In addition to recognising corporations as alien usurpers, Mr Stross also recognises that something is broken about one of their privileges, copyright, but I suspect he is yet to enjoy the epiphany that it is copyright that is the ever weaker breaker, and the back of our cultural liberty that was almost broken. Fortunately, the information age and communications revolution sees us less indoctrinated mortals escaping the alien yoke of this corporate privilege in ever greater numbers.
The corporations pretending to be people, their corporate states pretending to be of the people, their privileges pretending to be the rights of the people, have all nearly completed their infiltration of mankind. Wikileaks is a crack widening in this invading empire’s defences, revealing the truth and corruption under their glamorous veneer. Piracy is the act of remembering that mankind’s knowledge and culture belongs to man, not corporation. Resisting and undoing the subliminal programming is not easy, but it must be done.
I am taking the liberty to republish these percipient words by Charlie Stross, whether he feels he should appoint a publishing corporation (able to wield the privilege covering his work) to sue me for doing so or not.
“Voting doesn’t change anything — the politicians always win.” ‘Twas not always so, but I’m hearing variations on that theme a lot these days, and not just in the UK.
Why do we feel so politically powerless? Why is the world so obviously going to hell in a handbasket? Why can’t anyone fix it?
Here’s my (admittedly whimsical) working hypothesis …
The rot set in back in the 19th century, when the US legal system began recognizing corporations as de facto people. Fast forward past the collapse of the ancien regime, and into modern second-wave colonialism: once the USA grabbed the mantle of global hegemon from the bankrupt British empire in 1945, they naturally exported their corporate model worldwide, as US diplomatic (and military) muscle was used to promote access to markets on behalf of US corporations.
Corporations do not share our priorities. They are hive organisms constructed out of teeming workers who join or leave the collective: those who participate within it subordinate their goals to that of the collective, which pursues the three corporate objectives of growth, profitability, and pain avoidance. (The sources of pain a corporate organism seeks to avoid are lawsuits, prosecution, and a drop in shareholder value.)
Corporations have a mean life expectancy of around 30 years, but are potentially immortal; they live only in the present, having little regard for past or (thanks to short term accounting regulations) the deep future: and they generally exhibit a sociopathic lack of empathy.
Collectively, corporate groups lobby international trade treaty negotiations for operating conditions more conducive to pursuing their three goals. They bully individual lawmakers through overt channels (with the ever-present threat of unfavourable news coverage) and covert channels (political campaign donations). The general agreements on tariffs and trade, and subsequent treaties defining new propertarian realms, once implemented in law, define the macroeconomic climate: national level politicians thus no longer control their domestic economies.
Corporations, not being human, lack patriotic loyalty; with a free trade regime in place they are free to move wherever taxes and wages are low and profits are high. We have seen this recently in Ireland where, despite a brutal austerity budget, corporation tax is not to be raised lest multinationals desert for warmer climes.
For a while the Communist system held this at bay by offering a rival paradigm, however faulty, for how we might live: but with the collapse of the USSR in 1991 — and the adoption of state corporatism by China as an engine for development — large scale opposition to the corporate system withered.
We are now living in a global state that has been structured for the benefit of non-human entities with non-human goals. They have enormous media reach, which they use to distract attention from threats to their own survival. They also have an enormous ability to support litigation against public participation, except in the very limited circumstances where such action is forbidden. Individual atomized humans are thus either co-opted by these entities (you can live very nicely as a CEO or a politician, as long as you don’t bite the feeding hand) or steamrollered if they try to resist.
In short, we are living in the aftermath of an alien invasion.
I am intrigued and love the idea on the comparison of corporations to an alien invasion. Both are not that far defined from the other. A social media company that struggles to boom around the web and makes a brand is an example.
Comment #000497 at
2011-01-18 02:51
by
Vada Lynn Smith
Vada, unlike your other plagiarised comment (redacted as spam), this one is just about passable even if its point is ruined by a blatant plug masquerading as ‘an example’ – a contradictory one at that.
If you don’t really have a position on copyright except as a cultural hazard, and just flit from flower to flower, copying what you want, sharing what you will, generally taking back whatever cultural liberties seem appropriate at the time, then you are a bee – busily bumbling along.
However, if you do have a position in the copyright debate then the first question to put to you is this:
“For those few holders who can afford to prosecute it, is copyright still effective in achieving reproduction monopolies for covered works?”
