On the occasion of this week’s visit to New York to be a guest in Bob Levinson’s Bob Dylan class at the 92nd Street Y taught by Nina Goss, here is one of this blog’s initial posts from back in May:

If I Was a Master Thief, Perhaps I’d Rob Them: Bob Dylan, Plagiarism, Freshman Composition, and the “Cult of Originality”

They’re Planting Stories in the Press

After spending many years among the has-beens, a once renowned performer releases a series of well-received albums. After a while, amid the new rave reviews, reports surface that some lines from these new albums have been stolen from an obscure nineteenth century poet, a Japanese gangster novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, old films, and a number of blues songs. Talk of plagiarism emerges. The guy may have written some strikingly original songs back in the day, people say, but now, clearly, the well has run dry. Sadly, he must rely on the work of others to produce much of anything.

Yet to others, this is no surprise. What about his first famous song, the one school children the world-over sing? As Greil Marcus points out, that melody is straight from the old spiritual, “No More Auction Block.” His second most famous song from two years later took chords from “La Bamba” and stole its title from Muddy Waters. Though in many respects that particular song was never new, in some strange way, it was newer than most—so much so that it changed the popular music world irrevocably. Marcus quotes Al Kooper who said it was like when “talkies” replaced silent films–it “put a lot of people out of work.”

Whether you are talking about the artist’s new “controversial” songs or the old “groundbreaking” songs, none is original if you go by common definitions. Yet in some miraculous, inexplicable way, they are.

God Knows When, but You’re Doin’ It Again

Even before the release Bob Dylan’s latest album, Together Through Life, there were rumors all over town. Some say the early download, “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’,” sounds like “Black Magic Woman.” Those of a somewhat earlier vintage might think of “Who’s Been Talkin’.” Scott Warmuth’s excellent detective work has found that the album title, Together Through Life, is lifted both from Walt Whitman and from James Joyce’s letters to his wife. The Bruce Davidson cover photo was a cover photo before––on Larry Brown’s book, Big, Bad Love. Several lines in the songs (co-written this time with partner in crime, Robert Hunter) come from The Canterbury Tales, others from Ovid’s The Erotic Poems. Despite all the uproar over stolen lines from Confederate poet Henry Timrod and Japanese novelist Junichi Saga in his two previous albums, apparently, Bob Dylan is up to his old tricks.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Depending upon your perspective, either Dylan is an artist the likes of which the world has rarely seen, or he’s a musical pickpocket.

Maybe you can’t have one without the other.

As a listener and a blues-educated musician, I am familiar with the folk/blues worlds and how most new works borrow extensively from what came before. Not only am I not troubled by such appropriations––I consider them indispensable. Yet, worlds collide: I also teach freshman English. In that setting, undocumented appropriation is the third rail. It’s a capital crime. What’s a poor composition teacher-slash-musician to do?

Something Is Happening Here, But You Don’t Know What It Is

Perhaps I should make a distinction: I am at ease with appropriation as long as it is used to create rather than duplicate. I’m not alone. If members of the blues/folk/jazz cultures hear something familiar, they might say, “I like what you did with that.” When something “new” turns up, these people already know its genealogy to the letter. (The documentation is “embedded,” you might say.) When you are just copying (i.e. the Elvis version of “Hound Dog”), rightful owners deserve acknowledgement and proper compensation (which they often didn’t get back then). But that’s not what this is about. This is about what the act of creating involves. When you are borrowing to create, you are granted greater freedom (or should be), and for good reason.

Few will have an awareness of this other open-source world musicians know so well. As a consequence, outsiders, like overwhelmed comp teachers who have been burned too many times, feel violated. Yet, if at some point those folks decide to get more involved, they’ll learn soon enough. Eventually, such listeners will find their way back to some earlier (though maybe not “original”) sources just as I did, largely because Dylan’s songs pointed me in that direction. As legal expert Lawrence Lessig says, “You pay respect to tradition by incorporating it. But you make the tradition compelling by doing so in a way that makes everyone want to understand more.” In just two lines, Lessig captures the essence of Dylan’s career.

The academic world does things differently. If I were to refer to the “uses of chaos” here or to comment on Dylan’s use of “dialogism,” people familiar with English composition studies would know I’m referring to Ann Berthoff and Mikhail Bakhtin. (Duh, as the kids say.) Even though, like with the blues singers, these references are already deeply embedded in my peers’ neural pathways, I need to document them anyway. In academia, that’s the only way you’ll ever be heard. There are gatekeepers in place to uphold certain quality-control standards. Nothing wrong with that. Giving credit where credit is due matters. How to do that, however, changes depending on the context. In traditional music, whatever gates do exist tend to swing freely like those John Wayne movie barroom doors. Though it may not look like it, Dylan is following conventions and accepted practices. Where he works, borrowing is just how it’s done. Credit is assumed based upon a vast reservoir that is held in common. Put up a bigger gate and you don’t get a Louis Armstrong, or a Memphis Minnie, and Bob Dylan would be forever young Bobby Zimmerman.

You’re Very Well Read, It’s Well Known

Music, literature, it’s all the same to Dylan. In an Oral Tradition article, Richard F. Thomas describes how Dylan digs deep, going back even farther than The Canterbury Tales, using Ovid and Virgil in “Love and Theft” and Modern Times. Thomas speaks eloquently of what it does to a listener who unexpectedly hears other voices in Dylan’s songs:

But even on the first time through “Love and Theft,” even before we had noted the quotes around the title that drew attention to the theft of Eric Lott’s title, before we had been handed the snippets of Confessions of a Yakuza, transformed into Appalachian and other vignettes, there was Virgil, loud and clear, in the tenth verse of “Lonesome Day Blues” (itself a Blind Willie McTell title):

I’m gonna spare the defeated, I’m gonna speak to the crowd / I’m gonna spare the defeated, boys/ I’m going to speak to the crowd/ I am goin’ to teach peace to the conquered / I’m gonna tame the proud // (“Lonesome  Day Blues”)

But yours will be the rulership of nations, / remember, Roman, these will be your arts: / to teach the ways of peace to those you conquer, / to spare defeated peoples, tame the proud //(Virgil, Aeneid 6.851-53, [trans.Mandelbaum])

Such insertions, known as “intertexts,” are not gap-fillers for a burnt-out, writer’s-blocked songwriter. They are placed there precisely to create something new.

Poems that are layered with intertexts reveal depths of meaning through our recognition of those texts as we import other contexts that work together with new images, metaphors, and other poetic or musical effects. That is true of Virgil, Dante, Milton, and as we saw, it was true of “Lonesome Day Blues” and much else on Love and Theft.

Thomas, the classicist, hears Virgil where others hear just Dylan. Someone schooled in the blues/folk tradition can no longer just hear the singer or the guitar player when listening to a song because for those people, the song is an echo chamber of familiar melodic and lyrical voices. Like Thomas listening to Dylan, Lessig, too, hears voices when he reads law briefs:

A great brief seems to say nothing on its own. Everything is drawn from cases that went before, presented as if the argument now presented is in fact nothing new. Here again, the words of others are used to make a point the others didn’t directly make. The old cases are remixed. The remix is meant to do something new.

The phrase used to make a point the others didn’t directly make is key. This is something mere copying could never hope to do. These recent works of Dylan’s, says Robert Polito, like all of his works, are “Modernist collages,” much like Pound’sCantos or Eliot’s The Waste Land which are filled with allusions and lifted lines but which stand on their own, to say the least. In the company of such master thieves, Dylan, too, uses lines familiar to some and places them in new contexts. “Timrod,” says Polito, “works as a citation we’re ultimately intended to notice, though no song depends on that notice.” In short, these are not like photocopies or essay mill purchases from cheathouse.com. They function within the new works independently of their original contexts.

Like traditional music, literature is littered with lifted lines.  Jonathan Lethem recounts the thefts of Nabokov, Pound, Eliot, and Shakespeare. Paul Collins cites thefts by Poe, Melville, and also mentions how “Lawrence Sterne’s immortal diatribe against plagiarism in Tristan Shandy was itself  . . . plagiarized from Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.” In addition, Collins reports that the introduction of Google Books to the search engine world has exposed some previously hidden thefts that could be “the first rumble of what may become a literary earthquake.” Though it sometimes has pretended to be somehow separate, the literary process is proving to have been another version of the folk process all along. Here’s how T. S. Eliot put it: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”

Virgil was also accused of plagiarism, says Thomas, and his answer to his critics was a defiant, I’d like to see you do that! :

Why don’t they try the same thefts? They’ll find out it’s easier to snatch Hercules’ club from him than a single line from Homer.

As Thomas shows, for Dylan to seamlessly weave together lines from Virgil, an allusion from translator Mandelbaum’s introduction, phrases from a Japanese gangster novel and Huck Finn, and then put them into a song that uses a Blind Willie McTell title shows not only that he has a lot of nerve, but also exhibits Herculean skill.

Coming up –

Part II, plagiarizing about plagiarism, Bob Dylan and Muddy Waters chime in, some good fishing spots, Andy Warhol, misplaced fossils, old is the new new, architecture, law school, “I just sorta recorded it” . . .

Part III, college dropouts, the death of the term paper, lawyers, pirates, and black marketeers, Cafe Wha?, love not theft, hey Woody Guthrie I wrote you a song

Postscript: a tour of the cotton field, a rundown of sources, plus intertexts, and other voices.

Related posts here.

Andrew Keen is up to his usual reactionary hijinks in his recent article Why Culture Isn’t Free. While I can appreciate a sober reminder about the ill-conceptions of any digital utopianism, I feel Keen is building disingenuous arguments to attack the free culture movement and in particular remix culture.

One part of his piece sticks out like a sore thumb and sadly it’s the point Keen wants to try and drive home with the reader. Emphasis added by me:

Much of the pirate ideology is simply left-leaning communitarianism gone amuck. Book after book and idealistic media academic after academic eulogize the “public sphere” and its supposedly cathartic impact upon culture. Take, for example, Copyright and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity by the University of Virginia media theorist Siva Vaidhyanathan, which argues that the privatization of culture has impoverished the public sphere. We need radical copyright reform, Vaidhyanathan claims, to “encourage creative expression without limiting prospects for future creators.”

But what kind of creative expression are radical copyright reformers like Vaidhyanathan seeking? Their goal in the copyright wars are to give consumer-artists the right to “remix” content, the creative pasting together of different forms of media which current copyright law restricts. While Lessig who, for a law professor has much to say about the muse of creativity, argues that in today’s interactive media, the nature of art has changed and that pre-existing images and sounds have become a “palette” for the digital artist.

The problem with the cult of the remix, however, is that it conveniently ignores why the majority of consumers steal content on the Internet. No doubt Lessig and Vaidhyanathan are right that there are some genuinely creative artists whose digital work is being undermined by today’s copyright laws. But the vast majority of thieves on Pirate Bay and other file-sharing sites aren’t Lessig’s heroic digital visionaries remixing the sounds of Philip Glass with the images of Andrei Tarkovsky to create innovative new art. Instead, they are downloading the latest Harry Potter movie or hit song by Madonna so that they won’t have to pay for it at the cinema or record store.

Keen believes the death knell to the arguments of those like Lessig and Vaidhyanathan is that the vast majority of content sharing goes to free-riding viewers rather than for creative purpose which would carry a noble merit since there is a productive outcome. Now even though Keen disavows this productivity in “Cult of the Amateur”, the ideas at stake that Keen picks from Lessig and Vaidhyanathan on remix culture are not aimed at excusing the bulk of file-sharing. It’s merely a function of what liberty consumers should feel they can take with their content and culture that they engage and immerse themselves with.

Both Lessig and Vaidhyanathan, among others in the area of arguing copyright reform, have made distinguishable arguments on the function of sharing. For instance Vaidhyanathan’s “The Anarchist in the Library” looks more at a function of cataloging knowledge reciprocity with digital media while making little mention about remixing. If Keen wanted to address the problem of people downloading Harry Potter and Madonna with no intent to remix the content, then he should have addressed it from their arguments on content sharing.

Before remix culture and the Henry Jenkins’s out there tried to convince us we’d all prosume our digital media, there was a straight forward response by nascent file-sharers that felt dejected by the price and distribution mechanisms of CDs and DVDs. There was little recognition of piracy as a function of identity-politics or an overarching ideology about what should be done with the content once it was shared. While Keen chastises the vast amount of pirates for wanting a free lunch from their file sharing, that same vast majority never conformed or saw themselves as part of the ideology either. Overtime that may have changed certain people with the popularity and support to matters like The Pirate Bay’s dramatic saga, but most importantly the ideology never preceded the action.

