Participation: the most important, underlying theme

In the first half of the semester we were introduced to Susan Delagrange’s “Wunderkammer,” – and more importantly, her essay about the revision process for that piece. 

Her essay, “When Revision is Redesign,” taught us about a heuristic process – Enabling us to discover or learn something for ourselves.

She said, “...a key to innovative thinking and problem-solving is maintaining ambiguity for as long as possible. Designers must preserve ambiguity so as not to exclude avenues of thought or experiment that might later prove productive. Learners too must preserve ambiguity, as premature certainty shuts down the process of inquiry and exploration that often leads to more sophisticated, more interesting, more generative knowledge." 

She used the visual effect of the Wunderkammer as a physical place, creating what she called a “richly furnished imaginative space” – something that would get us to wander and explore. 

And that was something I carried into my midterm. 

-----> For the midterm project, I posted a series of images laid together with quotes from our readings. And when I wrote about them, it kind of came out as slam poetry. I wrote it as I spoke it, and practiced it out loud – hoping that when someone read it, they would be able to hear my voice, or that they’d be inclined to read it out loud to feel the words. 

TO PARTICIPATE. 

I was learning by doing the project –– and the revision process – rewording and editing – helped me fine-tune not just my words on the page, but all of my thoughts around the pieces we’d read so far this semester. Finishing the midterm gave me a product I could be proud of, and helped me really digest what we’d been learning.

***

The theme I’m getting at concerns internalizing in our memories. To embed our personal knowledge into culture to have some effect – it requires participation. 

Nowhere did that seem more important to me as in the legal issues surrounding copyright infringement and information, which we touched on with John Barlow’s “The Economy of Ideas.” 

He taught us the difference between INFORMATION and DATA:

-----> “Even when it has been encapsulated in some static form like a book or a hard disk, information is still something that happens to you as you mentally decompress it from its storage code. But, whether it's running at gigabits per second or words per minute, the actual decoding is a process that must be performed by and upon a mind, a process that must take place in time.”

We are the ones who give life to data, turning it into information. And we are the ones who must carry that burden into culture if we want to see change. 

So for my final project, I am creating a website that will become an action center – a hub for a collection of organizations that fight with and against lawmakers and lobbyists who are addressing Internet Freedom and cyber security. 

-----> Organizations like:

The American Civil Liberties Union

Electric Frontier Foundation

The Internet Defense League

Demand Progress 

As Barlow said, “Law adapts by continuous increments and at a pace second only to geology. Technology advances in lunging jerks......real-world conditions will continue to change at a blinding pace, and the law will lag further behind... This mismatch may prove impossible to overcome.”

But is my hope that by creating this website, where people can learn to participate, I will be able to provide a useful tool for those like myself who want to be part of the movement to help the law catch up to real world technology and culture.

AMA (ask-me-anything) chat about the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act happening on Reddit NOW!

Check it out!

AMAs are "Ask me anything"s where people field questions from Redditors. 
The panel includes Demand Progress, Aaron Swartz's partner Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Free Press, Orin Kerr, Jennifer Granick, Lawrence Lessig, Marvin Ammori, Tim Berners Lee.

Jay Cox of the EFF said this is what they're ultimately trying to accomplish by raising awareness about the CFAA reform

"We want to reform a vague, overly-expansive law that was originally intended to only deal with malicious computer trespass of a very small subset of computers. The law has been used in an aggressive manner by the DOJ, which believes that violating a terms of service should be punishable under the CFAA. For a great example of why reform is needed check out our blog post on the terms of service on news sites--some of which say if you're under 18 you can't access their website. The law was recently used in the aggressive prosecution of Aaron Swartz. Even before Aaron's death, we were fighting in the courts to narrow, and curtail, the law.

Common sense reform to the CFAA is needed to curtail aggressive prosecution by the DOJ and to ensure that companies can thrive. Large companies have all used the CFAA as a way to stop startups and innovators from creating innovative new products and services. That's why we're asking people to tell their Congressmen to reform the CFAA.

We're trying to: *) Make sure the CFAA doesn't criminalize simple terms of service violations *) Make sure that security, researchers, engineers, and innovators can create addons, new products, and new services without the threat of a criminal prosecution *) Decrease some of the penalties in the law so that low-level offenses aren't punished by an overbearing heavy-handed regime."

David Segal of Demand Progress on why the CFAA is bad (in its current state and with the potential new amendments):

"The biggest issue: Law enforcement asserts that it's a crime for you to violate a terms of service agreement on a website. Meaning that if Facebook says don't share your password with your friend, but you do anyway, then you're a federal criminal.

If Stephen Colbert starts a Twitter account for Bill Clinton, he's a federal criminal:https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130409/08525322632/did-stephen-colbert-president-bill-clinton-violate-cfaa.shtml?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

This means almost all of us are criminals, which is a hallmark of an authoritarian society and means that we're all susceptible to prosecution if we do something that steps on the wrong persons toes. It also creates a chilling effect on innovation, because if you're trying to build a device or platform that's inter-operable with other devices/platforms, it's easy to violate terms of use agreements."

CFAA "Reforms" Discussed in Congress Fail to Improve

As early as April 10, Congress may vote on amendments to reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act – basically, the legislation used to punish cyber "criminals." Not that they don't already, but the reforms may make criminals out of almost every Internet user in the country.

"Over the weekend, they (Congress) began circulating a "draft" of a "cyber-security" bill that is so bad that it almost feels like the Judiciary Committee is doing it on purpose as a dig at online activists who have fought back against things like SOPA, CISPA and the CFAA. Rather than fix the CFAA, it expands it. Rather than rein in the worst parts of the bill, it makes them worse. And, from what we've heard, the goal is to try to push this through quickly, with a big effort underway for a "cyberweek" in the middle of April that will force through a bunch of related bills." –Mike Masnick, "Rather Than Fix The CFAA, House Judiciary Committee Planning To Make It Worse... Way Worse."

[[Check out Congress' discussion draft of the cyber security bill (primary source).]]

Reform is crucial, as the letter of the law so heinously does not reflect the spirit of the "crimes" defined in the policy. There is a huge disconnect between what is socially acceptable and legally acceptable when it comes to online activities.

All websites and online services require users to agree to a "terms and conditions" agreement. The CFAA (with its new amendments) would state that a violation of said agreements are punishable by law.

• Making a Facebook account for your pet? Violation.
• Checking your family airline miles on your husband or wife's account? Violation. 
• "Exceeding authorized access," one of the new amendments, means even if you are allowed to obtain information from the site, you can be violating the agreement if you misuse it. Felony.

The CFAA originally passed in 1984, before the Dot Com Boom and the advances in digital technologies which are now so imbedded in our culture. Though it has been amended several times – most recently in 2008 – Congress is now taking backward steps to make the CFAA worse.
______

Fix the CFAA: get involved by telling Congress that their expansions of the CFAA are not acceptable and demand better reform.