If you answer “Yes”, then you no doubt consider that piracy is negligible and can be written off as youthful exuberance to be remedied by better education and deterrence. In general, you are optimistic for copyright’s future, and believe it will remain a sound basis for anyone to adopt for their business model. An apposite label for you is ostrich – unable to consider things from a broader perspective, reassured by the similar, inward looking agreement of one’s fellows.
If you answer “No”, then there are three main answers to the next question:
“Can copyright be returned to effectiveness, and if so, how?”
If you answer “Yes, via draconian enforcement – cultural terror“ then you are a hawk – not an uncommon position, though typically found isolated in high positions of power.
If you answer “Yes, via reform, such as by compulsorily licensing the areas in which it is not effective (instituting an Internet mulct)” then you are a dove – clustering for safety in numbers, unwilling to challenge incumbent hawks, espousing appeasement and compromise.
If you answer “No, of course not. Moreover, it follows that the privilege of copyright should be abolished, since it can only serve as a means of enabling copyright oligarchs to spitefully wreak vengeance against the public for having the temerity to re-assert their cultural liberty” then you are an owl – rarely seen, but unafraid to prioritise nature’s principles above political expediency or popularity.
If “No” then there’s another question:
“Given their 18th century privilege is now worthless except as a means of extorting random file or news sharers, how can artists exchange their labour in a market that is now effectively free?”
The answer is simple: “Enable the artist’s audience to offer the artist money in exchange for further work – on the proviso that copyright is neutralised as a means of extortion, and that the public’s cultural liberty concerning this work and derivatives is restored”.
Obviously, once work and money are exchanged, all can freely distribute and promote the artist’s work through copying it accurately and honestly (being careful not to corrupt or misattribute it, nor misrepresent the artist).
So, what are you? Unconcerned bee, optimistic ostrich, predatory hawk, appeasing dove, or wise owl?
Or would you rather not be so pigeonholed?
Where you stand in resolving this conflict between privilege and liberty is all rather moot. The bees do whatever comes naturally. If the legislators, whatever their feather, do not want to be stung they make the law accord with the bees, not vice versa.
DNA copies and remixes, and nature selects the best. Homo Sapiens copies and remixes accordingly, and mankind learns and progresses the better because of it. It is power that corrupts, and queens so corrupted who legislate contrary to natural law, pretending that it is the suppression of copying and the prohibition of remixing that best advances mankind’s learning and progress.
We must awake from this lie that we have been living, snap out of our collective delusion, realise the empress is naked, and remember that the liberty we were born with is rightfully ours, not Queen Anne’s more privileged subjects. Only willing slaves are seduced by such a snow queen’s suggestion that the sacrifice of her subjects’ liberty serves them more than herself.
I’m still probably a “bee”, from a cultural consumer POV.
Certainly, I’m not any of this: optimistic ostrich, predatory hawk, or appeasing dove.
A wise owl? Well, an owl trying to get wiser and trying to explain other this “new” concepts, which sometimes I just find very hard to explain (the copyright unlearn process isn’t too easy to apply).
Crosbie, please, would you care to briefly explain the “naked empress” analogy?
I’ve read the tale long time ago, but I can’t make the relation between the topics you write about and that tale.
Thanks
Maniquí, the trouble with wisdom is that it cannot be taught. It has to be learnt.
It is of course the proverbial Emperor who conceitedly credulous is conned, and in turn cons his subjects, into believing in the existence of fabulous clothing that is plain for all to see does not exist. A carefully contrived pretext creates an avalanche of peer pressure that binds people into suspending disbelief – since it says the clothing is invisible only to ignorant buffoons.
Queen Anne’s pretext tells us, as her Stationers’ Guild helped persuade her, that a power to prohibit copying would obviously encourage her subjects’ learning. Ignoring the gold coins that end up in the guild’s pocket, the con, illusion and deceit, that all must suspend disbelief in, is that there can be such a power and that it would assist learning.
It is plain to all that no such power exists. No musician or storyteller has a natural power to prevent all persons the world over from making copies of their work. Children can see this. They can see that no power can constrain their sharing of music and stories. But, their parents tell them, if they misbehave, bogey men will come to lay their family to waste, and will imprison and enslave all naughty children that dare to share. Even so, the children still fail to see how such liberties are detected, so they carry on regardless. And teachers, scientists, and journalists, all fail to see how a power to prevent copying of knowledge, science, and news, can improve the world’s learning of it. But all, of course, cannot betray themselves as buffoons, so all pay lip service to the righteousness of Queen Anne’s sacred gift to her subjects.
