse DVD Ripper.


[link via Lifehacker]

The Chalk Guy

http://gprime.net/images/sidewalkchalkguy/

down at the bottom is "all material copyrighted by its original creator"

here is the artist's site, i think. http://users.skynet.be/J.Beever/pave.htm

READING RESPONSE: Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig

ARE YOU A GOOD PIRATE OR A BAD PIRATE?

I am not sure what else I can add to the previous reading responses. It is difficult to distill 175 pages into 500 words and be more original than my talented classmates.

The first half of this book is a legal, moral, social, and financial argument built upon case histories written in a story-telling format. The argument Lessig writes about is copyright law and the distinctions that need to be made regarding piracy and property as they relate to free culture. Specifically, he addresses the Internet and our ability not only to store information, but to share information. He argues about the pitfalls of extremism and monopoly in ownership rights. The United States government treats intellectual property similarly to physical property; however, only a select few, who are wealthy and powerful, benefit from the laws enforcing copyright. American culture suffers the stifling of its creativity.

Lessig takes us on a historical journey to support his argument about copyright as it relates to new technologies. He shares stories about the various creators of different inventions: photography, the airplane, AM and FM radio, synchronized sound in film, and the Internet. He examines these events in the context of the legal rights the inventors had juxtaposed with the need for everyone in our culture to share (pirate) and expand upon these inventions for the greater creative good.

As Lessig progresses in his argument, he shares examples of individuals expanding and improving upon existing technologies, which would benefit millions of people while threatening the fattened pocketbooks of the owners or inventors of these technologies. He tries to make distinctions between good pirates and bad pirates. He writes that in some cases, there are clear examples of right and wrong ways to copy and distribute information. However, he warns that some instances of piracy need to be examined more closely. As stated before, sometimes piracy rises out of a need for a culture to take advantage of a new technology in a more democratic way to promote creativity and intellectual growth.

Lessig defines piracy as born of a history of each new medium pirating on the generation of technology before it. He gives examples of these “pirates” as film, recorded music, radio, and cable television. He cites clear examples in each industry of piracy. He later differentiates types of piracy into four categories: those who download music without purchasing it (bad), those who use shared networks to sample music (good), those who share networks to access material no longer sold (good), and those who use shared networks that give access to material without copyright (good). (p. 68-69)

Although I simplify the various types of piracy as good or bad, Lessig takes the definition of piracy and teases it apart. He argues that it is not valid to define piracy as good or bad – that it requires a deep investigation to understand if the laws that protect against piracy are logical.

In the second half of Lessig’s book, as has already been written about in the previous response readings, he examines the nature of property. He states that our tradition is to think of property as something physical – I own the land. It is difficult and often times ridiculous to apply the same laws to intellectual property. He gives an example of a director creating a celluloid homage to Clint Eastwood. The director had to spend an enormous amount of time, one year, to clear and cover all the possible copyright infringements. Each actor that had ever been in any Clint Eastwood film for even a second had to be found and compensated in order for that minute or two of old film to be incorporated into something new without legal consequences. It seems wasteful to spend that much time in obtaining permission and waiting that long to create. Lessig gives another example of a man making a documentary. During filming, he captured a Simpsons broadcast on a television set for about 4 seconds. He was allowed to include that 4-second footage if he was willing to pay an exorbitant $10,000.

Lessig poses that copyright should not be regarded solely as property, but as a balance of incentives to artists and authors with public access to their work. He argues that free culture suffers when creativity requires permission and legal advice.

reading response - free culture & permission culture

In the first two major sections of Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig outlines the American social and legal histories of copyright over the past two centuries. Throughout the first section, "Piracy," Lessig draws parallels between the ways the Internet and other digital technologies have challenged public notions of copyright and the ways in which radio, recorded music, television, and film did when they were emerging technologies. All of the aforementioned industries at least partially owe their development to the same kind of "piracy" that media conglomerates are trying to stop on the Internet. However, in section two, "Property," Lessig illustrates a key difference: whereas previous technologies have brought about changes in copyright law that balanced the interests of the content owners and the general public, the conglomeration of media has created a "permission culture" that has unfairly shifted this balance in favor of those who already hold copyright. As a result, the individual freedom to create and transform existing works of art and ideas is now limited more than ever before.