Sharing Will Always Occur

In looking at file-sharing there is a social function at work that precedes any inherent value to data. It’s predicated on the simple exchange of knowledge communicated between humans. This is a distinction Karl Polanyi observed about human relationships to the market society in “The Great Transformation”. Polanyi noted the process of gifting resembled a reciprocity of knowledge shared through social interaction. Telling ideas, laws, theories, mythologies and fictions had an intrinsic function to enable human communication which society thrived to progress and educate themselves by. So as a result the gifting of goods or services operated the same function to gift someone with the said knowledge about it.

Now we don’t have to follow Polanyi to a T, but we strive to have knowledge at our disposal and whether it’s free or not; we want the quickest and easiest ability to fill voids of knowledge. Here’s an example. Your friend tells you about a movie they just saw but you haven’t seen it. In communicating to you aspects of the plot, you instantly want access and knowledge of the movie in your mind. But why? Because your mind operates on this interaction with either a desire for reciprocity to communicate back or the need to fill the gaps of knowledge with the rest of the information available about it. Since we might not have immediate access we then fish around for other areas of information freemiums: trailers, press-packs, IMDB information, discussions on message boards, reviews. To those like Keen these only serve allowable marketing function to generate buzz but we flock to them since they serve a function of completing a knowledge loop.

Sadly as a society that’s become so rooted in having controlled mechanisms to ideas, it’s become an acceptive norm to negate having an informational buffet even when we have the technology to provide it. The information we get for free in regular human interactions is just overlooked and dismissed as banal even though it’s a vital and common aspect of our lives that we almost never think twice about. Our culture educates us and looking to commodify it so artificial market mechanisms will be at work to construct profit, we treat our notions of culture passively in the way we can dismiss its routine consumption. This creates the problem of looking a culture to be there to entertain and do nothing more. The power of fictions are unmistakable, Oliver Twist may tell you more about 19th century industrial England than what you may get from an encyclopedia and you’re more likely to turn to it as an example than you would a historical moment.

The argument I would expect against this, is that by allowing content sharing to persist you remove the incentive for the Milos Formans out there to share their genius with us. This assumes a sort of cultural vanguarding with content bias built on trite canonizations to make content appear scarcely unique to be considered “good” or high brow (the way a 100 Greatest Movies list tries to give each movie some glistening aura). Moreover it ignores that any genius or good ideas will flow into a public sphere or be communicated, reflecting a true marketplace for knowledge. Is that not an even more supportive argument for remix culture? Not everyone will be in the situation Forman or others were during the Czech New Wave to have large state funding to make films lampooning the system. While we consider it genius, his work came purely by happenstance. Preserving copyright had nothing to do with it, nor would it create another Forman. But i’m sure just by brining up Milos Forman in this discussion (as these ideas are publicly exchanged), those who read this or Keen’s piece will feel compelled to look Forman up or find his work and perhaps better educate themselves about Forman, the Czech New Wave or any other related knowledge category that might in turn inform themselves about both his film’s cultural place place in history and now in being used in a discussion on copyright reform.

This question seems so obvious and simple as to be undeserving of any scholarly attention. “Copyright” has a long history, tracing back to the early 18th century in Britain –- which includes the variants “copy right” and “copy-right” — so the term is not new. Yet this question is important to ask and answer for several reasons.

First, copyright no longer is a backwater discipline relegated to the inspection of nerdy specialists. Instead, it is now central to the everyday activities of most American citizens.

Second, many people –- lawyers and lay persons alike -– often conflate copyright and “intellectual property.”

Third, there are some important theoretical and political considerations that influence definitions of copyright. While these considerations are advanced issues we are more likely to address over on Copycense than here, they are important these days because of the rhetoric and framing that is being used to position copyright law and policy in one direction or another. I will summarize copyright law’s main theories in a future post, and we will devote extensive coverage to the theory of copyright in upcoming articles on Copycense.

Dictionary Definitions of Copyright

With this said, let us look at some definitions of copyright. In a prior post, I put forth an interim definition of copyright as “a legal system or program that governs the use of original, recorded works.” Compare my interim definition to the definitions of copyright from the following sources:

Black’s Law Dictionary: The right of literary property as recognized and sanctioned by positive law. An intangible, incorporeal right granted by statute to the author or originator of certain literary or artistic productions, whereby he is invested, for a specific period, with the sole and exclusive privilege of multiplying copies of the same and publishing and selling them.

Barron’s Law Dictionary: The protection of the works of artists and authors giving them the exclusive right to publish their works or determine who may so publish.

Nolo: A bundle of exclusive rights granted to the author of a creative work such as book, movie, song, painting, photograph, design, computer software, or architecture. These rights include the right to make copies, authorize others to make copies, make derivative works, sell and market the work, and perform the work.

Oxford English Dictionary: The exclusive legal right, given to an originator or an assignee, to print, publish, perform, film, or record literary, artistic, or musical material, and to authorize others to do the same.

U.S. Copyright Office: [.pdf] Copyright is a form of protection provided by the laws of the United States (title 17, U. S. Code) to the authors of “original works of authorship,” including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works. This protection is available to both published and unpublished works.

When I read the five definitions above, a handful of issues occurs to me. First, all these definitions ostensibly focus on two issues: rights and protection of rights. Of course, copyright law has a sextet of rights, and another pair of rights that may be relevant when considering specific types of works.

Yet, I find it interesting that none of these definitions mentions the limitations on copyright rights that exist within the statute. If one considers that the limitations copyright law grants to the public are as important a part of the statute as the exclusive rights copyright law grants to authors, then it seems odd to me that basic definitions of copyright fail to mention limitations (or even compulsory licenses, for that matter).

Second, the definition in Black’s Law Dictionary puts forth a subtle, but important focus on property. This emphasis on property is important because courts and scholars regard Black’s as the definitive dictionary of American law (based upon legal citation frequency), and also because there has been an increasingly ferocious debate among legal scholars about whether copyrighted works qualify as (or retain characteristics similar to) property in the same way as we consider land or personal possessions to be property. (This debate is beyond Core Copyright’s scope, and something we will address separately on Copycense. The emphasis of Black’s on property, however, has important policy and legislative ramifications.

(And lest one think that the analogy of copyright with tangible property is one made only by copyright owners or their lobbyists, Lawrence Lessig refers to copyrighted works as property in his book Free Culture. He qualifies this by saying copyright is a special form of property, but he clearly refers to copyright as property.)

Third, the Black’s, OED, and Copyright Office definitions are quite technical and require some level of legal knowledge and training to understand fully. Neither the Barron’s or Nolo definitions suffer these problems, but, again, they retain what I consider a value-laden allusion to rights, protection of those rights, and the absence of any mention to limitations, or even the public domain.

Scholarly Definitions of Copyright

Several scholars have attempted to define copyright. Once again, I think it is instructive to survey these descriptions as well:

Paul Goldstein: In his book Copyright’s Highway, Goldstein defines copyright as one’s right to make copies of a given work (and to keep others from making copies of that work), and also as “the law of authorship.”

Niva Elkin-Koren: Elkin-Koren, an Israeli copyright scholar, defines copyright as “a property rule defined in legislative bodies of territorial states and applied by their enforcement systems” in a 2001 journal article.

William Patry: Patry, the author of the book Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars and the scholarly treatise Patry on Copyright, defines copyright as a social program that is a means to an end.

Jessica Litman: In a 1990 article entitled “The Public Domain,” the law professor defined copyright as “a legal scheme, prescribed in the Constitution and put in place by Congress, to encourage the enterprise of authorship.”

Again, it is interesting to note the emphasis on property or property protection, as they appear in Elkin-Koren’s and Goldstein’s definitions. Patry’s definition, while emphasizing the role government plays in granting copyright protection to authors, does not identify what means are being used and what ends are the objectives.

Ultimately, I believe Litman’s definition is the best because people can understand it on its face regardless with familiarity with the U.S. legal system. It also is the definition from either category that does the best job of eliminating or limiting personal and theoretical values, judgments, or assessments. This will be the operative definition we use going forward in Core Copyright.

(Editor’s Note: Portions of this writing have been taken from the author’s forthcoming study on copyright law and the frame of “piracy.”)

© Copyright 2009, Core Copyright

Just finished watching RiP : A remix manifesto (a film from NFB), a documentary film made with open source and remixed work about copyright and remix culture.

The RiP DVD has a copy of speech that is available online and I highly recommend, Lawrence Lessig’s Last Speech on Free Culture (delivered in 2008).

Last month the Institute of Network Cultures organized a two day conference entitled Society of the Query. Below you can find a wrap-up of the notes I took during the conference. More elaborate blog entries focusing on each of the lectures separately can be found here and you can also take a look at the video recordings here.

Subtitled Stop searching start questioning, the Society of the Query conference was soon nick-named the anti-Google conference, though its focus was a little bit different. The underlying idea was to take a critical look at Google and its dominance in the digital domain, as a way to start thinking about ways to conceptualize the idea of search, and to think about its theoretical background. In order to achieve this goal, the Institute of Network Cultures brought together people from all kinds of disciplines and backgrounds, academics, tech people, artists, media critics, to discuss the politics and culture and the philosophy and aesthetics of the search and search engines. As Geert Lovink, the main organizer states in his opening talk, the (sub)title of the conference was dedicated to the American Computer Scientist Joseph Weizenbaum, who wrote about the rise of the search paradigm and asked the question what the long-term implications would be of this search dominance. Hence the motto of the conference ‘stop searching, start questioning.’ What are the wider consequences of the rise of search in everyday life, of surfing as the dominant activity on the Web? As Lovink states, the Internet is still widely under theorized: we need some new ideas and theories to reflect upon this issue. Lovink’s aim is to develop a cultural theory of search. To achieve this we should (also) focus on alternative (search) models, for through the alternatives we can also come to a better understanding of the present situation and how to deal with Google.

From the perspective of critique (anti-trust, legal issues) we can consider from which point of view to take on this giant. What exactly defines our problem with Google, is it (justified) fear, is it envy? What disturbs us so much about Google itself? Whatever the problem, as Lovink says, we should not let Google become an obsession. We should not underestimate our influence when it comes to the power we have to develop political, aesthetic and cultural concepts that can undermine this giant. In this respect Lovink feels theory and criticism have a much larger role to play. Research, alternatives interfaces, and artistic interpretations all contribute to a cultural flow that could push things into another direction.

The first speaker, Yann Moulier Boutang, from France, recently wrote a book entitled Cognitive Capitalism. The main question he asks during his talk is whether it is possible to escape the monopoly of Google. For the dominant position of Google is growing each year. Exactly why is Google so popular, he asks. According to Boutang this mainly has to do with the increasing number of services Google offers. The problem is that these services are increasingly being perceived as being new ‘commons’ or services that should be public state services. Hence we are not only afraid of Google’s monopoly but even more afraid of Google becoming (being?) a rent seeker of our own collective intelligence, exploiting us as producers of knowledge. In a way Google’s platform can thus be seen as a form of cognitive capitalism, as a factory for the commoditization of knowledge.

Boutang describes what in his view can be seen as the economic model of Google. Google creates a neo- or meta-market on top of a society of personal data, of singularities (pollen). The counterintuitive part of this model is that it needs some ‘free’ or ‘gratis’ space in order to be able to aggregate some added value in another field. You need some non-market driven services to aggregate money. ‘Free’ is thus an inescapable part of the model. Who is working for Google? We are. By our contribution (clicking, surfing) we pollinate. Google offers us a platform, a hub. What Google sells is thus not only a space for publicity but also the network itself in real time. And this is the strength of Google: it offers you a platform of free services and lets you through these services again contribute to the platform: it functions as an economy of contribution which you add to by pollination. What Google sells to firms is not knowledge as a good but the possibility to enter into the market. In the realm of cognitive capitalism a shift has thus occurred from the sphere of marketable input and output to the sphere of human pollination. As Boutang states, this naturally creates a problem. Where knowledge is perceived as a public good, Google gathers its income from the exchange of information and knowledge, creating additional value in this process. Google, as a true capitalist, is able to capture this value created in the net by building platforms that function like agricultures or hives. In this way, Boutang says, Google is emblematic of the “communism of capitalism”. We need to understand that the basics of our economy have changed. And this raises some important questions: Is it possible to free the click workers? Can a search engine increase our autonomy? Should we think about a nationalization of Google? (where Google imitated the public model of knowledge?) And what about the privacy issue? And should we protect the peer to peer networks?