Demand Progress, the organization Aaron Swartz worked for before he committed suicide earlier this year, is also trying to amend the CFAA and pass "Aaron's Law."

Johnson vs. Morozov: Internet-Centrism and Cyber-Utopianism

Johnson (Future Perfect) and Morozov (The New Republic)

Morozov also against the ideas of what he calls 

cyber-utopianism: the inability to see the Internet's 'darker' side, that is, the capabilities for information control and manipulation of new media space 

and 

Internet-centrism: the growing propensity ["quasi religion"] to view all political and social change through the prism of the Internet   (from Wiki)

Morozov claims Johnson (and Clay Shirky, author of "Here Comes Everybody") are Internet-Centrists, while Johnson claims not to be an Internet-Centrist; he calls IC "naive techno-determinism."

To this, Morozov counters: "The kind of naive determinism that views the “Internet” as a "positive force" and that Johnson seeks to distance himself from has nothing to do with Internet-centrism; it's a feature more commonly attributed to cyber-utopianism, as I clearly state at the very beginning of the review. That Johnson is not a starry-eyed techno-determinist doesn't make him less of an Internet-centrist."

I would argue against Morozov's claim about Shirky being an Internet-Centrist, who has obviously focused his lens through the idea that the Internet is effecting change in social and political developments but does not attribute those changes exclusively to the Internet. In "Here Comes Everybody," (which is the only work of his I've read) Shirky explains that the degree to which information is now spreading on the Internet is so different that we can call it a difference in type. And that the breakdown of barriers like time and distance reduce the gap between action and intention when it comes to political and social moves. But I did not get the impression that he was giving exclusive credit for these changes to the Internet. Still, I have only read a small portion of Shirky's body of work. 

Morozov: "Perhaps it was a mistake to treat the Internet as a deterministic one-directional force for either global liberation or oppression, for cosmopolitanism or xenophobia. The reality is that the Internet will enable all of these forces—as well as many others—simultaneously. But as far as laws of the Internet go, this is all we know. Which of the numerous forces unleashed by the Web will prevail in a particular social and political context is impossible to tell without first getting a thorough theoretical understanding of that context."

Johnson: "The point I tried to make explicit in Future Perfect is one that I’ve been implicitly making for more than a decade now: that peer collaboration is an ancient tradition, with a history as rich and illustrious as the more commonly celebrated histories of states or markets. The Internet happens to be the most visible recent achievement in that tradition, but it is hardly the basis of my worldview. And there is nothing in Future Perfect (or any of these other works) that claims that decentralized, peer-network approaches will always outperform top-down approaches. It’s simply a question of emphasis."

"Liberals can still believe in the power and utility of markets, even if they tend to emphasize big government solutions; all but the most radical libertarians think that there are some important roles for government in our lives. Peer progressives are no different. We don’t think that everything in modern life should be re-engineered to follow the “logic of the Internet.” We just think that society has long benefited from non-market forms of open collaboration, and that they’re aren’t enough voices in the current political conversation reminding us of those benefits. For peer progressives, the Internet is a case-study and a role model, yes, but hardly a deity. We would be making the same argument had the Internet never been invented."

Morozov: "An Internet-centrist asks the question: “What does the Internet want?” as if that question made sense. An Internet-utopian doesn't even ask that question, assuming that the Internet wants democracy and freedom. I don't know if Johnson is an Internet utopian but he is certainly an Internet-centrist.... It it might be useful to step back and ask whether the very fact of bringing “the Internet” in our explanatory accounts is enhancing or impoverishing our understanding of the technological world that we inhabit. Are we gaining anything by lumping thealgorithms used in high-frequency trading with a very different set of algorithms that Twitter uses to decide on its “popular trends” while using the sexy but highly elusive label of “the Internet” to do all that lumping? I don't think so—which is why I've been calling for a highly particularized approach to studying digital technologies—one that would treat each of them on their own terms without having to smuggle in some abstract, macro-level concept such as “the Internet” to smooth over the rough empirical and theoretical edges"

Johnson promotes the ideology of “peer progressivism.” 

Morozov: "What, one might ask, is new about this political ideology? According to Johnson, at least two things. First, its adherents believe that there are some areas of expertise where the public—or the crowd—are more knowledgeable than the experts. Second, “peer progressives”— unlike all those pre-peer progressives—don't have to choose between the state and the market; the two can co-exist, tapping into networks of crowd expertise along the way....
>>>Johnson, comfortably ensconced in his Internetcentric bubble, seems to sincerely believe that no one had ever thought about ways to make democratic politics more participatory before the onset of blogs, chats, and social networks. This, of course, is nonsense. The most unfortunate consequence of Johnson's project might be that, in his half-baked efforts to make a case for “peer progressivism,” he might undermine public support for more serious government reforms that are not as excited about “the Internet” but have developed sophisticated theories about involving crowds and networks in both deliberative and participatory processes."

It seems like Morozov is simply trying to direct the attention of people he perceives to be Internet-Centrists back to the subtleties of the real world which require more context-sensitive thinking. He is reminding us that there are other forces at work besides the Internet in current affairs, and that lumping together complicated phenomena under the umbrella of "the Internet" is actually hindering critical thinking.

Imogen Heap the Musical Cyborg

Heap demonstrates the technology of her musical suit in the first 13 minutes and then begins her song, "Me and the Machine." Absolutely amazing.

Shapiro and Varain vs. Barlow: Economy+Information

John Barlow, "The Economy of Ideas" and Carl Shapiro and Hal Varain "The Information Economy"

Shapiro & Varian talk about information goods the way most talk about data, as a commodity to be turned into profit. Selling information in the Age of Information creates an entirely different economy, where the market price of "goods" does not depend on the production cost any longer; sellers set prices based on the value information has to its market (Shapiro & Varian 3). Their approach to information is purely business-like. Cold, and nothing like Barlow.

Barlow describes Information as a living thing, a relationship, an activity. He says on page 7, "Information is an action which occupies time rather than a state of being which occupies physical space, as is the case with hard goods... Even when it has been encapsulated in some static form like a book or a hard disk, information is still something that happens to you as you mentally decompress it from its storage code. But, whether it's running at gigabits per second or words per minute, the actual decoding is a process that must be performed by and upon a mind, a process that must take place in time."

Eventually, Shapiro and Varian hit a point that agrees with Barlow – marketing one's intellectual property involves establishing authority: building a reputation to convince the market to buy one's product without knowing whether the product is good yet. Shapiro and Varian call this building brand name, and Barlow calls it point of view. Barlow, on page 10, writes "Familiarity is an important asset in the world of information. It may often be true that the best way to raise demand for your product is to give it away... In aesthetic information, whether poetry or rock 'n' roll, people are willing to buy the new product of an artist, sight-unseen, based on their having been delivered a pleasurable experience by previous work." 