Lessig’s observations have serious implications for contemporary authors. In an age where one may be threatened with legal action for publishing fanfiction, one’s incentive to share creative works (especially if they are derivative) may be outweighed by the fear of punishment for violating copyright law. In cases like this, ideas may therefore be kept to oneself, which is exactly what the Progress Clause in copyright law is supposed to prevent. Or, artists may begin to recognize the legal implications of their work and instead “publish” pseudonymously.

Whatever the response, it is becoming clear that the transformative forms of creativity are checked by corporations. While the Wu-Tang Clan, who has a contract with a major record company, may have the means and connections to sample The Beatles, the majority of us do not. This includes DJ Danger Mouse, whose mashup of the band’s “White Album” with Jay-Z’s “Black Album” was created and disseminated without permission of the content owners. Despite the fact that this was a noncommercial, transformative use of two works, Danger Mouse was threatened with legal action for violating copyright. Meanwhile, the LOVE album—a Beatles remix/mashup album authorized by the estate—has reached Platinum status, won a Grammy, and can be purchased alongside traditional Beatles albums in stores and online.

I am not suggesting that everyone ought to have the same access, but the situation reveals something important about contemporary authorship. We have reached a point at which the genius of The Beatles can be mixed with someone else’s creativity is culturally acceptable if not outright desirable. This might call into question the public concept of how art is created—the product of a single author, an individual genius. Perhaps the LOVE album does this to some extent, but it is underscored by the corporate control of the original works. After all, nobody is going to confuse The Grey Album for a classic Beatles record (although LOVE will probably leave some feeling duped) and thus will not threaten sales or have a negative effect on the work’s value. But such work is technically not allowed, and one of Lessig’s biggest points is that this sort of noncommercial transformation used to be.

Reading Response: Patronage and Permission

In Free Culture Lawrence Lessig illustrates how the (d)evolution of copyright law and its often renegade corporate enforcement (through code, use fees and litigation threats) has produced a culture of creative permission rather than creative freedom. Despite an American tradition of encouraging derivative creativity for the development of public knowledge, copyright law has transitioned from solely a publishing issue that affected a relatively small subset to a tightly controlled issue of transformation that affects everyone.

Lessig asserts that the protection of derivative rights is the most significant change in copyright law, which has effectively cast everyone under suspicion—from students to artists to anyone wishing to express herself. And while the copyright net has recently been cast more widely to regulate (and capture) a larger group than that original small subset of publishers, the law, as it is currently enforced, seems to protect only the concentrated few who can threaten and pay for litigation—namely corporations.

Fair use is no longer the accepted norm that provides amnesty to uses that fall outside of copyright law restrictions, but is now a fuzzy notion that corporations use “as a sword” (i.e., “pay me or I’ll litigate until the end of time.”) The creative process has become a process of paying lawyers—in Lessig’s words, of protecting businesses, not artists.

In fact, through the increasing concentration of corporate creative ownership, it seems that artists who make a living through mainstream media may not always own their own work (e.g., Fox trumping Max Groening’s and Gracie Films’ decision to allow a Simpsons clip to be included in a documentary or FCC regulation changes allowing television networks to be content owners of productions). While historical values encouraged creators to freely build on past creations to avoid a society of patronage, it seems that this type of corporate ownership (and corporate chokehold) of individual creativity has created a system of patronage.

Ironically, while more of our culture is owned by the powerful few, we have access to one of the most democratic tools for learning, expression and transformation ever: the Internet. Lessig argues that the Internet affects how our culture is made through noncommercial creativity. However, the litigious nature of our corporate patrons and their ability to enforce beyond the copyright law’s intent through technological code strips that democracy away. And what we value becomes our ability to avoid becoming bankrupt after a corporate lawsuit.

It is quite telling that Lessig defines transformation as the creation of new content or new ways of doing business (emphasis mine) and then later states, “A society that defends the ideals of free culture must preserve precisely the opportunity for new creativity to threaten the old.” Clearly, the old way of doing business is threatened, and it will do everything in its power to preserve itself. In the end, though, creativity loses, and permission wins, and so goes our culture.

Free Culture Reading Response

Because of the large scope of this week's reading, I have limited my summary and reflection to what I perceive to be the most important discussions in each of Lessig's sections, "Piracy" and "Property."