The next speaker, Matteo Pasquinelli, an Italian media critic, starts his talk by stating that knowledge is easy to replicate, since it is non-competitative or non-rival. Where we have embraced the network as a new kind of space for social interaction and self organization, the digital sphere at the same time also amplifies competition. The digital matrix multiplied everything, cooperation as well as monopoly. Pasquinelli wonders whether knowledge is (still) really non-competitive, with the monopolistic colonization of the digital sphere by Google. Referring to Nicolas Carr, he states that the hearth of Google is the page rank algorithm. With this algorithm, Google mines the intelligence that is in the number of links. The greater amount of links to a site, the greater its knowledge. And clicking on the links makes the system smarter, Pasquinelli states, referring again to the diagram of cognitive capitalism. In this sense the digital sphere can no longer be satisfyingly analyzed in the context of ‘the good people and the evil empire’ in the  Foucaltian, biopolitical idea of control and the big brother paradigm. Where Google produces value in a new way, Pasquinelli states we cannot use these old conceptual tools to describe this process. We should not focus on control but on value and on how this value is produced, accumulated and re-appropriated by us. Pasquinelli asks whether it is possible to do critical network thinking? And what notion of value do we need with that? How can we describe the value of the node, of the way Google organizes the fluid, liquid flow of data through its algorithm? It is an economic flow of values that circulates on the Internet and offline. What is the value of the network? How do we valorize the level of pollination and valorization, now that the value of circulation is much higher than the value of production?

Google’s income comes from advertising. But as Pasquinelli states, Google is exploiting cultural capital with this. What about the copyright question when free culture and free cooperation feeds Google? Social production and the idea of free knowledge propagated by thinkers like Lawrence Lessig are quite naïve, Pasquinelli states, because they do not grasp the whole value system around knowledge and the way our free contributions add value to the system. We need to think about new business models that look into this exploitation which also entails a dematerialization of traditional commodities. With this crisis of the traditional commodity and product (everything free) comes the rise of a new monopoly, a monopoly of space instead of a monopoly of the product: Google monopolizes the metadata space. We are faced with a liquid matrix which makes it very difficult to challenge Google. Pasquinelli asks whether we could not create an open-source page-rank algorithm. Whatever we create, it has to relate to the way Google extracts value. Pasquinelli ends his talk by proposing that maybe the model of CrossRef might be an alternative, or creating a page rank based on trust.

Teresa Numerico, from the university of Rome, gave a very interesting talk on cybernetics, search engines and resistance. With the metaphor of cybernetics, mechanical devices can be described in terms of biological organisms. They are able to self-organize themselves as if they could interact and exchange messages with the environment. In this way we can interpret machines as vehicles of messages (input or output) without questioning what happens with them. Numerico goes deeper into the system of cybernetics as developed by Norbert Wiener. According to Wiener, messages between man and machine, between machines and man and between machines and machines are destined to play an ever-increasing role. Communication can thus be seen as interactive, as the collective possibility of interacting. According to Wiener, information cannot be stored. If we store it, we will depreciate its value, where information is more a matter of process than of storage. Numerico also discusses Joseph Licklider and his ideas concerning the library of the future, consisting of a new form of collecting, of controlling and monitoring the processing of information. After discussing Plato’s Meno dilemma, Numerico describes the elements of a search engine and what makes them similar to the cybernetics metaphor. For the ranking algorithm hypnotizes the self-organization within the network. Google gives us a cognitive pattern or framework that is very strong, which is also shown by research into the information behavior of the researcher of the future (Jan 2008), which shows that horizontal information seeking is all around. Numerico combines this cybernetic search engine perspective with Foucault’s idea of the archeology of knowledge and the definition of the archive. It is obvious that the archive of a society is part of the culture of that civilization. At the same time we now have no control over the meaning of the archive as it is being created. The question is however what we value more, control or communication? Numerico ends by suggesting some actions for resistance against cognitive control (in a Deleuzian fashion):

-Be creative not communicative

-Choose ‘pourparles’ instead of communication

-Close the devices (every now and then)

-Live without leaving (too many) digital traces

-Do not interpret people and the world only according to their digital representations

-Forget or delete digital memories

-Express the living culture; in Fahrenheit 451 people learnt books by hearth

 Other things we might do according to Numerico:

-Stimulate cross generation information literacy and education

-Encourage variation. Variation is the key-factor for the transmission of knowledge and culture: variation vs. standardization: support all different searching technologies. For we need to have different perspectives on technology

-Asses trust and authority by checking a multiple sources through a cross-mediation effort.

Numerico stresses that we should stimulate difference and variation in the creation of the archive by a double-strategy consisting of both logging off on the one side and creating alternatives on the other. She ends by stating that conversation also needs time and relaxation, something we should probably be focusing on more.

Comment: Watch establishment shills such as Barbara Boxer use the leaking/hacking of the “Climategate” emails as “justification” for the passage of Jay Rockefeller’s Cyber Security Act of 2009, aka the “i-PATRIOT Act”.

Flashback: Lawrence Lessig predicts cyber-9/11 will result in cyber-PATRIOT Act

————————–

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/70249-boxer-hacked-climategate-emails-may-face-criminal-probe

Leaked e-mails allegedly undermining climate change science should be treated as a criminal matter, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said Wednesday afternoon.

Boxer, the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said that the recently released e-mails, showing scientists allegedly overstating the case for climate change, should be treated as a crime.

“You call it ‘Climategate’; I call it ‘E-mail-theft-gate,’” she said during a committee meeting. “Whatever it is, the main issue is, Are we facing global warming or are we not? I’m looking at these e-mails, that, even though they were stolen, are now out in the public.”

The e-mails, from scientists at the University of East Anglia, were obtained through hacking. The messages showed the director of the university’s Climate Research Unit discussing ways to strengthen the unit’s case for global warming. Climate change skeptics have seized on the e-mails, arguing that they demonstrate manipulation in environmental science.

Boxer said her committee may hold hearings into the matter as its top Republican, Sen. James Inhofe (Okla.), has asked for, but that a criminal probe would be part of any such hearings.

“We may well have a hearing on this, we may not. We may have a briefing for senators, we may not,” Boxer said. “Part of our looking at this will be looking at a criminal activity which could have well been coordinated.

“This is a crime,” Boxer said.

Miné Salkin
JRNL 502
Dec. 03/09
Final Feature Submission

DJ Heroes vs. Stephen Harper
It’s a mashup world. Get over it.

My living room is throbbing with the posthumous glory of my favourite dead music star. It’s a mashup party for one. The strained and tortured sound of Nirvana laid against the funky, soft-core porn beat of the Supermen Lovers is streaming through my Internet browser while I eat corn flakes for dinner. French master of mashup Overdub has reinvented and repurposed the meaning of Kurt Cobain’s agony and has turned it into something new and surprising, and, for me, this pleasure is free. If creativity is a battle between the right to create and copyright laws, the remixer is a mashup mercenary.

Overdub isn’t the only condottiere of his genre. Mashups are everywhere today, and litter the streets of human intellectual history. Politics is a mashup. When communism and capitalism collide you get Marxist socialism. Literature is a mashup. Out of post-World War II conservatism, the beat generation was on, and William S. Burroughs was testing out his cut-up technique. Cooking is a mashup that gets better the more mashed up it is. A turducken is a delicious roast consisting in a chicken stuffed within a duck stuffed within a turkey. Someone must have laughed when they invented that mashup.

The bottom line is the mashup is a cornerstone of collective human consciousness. Remix is a recipe for cultural progress. Only now, it’s facilitated by technology, open source software and endless possibility. Truth be told, mashup is going to get even better, because people are creating new software to remix and create entirely new digital sounds, and all of this is available through a simple download. Imagine taking a speech delivered by George W. Bush and mashing it up with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. At the 2009 Vancouver New Music Festival, one artist made a video mashup using clips from Apocalypse Now, where the Americans were bombing Vietnam, and set it to the tune of Julie Andrews singing “The Hills Are Alive” from the 1965 classic film, The Sound of Music. The crowd went berserk. It was irony in the flesh. Two different cultural artifacts were being manipulated to the point of absurdity, but it was as enjoyable as ever. The mashup today is merely the platform for bigger and better — more culturally varied — mashups tomorrow.

The Turducken: the possibilities are endless

Perhaps one the greatest things about mashup culture is that it encompasses a community that wants other people to take their work and mash it up too. It encourages cultural adaptations, mutations and re-adjustments to a pre-existing artwork. For the most part, there’s no licensing needed, no big companies to go through to get permission: all you need is a computer and an Internet connection to get your own mashup party going.

It was only a matter of time before the music recording companies realized that they were missing out on this huge potential to make money off mashup artists. Culture-mashing other people’s music opens itself up to possible commodification and copyright violation, all of the things that the music industry depends on. To protect the music recording industry, a top-secret government treaty that could ban people from the Internet for a year for downloading movies, software programs or even a single mp3 is currently being drafted.

It’s called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), an offshoot of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which our American counterparts have been pushing to the north to combat the sweeping wave of Internet piracy that makes up the fabric of our cultural consciousness. If you or someone in your household is suspected of illegally downloading any files you haven’t paid for, you could all be banned from using the Internet for a whole year. That means not having access to source material without paying the big media companies. For remix musicians, the inability to access free source material to mashup could threaten their art. It could be the end of remix culture as we know it.

Under the rules of ACTA, all Internet service providers like Shaw, Rogers and Telus would be forced to become “copyright pigs” — spies if you will — to seek out and filter through downloaded content and the downloaders from their networks. They will hand over your name, address and they will find you. It’s George Orwell’s prophesy realized:

“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”

Spooky.

The martyrs of Big Brother

We live in a digital world, where every iota of information is disposable at our fingertips. All you need is a computer and an Internet connection. We have the freedom to download programs, video games, movies and any song from any album that was ever recorded. The totality of human creativity, thought and action has been categorized neatly, thoughtfully, and can be traced with the easiest Google search. We live in a world of digital archives, a massive information cloud where we can take, share and proliferate information by free will. It’s the largest democratization of culture in the history of the world. Remix music has thrived because of it.

Thriving during the twentieth century was a very different thing. For the first time in history, art and artists were closed off by companies and licensing laws. If you wanted to be a remix musician, it would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to get the legal permission and licenses necessary to put out a mashup album. There were no YouTube musicians, because people couldn’t afford the technology to record and broadcast their work. People didn’t live through music, they were consumers of music. People bought CDs, propping up big media companies like EMI and Universal, took their CDs home and listened to them. You couldn’t engage in the music-making process because it was limited to professional musicians and the unfathomable cost of recording an album professionally. As a result, people were passive to the remix process because it meant licensing something in a closed-off, heavily guarded cultural vault.

The bolts were ripped off the vault door when the Internet bomb detonated in 1999. College dropout Shawn Fanning created Napster, a peer-to-peer file sharing program that allowed people to download music from others, for free. Now anyone with a computer could get their music, and manipulate it however they wanted to. It was the birth of digital mashup.

This sent shivers through the bodies at every major music label boardroom. With the advent of user-generated programs, websites and collective licensing, the big media companies lost control of something they didn’t even create. They’re the unlawful gatekeepers of cultural trends that don’t comply to their business models, and rather than evolving their industrial view of production, they are completely missing the point of cultural democracy. They’ve lost control and their trying to get it back.

If culture-mashing without a costly license from a record label, we are in trouble indeed. Mashups are intelligent culture play. Interpretation of art through remix methods are integral to the development of more art, and the advancement of technology has improved the game space of these artists. For the government to curtail these interpretations solely to protect the interests of the music corporations is an abhorrence to democracy as well as art. Limiting mashup musicians by cutting off their access to source material will place them in a vacuum — and that’s just not how art is made. If remix is the recipe for cultural progress, ACTA is the poison.

Mashup martyrs aren’t going to let that happen quietly. Steve Anderson is the coordinator for the Stop the Big Media Takeover, a community of activists defending the openness of the Internet and the social innovation it brings. He’s an attractive, twenty-something year-old writer who’s adorably diffident despite his accomplishments. He’s upset too. Media companies, or as he calls them “the middle men,” are controlling the creation of culture, and turning it into a dry business of who-owns-what. The Internet wasn’t supposed to be closed off: the idea of it would be an existential paradox.