On page 8, Shapiro & Varian make a huge mistake. They argue that the Web "isn't all that impressive as an information resource. The static, publicly accessible HTML text on the Wen is roughly equivalent in size to 1.5 million books. The UC Berkeley Library has 8 million volumes, and the average quality of the Berkeley library content is much, much higher! If 10 percent of the material on the Web is 'useful,' there are about 150,000 useful book-equivalents on it, which is about the size of a Borders superstore. But the actual figure for 'useful' is probably more like 1 percent, which is 15,000 books, or half the size of an average mall bookstore."

Shapiro & Varian could not have underestimated the Web more in 1999, when their book was published. 

I have no way to confirm whether their statistics were true 14 years ago, but saying only 10% of the information on the Web is useful is an incredible oversight. They continue on page 9 to describe the usefulness of the Web's immediate access factor, but even there they lack a complete picture. 

The Web, whether a majority of its content is "useful" or not, is much more impressive than Shapiro & Varian give it credit for – even as a marketing tool, which they seem to be limited to in their focus here. The Web is not just immediate and widely accessible – it has cracked the code, broken the barriers, for information to cross time and space. Their library metaphor shows just how diminutive their take is. With information on the Web, there is no longer a need to physically go where information is to access it, and people no longer have to be on synchronized schedules to share information. 

They say the Web enhances the value of information (9), but it also enhances the scope of its audience, enabling those with an idea or product to share to reach people who they never could have in physical space or time. Shapiro & Varian seriously overlooked that characteristic of networking technology, which has made commerce explode online.

When it comes to law and technology meshing, the two sets of authors hold strongly contrasting ideals. Shapiro & Varian write, "The Sherman Anti-Trust Act was passed in the 1890s to control monopolies. Technology has changed radically since then. As we have stressed, the underlying economic principles have not. As a new century arrives, the Sherman Act is flexible enough to prevent the heavy hand of monopoly from stifling innovation, while keeping markets competitive enough to stay the even heavier hand of government regulation intruding in our dynamic hardware and software markets" (17-18). 
Barlow writes, "Law adapts by continuous increments and at a pace second only to geology. Technology advances in lunging jerks, like the punctuation of biological evolution grotesquely accelerated. Real-world conditions will continue to change at a blinding pace, and the law will lag further behind, more profoundly confused. This mismatch may prove impossible to overcome" (6)

In my view, Barlow was closer to the truth here. If anything has become apparent in the struggle between technology growth and the stagnation of the law, it is the latter's inability to keep up with the former. 

Reading Notes for Barlow "The Economy of Ideas"

Barlow: "The Economy of Ideas"

"The source of this conundrum is as simple as its solution is complex. Digital technology is detaching
information from the physical plane, where property law of all sorts has always found definition.

Thus, the rights of invention and authorship adhered to activities in the physical world. One didn't get paid for ideas, but for the ability to deliver them into reality. For all practical purposes, the value was in the conveyance and not in the thought conveyed." (2)


"While the Internet may never include every CPU on the planet, it is more than doubling every year and can be expected to become the principal medium of information conveyance, and perhaps eventually, the only one.

All of the broadcast-support models are flawed. Support either by advertisers or government has almost
invariably tainted the purity of the goods delivered. Besides, direct marketing is gradually killing the
advertiser-support model anyway.

The greatest constraint on your future liberties may come not from government but from corporate legal departments laboring to protect by force what can no longer be protected by practical efficiency or general social consent." (3)

In the Age of Information, we patent and copyright IDEAS, and not their physical manifestations. "In certain areas, this leaves rights of ownership in such an ambiguous condition that property again
adheres to those who can muster the largest armies. The only difference is that this time the armies
consist of lawyers.

What was previously considered a common human resource, distributed among the minds and libraries of the world, as well as the phenomena of nature herself, is now being fenced and deeded. It is as though a new class of enterprise had arisen that claimed to own the air.

In a more perfect world, we'd be wise to declare a moratorium on litigation, legislation, and international treaties in this area until we had a clearer sense of the terms and conditions of enterprise in cyberspace. Ideally, laws ratify already developed social consensus. They are less the Social Contract itself than a series of memoranda expressing a collective intent that has emerged out of many millions of human interactions. Humans have not inhabited cyberspace long enough or in sufficient diversity to have developed a Social Contract which conforms to the strange new conditions of that world. Laws developed prior to consensus usually favor the already established few who can get them passed and not society as a whole." (5)

"Whenever there is such profound divergence between law and social practice, it is not society that adapts. Against the swift tide of custom, the software publishers' current practice of hanging a few visible scapegoats is so obviously capricious as to only further diminish respect for the law.

Law adapts by continuous increments and at a pace second only to geology. Technology advances in lunging jerks, like the punctuation of biological evolution grotesquely accelerated. Real-world conditions will continue to change at a blinding pace, and the law will lag further behind, more profoundly confused. This mismatch may prove impossible to overcome.

But something will happen. After all, people do business. When a currency becomes meaningless, business is done in barter. When societies develop outside the law, they develop their own unwritten codes, practices, and ethical systems. While technology may undo law, technology offers methods for restoring creative rights." (6)


Information is an activity. 

"Gregory Bateson, expanding on the information theory of Claude Shannon, said, "Information is a
difference which makes a difference." Thus, information only really exists in the Delta. The making of that difference is an activity within a relationship. Information is an action which occupies time rather than a state of being which occupies physical space, as is the case with hard goods.

Even when it has been encapsulated in some static form like a book or a hard disk, information is still
something that happens to you as you mentally decompress it from its storage code. But, whether it's
running at gigabits per second or words per minute, the actual decoding is a process that must be
performed by and upon a mind, a process that must take place in time.

Information must move: Information that isn't moving ceases to exist as anything but potential...at least until it is allowed to move again. For this reason, the practice of information hoarding, common in bureaucracies, is an especially wrong-headed artifact of physically based value systems." (7)


Information is a life form. 
It is a life form, and humans are its host.
"Information Replicates into the Cracks of Possibility: just as the common housefly has insinuated itself into practically every ecosystem on the planet, so has the meme of "life after death" found a niche in most minds, or psycho-ecologies. "

If ideas and other interactive patterns of information are indeed life forms, they can be expected to evolve constantly into forms which will be more perfectly adapted to their surroundings. And, as we see, they are doing this all the time. But for a long time, our static media, whether carvings in stone, ink on paper, or dye on celluloid, have strongly resisted the evolutionary impulse, exalting as a consequence the author's ability to determine the finished product. But, as in an oral tradition, digitized information has no "final cut."(8)

Information is a relationship. 

"The value of what is sent depends entirely on the extent to which each individual receiver has the
receptors - shared terminology, attention, interest, language, paradigm - necessary to render what is
received meaningful.
Data may be any set of facts, useful or not, intelligible or inscrutable, germane or irrelevant... Only a human being can recognize the meaning that separates information from data." (9)

"Familiarity has more value than scarcity: Familiarity is an important asset in the world of information. It may often be true that the best way to raise demand for your product is to give it away.