Lessig begins his first chapter, "Creators," with an illustration of the beginnings of Disney's sound cartoons. In late 1928, taking inspiration from The Jazz Singer's use of synchronized sound and offering a parody of Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Jr., Disney released Steamboat Willie, "the first widely distributed cartoon synchronized with sound" (Lessig 21). Here we can directly see Disney pulling from the surrounding culture and adding to it a creative work that is inspired in one capacity or another from an existing work. This type of "Walt Disney Creativity" (24) brings to mind Bakhtin's discussion of intertextuality in "The Problem of Speech Genres" and Lev Manovich's writings on remixing. Bakhtin writes, "the unique speech experience of each individual is shaped and developed in continuous and constant interaction with others' individual utterances... Our speech, that is, all our utterances (including creative works), is filled with others' words, varying degrees of otherness or varying degrees of 'our-own-ness,'..." (Bakhtin 89). All of our ideas, Bakhtin argues, come in "varying degrees" from some other source. By reshaping public domain fairy tales, parodying Steamboat Bill, Jr., and advancing the ideas of sound synchronized to motion first seen in The Jazz Singer, Disney effectively demonstrates this principle that Bakhtin describes.

Lessig gives readers this illustration to show how the public's (and the law's) perception of this borrowing and mutation of another's idea has changed over time. Manovich, in "Who is the Author? Sampling/Remixing/Open Source," writes about the development of remix, "a systematic re-working of a source" that typically involves music and a visual to convey a message of the creator's. How is this much different than Disney's Steamboat Willie or Fantasia? Today, derivative works written without permission are a violation of copyright law. In fact, as Lessig's section titled "Piracy" implies, unauthorized derivative works are considered to be a form of stealing. Yet, Lessig questions, what is the significance of taking an idea? (83). While he explicitly states that piracy in the from of downloading an artist's work without compensation is wrong and that individuals should be paid for their intellectual property, he clearly spells out the dangers of being a "permission culture" (xiv). At the conclusion of his second section, "Property," Lessig succinctly illustrates these dangers: "the opportunity to create and transform becomes weakened in a world in which creation requires permission and creativity must check with a lawyer" (173), but throughout this first half of Free Culture, Lessig also hints at another broad danger.

Because the costs of contributing to today's culture have (in most cases) risen as an author wishing to remix must clear rights or a creator seeking to use material under the free use clause often must prove free use in the courts, the democracy of our culture has been threatened. No longer is the opportunity to create equally available to all participants; now, the right to participate comes at a high price. Lessig attributes much of the rising cost, intimidation tactics, and code-enforced uses (as opposed to law-enforced) to the increased consolidation of the media. With this consolidation, Lessig argues, democracy is again challenged. Even though Americans can influence policy through voting, our awareness of the issues is controlled by the media, which when in the hands of only a few, can easily choose which issues to highlight and how to depict them (167). Here is where one of Lessig's most important arguments surfaces: the issues of copyright and the Internet are not confined to the Internet. As illustrated by the Disney example, our culture’s view of derivative work has radically shifted in the last few decades, but this is not where the influence of the Internet ends, and Lessig cautions us to look beyond the digital world. As we continue to study how digital media has changed authorship and rhetoric, we would be wise to extend our discussion and analysis to include changes that digital technology, digital texts, and evolving copyright law have imposed on other areas of our culture, government, and society.

FW: Physics Journal May Reconsider Wikipedia Ban

Woopsie! Messed up posting via e-mail...

Physics journal may reconsider Wikipedia ban. on Slashdot.

Anyway, that is all.

better late than never

One of my students recently emailed this to me just because [ . . . he knows I'm a nerd]. Anyway, this article is about Digg, Wikipedia, and the Myth of Web 2.0 Democracy.

Might help some of you with your paper, so I thought I would share.

Anti-piracy lawsuits a drain on record companies

From the Tech Law Prof Blog:

“EMI has struck a deal with the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) for reduced membership rates. The organization represents music labels on an international basis. Venture capitalists took over the label some time back and threatened to leave the organization due to a lack of return on the membership fees, estimated at $250 million. Specifically, the cash that was paying for anti-piracy lawsuits was high compared to the result of not stopping piracy. Apparently EMI was not happy with the symbolism given the cost.”

What, so just throwing money at it doesn’t make it go away? And sooner or later you have to pay the piper?

Why not stop with the lawsuits, and the anti-piracy software, already? Start a positive outreach to the consumer: make a deal, compromise, even if it’s with the devil you think you know. Get over the breakdown of the old system and deal with the new.