“The middle men are governing our world,” he said angrily at the 2009 Vancouver Media Democracy Day. He made a tight fist with both hands. “The telecom companies didn’t create the Internet, they just reacted to it. Now they are delivering it, and making a lot of money from it. In the same way, a lot of big media companies didn’t create our culture, they just took it and monetized it. Now they’re losing control. These middle men are scrambling and falling apart and trying to take back culture… this is where the battle begins for us.”

Web 2.0, by virtue, is based on information sharing, user-centre design and collaboration. Interactivity has spawned Wikipedia, web hosting and social networking sites such as MySpace and YouTube. Affording everyone with the opportunity to be an amateur writer, a citizen journalist, a microblogger, and to partake in thousands of virtual communities, it opened the doors to creative avenues that will only become more innovative and interactive as the technology gets better. Amateur writers can vent. Music lovers can now become self-made musicians with the ability to write, record, produce and stream their own work through hundreds of free software programs to choose from. With a basic Djing program like Panatone, you can learn to edit and remix your favourite songs. And it’s all free. Just click click click, download what you want and you are a self-made artist.

Lawrence Lessig takes the same approach to remix culture. As a law professor at Harvard University, he’s calling for a copyright rebellion. Copyright law may have been intended to protect the intellectual property of creators, but it shouldn’t accommodate businesses that are trying to line their pockets rather than giving the advancement of human culture room to breathe.

At the Free Culture Conference last November, Lessig described the industrial monopoly on culture during the twentieth century as the single most destructive maneuver to destroy culture as we know it. “We didn’t know what would become — couch potatoes, passive recipients of culture, not creating it, not doing things with it… there were extremely important kinds of culture, like film or recorded music, that most people couldn’t have any real connection to,” he said. “You couldn’t make a great film, you couldn’t make a great record, because the technology was so far removed. We became passive relative to this culture.”

For the first ten years of this decade, culture managed to evade this material question of licensing, and people mashed away. A Google search will yield 1.5 million results for music mashup. That’s quite a sizable army.

You + me + Stephen Harper

People like Anderson and Lessig feel that culture builds upon what came before it. Whether it’s a rejection of what came before, it is impossible for any artist to not be conscious of the cultural sensibilities they live within. That’s how culture is built — it’s a never ending Hegelian synthesis of observation, analysis and remix — of repurposing and readjusting. Multinational policies like ACTA just don’t fit this organic model. Nor do the corporate models of large music recording industries.

“They’re losing control, and they don’t like the fact that we’re sharing files and not buying their music,” Anderson says. “Right now, we’re making our own music and we’re taking back control of our culture. That is where the battle must end. We must collectively make a decision. Do we want to let people be awesome and create what they want to create, or do we want to clamp down and create a limited, top-down culture?”

Lessig takes the stance that rewrite culture is an empowering, educational realm for amateur as well as professional artists. “It’s a kind of cultural literacy. You know, if you’re 20 years old and you can’t make a film, there’s something wrong with you, right? I mean if you can’t remix using digital technology, you’ve been somehow deprived in your education, and what we need to recognize is that this generation is radically different from mine. My generation was kind of embarrassed by the idea of creating, but your generation and the generation that will come after you is a generation that celebrates creating, and that’s something that the law’s got to begin to encourage.”

“Just think about Nine Inch Nails or Girl Talk, who are releasing content, explicitly encouraging people to do stuff with it, explicitly licensing them to do it with it, and licensing it in a way that guarantees the creators own the rights. They don’t own Girl Talk stuff, they don’t own Nine Inch Nails stuff, but they own their remix. They are creators, that’s the right of creators, and that kind of hybrid relationship I hope will fight to make sure it defines the future.”

GhostReznors: Nine Inch Nails meets Bill Murray

If the mashup prevails copyright reform, we would be able to continue the legacy of remix culture building. But Stephen Harper and ACTA are getting in the way.

Tech nerds, DJs: the mashup mercenaries

Jason Sulyma is a Vancouver original. He’s one of the residents at the infamous Biltmore Cabaret, an old-time-dive bar turned into a classy venue adorned with French country wallpaper and an deer antler theme. Toting the stage name My! Gay! Husband! (MGH) the shy, contemplative DJ defends his art as being a purely creative act.

“I’m not a proper producer or remixer; I just make hood East Van dance edits for drunk people when I’m bored at 4 a.m,” he says. He’s not in it to make money from selling CDs, but rather, making a party for his friends and neighbours.

He may be humble about his work, but Sulyma’s crafted some pretty infectious tunes. By mixing popular reggaeton, hip-hop and old-school rock by the likes of Lou Reed and the Beatles, MGH’s musical creations are downright feisty, creative and nostalgic. Remember the Muppets? He’s even got a song for that, a teched-up Muppets theme with a fat throbbing dance beat where Kermit keeps repeating “It’s time to get things started” in a way that automatically gets people dancing. Despite the popularity of this culture-mashing, Sulyma admits there’s hostility directed at his art.

“There are so many DJ, remixer and producer haters out there that I don’t want to give any more ammo. I think a majority of remixes are garbage and ego strokes, and I only do it because it gives me some alone time with the music. It’s just for me, those songs,” Sulyma writes in a Facebook message.

There are a lot of “haters” indeed. Aside from copyright zealots who defend the notion of intellectual property as the be-all-end-all of real human creativity, there’s animosity within the music world as well. This stems from the d.i.y nature of the mashup ― from dorm rooms to basement studios across the world ― literally anyone can tap into the art of the remix without needing to know much, if anything at all, about music. The lack of a price tag to this kind of freedom pushes the buttons of any corporation wanting to make money off this phenomenon that they don’t even belong to.

Eric Hedekar, a.k.a. Eric The Red, is a tech-savvy DJ who designs his own software to make his remixes. Classically trained in composition at Simon Fraser University, he got a fair share of criticism from his professors when he composed and arranged a mashup piece using Radiohead and sound bites of “bitches and hos” for his exam.

He’s optimistic though, and understands the value of technology and the cultural benefits of remixing, even if its not everyone’s cup of tea. “It’s something culture needs to do,” he explains in his 400 square foot basement studio in New Westminster. “All the creative minds in the Bronx in the 80s were looking at the turntable and saying, “Hey, this is more than just a record player” and learned they could adjust the record and make these new songs, or that they could put two songs together that hadn’t been played together before. That’s how hip-hop started, and there are countless examples of this kind of mashing everywhere. The Beatles played with their technology too when they used magnetic tape and played it backwards for “Revolution Number 9.”

Remix culture is the recipe for cultural progress. We need to protect the history of sampled music in order to show how far we’ve come. Technology is the tool for redesigning, tweaking and re-arranging art, and if government starts to monitor and punish Canadian citizens for enjoying the collaborative fruits of remix, we are surely done for. Corn flakes without Overdub booming through my speakers just isn’t the same.

In my previous blog Remixing Lawrence Lessig’s REMIX, I used a rhetorical question Lawrence Lessig asked in his book  REMIX: MAKING ART AND COMMERCE THRIVE IN THE HYBRID ECONOMY to reflect on what made big government distrusting conservatives think the government was capable of running a foreign country/society?  

Of course that was not Lessig’s purpose in asking the question.   He was simply pointing out that faulty thinking in believing the government can use power and then more power to create or control a democracy.   That same faulty thinking is being used to try to control ‘digital piracy’ in the Internet age.  Lessig favors a policy of less control on copying material and concentrating law more on how copy is used as the way to insure artists get paid for their work while simultaneously encouraging further creativity in culture.

He is concerned that the pressure from the entertainment industry on government to control piracy/copying is actually counterproductive and doomed to failure.

It is counterproductive because it makes teens and amateurs who want to be creative with materials made available to them electronically and through the Internet into pirates.  Since this digital piracy by kids is in fact not being stopped by government crackdowns  (Brafman and Beckstrom in THE STARFISH AND THE SPIDER: THE UNSTOPPABLE POWER OF LEADERLESS ORGANIZATIONS argue in any case it is not possible to stop Internet file sharing), it exacerbates disobedience and disrespect of authority in our young people because they see the laws as being morally unjust which leads them to see all law and all society in that same way.   The corrosiveness of this cynicism can only be anarchy.   Lessig offers some ideas to change the direction we are heading in this societal “war.” 

“But as history has taught us again and again, morality in motive does not guarantee morality in result.  Good intentions are a first step.  Responsibility requires considering, and reconsidering, every step after that.   …. however right the motive, means are always subject to measure.”  (p 287)

Why is the entertainment industry so pursuing a legal war against young people who electronically copy materials?   Lessig postulates:

“The simple reason we wage a hopeless war against our kids is that they have less money to give to political campaigns than Hollywood does.    … Our government is fundamentally irrational for a fundamentally rational reason: policy follows not sense, but dollars. … our government is irrational because it is, in an important way, corrupt.”  (p 294)

Politicians need money to finance their campaigns; political parties need money to finance their politicians.  Hollywood is willing to meet that need in the hopes of enriching itself.   Lessig argues for a different way one that does not let the media industry determine the importance and purpose of copyright law.

“…let’s get on to the hard problem of crafting a copyright system that nurtures the full range of creativity and collaboration that the Internet enables: one that builds upon the economic and creative opportunity of hybrids and remix creativity; on that decriminalizes the offense of being a teen.”  (p 294)

The war on digital piracy will enrich the lawyers, though not the pirates.  Lessig as a teacher of law knows this, and perhaps he is opposing that form of piracy!     His ideas are to not allow industry and attorneys to hijack the creative playground which the digital world has opened to all.

I read Lawrence Lessig ’s  REMIX: MAKING ART AND COMMERCE THRIVE IN THE HYBRID ECONOMY  to learn something about copyright law and what constitutes “fair use” of material.  I am specifically interested in what this means for blogging, though probably the issue of biggest concern in our society is the file sharing of movies and music done by so many today because the Internet has made it so easy to do.  Not being much of a consumer of contemporary media, my interest in Lessig is certainly not mainstream. 

I really did enjoy his book and learned a great deal about the issues and problems which the electronic age has caused regarding copyright and fair use.  Lessig’s thoughts on how to reform law and culture in the electronic age made sense to me.  His use of the metaphor comparing a RO culture (read only) to a RW culture (read write – taking cues from modern electronic equipment) shed a lot of light on the topic. 

I intend in this blog  and the next to do a bit of amateur creative remixing – taking from his book an idea that was not his main purpose but which intrigued me to ask a rhetorical question about America’s war in Iraq.   Lessig is writing about the limits of government regulation in dealing with many issues and specifically as it might apply to government efforts to regulate the copying and creative use of copyrighted material (Lessig favors regulation on the use of copy but not so much on the copying itself).  He draws an example from America’s war in Iraq, which is what got me thinking about how Bush led us to war.   What follows is related to what became a mantra for conservatives in advocating smaller government and the deregulation of so many aspects of the economy.   On 20 January 1981, Ronald Reagan said:

“In this present crisis, government is not the solution to the problem, government is the problem.” 

The anti-government attitude was in some ways a mix of 1960’s anti-establisment thinking with laissez-faire capitalism and conservative small government thinking.  It gets embraced in varying ways by Americans of all political stripes (from government should stay out of our bedrooms and leave sexual and reproductive decisions to individuals to government should not run the health care industry thereby socializing 17% of the economy (GDP); and on the other hand from both sides wanting government – legislative and judicial – to support and champion their causes and issues).

Lessig’s rhetorical question, which is not the main subject of his book (“This is not a book about Iraq.” p 282), made me wonder about what was the supposedly conservative Bush administration thinking when it invaded Iraq?   Lessig asks:

What reason was there to think that government power could succeed in occupying and remaking Iraqi society?

… I’m talking about everything that would obviously have to be done after the invasion – from security, to electric power, to food supplies, to education.  It was as if those at the very top simply assumed that the government could do all those things, without ever asking whether that assumption made any sense. (p 281)

The very philosophy supposedly influencing the conservatives was a distrust of the government to do anything right.  So why did they believe they could remake and run a whole society?   If government was not the solution to America’s problems why did they believe that the U.S. government could readily make right Iraqi society?

Of course the question might be faulty.  It is possible that they actually never thought much at all about rebuilding the country they were about to destroy because they saw themselves as only destroying “the government” and didn’t take into consideration that the whole Iraqi society would be the “collateral damage” in such a war.     Or perhaps they assumed in their Reaganesque thinking that since only the government is the problem, eliminate the government and the society will do just fine on its own – vastly underestimating that the total removal of government would push the people toward nihilistic chaos.  (One need only think about the scenes in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina once it was apparent that the government had vacated the city leaving only flood waters to check people’s activities).

