open Democracy News Analysis - the people vs. copyright - Comments

Cathy Fitzpatrick on "The reinvention of scarcity"

Cathy Fitzpatrick — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 23:06:40 +0000

I wish there was a better way to space your post with paragraphing on here. Here's an article in the New York Times today that perfectly sums up this idea of how a digitalized version of a real life scene on the Lower East Side vacuums out content of music clubs and removes "the curatorial moment," as one club owner put it. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/arts/television/06itzk.html?_r=2&th&emc=th&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Cathy Fitzpatrick on "The reinvention of scarcity"

Cathy Fitzpatrick — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 09:51:36 +0000

I'm tremendously heartened to read your post, because you've hit upon something that has troubled me for a long time: the *orthodoxy* of the Creative Commons movement. There really needs to be some liberal revisionism away from some of these rigid doctrines. You've made a wonderfully valid point about the context and community around publications on an Internet site such as opendemocracy.net In fact, there *is* a scarcity in the new world of social media and that is *attention*. And that means if you can no longer gather the coin of the realm of attention, you cannot survive. If other sites like ISN essentially vacuum away your content, it doesn't "live" in the same way with the same sustenance and at some point, you cannot keep producing that content such that ISN can go on vacuuming it. So the ISNs of the world have to figure out how to pay, too, as much as you have to figure out how to retain value. I'm afraid Cory Ondrejka (the former CTO of Second Life who has now left Linden Lab and who will be teaching at USC) is somewhat disingenuous in his depiction of the Brave New World of virtuality and his claims that it doesn't suffer from scarcity. Of course there's scarcity -- starting with server space, which costs money, and programmers' time, and therefore costs a maintenance fee to Linden Lab each month. Then there's frame rates (FPS) and the capacity of those servers to hold only 40-100 avatars. In fact, there are very real constraints on creativity given those parameters. Land to display content cannot be rolled out endlessly for free like shelf paper. Second Life is a very concentrated, visual example of the attention economy, and it is definitely one made of the very real scarcity of people's time, views, and cash. Even Cory's claim that the virtual architect has no start-up costs or material costs and can bask in the glory of sheer creativity is heavily misleading. The building tools are wonky and difficult for the average person, so only the tekkie who is well schooled in Photoshop and the scripter who knows code can really excel -- education has to precede the utopia of SL. And naturally there is competition among architects for the marketplace, both commercial (housing, clubs, businesses) and non-profit (aesthetics, blog reviews, public meetings, reputation). The architect may be free of the weight of stone masonry and gravity and the cost of building a tower, but now he has to ask: Can he become a *good* architect? Will his builds gather the precious eyeballs of the attention economy? The tragedy of the commons in Second Life isn't that there is no bustle in the marketplace -- that's just a superficial impression that comes from needing more adaptation and lessons in how to use the search functions and networks to find topics and people of interest. Rather, it's that on the mainland, the place where precisely serendipity, creativity, collaboration should all come together in this very interesting international space, the Linden-induced anarchy misrules in the name of open-ended "creativity" that often winds up turning into a very accelerated lesson of the tragedy of the commons. You have to buy the view if you don't want a huge purple spinning tower or giant refrigerator in it, cramping your own style. Worse, on the mainland, land (that is, the metaphor for the display space for creativity and communications) is defaced and devalued by ad-farmers who cut up the server space into 16 m2 squares and put ugly spinning ads on them, then set the squares to sale for outrageous prices in order to extort residents to "buy back the view". This and other rigors of the mainland (griefing, crashing, etc) mean that it's quite the challenge to live and work on this commons, it's like trying to live with an email box that is full of spam. But I would say it is worth it, and gradually the norms will start to come into place to create the necessary degrees of restraint that help preserve the space for the creativity of all, not to grant it only to a few at the expense of the many through a misguided orthodoxy of absolute creator's rights that amount to cavalier licentiousness. A terrible blow to the world, and one in which Ondrejka took a position that was controversial yet became orthodox for the elite, was the appearance of the "Copybot" or program that could copy anything and therefore destroy all intellectual property rights -- the hallmark of Second Life had been that unlike other games or worlds, they gave subscribers the right to retain rights over their IP and to buy and sell for real money. Copybot as a metaphor for the copyability of everthing that is digital remains as a profound problem, as does the drive to open source the server code of SL itself -- it raises issues of property value and content copyright. I don't see that an exuberant business model that glorifies open source yet survives through foundation grants and constant demands for voluntary donations is really functioning as a *business* or that it is quite the viral model that we should all be emulating. People need to be paid for their work. So often the excited theorists relying on "wisdom of crowds" aren't factoring in that the people who make those crowds are paid at day jobs that give them just enough disposable time or fractured "multitasking" and "microchunked" attention to give away for free to various open-source projects. Somebody always has to pay...somewhere. I don't think you define the new world of Web 2.0 and such as "beyond scarcity" merely because there isn't a model of earth, resources, labor, etc. Rather, you need to define what the new scarcities are, and they are server space, attention, reputation, etc. I've been pondering that in this new dispensation, with copyright "withering away" and the difficulty in holding value in recordings and objects, copyright and intellectual property will become more event-driven than object-driven. That is, people who put together communities and networks and events within them will make up a kind of footprint or social graph or community icon that will in a sense become the new "copyrightable" thing. In this new kind of existence, you wouldn't have to worry about physically copyrighting an object in Second Life or a work of philosophy on the Internet because those would become artifacts that you would willingly hand out as freebies in conjunction with your community/event/interactive space. You won't have to worry about attempting to imprint and legally defend the community icon, because it will be unique, like a retinal pattern -- people might imitate it, but poorly. This communal icon can take many forms, from loose networks of individuals collaborating, to more organized corporations or non-profit organizations. A lot of thought and discussion will have to go into how to define the elements of these icons and also not become rigidly orthodox about "communities," as so often happens online, because the individual has to retain rights and dignity and minorities must be defended as well within the context of these overarching communities. Catherine Fitzpatrick/Prokofy Neva