Point of View and Authority Have Value: In aesthetic information, whether poetry or rock 'n' roll, people are willing to buy the new product of an artist, sight-unseen, based on their having been delivered a pleasurable experience by previous work." (10)



"...point of view is an asset which cannot be stolen or duplicated.
In the hick town I come from, they don't give you much credit for just having ideas. You are judged by
what you can make of them. As things continue to speed up, I think we see that execution is the best
protection for those designs which become physical products.

But, as we become fixated upon information commerce, many of us seem to think that originality alone is sufficient to convey value, deserving, with the right legal assurances, of a steady wage. In fact, the best way to protect intellectual property is to act on it. It's not enough to invent and patent; one has to innovate as well." (11)

"Nevertheless, most of what a middle-class American purchases has little to do with survival. We buy beauty, prestige, experience, education, and all the obscure pleasures of owning. Many of these things can not only be expressed in nonmaterial terms, they can be acquired by nonmaterial means.

It is an economy which consists almost entirely of information. This may become the dominant form of human trade, and if we persist in modeling economics on a strictly monetary basis, we may be gravely misled.

I'm not really so gloomy about our prospects as readers of this jeremiad so far might conclude. Solutions will emerge. Nature abhors a vacuum and so does commerce." (12)

Ethics used to be more important than laws -- and now we have a law for almost everything. There is no way for law to keep up with the new issues technology is presenting. "Uncodified or adaptive "law," while as "fast, loose, and out of control" as other emergent forms, is probably more likely to yield something like justice at this point.

...people seem to eventually buy the software they really use. Once a program becomes central to your work, you want the latest version of it, the best support, the actual manuals, all privileges attached to ownership. Such practical considerations will, in the absence of working law, become more and more important in getting paid for what might easily be obtained for nothing." (13)

"In any case, whether you think of yourself as a service provider or a performer, the future protection of your intellectual property will depend on your ability to control your relationship to the market - a relationship which will most likely live and grow over a period of time. The value of that relationship will reside in the quality of performance, the uniqueness of your point of view, the validity of your expertise, its relevance to your market, and, underlying everything, the ability of that market to access your creative services swiftly, conveniently, and interactively. " (14)

"Crpto-Bottling... Having come from a place where people leave their keys in their cars and don't even have keys to their houses, I remain convinced that the best obstacle to crime is a society with its ethics intact. " (15)

"If the payment process can be automated, as digital cash and signature will make possible, I believe that soft product creators will reap a much higher return from the bread they cast upon the waters of cyberspace.
Moreover, they will be spared much of the overhead presently attached to the marketing, manufacture, sales, and distribution of information products, whether those products are computer programs, books, CDs, or motion pictures. This will reduce prices and further increase the likelihood of noncompulsory payment.
But of course there is a fundamental problem with a system that requires, through technology, payment for every access to a particular expression. It defeats the original Jeffersonian purpose of seeing that ideas were available to everyone regardless of their economic station. I am not comfortable with a model that will restrict inquiry to the wealthy.

An Economy of Verbs:

• In the absence of the old containers, almost everything we think we know about intellectual property is wrong. We're going to have to unlearn it. We're going to have to look at information as though we'd never seen the stuff before.
• The protections that we will develop will rely far more on ethics and technology than on law.
• Encryption will be the technical basis for most intellectual property protection. (And should, for many reasons, be made more widely available.)
• The economy of the future will be based on relationship rather than possession. It will be continuous rather than sequential. 
• And finally, in the years to come, most human exchange will be virtual rather than physical, consisting not of stuff but the stuff of which dreams are made. Our future business will be conducted in a world made more of verbs than nouns." (16)

3.19 Notes

The Memory Hole

Three videos: first, second, and third. "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"

When others do a search for your online information, what do they find? What do you want them to find? What information exists about you online that you'd like to remove? What would happen, ideally, with electronic research about you?

Apropos of the movie (which, if you haven't seen it, is very very good) trailer: we can't wipe people from our memories, but what happens if we try to wipe traces of ourselves from the internet, or from Facebook? What remains? What's the shelf life of information?

We'll also look at the evolution of privacy settings on Facebook.

"We Can Remember it for you Wholesale" - book that Total Recall was based on

Facebook creeping... there is a lot of information about you that is, by default settings, accessible to the public -- not even just the Facebook community

Six Strikes Law

Is the Internet in "the cloud"? They are in physical space, and a lot of electrical production.

The only thing that can overturn the Citizens United supreme court decision is a constitutional amendment. Ohmygawd.

Homework:

Information ownership vs. information anarchy

We will meet in AML105 on Thursday.

Read John Perry Barlow, "The Economy of Ideas," keeping in mind that it's by (1) a member of the Grateful Dead and (2) a co-founder and member of the board of directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. (He didn't invent the term cyberspace -- William Gibson did -- but he was the first to apply it to what it currently describes.) 

Read, also, Shapiro and Varian, "The Information Economy," keeping in mind that Hal Varian is currently chief economist at Google.

Write a blog entry. 

If you prefer the stock option for the blog entry, compare the perspectives of Barlow with those of Shapiro and Varian. Barlow seems to be more about principles, and has economic ideologies very different from Shapiro and Varian. Shapiro and Varian say that they're about models, not trends. Note that their book, like Barlow's article, was published in the middle of the dot-com bubble that (when it burst) contributed to the recession of the early 2000s: Time Warner and AOL produced the "worst merger ever," WorldCom and Global Crossing went public and cheated on their accounting and went bankrupt, the stock market lost $5 trillion in value, and tens of thousands of people with new degrees in technology-related fields went unemployed. So: in retrospect, what do these authors get wrong, and what do they get right? Whose predictions have come more true, and who would you ideologically align yourself with? Give examples. 

Amanda Palmer, a Copyright Libertarian

Amanda (Fucking) Palmer of the Dresden Dolls used to be a street performer. She would ask passersby for money in exchange for a flower, and some intense eye contact. In her music career, she and her band have surfed many couches and taken food donations from fans in countless cities.

With all of her practice in simply asking people for things when she needed them, she decided to give her music away for free online. She encouraged downloading, but asked others to help her in a crowd-funding project. She discovered incredible results when she asked people to pay her, rather than making them pay through a record label.

Her goal was to raise $100,000.

Her fans donated $1.2 million - "The biggest crowd-funding project to date."

She testifies that her fans want to help her when she connects to them by asking. "Asking makes you vulnerable," she says.

"Celebrity is about a lot of people loving you from a distance. But the internet and the content that we're freely able to share on it – it's taking us back. It's about a few people loving you up close, and about those people being enough."

How do we make let people pay for music? 

Amanda Palmer is a copyright libertarian: advocating voluntary funding and free will.