We all convince ourselves and each other as to how essential copyright is to everyone, and yet this is a myth the opposite of Father Christmas. It is a magical force that children are blissfully ignorant of, but one in which adults come to believe and fear (or if powerful, learn to threaten others with).
It is time all adults also dared to share, and time we all became buffoons and resumed our disbelief in a magical power that pretends to prevent us singing each other’s songs or telling each other’s stories.
The empress is naked. The power to prevent sharing is non-existent, invisible, illusory, a figment of our imagination. All that exists is her permission to punish unbelieving children and imprison incorrigible pirates, and the policy that all should ridicule non-believing buffoons.
It’s time to turn the tables, time to call for the repeal of this instrument of injustice. We must all declare what we see with our own eyes, that it is copyright that is truly ridiculous and all who yet believe in it. That’s how we, as a people thus enlightened, can abolish a wicked queen’s curse upon us and our cultural liberty. That’s how we become as free as our children.
We CAN copy. It is good to copy. Copying is how we learn. Copying is in our DNA, and no law should be made that pretends to take this liberty from us.
How do you stop people enjoying their natural liberty to communicate? How do you prevent them telling each other’s stories, singing each other’s songs, engaging in free cultural intercourse?
How do you end the war against file-sharing? How do you stop immortal corporations persecuting and predating upon the populace?
There are three final solutions:
Draconian enforcement – ‘cultural terror’
Cultural mulct
Copyright abolition
In the first case, the law is so extreme that file-sharing ends, and the war against it ends. There is ‘peace’, but the populace are effectively subjugated into content consumers, too scared stiff to do anything else.
In the second case the copyright cartel’s persecution (deliberately directed at the most naive and innocent victims) catalyses the populace into paying the mob’s protection money. A cultural mulct is collected from all citizens in exchange for immunity from prosecution (no longer based on guilt or evidence). Thus the people pay an unjust rent to those publishing corporations who’ve received and amassed the stolen good that is their cultural liberty (Statute of Anne 1709) for its temporary restitution.
In the third case, the people rub the scales from their eyes and realise the emperor is naked, that they had never lost their liberty, that it was all an illusion, that their children have been innocent all along. Artists learn to exchange their intellectual work for the money of their fans in a free market, no longer intermediated by immortal corporations taking most if not all of the revenue for copies that can no longer be priced as if they were expensive to make.
The only reason the third solution is unthinkable is that those in a position to champion it cannot confront the possibility that all their lives they have been wrong in supporting copyright. Copyright MUST be right. That it is an unethical anachronism and instrument of injustice is too horrific to countenance except as incoherent ranting. People have been indoctrinated by copyright as if it were a religion, to believe that it is the only thing able to encourage author to put pen to paper, the only means of enlightening mankind out of cultural oblivion. This is its ‘truth’, that it is as essential to our species as circumcision, that any questioning of this is heresy.
Being unable to imagine a world without copyright is a failure of imagination.
The whole point of CC having a variety of licenses is to demonstrate that the copyright holding, self-publishing author is in charge of determining what their audience can do, i.e. to insinuate that copyright is properly a right of the author, to modulate as they see fit.
If CC was actually principled upon restoring to the public their freedoms suspended by copyright then it would have a single copyright neutralising license, either abdicating it (cfBSD), or copylefting it (cfGPL).
Unlike the FSF, CC is a pro-copyright organisation, hence its willingness to imply that copyright is as much a right one may wish to unreserve as an inalienable/inviolable (natural) right – also known as a moral right. Why on earth would someone wish to waive their moral right to authorship to permit someone to falsely claim authorship of their work? Conversely, given that the right to copy was derogated from the individual’s right to liberty in 1709 by Queen Anne, it is quite laudable to wish to restore this to the public from whom it was stolen.
Terry, apart from demonstrating a complicated interim migration path, is in danger of suggesting that Creative Commons should commit the apostasy of moving from an organisation principled on empowering authors’ use of copyright to one principled on enabling/persuading authors to restore to the public their cultural liberty.
A single, libertarian license is what a liberty principled organisation would have created. Instead, espousing copyright as if a right, CC has created a complex confusion of licensing pollutants that have prevented a simple demarcation between copyright/proprietary and copyleft/free culture developing. This is probably the original objective, to consolidate copyright’s prominence and importance in any self-publishing artist’s consciousness.