Konstantinos on "The reinvention of scarcity"

Konstantinos — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 11:05:25 +0000

What Curzon Price evokes is the old paradox of individual emancipation: its impossibility if there is no structure to support this condition and its irrelevance if it is for free. To take up the Athens paradigm evoked by him, the worse destiny was to be exiled from the Pólis (which means much more than the "city"), because only therein could individuality be lived as a vital intensity and creativity, of course with the permanent risk to pay the highest price for daring to confront the city with its misfits. The crucial question is: where is our Pólis today and how can we get there ? How can we establish links and create emancipating communities of our deliberate choice in the time of the cybernetic turn (Laymert Garcia Dos Santos "The cultural and cybernetic turn", http://www.ces.uc.pt/emancipa/research/en/ft/biosocio.html), in a time where all cultures are being cannibalised by the accelerating globalised mechané ? What is the price one has to pay? In the Pólis, besides its agorà, there was a fallow in the middle of the city, where access was denied to all (ie not a garden, park, etc.). It was called "boulimiaíon", because, being the most central and prominent part of the city, everybody wanted to get hold of it and "value it up". It was protected by Hermes, the god of the fallow land. Its mere existence and the temptations it caused meant a permanent mental and psychological training of the citizens to understand that not everything should be done, simply because it is "useful" or simply "doable". What about introducing such an approach, deliberately and by an open political process, in fields of science, for the tropical forests, for the human genome ? Why should we do this ? Because the political project of democracy and emancipation has been kidnapped by the sphere of techno-science und perverted to its opposite. Thus, the fight for reclaiming political sovereignty back from the sphere of techno-science is the most critical one, if we should survive as humans and not end-up as humanoids.

samirchopra on "Free culture: tumble down the walls"

samirchopra — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 00:03:42 +0000

Hi Tom; I quite enjoyed this piece (and blogged on it at: http://decodingliberation.blogspot.com/2007/06/its-all-just-one-really.html) - I think that in fact there is no such distinction (as you seem to be saying) and that drawing such a line simply makes a distinction that the "commercial economy" would like to see drawn.

Tom Chance on "Free culture: tumble down the walls"

Tom Chance — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 09:16:14 +0000

Thanks for your comment, Michel. I don't really understand, however, why you want to impose these two polarities upon disparate and diverse communities. You have succinctly described a key difference between copyleft (GPL) advocates and CC advocates, yet I see no reason in your comment as to why we should care about them! What I tried to argue in my article is quite simple: we should seek to configure our tools, our general approach, even our underlying philosophy to an extent, around the individuals and communities that are already practising. To do it the other way around completely defeats the point, and elevates those tools to the point of technocracy. I'd also reject the idea, anyway, that the "continuum between the market; the sharing, and the commons" is a good description of the real world. It's another example, to my mind, of academics and advocates trying to frame the world in terms of their own work, rather than doing things the other (and right) way around.

michelsub2003 on "Free culture: tumble down the walls"

michelsub2003 — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 08:34:28 +0000

I'm really not sure I understand what this article is proposing, except a further search for solutions for a free culture, of which Lessig efforts where a beginning. I find it useful to distinguish between two different logics. One is the sharing economy, which is about the creative expressions of individuals or communities, wishing to share their work, while staying sovereign in this matter of sharing. The flexibility of the Creative Commons scheme, works very well for that, and has the advantage of extending the scope of these types of social relations. The second logic is of common production for a commons. Here the individual knows that his individual work is a priori part of the commons, and belongs to that commons. This is the function of the GPL like licenses. If the one focuses on individual sovereignity in sharing; the second focuses on the protection of the community assets. In my opinion; a lot of the back and forth criticism between CC and GPL advocates, would be avoided if we recognize their different purpose. By having them both, we have a very broad range of options, and we can engage with the market on our own terms, while also having the option to create non-market logics. While it is true that there is a continuum between the market; the sharing, and the commons, it is useful to have those polarities in mind, and to have tools which allow us to configure their interrelationship as individuals and communities. Michel Bauwens, http://p2pfoundation.net

ferdaus98 on "The future of intellectual property: Andrew Gowers interviewed"

ferdaus98 — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 16:29:18 +0000

I believe you can also discuss about "Copyleft" here introduced by Richard Stallman which I guess led to the establishment of "Free software Foundation".

There are thousands of highly qualified programmers in the world now who do not favour the idea of Copyrights. That's why very successful Operating Systems like Linux is expanding.

Thanks