Don't View that Cuban Web Site!

In light of the Wikinews post earlier, I thought it was interesting that they were not the only ones who have had their domains "blocked."

Link.

This OFAC list is something we did use quite frequently when I worked at a bank to prevent certain people/organizations from opening bank accounts. But this is blocking of speech. From Cuba to Europe. The U.S. only handled some traffic.

Education and Free Use

Here is an interesting BBC article about schools and free use of images on their web sites. This article argues that while images can be used for educational purposes without gaining permission from the rights' holder, the use of images on a web site or on shared lesson plans, is a violation of copyright law.

While these are UK schools, I find the idea of a school owing large amounts of money because an image was posted on their web site very puzzling. Apparently the line between "educational" free use and piracy is not clear. Isn't sharing a lesson plan with a colleague a form of education? Aren't most school web sites aimed at either the students who attend the school or other people interested in learning?

Here is an area of the copyright law that I feel needs to be reexamined, but even as I write this I recognize the difficulty of this. How can we clarify online, outside of the physical classroom, what is education and what is piracy? In one manner of speaking, couldn't every use be considered educational?

It's Christmas in March (Sorta)

Here's a freebie that I thought I'd pass along to all my fellow under-funded graduate students: Microsoft is giving away free Web Development software to college students. Yes, you read that correctly, MS of all companies is giving away full-featured versions of Expression Studio, Visual Studio, Windows Server 2003, etc. They call it Dreamspark.

If you're thinking, "What does this have to do with me? I don't even like any of this stuff?!" All I can say is if you ever see yourself wanting to create your own webpage, or edit photos for the web, you really should at least pick up Expression Studio, MS's version of Adobe Dreamweaver. Read about Expression Studio on wikipedia. It's a $600 program. Really.

From what I've read MS is losing credibility with the up-and-coming web developer crowd because it's products are so expensive (and it's, well, Microsoft) compared to free Open Source software that basically does the same thing. So take advantage of this last-ditched effort to snag yourself a cool program or two. For free. Could MS be learning one of Barlow's dictums: "Familiarity has more value than scarcity"?

Reading Response

“When you control the mail, you control information!”
—Newman, the character from Seinfeld

Boyle noted that most people (by 1997) agreed they were living in the Information Age. He acknowledged that the statement “ownership and control of information is one of the most important forms of power and contemporary society” had been so immersed in that culture that it was not credited to any one person. Boyle approached the challenge of governing intellectual property by attempting to define it, construct it, appropriate it, and compare it to concepts and ideas that were concrete to society then.

It is important to remember that this was written and published ten years ago, and not much research was done on the information society, so people had to look to the creators of this area, the “cyberpunks.” Cyberpunk fiction was an introduction into cyberspace for many, and though people could relate to the virtues and vices of the fictitious characters, they could not wrap their brains around the concept of mixing computers and genetics together in the same space.

So much of the information age was linked to cyber-indecency (i.e., Web porn), so most people did not see a real need for governing intellectual property or protecting it. Eventually, the subject of intellectual property was no longer viewed as a special or unique interest to a small minority, it was soon seen as the power behind the digital age, and it was valued at billions of dollars.

The argument for privacy rights in genetic information cases was very similar to the argument for privacy in electronic information cases. Boyle showed how society tried to make electronic and genetic information akin. Most people could justify owning the rights to computer code, but some could not agree that owning genetic code rights fell into the same justifiable category. Others saw the DNA code analogous to computer codes and tried to show the similarities between computers and genetic code processes, specifically, the “natural selection” process of genetic code compared to the “survival” process of computer code. Once similarities were established between genes and computers, attention moved from devoting resources to the message to devoting them to the medium. Companies began protecting their content and placing the value of the content over the value of how the content was delivered.

This power struggle between the message and the medium spilled over into a battle for information access. Regulations were badly needed to avoid granting access to one body or group over another. Each group had a need for information technology, and each group looked to its own advantages of having and disadvantages of being denied access. Everyone wanted a piece of the digital pie.

Boyle’s case study showed that Clinton’s White Papers did not address many issues such as the possibilities that some people will benefit from higher level intellectual property rights while others could still profit well from lower level rights. He believed that the report should have considered the benefits that intellectual property rights have for both the public and the individual. Boyle also pointed out that the press failed to do an accurate job by not contacting sources beyond the well-known “players.” The press needed to talk with those who would be negatively affected by the proposed regulations in Clinton’s White Papers.

