Copyright

Review: Remix – Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy

/ Christopher Parsons

continues Professor Lessig’s discussion about the role of copyright in contemporary Western societies. This time he is focusing on how digital tools are used by children and adults alike to ‘remix’ pieces of culture. ‘Remixing’ involves taking images, music, speeches, and video (for example) and manipulating and arranging them to create entirely new cultural artifacts. You see this in homemade music videos, funny YouTube clips that use music to mock or praise politicians, and in blogs where people appropriate content from various locations to create the narrative of each posting. These amateur cultural artifacts are significant, both because they are creative expressions and because they leverage the weight of the symbols that are used in remixing to create the new cultural artifact. There is very real value in the referential elements of remix culture.

Lessig distinguishes between ‘Read Only’ (RO) and ‘Read Write’ (RW) cultures. RO culture has been the traditional realm of copyright – here intellectual property is carefully fenced off from the public commons, and individuals must ask permission to use it. RW culture, on the other hand, thrives off of sharing and creatively adapting (and re-adapting) media. Neither is necessarily better or worse than the other – they are each useful in particular domains. The problem, however, is that the laws governing RO culture are now preventing RW culture from legally thriving; digital technologies enable culture to be remixed, while the laws of the land outlaw creating remixed digital artifacts without first asking the permission of rights holders. Lessig associates the RO and RW ‘culture models’ with commercial and sharing economies, arguing that the advent of digital technologies and spaces can drive a wedge between commercial and sharing economies to create hybrid cultures and economies. He points to wikipedia, craigslist, YouTube, Slashdot, and last.fm as operating within a hybrid economy between RW and RO culture. This economy thrives off of individuals’ shared participation that can stimulate commercial profits. If a company upsets the balance that makes possible this hybridity – by paying people when payment would be an insult, or mishandling the sharing of people’s contributions – there is a risk that the financial success of a company that operates in the hybrid economy will be (financially) endangered.

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Comment: Apple, encryption, and being uber-lame

/ Christopher Parsons

So, there is a great new technology that all the newest TVs and computers have: it’s called HDCP. This technology is great – it offers incredible resolutions for you movies, bringing a level of clarity to them that hasn’t ever been seen before.

The problem is, you might not be able to watch movies from iTunes on your TV at home if you’re using one of Apple’s new Macbooks.

HDCP encrypts data from point A to point B, largely in an effort to prevent people from copying the data (i.e. making your own copy/backup of the data while it streams from point A to B). Ars is reporting that iTunes’ Fairplay Version 3 DRM requires that you have a HDCP source and destination to play content wrapped in this DRM. If you’re going from HDCP to analogue, then you’re out of luck.

While I can appreciate that Apple has a real need to ‘secure’ the content in the iTunes library if they’re to keep ‘Big Media’ happy, it seems unreasonable that customers may be prevented from watching their videos on non-HDCP enabled screens if they want to. No wonder Jobs was pushing the new Apple monitors so hard when he revealed the new macbooks…

Study: Stolen Web Content Sees More Traffic Than The Original

/ Christopher Parsons

is reporting that a recent study from Attributor Corp., a copyright enforcement company, shows that content that is stolen makes more money than the original content itself. I don’t find this terribly surprising, but the solution (hunting down copyright violations) seems to be a Sisyphean task; no matter how many take-down notices that you send out, when content is taken across international borders it’s almost impossible to easily take it down if you’re dealing with an uncooperative content host.

What’s the solution then? The study suggests that content owners need to find a better way of monetizing their assets – figure out how to generate more revenue (potentially by studying how the thieves do it) so that even if content is ‘stolen’ you’re still ahead of the game. The nice thing about this solution is that it recognizes that you can’t ever, really, stop copyright infringement online – the best you can do is learn to roll with it.

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Why Lessig is Right (At Least When it Comes to Autobots)

/ Christopher Parsons

is the founder of the Creative Commons, which effectively allows for a more nuanced (and reasonable) approach to copyright – it establishes particularized rights for different audiences to use your work in different ways. The aim is to allow people to license work so that citizens can use facets of their culture to create new parts of their culture – as an example they can modify images and songs to produce something new, without their modification being labeled a copyright infringement. You’ll note that this blog is under a CC license.

Music, Mashup, and Meaning

There have been a number of particularly stunning documentaries in the past few years that attempt to grapple with the notion of copyright. Of the ones that I’ve seen, Good Copy, Bad Copy(and it’s a free download!) is likely about the best – it examines the role of mashup in music and the role of copyright as it applies to film. Mashups tend to involve taking multiple tracks of music and overlaying them in new and interesting ways – this also tends to act as a method of ‘culture jamming’, insofar as messages are playfully appropriated and modulated in ways that diverge from the cultural direction of the original works of music. As an example, you might hear a song about war with deep and potent lyrics laid atop an electronic dance beat, transforming both of the works in important and substantial ways.

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Three-Strike Copyright

/ Christopher Parsons

To fully function as a student in today’s Western democracies means having access access to the Internet. In some cases this means students use Content Management Systems (CMSs) such as Drupal, Blackboard, or wikis (to name a few examples) to submit homework and participate in collaborate group assignments. CMSs are great because teachers can monitor the effectiveness of student’s group contributions and retain timestamps of when the student has turned in their work. Thus, when Sally doesn’t turn in her homework for a few weeks, and ‘clearly’ isn’t working with her group in the school-sanctioned CMS, the teacher can call home and talk with Sally’s parents about Sally’s poor performance.

At least, that’s the theory.

Three-Strike Copyright and Some Numbers

I’m not going to spend time talking about the digital divide (save to note that it’s real, and it penalises students in underprivileged environments by preventing them from acting as an equal in the digitized classroom), nor am I going to talk about the inherent privacy and security issues that arise as soon as teacher use digital management systems. No, I want to turn our attention across the Atlantic to Britain, where the British parliament will soon be considering legislation that would implement a three-strike copyright enforcement policy. France is in the process of implementing a similar law (with the expectation that it will be in place by summer 2008), which will turn ISPs into data police. Under these policies if a user (read: household) is caught infringing on copyright three times (they get two warnings) they can lose access to the ‘net following the third infringement.

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Piracy, Privacy, and Big Brother

/ Christopher Parsons

As an initial aside: Linux betas really are betas, nothing like the relatively polished (in comparison) betas that Redmond released.

Piracy or ‘Avast Me Mateys!’

I don’t spend a lot of time talking about software or music piracy, largely because I think that there are alternate sources that more effectively aggregate and deliver news about it. That said, I couldn’t resist commenting on Jennifer Pariser’s (head of litigation for Sony BMG) statements surrounding digital technologies. When under oath, Pariser responded to Richard Gabriel’s (the lead counsel for record labels) question of whether it was wrong for consumers to make copies of music they have purchased, stating,

When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.” Making “a copy” of a purchased song is just “a nice way of saying ‘steals just one copy’ (source).

Her comments directly point to why fair use is under such duress. More importantly, however, even when we apply the principle of charity to her general position, her comments seem to defy the public’s position on the matter. I don’t want to suggest that because people generally believe something that the law should reflect their beliefs – if that was the case then racial segregation would be more prominent than it is – but that when extensive public discourse has been undertaken and a common position is held by the deliberative participants, that their shared consensus should operate as the basis for developing legitimated law. I think that this discourse has, and continues to, occur in North America.

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