“A parent, an army, a government: they all must be certain that their devotion to truth does not blind them to the consequences of their actions.  There’s only so much a government can do.  Where we find that limit, we must then find other means to the legitimate end.” (p 287)

Next blog:  The War on Digital Piracy: A Cynical Response?

I looked over to my stack of books and saw that I have a very diverse reading list at the moment. I thought it would be fun to list the books and share a favorite quote.

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

This is this first book by Stegner that I’m reading. Actually all the books that I’m reading at the moment are written by the authors who I’m reading for the first time. Crossing to Safety is my book group’s pick from last month which I wasn’t able to finish. (I had a good excuse with the new job. Yes I usually finish the book before we meet!) Here’s a favorite passage from the sections I’ve read already:

“In fact, if you forget mortality, and that used to be easier here than in most places, you could really believe that time is circular, and not linear and progressive as our culture is bent on proving. Seen in geological perspective, we are fossils in the making, to be buried and eventually exposed again for the puzzlement of creatures of later eras. Seen in either geological or biological terms, we don’t warrant attention as individuals. One of us doesn’t differ that much from another, each generation repeats its parents, the works we build to outlast us are not much more enduring than anthills, and much less so than coral reefs. Here everything returns upon itself, repeats and renews itself, and present can hardly be told from past.” pg 4

The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches by Matsuo Basho
Translated and introduced by Nobuyuki Yuasa

I’ve read Basho’s work before, but never this one which is of his most renown works. And when I was in the bookstore browsing, the thorough introduction by Nobuyuki Yuaka caught my eye. He places Basho in historic perspective and explains his significant part in the development of the Haiku.

Here’s one of Basho’s haikus at the beginning of a Travel Sketch entitled “The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton”

In a way
It was fun
Not to see Mount Fuji
In foggy rain

Vertigo by W.G. Sebald (More on Sebald in The Guardian)
Translated by Michael Hulse

I’ve had this book for several years, so I’m not sure where it came from. I’m guessing I read about W.G Sebald and nabbed it somewhere along the way and hadn’t found time to read it yet. He’s one of those authors I’ve been meaning to discover for a while and even though he is German, I’m reading him in English translation.

“  There they stayed for several days, visiting the famed underground galleries of the Hallein salt mines, where one of the miners made Mme Gherardi a present of a twig which was encrusted with thousands of crystals. When they returned to the surface of the earth once again, Beyle writes, the rays of the sun set off in it a manifold glittering such as he had only seen flashing from diamonds as ladies revolved with their partners in a ballroom blazing with light.
The protracted crystallisation process, which had transformed the dead twig into a truly miraculous object, appeared to Beyle, by his own account, as an allegory for the growth of love in the salt mines of the soul. He expounded this idea at length to Mme Gherardi. She for her part, however, was not prepared to sacrifice the childish bliss that filled her that day in order to explore with Beyle the deeper meaning of what was doubtless a very pretty allegory as she sardonically put it.” pgs.25-26

Code 2.0 by Lawrence Lessig

I bought this book last March at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas where Lessig spoke. Lessing now at Harvard, was a Stanford Law professor and the founder of their Center for the Internet and Society, gave a masterful presentation and I wanted to dig deeper into his thinking. This is the next book I’m going to read. The blurb on the back says: “this foundational book as become a classic in its field” and “In this remarkably clear and elegantly written book [Lessig] takes apart many myths about cyberspace and analyzes its underlying architechture.”-Wired.

Här en intressant video med Lawrence Lessig, Harvardprofessor i juridik, som nyligen gästade Sverige för att tala om copyright.

Temat i denna video är kreativitet vs lagstiftning.

Artikel ur BIS nr. 3 2009

Valet till Europaparlamentet 2009 fick ett rätt så bedrövligt utfall. Jag är säker på att jag inte var den ende som satt och kände sig besvärad under Svt:s valvaka. Stadigt sjunkande valdeltagande i hela unionen och framgångar för högerextremistiska mörkermän som gick framåt i flera europeiska länder. I Sverige kan man glädjas åt att valdeltagandet faktiskt steg, men oroas över att sverigedemokraterna växte och nu inte var långt ifrån att vinna mandat trots att partiet har varit i total medieskugga under hela valrörelsen. Istället var det ett annat uppstickarparti som stal spotlighten och lyckades baxa sig in i europaparlamentet. Exakt vad det innebär att Piratpartiet kommer in i Europaparlamentet vet vi inte än, men det jag förmodar är att den del av vår yrkeskår som har lanserat idéen om bibliotek 2.0 tycker att det hela är rätt spännande. Och det är spännande! Hur internet och våra liv där regleras angår oss som medborgare, och angår särskilt oss som värderar rätten till kunskap, information och det demokratiska samtalet.  Jag och min generation hör väl till de första som växte upp med internet och vi har sen 2006 sett hur staten och kapitalet stegrat sina ansträngningar att få kontroll över det som tidigare har kunnat liknas vid oinmutad mark, ett fritt rum, eller till och med vid en allmänning. Nu vill kommersiella intressen ha en allt större del av kakan, och politiska intressen blir oroliga över att all denna frihet skall missbrukas. Repressionen är en globala företeelse: från FRA och IPRED i EU, till samarbeten mellan storföretaget Google och enpartistaten Kina.  Prästregimen i Iran använder system köpta från telekommunikationsbolaget Nokia Siemens för att kartlägga iraniernas internetanvändande.

En belysande frågeställning är om vi i ordningsmaktens ögon skall fungera som medborgare eller konsumenter på internet. 2009 har frågan varit uppe om huruvida EU-stater skall kunna stänga av enskilda medborgare från internet, ett förslag som är ivrigt påhejad av de storföretag som har intresse i upphovsrättens stärkande. Är det bara en fråga om att frånta en kriminell person möjligheten att utnyttja en tjänst, eller handlar det om att beröva en medborgare sina rättigheter? Med den betydelse som internet har i vår moderna tid får det allvarliga konsekvenser för en individ att vara utestängd från det.

Några dagar innan valet till Europaparlamentet läser jag ett inlägg ur Erik Bergs blogg Approximationer (http://approximationer.blogspot.com/2009/06/piratpartiet-ar-slutet-pa-borjan.html). Detta är alltså innan Piratpartiets triumf men valundersökningar har redan spått stora framgångar för partiet. Berg skriver i inlägget om saker som jag själv har känt men inte riktigt kunnat sätta fingret på: Nämligen att frågan om regleringar av internet är större än piratpartiets motstånd mot integritetskränkande lagar, och vi som håller på det vänstra laget måste kanske börja se den här frågan i ett större sammanhang. Jag lyfter ut några rader ur Erik Bergs inlägg:

Demokratin har aldrig genomförts mer än halvvägs. Att kontrollera kapital har under hela 1900-talet inneburit en möjlighet att utöva massiv makt och köpa sig politiskt inflytande. Det sker genom kontroll av arbetet, genom lobbyister och genom direkta röstköp men framförallt genom att kontrollera media. I massmediernas tidsålder har media varit porten till verkligheten, att se, förstå och påverka, att sätta agendan, att förvrida perceptionen. När nu media håller på att ändra karaktär från massmedia till mikromedia och sociala medier så rör sig också kapitalet för att behålla kontrollen… För en sak är säker, även om det är en gammal kamp som återuppstår på nätet så är det inte en gammal trött och föråldrad industri som leder kampen mot det fria Internet, det är kapitalintressen som är mäktigare än någonsin förr, som har allt att förlora på en urholkad upphovsrätt och nedrivna medieoligopol och allt att vinna på ett Internet som kan användas för att konstruera sociogram, ett Internet som kan styckas, packeteras och säljas i lämpliga portioner, där vi i första hand är målgruppsplacerade konsumenter och inte fria medborgare /…/ Hoten mot friheten på Internet kommer från flera håll. Statliga dataloggnings- och övervakningsintiativ är uppenbara hot, men världens största sociogrammaskin är privata Facebook – inte FRA:s superdator.

Erik Berg utvecklar ett resonemang med hjälp av en forskare som jag själv gjorde bekantskap med på Biblioteks- och informationsvetenskapen i Borås: Lawrence Lessig.

“We can build, or architect, or code cyberspace to protect values that we believe are fundamental. Or we can build, or architect, or code cyberspace to allow those values to disappear. There is no middle ground. There is no choice that does not include some kind of building. Code is never found: it is only ever made, and only ever made by us. [...] The first generation of these architectures was built by a noncommercial sector – researchers and hackers, focused upon building a network. The second generation has been built by commerce. And the third, not yet off the drawing board, could well be the product of government. Which regulator do we prefer? Which regulators should be controlled? How does society exercise that control over entities that aim to control it?”

(Lessigs text är hämtad ur wikin Code 2.0 som finns på adressen http://www.socialtext.net/codev2/ )

Kod är lag på internet menar Lessig. Och kod är något som produceras vilket betyder att den som kodar också reglerar internet. Inser man det inser man att internet lika mycket kan var ett redskap för kontroll som för frihet. Vi kan inte enbart titta på juridiska regleringar av individers användande av internet, som Piratpartiet gör, utan vi måste också titta på hur internet produceras och titta på ägandeförhållanden och olika aktörers roll på denna arena. Har den digitala eran sin Karl Marx?

Det här är saker som folkbiblioteken kommer behöva förhålla sig till inom de kommande åren. På lång sikt måste vi se att mänsklig tillvaro på internet inte är magiskt befriad från de maktförhållande som vi så tydligt kan se ute i samhället. Och om vi accepterar den premissen måste vi fråga oss: vilket slags rum vill vi skapa på internet? En av de många fina sakerna med idéen om ett folkbibliotek är att det är ett rum där klasskillnader inte skall existera, utan vi faktiskt är jämlikar. Hur tänker vi in det i ett digitalt rum? Hur bygger man ett folkbibliotek med kod? Vi vet vad ett folkbibliotek är i den fysiska världen med vad är det i den digitala?

Det är en fråga som vi måste besvara på lång sikt. På kort sikt måste vi förhålla oss till de

försök som stat och kapital gör idag för att reglera internet på ett sätt som tar ifrån dess användare sina medborgerliga rättigheter. Vad får detta för konsekvenser för det demokratiserande potential som internet har, ett potential som många forskare och orakel inom biblioteksvärlden dragit höga växlar från? Hur förhåller sig folkbiblioteken till de här försöken att kontrollera information: Är det någon skillnad mellan FRA:s övervakning av internetanvändare och att FBI undersöker en biblioteksbesökares boklån i kölvattnet till 11e september? Är det bara när repressionen drabbar biblioteken direkt som vi engagerar oss, eller kan det vara så att folkbiblioteken måste förhålla sig till vad som kan beskrivas som en backlash för demokratin? Hur?

Tobias Willstedt

“Så försöker Pirate Bay lura lagen” skanderar Aftonbladet. Vilket ju givetvis ger intryck av att Aftonbladet tagit ställning i frågan, jämfört med DN:s mer neutrala rubrik “The Pirate Bays tracker borta“. Möjligen skulle man kunna beskylla DN för att lindat in sig så i neutralitet att rubriken inte längre kan anses klargöra artikelns innehåll annat än för de allra mest insatta. (Det vill säga inte svenska tingsrättsjurister)

Man kan diskutera semantik till korna kommer hem självmant, men visst är det så att det finns en antydan till kryphål i Pirate Bays agerande. Slå undan ett av benen i vitesföreläggandet och hela det ruttna huset rasar (för att flirta med Goodwin). Analysen kan äga sin riktighet, i alla fall för oss lekmän, om du tar bort trackern ur ekvationen så blir skillnaden mellan Google och The Pirate Bay farligt liten och om det redan från början lätt farsartade vitesföreläggandet gäller länkar och sökdatabas kan vi ta och släcka ner hela jämra Internet redan nu för att bespara oss “future indignities”.

Monique Wadsted är inte lekman däremot och hon vet vad som gäller. “Så länge de har sin hemsida uppe så gäller vitesförbudet.” Möjligen kan lekman och vän av ordning anmärka att Wadsted inte är i positionen att avgöra huruvida Tingsrättens kriterier för ett vitesföreläggande är uppfyllda, just den funktionen är nämligen förbehållen just tingsrätten.

Professorn i immaterialrätt, Kristoffer Schollin tycker att saken inte är riktigt så klar som Wadsted vill göra gällande.

“Om man ska tolka tingsrättens beslut som att det finns flera olika komponenter bakom vitesföreläggandet som alla är nödvändiga så kommer det att påverka vitesföreläggandet.”