3.7 Notes

Computer Fraud Act, 1984 (<--- bogus - made before the Internet even existed?)

Illegal to violate the terms of service of any product/service.

That means... if you have an alias on Facebook, YOU CAN GO TO JAIL for violating FB's terms of service. 

It turns 46 million Americans into Criminals

It would take 76 8-hour work days for the average person to read the Terms and Conditions they agree to in a year.

Lessig's speech on Aaron's Law

Law named in honor of Swartz

Aaron violated JSTOR's terms of use by writing a script that downloaded article after article. That was his his ACTUAL criminal activity. "He was basically going to be sent to prison for checking out too many library books. If you were to do that in a real library, you'd be kind of a dick, but you shouldn't go to prison for it," said Edwards.

Lessig is currently going after Congress for its susceptibility to ignore lobbyists b/c of corporate/$ influence. #OccupyWallStreet

History is not natural. We're not where we are because there was no other way. People make cultural, economic, legal choices.... Once you turn experiences into information, you can do all kinds of stuff.
Meaning need not reside in information; people impose meaning on information.
When people have not calibrated their expectations enough because the issue has not been around long (doctors getting sued vs. copyright infringers), the first thing they prioritize is money.

--Edwards

"Art for Copy" movie to watch
John Burger essay, "Ways of Seeing." 

Notes: "Free Culture" Ch. 12 Harms

Creativity squandered, not expressed, not distributed
"The four students who were threatened by the RIAA (Jesse Jordan of chapter 3 was just one) were threatened with a $98 billion lawsuit for building search engines that permitted songs to be copied. Yet WorldCom—which defrauded investors of $11 billion, resulting in a loss to investors in market capitalization of over $200 billion—received a fine of a mere $750 million. And under legislation being pushed in Congress right now, a doctor who negligently removes the wrong leg in an operation would be liable for no more than $250,000 in damages for pain and suffering. Can common sense recognize the absurdity in a world where the maximum fine for downloading two songs off the Internet is more than the fine for a doctor’s negligently butchering a patient?" (185).

"But fair use in America simply means the right to hire a lawyer to defend your right to create. And as lawyers love to forget, our system for defending rights such as fair use is astonishingly bad—in practically every context, but especially here. It costs too much, it delivers too slowly, and what it delivers often has little connection to the justice underlying the claim. The legal system may be tolerable for the very rich. For everyone else, it is an embarrassment to a tradition that prides itself on the rule of law" (187).

"For in a world that threatens $150,000 for a single willful infringement of a copyright, and which demands tens of thousands of dollars to even defend against a copyright infringement claim, and which would never return to the wrongfully accused defendant anything of the costs she suffered to defend her right to speak—in that world, the astonishingly broad regulations that pass under the name “copyright” silence speech and creativity" (187).


Regulation simply enables the powerful industries of today to protect themselves against the competitors of tomorrow

"Everyone, of course, concedes that some regulation of markets is necessary—at a minimum, we need rules of property and contract, and courts to enforce both. Likewise, in this culture debate, everyone concedes that at least some framework of copyright is also required. But both perspectives vehemently insist that just because some regulation is good, it doesn’t follow that more regulation is better" (188).

"This is the world of the mafia—filled with “your money or your life” offers, governed in the end not by courts but by the threats that the law empowers copyright holders to exercise. It is a system that will obviously and necessarily stifle new innovation. It is hard enough to start a company. It is impossibly hard if that company is constantly threatened by litigation" (191).

"The law is a mess of uncertainty. We have no good way to know how it should apply to new technologies. Yet by reversing our tradition of judicial deference, and by embracing the astonishingly high penalties that copyright law imposes, that uncertainty now yields a reality which is far more conservative than is right.... Free market and free culture depend upon vibrant competition. Yet the effect of the law today is to stifle just this kind of competition. The effect is to produce an overregulated culture, just as the effect of too much control in the market is to produce an overregulated-regulated market." (192).

"The efficient spread of content means that content distributors have a harder time controlling the distribution of content. One obvious response to this efficiency is thus to make the Internet less efficient. If the Internet enables “piracy,” then, this response says, we should break the kneecaps of the Internet.... regulation of technical infrastructure will ... impose significant burdens and costs on the technology, but will likely be eclipsed by advances around exactly those requirements"(193).

"Copyright may be property, but like all property, it is also a form of regulation. It is a regulation that benefits some and harms others. When done right, it benefits creators and harms leeches. When done wrong, it is regulation the powerful use to defeat competitors" (194).

Better technology fosters better competition (196).

"While terrestrial radio does not have to pay our hypothetical Marilyn Monroe when it plays her hypothetical recording of “Happy Birthday” on the air,Internet radio does. Not only is the law not
neutral toward Internet radio—the law actually burdens Internet radio more than it burdens terrestrial radio... if an Internet radio station distributed adfree popular music to (on average) ten thousand listeners, twenty-four hours a day, the total artist fees that radio station would owe would be
over $1 million a year. A regular radio station broadcasting the same content would pay no equivalent fee." (197).

"And so the attorneys representing the webcasters asked the RIAA, . . . “How do you come up with a rate that’s so much higher? Why is it worth more than radio? Because here we have hundreds of thousands of webcasters who want to pay, and that should establish the market rate, and if you
set the rate so high, you’re going to drive the small webcasters out of business. . . .”
And the RIAA experts said, “Well, we don’t really model this as an industry with thousands of webcasters, we think it should be an industry with, you know, five or seven big players who can pay a high rate and it’s a stable, predictable market” (197-198).


Corrupting citizens
"According to The New York Times, 43 million Americans downloaded music in May 2002. According to the RIAA, the behavior of those 43 million Americans is a felony. We thus have a set of rules that transform 20 percent of America into criminals" (199).

"In September 2003, the RIAA sued 261 individuals—including a twelve-year-old girl living in public housing and a seventy-year-old man who had no idea what file sharing was. As these scapegoats discovered, it will always cost more to defend against these suits than it would cost to simply settle. (The twelve year old, for example, like Jesse Jordan, paid her life savings of $2,000 to settle the case.) .... And the consequence of our law as it is, is that those with the power can use the law to quash any rights they oppose"(200).

Drugs, driving regulations, taxes -- most Americans regularly break the law.

"Generations of Americans—more significantly in some parts of America than in others, but still, everywhere in America today—can’t live their lives both normally and legally, since “normally” entails a certain degree of illegality" (201).

"And I do care if the rules of law sow increasing disrespect because of the extreme of regulation they impose. Twenty million Americans have come of age since the Internet introduced this different idea of 'sharing.' We need to be able to call these twenty million Americans 'citizens,' not 'felons'" (202).

Notes: "Free Culture" Ch. 5 Piracy

PIRACY I

The recording industry estimates loss at about $4.6 billion every year to businesses that do nothing but steal others people’s copyrighted content, copy it, and sell it without permission of copyright owner. 