Nina Paley has it right. “Copying art is an act of love”. It is those who love an artist and their work who are driven to want to promote that artist, to share their published work among their friends.
Cultural intercourse is not something to be constrained by commercial privilege. We must move from an obsession with copyright and obeying the copyright holder, to loving art, respecting the artist, and honesty in sharing their work and promoting them. This means embracing moral rights, but deprecating anachronistic constraints on distribution, copying, communication, or commerce. If you love me, sing my song, tell my story, but be true.
Meh, I have no use for any of their licences except for CC0. I’m currently publishing my commercial work CC0. I would do BSD but I estimate it’s requirement to include attribution to be over-burdensome for would be sharers, and not really any of my business.
Just out of curiosity, you wouldn’t know of any legal instruments aside from CC0 which disarm the noisome recourse to copyright at my disposal to best approximate public domain work, would you?
While I agree that the Creative Commons have an agenda of their own, I’d say this one licence of theirs isn’t half bad. But I’m interested in your opinion on that as well.
CC0 as demonstrated by the FAQ you link to is corrupt in conflating privileges (legislatively granted ‘rights’) with natural rights. Being inalienable, natural rights (aka moral rights in the context of intellectual work) should not be the subject of a license or other testament, nor even suggested as something an individual would aspire to be without.
So, the CC0 is just another device to cement the privilege of copyright as equivalent to a right, except in this case to join them for those who wish to divest themselves of all nuisance ‘rights’, which for some strange reason cannot be divested in certain jurisdictions (that properly recognise them as natural, inalienable, unlike granted privileges).
So, CC0 attempts to throw the baby out with the bathwater, the rights out with the privileges. It goes too far as if in petulance, offended at rejection.
There is no CC license that has been formulated to emancipate the public from the yoke of copyright, and this is because CC cannot conceive of a culture in which the author is not king over their subject audience, possessed of a god given authorial right to dictate how their published work may or may not be used, and to demand due obeisance wherever it is.
As for simulating a lack of copyright ‘protection’ all bets are off. Try claiming copyright in your work as dated 1810? Or perhaps declare that your work is wholly unoriginal, primarily factual, and not covered by copyright? Alternatively, provide a covenant that you will not sue anyone for any act involving your work that they are at liberty to do. Also check out the discussions on Nina Paley’s site (as I linked to in my article).
Mathias, the GPL attempts to restore to the public as much of the freedom suspended from them by copyright and patent as possible. That it uses a copyright license to achieve this should not be mistaken as ‘supporting copyright’. A license restores liberty (typically conditionally), it is not a constraint.
If copyright and patent were abolished tomorrow it would be a tad silly for the FSF to campaign for their reinstatement in order that the GPL could once again restore the freedoms they suspended.
“Being inalienable, natural rights (aka moral rights in the context of intellectual work)”
it is my understanding that in some places what is called moral rights are more than what I think you are calling moral rights. check the cc mailing lists for some indication of this.
Yes, Drew, like trademark and libel, in some jurisdictions moral rights become contaminated by the monopolist’s proprietary assumptions of control over others’ use of a covered work or design, and so they lose sight of protecting rights (such as the public’s apprehension of the truth – against deceit) and venture into nebulous realms of protecting a privileged party’s reputation or peace of mind (against disrepute, defamation, insult, etc.).
By moral rights I refer to the natural rights relating to intellectual works as opposed to the privileges (aka legislatively granted rights). Most of the moral rights that tend to be enumerated can be pared back to their natural foundation. It is only assumptions of control inculcated by copyright that lets their definition drift back toward proprietary privileges.
Moral rights (copyright law) are a subset of the rights of creators of copyrighted works, including the right of attribution, the right to have a work published anonymously or pseudonymously, and the right to the integrity of the work.
Natural rights, also called moral rights or inalienable rights, are rights which are not contingent upon the laws, customs, or beliefs of a particular society or polity.
Moral rights are not a subset of proprietary ‘rights’ nor traditionally part of copyright law (YJMV). They exist independently of statute, and are recognised, not granted. It is not surprising that many would have moral rights given equal status to privileges, legislatively granted ‘rights’.
I’ll run through the ones listed:
‘Right of attribution’
One does not have a natural right to be attributed. It is only that attribution must be truthful, i.e. accurate, not misleading, that misattribution does not occur whether explicitly or implicitly. If attribution can be omitted without misattribution occuring then no dishonesty occurs.