Ja ja, jag vet att det inte spelar någon roll. Det handlar bara om att Wadsted inte hunnit briefa sin kompis Tomas Norström om vad husse vill. Men Monique, du kan väl ändå bara göra oss artigheten att låtsas om som om det svenska rättsystemet har någon form av demokratisk baserad autonomi från storkapitalet, det blir så pinsamt när du visar kopplet så tydligt.

För mer läsning, vänd er till Opassande, hon kryddar också med intressanta siffror från skivindustrin i England.

Jag passade också på att läsa Anna Troberg, som berättar något som i ljuset av The Pirate Bays övergång till magnetlänkar blir nästan lite komiskt. Vad ska The Pirate Bay med en ny tracker till, när de har avskaffat behovet av just tracker? SVD-artikelns kommentarer gav mig anledning att ta fram rödpennan. De konservativa tycks ha rätt när de kräver hårdare tag i skolan:

Nedladdning är ett brott. Den som laddar ner, stjäl något som inte tillhör en själv honom eller henne. Ingen skulle få för sig att stjkäla [Hur vore det med lite konsekvens i sche-ljuden] ur en affär men att stjäla [Okej, att du inte klarar av att göra rätt mellan stjäl och stjäla kan jag gå med på, men att göra fel mellan stjäla och stjäla?] från Iinternet [Om det är en entitet som kan bli bestulen så ska det definitivt ha stor begynnelsebokstav, att sen ingen någonsin stulit något från Internet (förutom dess frihet) är en helt annan fråga.] bryr sig ingen om. Självklart bör vi ha kvar våra friheter ute på nätet men hur hade ni tänkt er att filmbolagen skulle tjkäna [Du bara tjangsar vilt när det gäller de här sche-ljuden, ersjän.] pengar om filmerna bara laddas ner direkt från nätet. Jag är ingen dum gammal gubbe och ingen sur gammal [kvinnor är mindre värda, så de får bara ett "m" eller?] kärring heller. Jag är 14 år så tro inte att det bara är gamlingar som har denna åsikt.

Visst, det kan tyckas en smula ogint att ge sig på någon som erkänner att han eller hon bara är 14 år, men om sku år i sjolan inte lärt dig bättre svenska behöver du ett incitament att schärpa dig. Här får du en länk att forska på.

In other news:

Lawrence Lessig var i stan idag. Jag ångrar grovt att jag inte hållit koll på det eftersom större delen av min dag på jobbet nu i omorganisationens tider var rätt poänglös och jag gott och väl hade kunnat smita iväg för att få se LL. Men det är i alla fall trevligt att DN uppmärksammade saken.

Una madre riprende il proprio bambino mentre, per la prima volta, inizia a ballare spingendo il proprio girello a ritmo di musica. Il video è divertente e la donna decide di conviderlo con amici e parenti caricandolo su Youtube. Ma dopo alcune settimane qualcuno scrive alla signora minacciando di intentare causa per una riproduzione non autorizzata.
Un ragazzo appassionato di manga, realizza un mashup, unendo come colonna sonora la propria canzone preferita e, per la parte visiva, immagini di una sequenza di scene del fumetto per il quale stravede.
Di questi paradossi e di molti altri aspetti legati al cosiddetto diritto d’autore si occupa il (bel) libro Remix, il futuro del copyright (e delle nuove generazioni) di Lawrence Lessig (fondatore di Creative Commons, l’organizzazione non profit che sostiene la condivisione pubblica di opere creative).
Un testo che cerca di fare il punto sulla situazione statunitense circa il copyright per capire come e se questa forma di tutela applicata con rigore nei media classici possa essere anche riprosta con le medesime modalità nel mondo digitale, territorio virtuale estremamente fluido, vasto e variopinto. Ma lo studio non si ferma a quest’analisi e scava più in profondità proponendo un ripensamento non solo del lato più “legale” del problema che la Rete porta a galla, ma un cambiamento capace di modificare economia, cultura e rapporto tra giovani e istituzioni.
Un libro ricco di aneddoti, riflessioni, suggerimenti per capire meglio la portata dei cambiamenti in atto non solo nell’industria culturale ma anche in tutti quegli atteggiamenti che – condannati o meno dalla legge – sono quasi diventati routine.

p.s.= un sentito ringraziamento a Gianfranco Chicco per avermi dato modo di ricevere una copia del libro

Chapter 1

There is a center at the University of Chicago that studied the reactions of new Democracies n in Eastern and Central Europe.  Many people were antigovernment after the end of Communism.  People had a kind of libertarianism; they believed everything could take care of itself and fall into place without government intervention, but there was a huge need for government.  Markets failed and people fell into chaotic and malicious behaviors.  Then there was the internet: a place of true freedom.  One could speak their mind without governmental control.  The government could threaten people in cyberspace, but had no true power.  The author believes that liberty everywhere comes at least a little from the state.  He believes that there should be a constitution of sorts to preserve liberty.  It should not control, but rather guarantee to protect certain values.

Chapter 2

                Cyberspace is richer than the internet; it is an experience of an online community.  Most people over 40 don’t experience cyberspace just the internet, but children often spend many hours inhabiting cyberspace.  A woman named Martha and a man named Dank were neighbors and had an argument about Dank’s dog dying from eating a petal off of Martha’s poisonous flowers.  This argument took place in cyberspace.  Millions of people spend many hours in these MMOGs and build a life and community of their own.  MMOGs came from MUDs and MOOs, which were text based games.  People build realities that they want to live in games like Second Life.  Martha and Dank’s problem was solved by making the plants only poisonous when purchased.  With cyberspace people can get around some laws, such as gambling being illegal, just gamble online from a server that is from a different area.  Jake wrote horrible stories about raping women and put them on a forum.  News got back to where he lived and he was arrested.  He claimed he had a first amendment right to write what he wanted to.  He hadn’t done anything to anyone.  He was set free and continued to write and reach millions of people.  The FBI could set out a worm that searched people’s hard drives for a particular file even if there was no suspicion.  Is that constitutional?  The themes of the previous stories were regulability, code regulation, latent ambiguity, and competing sovereigns.

Chapter 3

                It is believed that cyberspace can’t be regulated.  “is-ism” is the mistake of confusing how something is and how it must be.  Cyberspace is a certain way, but that is not necessarily how it has to be.  Cyberspace can be rewritten to regulate.  In the beginning of the Internet, colleges maily had a access.  At the University of Chicago students could access anonymously, but at Harvard they had to be registered, sign a user agreement, and were monitored.  Net95 had three imperfections: information about the user, geography, and information about use.  It was hard to enforce rules because of this.  If a state wanted to block porn from children, they couldn’t do it because of those imperfections.

Chapter 4

                If you don’t know who someone is or where they are, they can’t be regulated.  On the original internet everyone was invisible.  Germany asked CompServ to regulate porn, but they couldn’t do it.  Then they decided to filter by a country-by-country basis.  To do this they had to identify, authenticate, and credential.  IPs have been used to help with that.  Cookies can trace where someone has been and help to track what a person is doing.  SSOs have become an important tool for identification.

Chapter 5

Commerce has been made more effective by technology.  London installed cameras and charge a fee for people who drove in Central London (an overcrowded district with lots of traffic), who did not have to be there.  They plan to perpetually monitor where all cars are at all times in London.   Telephones are now regulated.  This is extended to cell phones.  The government is checking logs of how computers are used.  The government is trying to ensure they have to ability to crack all encryption.  None of these can be regulated easily, but the government is trying.

If you want to read more of this great book.

One: code is law
In the way that this book is not written so much for the tech-savvy but for more of a less technologically inclined. It begins with a similar story detailing different states and constitutions being forced on other emerging nations with no real idea why a constitution works for the US. In particular is the case of Russia, the loss of Communism and the emergence of a kind of libertarianism. “Power didn’t disappear – it shifted from the state to the Mafiosi, themselves often created by the state.” Lessig then leaves the metaphor to continue with a brief talk of cyberspace. Often seen as a more extreme version of a freedom from control (gov’t, anarchy, decentralized power etc.). One difference is that this cyber society was “built from the bottom-up” and self-ordering. So then, is the overarching question put forth: “Why was cyberspace incapable of regulation?” In a 1984-esqe way, the word itself denotes a “perfect control” while many celebrate its “perfect freedom.” The unique perspective of the author as a lawyer allows him to look at cyberspace and wonder if it can have its own control. As far as a constitution is a framework for the workings of a government, there is a constitution being laid down with guidance from commerce and gov’t, which will make cyberspace control easy. As the lengthy chapter ends, it delves into a look at understanding how the code that regulates is not laws and legal means but rather through the hardware and software that the Internet is built on.

Two: four puzzles from cyberspace.
This chapter picks up with examples from a game, in which it is suggested that some people, mainly from an older generation, see the Internet as only a source of information and not as having a life of its own. It is tough for someone who doesn’t know what they are missing to realize what they are missing, so this book serves as a good bridge between the printed word and virtual reality. “Second Life” is a game that is very literal for the readers, it functions as essentially a small part of the Internet Cosmos but is a place where its inhabitants have a second life digitally. The first story is about destroying the assumptions that we make in real life, that things have definite and persistent qualities. Things created in virtual reality can have different qualities attached to them. A book can fly (so can people too in Second Life), and death isn’t really death in our real world sense. Other things are the same, people communicate through typed words and speak to each other, get mad and work together. It also shows how code can change rules, like changing code so that a product is only usable by the person who purchases the product/service. Story two is largely about the idea that things do not exist locally in one place. A website about Indiana may be located on servers in Denmark. It begins to show how typical thinking fails to account for this property, especially in regards to the legal system. If a US citizen steals from someone is Europe on a trip, the person is subject to Europe’s laws. In other words, the states’ sovereignty is a fundamental concept that does not exist fully in cyberspace. The third story is about privacy, something we take for granted in most real life cases; it can be destroyed by a clever Internet detective when a person posts in an online community. Because of the way the site is coded, it was not hard in the example to figure out the person’s identity that was posting the stories. The last story is about the reach of a government’s hands into the lives of those on the Internet. We enjoy many freedoms in the US; that if someone from law enforcement searches your house, they need a warrant. On the Internet, a computer can be searched without most users ever knowing and left undamaged afterword. Is it okay for this kind of search to happen without any suspicion? These all serve to open up the readers mind to how the Internet can work. It also parallels ideas that some might not understand, that we work towards nebulous goals in real life too that we cannot touch, just as people in cyberspace. “Is freedom inversely related to the efficiency of the available means of surveillance?”

Three: is-ism: is the way it is the way it must be
Much of our vocabulary doesn’t apply directly to language found in our laws: “nature, essence, innate.” One of the main points is that right now “there is certainly a way that cyberspace is.” There is no single thing that defines what the Internet it. Many architectures exist within the Internet but the Internet could be made up of many more in the future. The Internet is reflexive and it can mirror the values of the people that are its inhabitants. So if the people that are using a certain network need a high level of control to make sure people aren’t illegally using the Internet, that sort of network would need a fair bit of authentication so that the network operator will know and track everything a user does on the network. Likewise if the network administrator feels that the Internet is not a place that should be regulated, then that network would probably have a lot less authentication. This is inherent to the bias of the design of a network. We use a control to get to the Internet everyday: TCP/IP. It is a set of agreed upon rules that all computers accessing the network will abide. At another level, the protocols require very little authentication, I can still be on the Internet posing as a middle-aged man or as a girl and be neither. This is very different from the real world where we enjoy a different sort of authentication. When I go the bank to cash a check and it is filled out with a woman’s name, and I am clearly male, the teller would naturally ask for ID. The ID is a multi-level authentication, my name would match their records and my picture would match, and most likely in most states, would also have a signature. Put succinctly “…there is no simple way to know who someone is, where they are from, and what they’re doing.”