 

"The MPAA estimates that it loses $3 billion annually worldwide to piracy" (63).

Lessig iterates: Piracy is wrong – legally and morally. Three arguments in favor of piracy:

1. "...in any case, it does no harm to the industry. The Chinese who get access to American CDs at 50 cents a copy are not people who would have bought those American CDs at $15 a copy. So no one really has any less money than they otherwise would have had" (64). But there are still people who can afford to pay for those DVDs they pirated who should have paid the copyright owner.

2. "Extremists in this debate love to say, 'You wouldn’t go into Barnes & Noble and take a book off of the shelf without paying; why should it be any different with on-line music?' The difference is, of course, that when you take a book from Barnes & Noble, it has one less book to sell. By contrast, when you take an MP3 from a computer network, there is not one less CD that can be sold" (64). -- weak argument for the morality of piracy, still.

3. It actually helps the copyright owner: "When the Chinese 'steal' Windows, that makes the Chinese dependent on Microsoft. Microsoft loses the value of the software that was taken. But it gains users who are used to life in the Microsoft world. Over time, as the nation grows more wealthy, more and more people will buy software rather than steal it. And hence over time, because that buying will benefit Microsoft, Microsoft benefits from the piracy" (65). The addiction strategy does work as a marketing tool. But we should still let companies decide when they want to give their stuff away for free. 

Lessig concedes: Not all "piracy" is wrong.

Distinction between piracy and p2p sharing: "For (1) like the original Hollywood, p2p sharing escapes an overly controlling industry; and (2) like the original recording industry, it simply exploits a new way to distribute content; but (3) unlike cable TV, no one is selling the content that is shared on p2p services" (66).

PIRACY II

"The key to the “piracy” that the law aims to quash is a use that “rob[s] the author of [his] profit.” This means we must determine whether and how much p2p sharing harms before we know how strongly the law should seek to either prevent it or find an alternative to assure the author of his profit" (66-67).

Napster didn't do anything new – they just put together things that independents had already developed (67).

Four kinds of file sharers:
1. Users who download instead of purchase

2. Those who want to listen to music before they purchase it

3. Those looking for content that is either not on the market or too expensive. Net damage is zero if the content isn't being sold anymore

4. Users downloading content that is not copyrighted or the owner is giving it away

Only the 4th is legal, and the 1st is the most harmful. "Type 2 sharing is illegal but plainly beneficial. Type 3 sharing is illegal, yet good for society (since more exposure to music is good) and harmless to the artist (since the work is not otherwise available). So how sharing matters on balance is a hard question to answer—and certainly much more difficult than the current rhetoric around the issue

suggests" (69).

Still, it is difficult to determine just how harmful p2p sharing is. Often times, those seeing loss in profits blamed technology for the problem, to be solved by banning or regulating it (69).

So the question we must also pose is "how harmful type A sharing is, and how beneficial the other types of sharing are." If type 2 outweighs type 1, then sharing is clearly beneficial (70).

"But let’s assume the RIAA is right, and all of the decline in CD sales is because of Internet sharing. Here’s the rub: In the same period that the RIAA estimates that 803 million CDs were sold, the RIAA estimates that 2.1 billion CDs were downloaded for free. Thus, although 2.6 times the total number of CDs sold were downloaded for free, sales revenue fell by just 6.7 percent...
If I steal a CD, then there is one less CD to sell. Every taking is a lost sale. But on the basis of the numbers the RIAA provides, it is absolutely clear that the same is not true of downloads. If every download were a lost sale—if every use of Kazaa “rob[bed] the author of [his] profit”—then the industry would have suffered a 100 percent drop in sales last year, not a 7 percent drop" (71).

"If efforts to solve the problem of type 1 sharing destroy the opportunity for type 4 sharing, then we lose something important in order to protect type 1 content." Society does not just lose money from p2p sharing -- it is also enriched (73).

But the war is still against all file sharing. When Napster said it could reduce all copyright infringement down to 99.4%, the district court told them that wasn't good enough. "If 99.4 percent is not good enough, then this is a war on file-sharing technologies, not a war on copyright infringement... zero tolerance means zero p2p" (74).

Our culture has not always been like that. The law usually strives for balance. The two main goals of copyright legislation during the compromise affecting records and player pianos were 1) "to [assure] that new innovators would have the freedom to develop new ways to deliver content" and 2) "[assure] that copyright holders would be paid for the content that was distributed." They were worried that if copyright holders (CRH) could charge however much they wanted for their content, then one medium's CRH would stifle a different medium, OR that letting a medium use copyrighted material for free would "unfairly subsidize cable." So Congress compromised to "assure compensation without giving the past (broadcasters) control over the future (cable)"(75).

Of the Supreme Court case for the movie industry vs VCR recording, the court wrote "Sound policy, as well as history, supports our consistent deference to Congress when major technological innovations alter the market for copyrighted materials. Congress has the constitutional authority and the institutional ability to accommodate fully the varied permutations of competing interests that are inevitably implicated by such new technology" (77).

"In none of these cases did either the courts or Congress eliminate all free riding. In none of these cases did the courts or Congress insist that the law should assure that the copyright holder get all the value that his copyright created" (77). New technology always creates this fight with the old medium, and everyone is concerned about protecting their property.

Notes: "Free Culture" Ch. 4 Pirates

FILM

"Creators and directors migrated from the East Coast to California in the early twentieth century in part to escape controls that patents granted the inventor of filmmaking, Thomas Edison. These controls were exercised through a monopoly “trust,” the Motion Pictures Patents Company, and were based on Thomas Edison’s creative property—patents. Edison formed the MPPC to exercise the rights this creative property gave him, and the MPPC was serious about the control it demanded" (53-54).

By the time Edison's law enforcers got there,  the patents had expired. Patents then granted the

patent holder a truly “limited” monopoly (just seventeen years) (54).

RECORDED MUSIC 

"But the law governing recordings gives recording artists less. And thus, in effect, the law subsidizes the recording industry through a kind of piracy—by giving recording artists a weaker right than it otherwise gives creative authors. The Beatles have less control over their creative work than Grisham does. And the beneficiaries of this less control are the recording industry and the public. The recording industry gets something of value for less than it otherwise would pay; the public gets access to a much wider range of musical creativity. Indeed, Congress was quite explicit about its reasons for granting this right. Its fear was the monopoly power of rights holders, and that that power would stifle follow-on creativity" (57).

RADIO

"But it doesn’t. Under the law governing radio performances, the radio station does not have to pay the recording artist. The radio station need only pay the composer. The radio station thus gets a bit of something for nothing. It gets to perform the recording artist’s work for free, even if it must pay the composer something for the privilege of playing the song" (59).

You compose a song and have someone famous record it. Every time a radio station plays it, you are compensated but the singing artist is not. Thus, the radio pirates the value of the work from the artist every time they play it on the air (59).