‘Right to have a work published anonymously or pseudonymously’
Again, this isn’t well phrased. One is at liberty to publish a work without needing to identify oneself as author. One’s right to privacy outweighs mere pursuit of the truth of authorship. That no author can be identified for a work doesn’t permit anyone else to claim or misattribute authorship.
‘Right to the integrity of the work’
Many presume this to mean that an author can veto modifications to their work. In some juridictions it may well be interpreted that way, but really it’s that what is presented as an author’s work should truly be that author’s work (or authorised by them). If it is clear to the audience that a work is modified, that it is an unauthorised derivative of another author’s work, then there is no loss of integrity. A work that is bowdlerised or otherwise adulterated without the audience’s knowledge has lost its integrity, whereas if the audience is cognisant that it is a subtle derivative then it is a new work distinct from the original.
CC is, for media files, what freeware is for software.
A freeware can be downloaded for free, and copied, but often it’s closed, you cannot sell it and you cannot modify it (exactly lika a CC nc-by-nd)
And freeware is not free software (it can also slow-down free software); many freewares are abandoned, or become commercial software.
Also, in CC there is nothing about the “source code”: many multimedia file have a source, that is needed to modify them, like software; for example, a 3d rendering (made with Poser, for example) cannot be easily modified, if you don’t have the 3d model. A song could be hard to edit, if you have only the MP3 and not the MIDI file.
But usually, even with a CC license, there is nothing that requires you to share the “source” with the final work.
Another problem is that using the “source code” is not always possible: if you have a program, and its source code, with the right compiler you can get a binary that is identical to the original (so, you can do a single change, without touching anything else). But, with a song, if you get the lyrics, can you rebuild the original song? No, because your voice is not the same of the original singer. If you have the script of a movie, can you rebuild the movie? No, because you don’t have the same actors.
And sometimes, the “source” cannot be copied: if I publish a pencil drawn picture, you’ll have only a scan of it, and you cannot work on it with pencil: but the source is only one, and the only way I have to make a copy is to hand-draw another one.
Ahmed Abdel Latif responds to Lessig wondering why WIPO is unable to succeed in its objective of global copyright reform, and whether the remaining need for such can be reconciled with the zealously prosecuted ‘war on piracy’.
How do you tell a child that there is no way of saving the sandcastle they’ve laboured long and hard over from the approaching tide?
Question the assumptions, even the language, and you might get closer to a truer understanding, and realise that a war against piracy is a war against liberty, a war against human nature and natural law.
This is a war that Canute would wage against the tide. The inexorable tide in turn, takes the liberty of eroding the fiat sandcastles of mercantile privilege.
There’s a reason rights holders are so called. These aren’t rights they are born with but rights annulled in all the inhabitants, to be held by a few. In 1709 Queen Anne derogated the right to copy from the individual’s right to liberty, and it is this that publishing corporations purport to hold. But of course, they do not. It is inalienable, and all the privileged hold is the power to persecute the disobedient.
There is no power on Earth that can subjugate the people to refrain from communicating, sharing, developing, copying, learning, or progressing, in order that monopolies may persist unchallenged. Giving them pretexts may smooth the passage of their legislation, but they don’t actually make monopolies do the opposite of what they do. If you want progress or learning you do not put a brake on it – you only do that if you wish to quell or tax an activity.
The only reform that fixes copyright and eliminates piracy is its repeal.
Lawrence Lessig is a copyright theist. That means that despite the roaring silence of evidence in its support, and the mute testament of victims suffering its depredations against the people’s cultural liberty, he remains a stalwart supporter of an 18th century privilege and instrument of injustice that enriches the legal profession almost as handsomely as its plutocratic and immortal clientèle. He has adopted the strategem of embracing the case against copyright as the case for its retention, albeit reformed. The best argument he has against restoring the people’s cultural liberty through repeal is that this would be extreme and destroy copyright’s core value.
What core value?
Copyright didn’t even make sense in a tangible/non-digital environment – it was simply an unethical privilege that was feasible to enforce.
Annulling the right to copy in the majority of the inhabitants in order to leave this right by exclusion in the hands of a few would by definition produce an instrument of injustice.