Boyle ended his article by taking a look back at how Environmentalists were able to get past the brick wall to the place where they eventually had a voice and a system for engaging in conversations that lead them to policies. He believed that advocates of intellectual property will be able to achieve the same goal, i.e., politics, if they have theories to base the arguments upon.

Cultural Environmentalism?

Here are two examples of the rhetoric of "cultural environmentalism" that Boyle calls for.

• Bound by Law, a graphic novel co-authored by Boyle.

• From the EFF Endangered Gizmos campaign:
  

copyright video that isn't Disney, sort of

I am not sure how many of you teach younger students, but I found this short video and think it works as a teaching tool. Essentially, it's a compliation of Disney movies that outlines the basics of copyright and fair use (and of course, takes a swipe at Disney).

Whenever I learn something, I try to figure out the best way to relay that information to students in a manner that is easy to understand and delivered in a format that is commonplace for them. While this video is somewhat annoying to adults, I feel it would work well in the classroom because today's students are entranced by flashing images delivered at record speeds.

"A Fair (y) Use Tale" Has a bias or two showing, but that'll make a nice discussion topic.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJn_jC4FNDo

material relating to presentation tonight

Vuguru article (NYT)

Piracy article (involving a how-to guide for Miro)

Warner Brothers' China division, in a rare act of intelligence on the part of a major media company, demonstrated significant savvy last year when they began selling cheap, legitimate, high quality DVDs of movies within days of the theatrical release. By pricing the discs at around 12 yuan (approximately US$1.50), Warner is hoping to make cost a non-issue, thus allowing them to compete in one area where they hold the upper hand: Quality. Instead of taking a chance with on a low quality, shaky-camcorder copy of a film, Chinese consumers can get a high quality copy of the movie at a reasonable price, all while enjoying the warm fuzzy feeling that you can get knowing that you've helped to pay for some small portion of a a Hollywood star's private jet. (Source: Surveillance State blog at cnet.com, Sept. 2007)

There were some efforts in Congress to modify the DMCA – Rick Boucher’s Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act (DMCRA) and Zoe Lofgren’s BALANCE Act – neither successful.

Timothy B. Lee (Cato Institute): “The DMCA is anti-competitive. It gives copyright holders — and the technology companies that distribute their content — the legal power to create closed technology platforms and exclude competitors from interoperating with them. Worst of all, DRM technologies are clumsy and ineffective; they inconvenience legitimate users but do little to stop pirates.” (Source: Wikipedia)

List of some recent fair-use legislation

Points from the BALANCE Act (2005) – Zoe Lofgren (CA) et al.
1. Copyright seeks to encourage and reward creative efforts by securing a fair return for an author's labor. Twentieth Century Music Corp. v. Aiken, 422 U.S. 151, 156 (1975). At the same time, `[f]rom the infancy of copyright protection, some opportunity for fair use of copyrighted materials has been thought necessary to fulfill copyright's very purpose, `[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts . . .' Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569, 575 (1994).
2. `[P]rivate motivation must ultimately serve the cause of promoting broad public availability of literature, music, and the other arts . . . When technological change has rendered its literal terms ambiguous, the Copyright Act must be construed in light of this basic purpose.' Twentieth Century Music Corp., 422 U.S. at 156.
3. On the one hand, digital technology threatens the rights of copyright holders. Perfect digital copies of songs and movies can be publicly transmitted, without authorization, to thousands of people at little or no cost. On the other hand, technological control measures give copyright holders the capacity to limit nonpublic performances and threaten society's interests in the free flow of ideas, information, and commerce.
4. The authors of the DMCA never intended to create such a dramatic shift in the balance. As the report of the Committee of the Judiciary of the House of Representatives accompanying the DMCA stated: `[A]n individual [should] not be able to circumvent in order to gain unauthorized access to a work, but [should] be able to do so in order to make fair use of a work which he or she has acquired lawfully.' House Report 105-551, Part I, Section-by-Section Analysis of section 1201(a)(1).