CABLE TV

1948: "When cable entrepreneurs first started wiring communities with cable television in 1948, most refused to pay broadcasters for the content that they echoed to their customers. Even when the cable companies started selling access to television broadcasts, they refused to pay for what they sold. Cable companies were thus Napsterizing broadcasters’ content, but more egregiously than anything Napster ever did— Napster never charged for the content it enabled others to give away" (59-60).

The copyright owners said: "All we are asking for is a very simple thing, that people who now take our property for nothing pay for it. We are trying to stop piracy and I don’t think there is any lesser word to describe it. I think there are harsher words which would fit it" (60).

"Copyright owners took the cable companies to court. Twice the Supreme Court held that the cable companies owed the copyright owners nothing" (61). OHMYGOD they didn't fix it for 30 years!! (61)

****

"Every generation welcomes the pirates from the last. Every generation—until now" (61).

Notes: "Free Culture" Ch. 3 Catalogs

Jesse Jordan and the RPI system
RPI = Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filed a lawsuit against him for copyright infringement because he tinkered with the code for RPI's site's search engine, making it easier to access content, which he did not create or post. For this "willful infringement," they demanded he pay a fine of $15,000,000 (48-50). Two other students faced similar lawsuits from RIAA.

"If you added up the claims, these four lawsuits were asking courts in the United States to award the plaintiffs close to $100  billion—six times the total profit of the film industry in 2001... [the RIAA] demanded $12,000 to dismiss the case" or in other words, Jesse's entire savings (51).


"The recording industry insists this is a matter of law and morality. Let’s put the law aside for a moment and think about the morality. Where is the morality in a lawsuit like this? What is the virtue in scapegoatism? The RIAA is an extraordinarily powerful lobby. The president of the RIAA is reported to make more than $1 million a year. Artists, on the other hand, are not well paid. The average recording artist makes $45,900. There are plenty of ways for the RIAA to affect and direct policy. So where is the morality in taking money from a student for running a search engine?" (52).

Now Jesse is an activist. He's trying to set the record straight, and point out the absurdity in the RIAA's actions.

Notes: "Free Culture" Ch. 2 Mere Copyists

CH 2: “Mere Copyists”

In photography, photogs are allowed to capture anything in the public space (Copyright:public domain)

"For just as there is a grammar for the written word, so, too, is there one for media. And just as kids learn how to write by writing lots of terrible prose, kids learn how to write media by constructing lots of (at least at first) terrible media... One learns to write by writing and then reflecting upon what one has written. One learns to write with images by making them and then reflecting upon what one has created." (36.) Media Literacy

Elizabeth Daley: 'From my perspective, probably the most important digital divide is not access to a box. It’s the ability to be empowered with the language that that box works in. Otherwise only a very few people can write with this language, and all the rest of us are reduced to being read-only.'

"'Read-only.' Passive recipients of culture produced elsewhere. Couch potatoes. Consumers. This is the world of media from the twentieth century" (37). 

"Education, Daley explained, is about giving students a way of “constructing meaning.” To say that that means just writing is like saying teaching writing

is only about teaching kids how to spell" (39).

"[Blogs] are arguably the most important form of unchoreographed public discourse that we have. That’s a strong statement. Yet it says as much about our democracy as it does about blogs. This is the part of America that is most difficult for those of us who love America to accept: Our democracy has atrophied" (41). (juries)..."But for most of us for most of the time, there is no time or place for “democratic deliberation” to occur" (42).

Blogs vs. Mainstream media: "This different cycle is possible because the same commercial pressures don’t exist with blogs as with other ventures. Television and newspapers are commercial entities.They must work to keep attention. If they lose readers, they lose revenue. Like sharks, they must move on.
But bloggers don’t have a similar constraint. They can obsess, they can focus, they can get serious. If a particular blogger writes a particularly interesting story, more and more people link to that story. And as
the number of links to a particular story increases, it rises in the ranks of stories. People read what is popular; what is popular has been selected by a very democratic process of peer-generated rankings" (43). "Blog space gives amateurs a way to enter the debate—“amateur” not in the sense of inexperienced, but in the sense of an Olympic athlete, meaning not paid by anyone to give their reports" (44).


"But it affects democracy in another way as well. As more and more citizens express what they think, and defend it in writing, that will change the way people understand public issues.... it is a rare human who admits that he has been persuaded that he is wrong. But it is even rarer for a human to ignore when he has been proven wrong. The writing of ideas, arguments, and criticism improves democracy" (45).


"...tinkering is no longer an isolated activity that you’re doing in your garage" (46). We used to tinker with our cars, small electronics, alone in our rooms. Now, when we tinker with things like open source code (free software or open-source software (FS/OSS)) we are letting others all over the Net see our work... creating a "community platform."

Notes: Lawrence Lessig "Free Culture" Intro - Ch. 1

Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity"

"To Eric Eldred—whose work first drew me to this cause, and for whom it continues still."

Introduction
Free Culture is about the troubles the Internet causes even after the modem is turned off. It is an argument about how the battles that now rage regarding life on-line have fundamentally affected “people who aren’t online.”

We come from a tradition of “free culture”—not “free” as in “free beer” (to borrow a phrase from the founder of the freesoftware movement), but “free” as in “free speech,” “free markets,” “free trade,” “free enterprise,” “free will,” and “free elections.”

The opposite of a free culture is a permission culture "...creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past"

"Does that sound unconservative? Not to me. The concentration of power—political, corporate, media, cultural—should be anathema to conservatives. The diffusion of power through local control, thereby encouraging individual participation, is the essence of federalism and the greatest expression of democracy."

"technological meme pool"

"Corporations threatened by the potential of the Internet to change the way both commercial and noncommercial culture are made and shared have united to induce lawmakers to use the law to protect them... They are succeeding in their plan to remake the Internet before the Internet remakes them (9)."

It seems there is a new "war" now between "piracy" and "property," (10) provoked by the Internet (17).

"There has never been a time in our history when more of our “culture” was as “owned” as it is now. And yet there has never been a time when the concentration of power to control the uses of culture has been as unquestioningly accepted as it is now... Or is the radical shift away from our tradition of free culture yet another example of a political system captured by a few powerful special interests?" (12)... "...we are allowing those most threatened by the changes to use their power to change the law—and more importantly, to use their power to change something fundamental about who we have always been" (13).

Part 1: “PIRACY”
Person-to-person sharing (p2p) has an efficiency which does not respect the traditional lines of copyright laws. "A generation of Americans, the warriors warn, is being raised to believe that “property” should be “free.” Forget tattoos, never mind body piercing—our kids are becoming thieves!" (18).

