Ok, I’ve calmed down over the Digital Economy Bill a bit now. If you don’t follow my Twitter (and you should, you really should) you may have escaped my incessantly expressed outrage at Lord Mandelson’s old man’s folly which, I am sorry to say, has lost this labour vote in the next election. Labour’s actions over Iraq were unforgivable, yet still to this voter they remained the lesser of two evils. But the day they start messing with my future livelihood, one has to question one’s own priorities.
There is a lot of good in the bill, don’t get me wrong, in fact it is only the parts on copyright and file-sharing where it falls down. But the proposals in this area are so unbelievably, insanely, dangerously wrong that they over-shadow everything else.
The problem is twofold:
1. Firstly, the powers the government are awarding themselves, to shut off internet access to anyone even suspected of file-sharing, are just plain draconian. And placing pressures on ISPs to enforce them will mean many, many innocents will be punished by threatened service providers forced to err on the side of caution.
Removal of one’s internet connection, in an age where most people bank, shop and connect with their friends online is a severity of punishment seemingly understated. It is certainly far beyond the crime, no matter how serious the copyright infringement.
2. Secondly, the gun is pointing in the wrong direction. The aim of the bill is to safeguard Digital Britain’s future. Not it’s past. The weighting towards the needs of copyright holders, at the expense of the new generation of digital media practitioners (the one’s most likely to be cut off, as their net usage might be greater, and less typical, than their neighbours), serves only to protect a fading status quo, not stimulate the new digital economy.
To most young digital practitioners the problem is obscurity, not a failure to maximise their income. Some digital content owners, myself included, are actually in favour of their work being distributed for free via file sharing. They are willing to adapt to the new “abundancy” economics, because they know scarcity economics no longer have the same relevance they once did.
The software industry and the music/film industry face the same issues regarding their ownership of digital content, yet it is only the latter who seem to be struggling. The (younger) software industry is coming up with ever new ways of thinking about digital economies, none of which is reflected in the Bill. Open Source, for example, may suffer. One consequence on insisting everything online comes with a price tag, is that it gets increasingly difficult to give stuff away for free.
Mine is only one opinion, and one vote, in this mess. But, if you are a UK resident, I can only urge you to consider yourself where you would imagine your digital life to be in ten years time, and if this bill serves your needs. And if you disagree with Mandelson’s vision, express your concerns now while it can still make a difference.
This is my projection from White Night last month. I was hit by bloody Swine Flu so never got to see it live, so repeated thanks both to Sarah Bird and the BANG team for organising, and J4mie Matthews for videoing it.
1:45-2:30 – Noise Garden. Doesn’t show too well in the vid, but you can see it better (and download the source) here.
2:30-3:25 – Orbitals. I haven’t added this to 100AbArts (yet) because I’ve rather overused it in videos recently, so a bit sick of it. But the source code is very similar to this.
I like to open source my generative art code because I would never be so bold as to declare my work the definitive rendering of any particular algorithm. I want others to join me in exploring these ideas and hopefully improve upon my work.
The 100 works at http://abandonedart.org are not intended to be a gallery, they are meant to be a recipe book. So, please, don’t just look at this video and say “pah, I could do better”. Take my source code and prove it.
I’ve been waiting a long time to be able to announce this, but it’s finally sorted – I’ve just signed my first book deal! My Generative Art book will be on real and virtual shelves sometime next year. Contrary to reports it will be published by the lovely folks at Manning Publications, not the equally nice folks at Apress (as they rather prematurely announced).
It’s been over three months since I was first invited to pitch an idea, and has taken a lot of negotiation to get a contract I was happy with. But rather groovily I have managed to get consent to release a significant portion of the book under a Creative Commons license, so some chapters can be reproduced and distributed as widely as the winds will carry them. This means I will be able to publish large extracts here as we get closer to publication, as will anyone else who wants to.
Already I’ve got a list of people I need to thank for getting my idea this far, but I’ll save it for the book. But to those who know who you are; cheers to you, you and especially you, I feed on your enthusiasm.
Watch this space, and my twitter, for further updates.
Manfred has a suite at the Hotel Jan Luyken paid for by a grateful multinational consumer protection group, and an unlimited public transport pass paid for by a Scottish sambapunk band in return for services rendered. He has airline employee’s travel rights with six flag carriers despite never having worked for an airline. His bush jacket has sixty-four compact supercomputing clusters sewn into it, four per pocket, courtesy of an invisible college that wants to grow up to be the next Media Lab. His dumb clothing comes made to measure from an e-tailor in the Philippines he’s never met. Law firms handle his patent applications on a pro bono basis, and boy, does he patent a lot – although he always signs the rights over to the Free Intellect Foundation, as contributions to their obligation-free infrastructure project.