Four: architecture of control
The original design wasn’t done with control in mind. So people could be anonymous because it wasn’t important to regulate the internet. Part of the problem too, is that most objects in life can be replicated. The same holds true for credentials, I can forge headers in email and make the receiver think they are from the government. I can make my computers IP address appear to be the same as any users (almost). To this end, we have credentials, drivers licenses and passports both give  “…a relatively high level of confidence about the facts asserted…”  that the information is about you. It is true that everyone would benefit from better authentication to prove who a user is on the Internet. We could better control our bank accounts and more efficient business. The problem is that these enable some to exert more control if the architectures are designed in a particular way.  Essentially the Internet was designed to be the way it is today the “network philosophy pushes complexity to the edge of the network – to the applications that run on the network, rather than they network’s core.” This keeps the Internet efficient and free to route traffic versus having to code new versions of the Internet to build things in like IM capability and new media features. It is easy to forget that many different computers are handling our data as it moves end-to-end and thus, can be seen by many eyes. With business looking to capitalize more and more on the Internet, industries like marketing want to link behavior and identity to specific people. There is also growing concern of not just privacy but of how information about users is stored. It would be catastrophic if someone managed to download a list of unencrypted users and passwords from Amazon.com. But the data needs to be in a database (or many) to make it easy for the user to not have to re-type all their purchasing data when shopping. One easy solution to some of the problems is encryption except that it makes things harder to regulate while keeping more inaccessible to prying eyes.

Five: regulating code
Technological advances in regards to Internet commerce have also helped the government with their regulation. One way to help agencies like law enforcement is the CALEA to design one type of network that can be more easily monitored by the government. In this indirect way, the code is being regulated because of the law passed. Another avenue being pursued is through encryption with a twist, a backdoor that the government can use to look at the data being sent. They can regulate encryption systems and indirectly regulate the information people are sending. This is purely because of the way the Internet is designed. No system is perfect but through some laws with limited scope, the bad behaviors and crimes can be better weeded out though these actions. Also introduced by the government is digital ID’s that provide a sort of personal database where only the needed information is provided to a website. Along with this idea is also a visual of the citizen to better facilitate traceability. Then the chapter moves to a sort of summary of how these codes differ, the code of law and the code of the Internet. The problems lie in that we have dealt with security on the web for a drop in the bucket compared to private property, Internet code has about 200 years of catching up to do. The chapter moves on to Z-theory that the terror will incite change, just like the patriot act after 9/11 the increase in incidents involving viruses and security will spurn radical change. As these changes are put in place though, so does the ability to subvert the good intentions. Thus, “we must ask of every exercise of power: Why?” Ideally this works, but as we all have had some exposure to political lobbyists and special interest groups, sometimes people ask question’s a lot later after acting.

The potential: “Daddy, Miss America wont share her toys.”

Obama vision could be crippled

by rich, greedy US institutions

… and commercial interests who want an arm  and two legs.

1. Sharing knowledge – The Gronstedt Group begins tour  of the SLENZ birthing unit.

The more time I spend in Second Life and  other virtual worlds the more I become convinced  that  SLENZ  joint leader Dr Clare Atkins (SL: Arwenna Stardust) is right: Collaboration and sharing is the key to success in  world education in virtual worlds.

But its not just collaboration within the United States, or New Zealand. It’s collaboration around the world.

The rich, big universities of North America and Europe might be able to afford to go  it alone, but for the smaller and the often poorer tertiary institutions of  the United States,  countries like  New Zealand, and Third World countries – if they even have reliable, affordable Broadband services – don’t have the luxury of NOT collaborating and sharing,  both at an institutional level and at an academic level.

The creation of complex builds, huds, animations and all the other paraphernalia of teaching successfully in a virtual  world, as well as aquiring the skills/knowhow to use them  can cost megabucks: to not share them under OpenSource and Creative Commons license with institutions and academics around the world would seem to be me to be both profligate and selfish. It also could regarded by some , particularly when sold at a high price or with an exorbitant  license fee attached, as both  neo-colonialist and  greedy capitalism of the kind that brought about the most recent crash of world markets.

Second Life behind the firewall

The collaboration thoughts, although first ennunciated  for me by  Dr  Atkins, were brought to mind more recently by  five things: the move by the Lindens, admitted an avowedly commercial organisation,  to  promote Second Life behind the firewall, previously Nebraska, to  commercial, Government and educational institutions at US$55,000 a pop, a princely sum for many cash-strapped institutions around the world;  President Obama’s Cairo vision, proclaimed in June;  a visit by the KiwiEd group to the University of Western Australia, Second  Life site; a Train for Success Gronstedt Group  35-avatar tour of the SLENZ Project’s virtual birthing unit on the Second Life island of Kowhai; and  finally, but not least,  the one-hour keynote address on copyright  by  Harvard University  Professor of Law Lawrence Lessig to  EDUCAUSE09 in Denver earlier this month.

2. Sharing the knowledge: Lessig’s certificate of entitlement.

Obama told  the world,  “We will match promising Muslim students with internships in America and create a new online network … ” something  which  Second Life arguably has been  doing for sometime with  the collaboration already  occurring between individual academics and many smaller institutions creating an “online network, facilitating collaboration across geographic and cultural boundaries.”

The problem with his vision is that  US commercial – and often Government -  interests  have almost always  worked against  facilitating collaboration and sharing across geographic  and cultural boundaries. Look at Microsoft software. Look at Apple and ITunes licensing. Look at software regionalisation. Look at the record industry. Look at the book industry, where rich English language publishers in the UK and the US split the world into at least two markets.  Look at the way copyright law has moved into  education – and science.

But its not a new phenomenon. Look at banana republics, created out of Boston,  as a rather ironical and destructive facilitation of collaboration across geographic and cultural boundaries.

Triumphs of reason

On the other hand there are triumphs of reason over idiocy. Look at the rise of the ubiquitous PC, compared to the Apple computer, even though using a proprietary Operating System  the rise from the “underground” of  Moodle, compared to say Blackboard; the slow advance of bilateral free trade agreements, even if not the much desired mutilateral  free trade agreements, instead of the trade siege mentality,  which  affected most of the world in the 1930s (and still threatens); the growing popularity of Linux compared to proprietary Operating Systems; and finally the astounding growth of  Wikipedia compared to Encarta or Britannia.

Despite my misgivings I have been heartened over the years by the surprising degree of co-operation and collaboration that has been happening in virtual worlds. That is despite the actions of  those  few Scrooge McDuck-like educational institutions which have purely commercial interests at heart and appear to run closed shop operations, sharing with none.

I was even more cheered recently by a visit to the University of Western Australia when I found that  university, which is in the forefront  of Australian virtual world education, was entering into bi-lateral  virtual “free trade” and/or “free exchange”  agreements with  the likes of Stanford University and others. This mirrors the agreements put in place  by  Scott Diener (SL: Professor Noarlunga) at the University of Auckland with the University of Boise; and Judy Cockeram (SL: Judy-Arx Scribe) and  her work with architects around the world;  and those “handshake”   agreements  or informal sharing arrangements put in place by a myriad of other relatively smaller institutions who have already recognised the benefits of world-wide collaboration.

3.Sharing the knowledge – KiwiEd group tours University of Wester Australia site.

And then there is the SLENZ Project, which 18 months ago adopted as its ruling credo,  complete transparency, with OpenSource under Creative Commons license for all its virtual educational products, developments and knowledge in the hope that others would be able to build on the team’s work. Even though the adoption of this credo was probably due more to the persistence and bloody-mindedness of a then non-Second Life “immersed” and relatively sceptical SLENZ Learning Designer Leigh Blackall than anything else, it has worked and is working.

One has to  agree now that Blackall was right, even though  there is obviously a place for fair payment to commercial (virtual world creators, builders, developers etc) interests, something Linden Labs has recognised  with its protection of its own virtual world product lines (and  unfortunately those created and developed by its residents, even if Creative Commons, full permissions and OpenSource) behind  the walls of Second Life.

Linden Labs is not alone, however, in usurping user/creator rights.  The way  they have covered the issue in their rather draconian and very American Terms of Service is little different from other major US on-line social networking services: if you put it up on their service, they own it.

Virtual World Free Trade/Exchange Pact?

This is despite, or perhaps in spite of “renegades” like the  onetime Arcadia Asylum, making all her magnificent “builds” available to “anyone to use anywhere,  how they like, even blowing it up.”

Like  the tyrants behind the old Iron Curtain the Lindens realise that keeping  control of their residents’ creations inside  their world (and keeping them there), guarantees that they will have to stay there unless they want to pour their creativity, time and work down the drain and start a new virtual life elsewhere.

This leads  me to the thought that President Obama, although paying lip service to “collaboration across geographic and cultural boundaries,” needs to put his Government’s money  where his mouth is and promote a world-wide free trade/exchange agreement for  virtual world education if not for virtual worlds themselves, guaranteeing rights of both personal ownership of  individual products when created or bought in a real world sense,  but also opening up US educational institution virtual knowledge and creativity for the rest of the world to freely add to, and build on.

The President  has the vision  for a better on-line world – which could lead to greater understanding between peoples through education.

If he does nothing except talk. Nothing will happen.

And, I believe, we will find the major educational institutions moving more behind their Ivy Walls – if they are not already there – and American educational institutions (and others in UK, Germany, Brazil etc) adopting  a siege mentality   even though  virtual worlds (all virtual worlds, whether emanating out of the US or China or anywhere else) will only fulfill their true potential of levelling the playing field for all educationally if they are free and open to all.

That is something America can do for the world – all worlds.

]]> http://therightwayforward.wordpress.com/2009/11/13/have-they-all-gone-mad/ Sat, 14 Nov 2009 03:32:32 +0000 usa1968 http://therightwayforward.wordpress.com/2009/11/13/have-they-all-gone-mad/

Disgraced New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was a guest speaker at a Harvard University ethics forum this past Thursday, November 12, 2009.

ETHICS.

Let that sink in for a second. Eliot Spitzer was a guest speaker at an ETHICS forum.

Perhaps Lawrence Lessig, the faculty director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, was absent the day Eliot Spitzer resigned his position as governor in disgrace.

Perhaps Lawrence Lessig missed the part where Spitzer admitted to frequenting high priced hookers.

Perhaps Lessig didn’t realize that Spitzer disgraced his wife and his family.

Ethics?

Websters dictionary defines ethics as: a set of moral principles, the principles of conduct governing an individual or a group.

What does this say to the students at Harvard? What does it say for Lessig and Harvard University? What does it say for us as a society?

Lack of integrity is lack of integrity. Eliot Spitzer has no integrity.

The only people Eliot Spitzer should be discussing ethics with are other johns and hookers.

Have they all gone mad?

Several programs on legal information, sponsored by the National Communication Association (NCA) Communication and Law Division, will be offered at the NCA 95th Annual Convention, to be held November 12-15, 2009 in Chicago, Illinois, USA:

• Communicating and Enacting Universal Constructions of the Law, Nov. 14, 2:00 p.m.:
• Beth Goering (Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis), Andrea Krause (Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis), What’s ‘Justice for All’? A Thematic Analysis of Legal Discourse in Popular Television Programs in the U.S. and Germany
• Abstract: ‘“Reality” judge shows have emerged as a favorite genre of daytime television programming around the world. While these programs entertain us, they also serve a didactic function, shaping expectations about legal discourse. This project, situated at the confluence of intercultural communication, communication and the law, and media criticism, provides a comparative analysis of the values related to justice and the “rules” governing courtroom interaction presented on popular television programming in the United States and Germany.’
• Sanna Ala-Kortesmaa (University of Tampere), Tuula Valikoski (University of Tampere), Finnish Prosecutors and Listening: Focus on Facts, Forget Emotions?
• Abstract: ‘The reform of judicial proceedings altered the communicational role of Finnish prosecutors. Therefore this study examines what kind of meanings Finnish prosecutors perceive to be related to the concepts of listening, which have been indicated to predict the listening behavior.The study was conducted using the Listening Concepts Inventory (LCI).The participant sample consisted of 96 prosecutors. Data were analyzed using SPSS. The findings differed somewhat from the findings of previous studies using the LCI.’
• Diana Winkelman (University of Southern California), Perelman’s Universal Audience and the International Criminal Court: A Rhetorical Analysis of US Opposition to the ICC
• Abstract: ‘This paper examines United States congressional opposition to the International Criminal Court in 2000, using Perelman’s universal audience as an analytical framework. Globalization exposes the complexities of establishing normative standards of justice as traditionally bounded national, political and legal systems intersect and conflict with one another; meanwhile a growing global legal-public sphere continues to develop. Debates over the ICC discursively negotiate collective values, seek legitimacy, and reflexively generate international legal procedures, policies and rhetorics.’
• Theresa Donofrio (University of Maryland), Jackson’s Moral Drama: Synecdochic Logic and Abstraction in the Opening Statement at the Nuremberg Trial
• Abstract: ‘This paper examines Justice Robert H. Jackson’s opening statement at the Nuremberg Trial for the insight it provides into America’s understanding of World War II and its vision for a post-war order. I argue that Jackson employed a rhetoric of abstraction that encouraged the elision of the features of the trial that challenged its legitimacy, reduced individuals to emblems, and most insidiously, erased the thumbprint of American involvement on the trial.’
• Communicative Innovations and Evolutions Concerning Law and Technology, Nov. 12, 2:00 p.m.:
• Debra Worthington (Auburn University), Paper vs. ‘Clickers’: A Test of the Biasing Effects of Electronic Data Collection
• Abstract: ‘Litigation consultants are increasingly turning to new technologies to enhance the efficiency and accuracy of their data collection. However, few studies have addressed the potential effect that these methods may have on how mock jurors respond to and process information. Using student-subjects, the primary goal of this study was to test for differential effects between data collection using traditional paper surveys and “Clickers” (radio frequency touch pads).’
• Sandra Braman (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee), Internet RFCs as Social Policy: Network Design from a Regulatory Perspective
• Abstract: ‘Internet architecture can either support or counter laws and policy. This paper reports on research mining the Internet design discourse for ways in which technical decision-makers deal with legal and policy issues. It provides a conceptual framework for and exemplars of the variety of interactions between technical and legal decision-making and explores interactions between the discourse and the evolution of formal policy-making processes for the Internet.’
• Renee Hobbs (Temple University), How Media Literacy Educators Understand Copyright and Fair Use
  • Abstract: ‘This paper describes the development of the Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Media Literacy Education, which was created to articulate the consensus that exists among educators about the application of fair use to the practice of media literacy education.’
• Contested Constructions of Constitutional Law, Nov. 12, 3:30 p.m.:
  • Joshua Gonzalez (Wake Forest University), Expressive Theories of Law: Un-Persuasive
    • Abstract: ‘This paper seeks to analyze the potential strengths and weaknesses of expressive theories of law, as well as their potential applicability to the communication discipline. Using Elizabeth Anderson and Richard Pildes’ “Expressive Theories of Law: A General Restatement” as a representative example of contemporary expressive theories, I conclude that, while useful as a means of explaining harmful expressions, the lack of an adequate account of persuasion makes expressive theories largely deficient.’
  • Kevin Garner (William Jewell College), Prairie Endres (Texas Tech University), Queering the Courts: Bisexual and Transgender Exclusion in Judicial Opinions
    • Abstract: ‘The cases of Lawrence v. Texas (1998) and Rowland v. Mad River Local School District (1984) are examined to explicate the ways in which the language of the United States court system frames sexual preference and sexual orientation in favor of heteronormativity. The language of the Supreme Court, as well as the language of local courts, excludes the sexual orientations of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender, and queer persons (GLBTQ) while giving preference to homosexual persons.’
  • Christopher Seaman (University of California, Santa Barbara), The problems with Miller v. California: A theoretical examination of the assumptions of obscenity law
    • Abstract: ‘The current work is a theoretical examination of the issues in both obscenity law and its application, through the use of three communication theories: the spiral of silence, the elaboration likelihood model, and structuration theory. The overall goal is to show how each theory can reveal part of the picture of how juries come to assess community standards in obscenity trials, address the underlying problems of obscenity law, and explore potential solutions.’
• Forensic Communication: Application of Communication Research to Courtroom Litigation, Nov. 14, 3:30 p.m.:
  • Abstract for This Program: ‘Virtually every discipline has a Forensic sub-area – forensics being the application of knowledge to courtroom litigation. We have forensic linguistics, forensic psychology, forensic anthropology, forensic entomology, and so on. Forensic communication is not a recognized sub-area of our discipline, however. Yet several scholars in the discipline perform expert-witness work applying communication research to legal issues in court. This panel presents examples in hopes of stimulating interest in a new sub-area of forensic communication.’
  • Michael Motley (University of California, Davis), Clarity and Connotations of Warning Labels and Instructions
    • Abstract: ‘Many lawsuits take this form: Someone gets hurt using a product; they sue; the defendant responds, in part, by claiming that the warning and/or instructions accompanying the product, if heeded, would have precluded the accident; and the clarity or likely interpretation of the warning or instructions becomes an issue. This talk will discuss how certain principles of semantics and communication can be applied to questions of message clarity.’
  • Debra Worthington (Auburn University), Bridging Disciplines: Psychology, Communication, and Hindsight De-biasing
    • Abstract: ‘The belief in a jury’s ability to render a fair and impartial verdict is a foundation of the judicial system. However, because the legal system asks jurors to render a verdict with knowledge of the original outcome of events, jurors can become susceptible to the human judgment phenomenon known as hindsight bias. This presentation explores the intersection of psychology and communication as it applies to this common cognitive heuristic identifying communicative strategies for reducing the bias.’
  • Charles Wesley Kim, Jr. (Yelman & Associates), Brian Spitzberg (San Diego State Univ), The Jurisprudence of Imprudent Behavior: Communication Challenges in Seeking Stalking Justice
    • Abstract: ‘Stalking is still a relatively new legal concept, and given that it often reflects an ongoing but unwanted relationship, it presents challenges in understanding how communication may be applied to its jurisprudential management. This presentation seeks to summarize three sets of work at the intersection between stalking research and applied communication. After a brief overview of basic stalking issues, including legal definitions and context, emphasis will focus on two complimentary lines of analysis. First, we examine the primary issues at stake in a stalking case, such communicating to judge and/or jury about issues such as intent, threat, pattern, coercion (i.e., the unwanted nature of the harassment), as well as the ‘reasonable person’ standard. Second, we explore potential communication strategies that perpetrators or victims may engage in that pose risks and opportunities for their courtroom outcomes, such as is implied by being a “bad witness” or failing evidence tests due to a lack of records of communication between the parties. Third, some of the more troublesome courtroom issues are explored, such as false victimization, abuse of judicial options as a means of harassment or counter-harassment, and the somewhat ironic implications of stalking as a ‘victim-defined’ crime.’
  • Frank Boster (Michigan State University), A Review of the Effect of Direct, Non-Physical Evidence on Trial Outcomes: Confessions and Eyewitness Testimony
    • Abstract: ‘There is a substantial literature examining confessions. One line of research considers their persuasive impact. Another considers the manner in which false confessions may be coerced. There is a parallel literature on the impact of eyewitness testimony. Because eyewitnesses have been found to be incorrect so frequently, the reasons for false identifications have been studied thoroughly as well. These studies are done primarily by psychologists. In this presentation I will summarize this literature with the purpose of making them familiar to communication scholars who, I believe, would have additional insights on these processes.’
  • Daniel Linz (University of California, Santa Barbara), Effects of Sexually Oriented Messages on Individuals and Communities
    • Abstract: ‘It is common these days to have legal conflicts between “adult entertainment” establishments (bookstores, dance clubs, etc.) and the communities in which the establishment wants to operate. This talk will discuss ways in which such litigation may be informed by research on the actual effects of these kinds of establishments on individuals and communities.’
• Top Papers in Communication and the Law, Nov. 13, 5:00 p.m.:
  • Ryan Malphurs (Texas A&M University), Could You Hear Me above the Laughter? The Role of Laughter at the U.S. Supreme Court
    • Abstract: ‘This paper expands previous studies of humor at the Court by questioning the communicative function of laughter in Supreme Court oral arguments. Using observations of nearly 40 Supreme Court arguments, audio files of 71 argument cases, and 2006-2007 transcripts of Court arguments, I argue that laughter enables lawyers and justices to negotiate the complex institutional, social, and intellectual barriers, which assists in stabilizing an argument to reach an understanding and fostering change in their decision.’
  • John Reinard (California State University, Fullerton), An Experimental Study of the Use of Voir Dire Questions to Preview Case Elements and Promote Positive Attitudes Toward Defendants
    • Abstract: ‘The influence of three types of voir dire questions was examined to test effects on ratings of defendant guilt, defendant credibility, defense attorney credibility, and prosecutor credibility. Results indicated that the use of strategic voir dire questions influenced decisions and ratings of trial participants. In particular, a main effect was produced by the use of questions requesting jurors to show empathy by reciprocating positively to the defense expressions of trust in them.’
  • Jeremiah Hickey (St. John’s University), Visions of Democracy: Partisanship, Race, Self-Government, and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation
    • Abstract: ‘This paper seeks to examine how competing assumptions concerning the nature of the communication process and competing ideological interpretations of the law contribute to the enactment of constitutional law and the development of political structure that this law supports. In this paper, I examine how the Supreme Court Justices employ competing rhetorical strategies in the “analytically distinct” cases of redistricting and reapportionment law to address the issue of racial reconciliation.’
  • Jennifer Andrus (Carnegie Mellon Univ), From Event to Text: The Effects of Entextualization in/on the Excited Utterance Exception to Hearsay
    • Abstract: ‘In this paper, I argue that assumptions about language circulated in US evidence law minimize the rhetoricity of some utterance and the actual differences between texts and events (Scheppele). I analyze trial and appellate language in which the excited utterance exception to hearsay is used, to argue that such utterances are actually entextualized–made into a recognizable “excited utterance.” Further, such practices ultimately affect the agency of the speaker of the “excited utterance utterance.”’
• What Can We Learn from the California Gay Marriage Debates?
  • Abstract for This Program: ‘This panel is the result of a research collaboration that took place in spring 2009 that compares and contrasts the legal and political arguments that took place in California in 2007/2008 that produced contrary decisions about how to define “marriage.” Two goals motivate the proposal: 1) To improve our scholarly understanding of how “reasonableness” was performed differently in the technical and public settings of the California debate; 2) To consider what role argumentation critics might play as the national debate over gay marriage continues.’
  • Justin Killian (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities), Public Arguments Supporting Proposition 8
    • Abstract: ‘This presentation reviews the four major arguments in print and video made in favor of Prop 8: Marriage is correctly defined as between a man and a woman, the people should define rather than the courts, the California Supreme Court decision will lead to bad consequences, and gay couples are already protected by California’s Domestic Partnership Act.’
  • Emily Berg (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities), How to Secularize a Religious Argument: An Examination of Selected Amici Briefs Filed in In re Marriage Cases
    • Abstract: ‘Amici Curiae briefs are an underappreciated source for understanding legal argumentation. This presentation is based on a review of all 45 amici briefs filed for In re Marriage Cases and will focus in particular on how advocates attempted to “secularized” otherwise religious arguments opposed to gay marriage in order to be “reasonable” according to the norms and practices of constitutional argument.’
  • Jon Hoffman (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities), Public Arguments Opposing Proposition 8
    • Abstract: ‘This presentation reviews the major arguments opposing Prop 8: That Prop 8 is discriminatory, the Courts should decide civil rights rather than popular vote, the bad consequences predicted by proponents are not true, and marriage should be about love and commitment. Limitations of the arguments deployed by Prop 8 opponents are noted.’
  • Edward Schiappa (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities), Lost in Translation: Considering the Role of Argument Critics in the Gay Marriage Debate
  • Abstract: ‘This presentation notes the very different performances of “reasonableness” that took place in the technical sphere of constitutional argument and the public sphere of the Prop 8 debate leading up to the election. The role of argument critics as “translators” of the technical sphere is offered as an appropriate role for argument critics interested in civic engagement.’

If you know of other legal information programs at NCA 2009, please identify them in the comments.

Additional conference programs are searchable here. For more information, please see the conference Website.

Lawrence Lessig is the foremost authority on copyright law. His two books: Code 2.0 and the more popular Free Culture talks about an out-standing, far reaching consequence of excessive copyright protection which is:

1. Does a customer have the right to modify the content of a media he has purchased

2. Does this type of self-expression or what Larry calls “read-write culture” violate notions or the intent of copyright beyond what the law states

Also see Lessig’s old blog here. The ideas are still fresh and relevant

Knowledge is power and so it tends to be hoarded. Sharing is the nature of creation. It matters because we live in media. Like fishes live in water. They iron all subjects flat than then proceed, in groups, at a forced march across the flattened plain. Involvements with the material is not encouraged nor taken into consideration, but their dutifulness of response is carefully monitored. We are saying no. We are saying we want to actually create with it respond to it cut it up design the molecules of our new water.

I think everyone would benefit from and enjoy watching this presentation that Lawrence Lessig gave this morning at the Educause 2009 conference. He illustrates how the extreme application of copyright to all aspects of our lives corrupts the rule of law in a democratic society, and promotes the Creative Commons approach to a legal infrastructure for avoiding the damage to science, education, and culture inflicted by copyright.

Click the picture above to see the video. Lessig’s talk begins at minute 35 26, just use the time slide control to bypass earlier talks.

Lessig is the Director, Edward J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, and Professor of Law at Harvard University