WRONG: "Creative work has value; whenever I use, or take, or build upon the creative work of others, I am taking from them something of value. Whenever I take something of value from someone else, I should have their permission. The taking of something of value from someone else without permission is wrong. It is a form of piracy" (18)

"Instead, in our tradition, intellectual property is an instrument. It sets the groundwork for a richly creative society but remains subservient to the value of creativity. The current debate has this turned around. We have become so concerned with protecting the instrument that we are losing sight of the value.

The source of this confusion is a distinction that the law no longer takes care to draw—the distinction between republishing someone’s work on the one hand and building upon or transforming that work on the other. Copyright law at its birth had only publishing as its concern; copyright law today regulates both" (19).

"Rise of the Creative Class" Richard Florida

CH 1: Creators
Disney

Japanese publishing of manga, or graphic novels..."Doujinshi are also comics, but they are a kind of copycat comic. A rich ethic governs the creation of doujinshi. It is not doujinshi if it is just a copy; the artist must make a contribution to the art he copies, by transforming it either subtly or significantly" (25-26). "This market exists in parallel to the mainstream commercial manga market. In some ways, it obviously competes with that market, but there is no sustained effort by those who control the commercial manga market to shut the doujinshi market down. It flourishes, despite the competition and despite the law" (26).

Even though Japanese copyright law technically bans these copycat comics, one Japanese man admitted that there simply aren't enough lawyers to defend these cases (27). "Would Japan be better off with more lawyers? Would mangabe richer if doujinshi artists were regularly prosecuted? Would the

Japanese gain something important if they could end this practice of uncompensated sharing? Does piracy here hurt the victims of the piracy, or does it help them? Would lawyers fighting this piracy help

their clients or hurt them?" (27-28).

"Scientists build upon the work of other scientists without asking or paying for the privilege. (“Excuse me, Professor Einstein, but may I have permission to use your theory of relativity to show that you were wrong about quantum physics?”)" (29).

2.26 Notes

Lawrence Lessig's "Free Culture"
The Causbys: chickens died when military planes flew over their yard. What is "your property"? Does the air space above it count? 

Steamboat Bill and Steamboat Willie: copyright lasted 14 years, then 28, and then the life of the creator. Disney has so far maintained ownership of Mickey Mouse, but lobbying Congress. But... SBW owed "ideational debt" to SBB, and many of Disney's stories came from folk tales, legend, oral history. #scumbagDisney

doujinshi: Fan fiction in the form of comics. Using the same characters. It's Japanese, where there are much different rules for intellectual property.

Copyright Criminals

Who gets the credit, and the money? Money and art

"We're all turning into DJs"

Anthony Berman - entertainment lawyer/douchebag

people who used to be miffed by sampling found out how much money they could make on copyright

Cheap and easy -- say the older generation of people, opposed to sampling. It's absurd to say samplers are "instrumentalists"

Modern music producer/sampler/DJ:instrumentalist as photographer:painter

"all these other artists that I'm sampling... they're in my band!"

Sage Francis: modern music producer

"Funk is the DNA of hip-hop"

Digital sampling came in the 1980s - the equipment was cheaper, more people knew how to make it.

"Sample police" -- lawyers and bullshit

The Bomb Squad -- four musical masterminds, bringing in sounds

"reality record" -- what you hear back on the streets is what you hear on the record... and then you hear that on the streets!

"Nobody took hip-hop seriously until it started making a lot of money." The copyright holders realized they could profit by charging artists for sampling their tracks

De La Soul got in a lot of trouble for sampling -- and sued

Biz Markie and Gilbert O'Sullivan: made a parody of "Alone Again," G.O'S fules a huge law suit. AS IF MUSIC CAN BE ERASED PAHAH. The judge called it "Biblically incorrect."

They weren't trying to steal or take what wasn't "theirs" -- they were creating, vibing. It was an unwritten code of the hip-hop world. You can't copyright a sound.

Sampling clearance emerged as an industry. Put pressure on artists to be honest about samples from the beginning. 

Now that creating includes asking for permission... the definition of musical creativity has changed. "It is cheaper to cover an entire song than to sample 3 seconds of it." If you change the words or recontextualize it, you're screwed. 

Paying over $100,000 to sample one song! "Now you're telling me that my style is too expensive?"

No rapper ever thanked Clyde Subblefield "the original funky drummer" for his drum beats. No credit, no mention, no compensation. (besides Melissa Etheridge)

There aren't many original that make more money than the pieces they sample from. 

CULTURE IS ABOUT COLLAGE -- FORGING THE BITS INTO SOMETHING STRONGER. 

Danger Mouse' "The Gray Album" from 2004: mashup between The Beatles' White Album and Jay-Z's Black Album. One of the most successful albums of 2004, if it had been for sale. Nobody made a dime. 

The people who make the technology do it so we can make music and create and move on. Wouldn't it be nice if we could just get on with it. The law may be too involved in, and an underground is growing because the "outlaws" cannot afford the lawsuits.

Subblefield says the credit is more important than the money. 

"That's how society moves forward. It evolves from taking old things, and changing them."

Soundtrack?

That was quick – White House acts on Swart's demand for free information

"White House Grants Aaron Swartz's Wish: Taxpayer-Funded Research Will Be Free"

Gerry Smith writes in his article for the Huffington Post that the Obama administration just granted Aaron Swart's wish by directing federal agencies on Friday to make the results of federally-funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication.

The Office of Science and Technology Policy wrote on Feb. 22, "in a policy memorandum released today, OSTP Director John Holdren has directed Federal agencies with more than $100M in R&D expenditures to develop plans to make the published results of federally funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication and requiring researchers to better account for and manage the digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research."

The memorandum was addressed to "the heads of executive departments and agencies" which "with more than $100 million in research and development expenditures" (Dr. John Holdren).

"In a 2008 manifesto, Swartz said sharing information was a 'moral imperative' and advocated for 'civil disobedience' against copyright laws pushed by corporations 'blinded by greed' that led to the 'privatization of knowledge.'"  Smith writes of Swartz. #PDFtribute

Some people marvel that this was not done earlier. As the reddit thread on the Huffington article put it, "Whenever you hear Republicans say they want to privatize a piece of the government, what they are really saying, is that they want tax payers to fund a private monopoly." - "I don't think this type of thing is limited to Republicans, unfortunately." - "Greed doesn't have a single party. It's all-inclusive." - "And it's global."

I don't think I agree that the whole issue itself started out of greed. In a time when information simply could not be shared as easily, or as cheaply, publishing and sharing (printing journals or books) would have been an expensive process. I wonder if, when government-funded research only resided in libraries, they allowed the public to access them for free.

Now the problem of sharing inexpensively has been resolved with the Internet, but the old laws about sharing information took longer to adapt to technology's affordances. More important than the laws themselves are the people of power who uphold them, and have built empires upon the old way. They are the ones resisting change and progress; their fortunes depend on an antiquated system.

This is not to undermine the challenge publishers will face when required to restructure their system. Making articles freely accessible will likely take a big chunk out of their profits, and someone is going to take the financial hit for that.