In IP geek circles, Manfred is legendary; he’s the guy who patented the business practice of moving your e-business somewhere with a slack intellectual property regime in order to evade licensing encumbrances. He’s the guy who patented using genetic algorithms to patent everything they can permutate from an initial description of a problem domain – not just a better mousetrap, but the set of all possible better mousetraps. Roughly a third of his inventions are legal, a third are illegal, and the remainder are legal but will become illegal as soon as the legislatosaurus wakes up, smells the coffee, and panics. There are patent attorneys in Reno who swear that Manfred Macx is a pseudo, a net alias fronting for a bunch of crazed anonymous hackers armed with the Genetic Algorithm That Ate Calcutta: a kind of Serdar Argic of intellectual property, or maybe another Bourbaki math borg. There are lawyers in San Diego and Redmond who swear blind that Macx is an economic saboteur bent on wrecking the underpinning of capitalism, and there are communists in Prague who think he’s the bastard spawn of Bill Gates by way of the Pope.
Manfred is at the peak of his profession, which is essentially coming up with whacky but workable ideas and giving them to people who will make fortunes with them. He does this for free, gratis. In return, he has virtual immunity from the tyranny of cash; money is a symptom of poverty, after all, and Manfred never has to pay for anything.
Copyright has a cultural purpose; it incentivises artists by enabling them to profit from their work, and prevents others from exploiting them for their own profit. It has a history going back almost as long as the printing press. Modern copyright law is based on the Berne Convention of 1886, and has served us well for a century. But this is also where it falls down, because copyright law is getting increasingly out of touch with the way artists communicate with their audiences today. The legislators of the 19th Century could not have anticipated the technological advances of our last two decades, nor those of the decades to come.
When we have the ability to reproduce and distribute digital work very cheaply, and to very high quality, it might seem copy protection is of even greater importance, because it is so much easier to exploit an artist’s work. But this kind of thinking underestimates the extent of the cultural changes we are living through. An inevitable consequence of the ease of digital production and reproduction is ubiquity. The internet means that all markets are now global markets, and with a playing field this large the problem for the modern artist (and by artist I mean anyone who produces digital content – musicians, filmmakers, writers, programmers, etc) is not protecting your work from improper use, but trying to ensure it is visible in such a crowded space.
There is little point protecting something when there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of others with the capability and comparable talent to create work similar to that you offer. The laws of supply and demand dictate that as supply increases, price must drop. And in an economy of abundance, the price of data drops to zero. If an artist is not prepared to give their work away for free, someone else will.
So How Does An Artist Make A Living in 2009?
Established creators, those who have made their money from the economics of scarcity, are the ones who will have the greatest difficulty giving up on the concept of copyright. The perfect example of this was Metallica leading the fight against Napster in 2001. They were ultimately successful, but there was a huge cost to their credibility. The generation of artists who will succeed the money makers of today will simply adapt to a world where copyright is no longer enforcable. There are, after all, other ways of monetising your worth. A world without copyright does not mean a world without incentive for creativity, especially as for most money is not the chief incentivator anyway.
Creative Commons licenses mean that work can be given away, distributed, and reputations grown, without fear of exploitation. The kudos of a respected creator can be monetised in ways that doesn’t involve selling the commodities they produce, the worth is in the person; their mind, their presence, their flow. Monetising commodities simply doesn’t work in a culture of abundant digital content.
It won’t be easy evolving past the current phase, but it is inevitable. People will still buy CDs and DVDs, but they won’t buy a TV box set without having first downloaded the few episodes for free. Those who have made the most money from copyright will be the ones who will cling to it the tightest. But even they must accept that if they were starting out today, they would have struggled against copyright for their success, rather than benefitted from it.
If a new band won’t allow their songs to be webstreamed for fear of them being ripped, they simply won’t have their songs heard. An author who will only write for money will have a much harder time building the following than the writer who blogs. The programmer who obfuscates their code for fear of copying will be less likely to be employed than the one who has the superstar reputation for their Open Source work. The short film-maker who refuses to work for nothing, will soon find themselves begging for a job from yesterday’s YouTube sensation.
“Data Protection”
There is a telling misnomer used by the defenders of copyright – “data protection“. They claim that by enforcing copyright they are “protecting” data. But isn’t it obvious that the only way to ensure the survival of a piece of data is to reproduce it as freely and abundantly as possible. To limit its reproduction is to cut off its wings.
Data wants to be free. For our culture to continue to evolve we need to let it, not fight it.
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