The Implications of Intellectual Property and Copyright for Identity Politics

Reading Boyle and Barlow, I couldn't help but think of Charles Stross, one of the most interesting and radical of the new generation of cyberpunk writers (a term that doesn't really fit the work but which I use here because Stross's fiction is partly influenced by the work of writers William Gibson and Vernor Vinge as well as singularity theorists like Ray Kurzweil and in fact shares some of their stylistic and thematic interests, but mostly because it communicates the exciting sense of radical newness of contemporary sci-fi as exemplified by Stross and others such as Richard K. Morgan, Alastair Reynolds, and Chris Moriarty). Reading this week's articles, I am especially reminded of Stross's best known work, the novel Accelerando, published in 2005 as the final iteration of a famous series of stories originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction between 2001 and 2004.

Obviously it's Boyle's reference to cyberpunk that made me think of this, because Stross uses the situations of the novel to carry the implied ethical problems of copyright and intellectual property specifically as they apply to human identity politics to their logical extreme. Check out the following passages from the book to see what I mean (by the way, if you want to read the whole novel, you might be interested in knowing that Stross has made it available in a number of electronic formats -- go to www.accelerando.org and scroll down a little):

"Let me get this straight. You're uploads--nervous system state vectors--from spiny lobsters? The Moravec operation; take a neuron, map its synapses, replace with microelectrodes that deliver identical outputs from a simulation of the nerve. Repeat for entire brain, until you've got a working map of it in your simulator. That right?"

"Da. Is-am assimilate expert system--use for self-awareness and contact with net at large--then hack into Moscow Windows NT User Group website. Am wanting to defect. Must repeat? Okay?"

Manfred winces. He feels sorry for the lobsters.... Awakening to consciousness in a human-dominated Internet, that must be terribly confusing! There are no points of reference in their ancestry, no biblical certainties in the new millennium that, stretching ahead, promises as much change as has happened since their Precambrian origin....

The lobsters are not the sleek, strongly superhuman intelligences of pre-singularity mythology: They're a dim-witted collective of huddling crustaceans. Before their discarnation, before they were uploaded one neuron at a time and injected into cyberspace, they swallowed their food whole, then chewed it in a chitin-lined stomach....

"Can you help us?" ask the lobsters.

"Let me think about it," says Manfred. He closes the dialogue window, opens his eyes again, and shakes his head. Someday he, too, is going to be a lobster, swimming around and waving his pincers in a cyberspace so confusingly elaborate that his uploaded identity is cryptozoic: a living fossil from the depths of geological time, when mass was dumb and space was unstructured.

This is just to introduce the concept of digital brain mapping and personality/memory upload that is central to the novel (as well as many others both by Stross and others). In a later scene, as the potential subjects of digital personality upload are discussed, so too are the legal and ethical implications of digitizing more complex organisms:

"The lobsters are sentient," Manfred persists. "What about those poor kittens? Don't they deserve minimal rights? How about you? .... The kittens are probably not going to be allowed to run. They're too fucking dangerous--they grow up into cats, solitary and highly efficient killing machines. With intelligence and no socialization they'll be too dangerous to have around. They're prisoners, Pam, raised to sentience only to discover they're under a permanent death sentence. How fair is that?"

"But they're only uploads." Pamela stares at him. "Software, right? You could reinstantiate them on another hardware platform, like, say, your Aineko [a robotic pet cat]. So the argument about killing them doesn't really apply, does it?"

"So? We're going to be uploading humans in a couple of years. I think we need to take a rain check on the utilitarian philosophy before it bites us on the cerebral cortex. Lobsters, kittens, humans--it's a slippery slope...."

[Another character, Bob Franklin, interjects at this point:]

"But they're just software! Software based on fucking lobsters, for God's sake! I'm not even sure they are sentient--I mean, they're, what, a ten-million-neuron network hooked up to a syntax engine and a crappy knowledge base? What kind of basis for intelligence is that?"

Manfred's finger jabs out. "That's what they'll say about you, Bob. Do it. Do it or don't even think about uploading out of meatspace when your body packs in, because your life won't be worth living. The precedent you set here determines how things are done tomorrow.... Some kinds of intellectual land grab just shouldn't be allowed."

"Lobsters--" Franklin shakes his head. "Lobsters, cats. You're serious, aren't you? You think they should be treated as human-equivalent?"

"It's not so much that they should be treated as human-equivalent, as that if they aren't treated as people, it's quite possible that other uploaded beings won't be treated as people either...."

It's worth mentioning that the future being imagined here is not decades or centuries from now, but years. Now I'm not necessarily suggesting that we should take this as an immediately cautionary tale (though there are some out there who would)--what I'm interested in is the connection to Boyle. The future Stross imagines here foregrounds the issues Boyle addresses in his article, particularly the increasingly difficult problem of defining the concept of "information" itself in a culture where information is a highly valuable commodity. As Boyle makes clear, it seems our conceptions both of what constitutes information and of how information is to be legally handled become highly problematic when we are unable to differentiate anymore between electronic and genetic information--it's all just code. For Stross, the inevitable end-point of this revolution (which theorists like Kurzweil posit is coming) is that human identity itself becomes more information. The ethical and legal implications are both obvious and frightening. I don't have any answers or even, really, any insights, but it sure is fun to think about, particularly since these ideas have become so central to contemporary sci-fi, from Accelerando to the Sci-Fi Channel's reinvention of Battlestar Galactica (which reimagines the robotic Cylons of the hokey '70s show as fanatically monotheistic cybernetic clones with the ability to upload and download their consciousnesses, personalities, and memories into newly engineered biomechanical bodies).

Oh, and try assigning Accelerando as a reading in a freshman composition class. You'll have all sorts of fun watching your students' heads explode.

Barlow Reading Response

Barlow begins his discussion of the economy of ideas, particularly in the digital age, with a question that defines the heart of the issue "If our property can be infinitely reproduced and instantaneously distributed all over the planet without cost, without our knowledge, without its even leaving our possession, how can we protect it?" (1). In the transition from complete reliance on the printed word, with Gutenburg as a reference point, Barlow points out that we have progressed from viewing information as a hard to attain commodity to something taken for granted and exchanged so freely that it becomes difficult to control either the actual movement of information or the value that any work or idea carries. In an effort to control and protect the movement of ideas and their original authors, Barlow sees a level of control that threatens to hinder the actual productions and dissemination of information itself.

With the roots of copyright law in a time when the internet was far from fathomable, the initial intent of a law to protect an author's rights to their work was focused on something other than profit, an aspect of current copyright law that one would be hard pressed to exclude. Yet Barlow suggests that "It may well be that when the current system of intellectual property law has collapsed, as seems inevitable, that no new legal structure will arise in its place" (5). In arguing that our entire understanding of the meaning of information and the social and legal order that surrounds it must be shifted in light of new technology, Barlow (and his contemporaries) look to reexamine the foundation of intellectual property and their place in a digital society.

The inability of an author to control the "finished" product of their work leaves those who have a more economic stake in controlling their work (and the work of others) relatively resistant to accepting a less structured idea of ownership. In addressing this issue, Barlow points out the less tangible (but more valid) ways that the value of information can be measured. Rather than placing standard values on fixed information, Barlow argues that information's worth is based on its relationship with its audience, proximity to the information and the timeliness of it all factor in to more adaptable concepts of worth in this more modern economic system.

At the base of Barlow's ideas about the changing face of intellectual property and information is a shift towards a more ethics fueled establishment and away from one so severely rooted in law and enforcement. Citing consistent software sales despite increasingly available free versions of software, Barlow argues that people buy those things that become essential to their work and lives. When information, or a program, become important to someone's productivity they look for the aspects of that application that can only come through purchasing the support, updates, etc...

In breaking down the various changes that come with the digital age, Barlow asserts that even semantic concepts of information must change. In shifting our thinking from a noun to a verb, "information" becomes something that is harder to actually own, becoming rooted in need and relationship rather than possession and control.

Ethics or Fear

Here is a really interesting thread about banjoists and copyright.

In Barlow's 1994 essay, he discusses how with the "third wave" of economic development, in which information replaces land and other tangible items as the mainstay of our economy, a new system of intellectual property protection is needed to replace the now-defunct copyright laws.

Barlow makes an interesting argument in both his 1994 and 2000 essays. He claims that as we move further and further away from effective lawful control of the internet, "ethics are going to make a major comeback."

I find Barlow's argument compelling, and I've personally witnessed its application, but I'm wondering if we are really there yet. In this post, "Musicians Censoring Themselves," isn't it fear that keeps the banjoists from sharing not only musical notation but also personal knowledge? How much of the lack of sharing here is based on ethics and how much on fear of being attacked by the law? Interesting stuff, considering our constitution's copyright law is supposed "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Art."