People are born with their right to liberty, and copyright’s derogation of an individual’s cultural liberty is a corruption of law to favour the state via its beholden press. Suspending the public’s cultural liberty, their right to learn and develop through copying, cannot benefit the public except in the corrupt argument of those few who stand to lucratively benefit.
In the early 20th century the countryside was being scoured for folk songs and folk music that could be registered for copyright’s ‘protection’ from further cultural engagement. This is the true theft – not file-sharing. Jammie Thomas-Rasset is a victim of injustice, not the incorrigible delinquent the copyright industry would portray as deserving of $1,500,000 in damages. Ask the RIAA:
We are again thankful to the jury for its service in this matter and that they recognized the severity of the defendant’s misconduct. Now with three jury decisions behind us along with a clear affirmation of Ms. Thomas-Rasset’s willful liability, it is our hope that she finally accepts responsibility for her actions.
The digital domain and the rapid advance in communications technology simply betrays the iniquity of copyright. The privilege was never a just law. It is now ineffective as well as unethical. All that remains is to abolish it.
I don’t recognise charity or donation as a business model. It can certainly help, and in some cases it can keep a venture afloat. Indeed, facilities for tipping or rewarding artists (Kachingle, Flattr, etc.) are being developed and are becoming popular.
However, for business or commerce you must have exchange: a free market agreement between two parties to exchange work for money at an equitable price. Kickstarter is enabling the less complicated transactions, e.g. “I’ll produce and/or supply intellectual work X for £Y”. One party being the producer, the other being those interested in the commission.
Ultimately, you can decompose this and similar transactions into a set of micro-transactions or micro-contracts between each micro-commissioner and the commissioned producer or supplier. Each micro-contract is a payment contingent upon a publicly observable event (such as the publication of a work). I’ve thus developed The Contingency Market as a back-end to facilitate the expression and processing of such bargains or deals (between an intellectual worker and those who would pay them to work).
One of the simpler examples I’m working on to demonstrate it is 1p2U where a blogger invites subscribers or sponsors to offer a penny in exchange for production of the next article. It’s not a donation because the blogger only gets paid if they do the work. Hence the exchange of intellectual work for money – and a business model that doesn’t depend upon copyright.
I really think that offering to bundle or simplify actual payment settling or escrow services will be what sells this solution to prospective users and helps to get things off the ground.
I believe there is a lot of mistrust in this market, people want some assurance (or possibly even insurance) that other people will not backpedal on agreed upon transactions. In your FAQ you mention gauging people based upon track record within the system, but you’ll need quite a bit of traffic through these halls before people can begin relying upon in-system reputation to hold agreements together from beginning to end.
That, and end-user facing simplicity is the lubrication that drives sales. I appreciate that the Contingency Market is a very wholesale type of service, but demonstrations of it’s application such as 1p2U would benefit from some retail polishing to that end.
I can’t easily determine from the site, but it sounds like 1p2U may not handle the money for the subscribers or publishers either, just handle the agreements. I would wager that service ought to do more to help avoid and resolve payment conflicts. There will always be trolls, bad apples and people who change their mind and bail. And even ignoring conflict, deciding on payment mechanisms are complicated enough to present a real barrier to entry. This speaks not just to adoption of 1p2U directly, but also as an example to others of how CM can be effectively utilized.
I’ve been thinking of building a micro-bounty system for bug tracking and feature requests whereby people can vote with money to effect changes in software instead of voting with displeasure. CM would be an interesting platform for such a project, but more interesting still if there were easily followed examples of how to tie in payment mechanisms and avoid and resolve end user billing/delivery disputes.
Comment #000471 at
2010-10-29 21:44
by
Jesse Thompson
With just a single pair of hands I have to focus on the lower hanging fruit, i.e. demo the system working first, and develop the more esoteric aspects (reputation systems, etc.) given additional funding (hopefully attracted as a consequence).
You’re absolutely right that things have to be extremely simple for the end-user.
1p2U is just the end-user interface that translates more familiar concepts such as sponsoring a blogger into their expression as micro-contracts or deals in the Contingency Market.
I’m rather sanguine about the prospects for conflict. When you are dealing with people en masse, they are much better behaved. Things are also greatly improved when people are paying a priori because they want to. Transparency also helps, e.g. if the vendor knows what proportion of a pledge is backed/liquid vs assured by good credit vs promised by newbies. If you know a publication will result in £500 definite, £250 v.likely, and £250 possibly one day, then it’s much better than £1,000 with luck. In other words, ‘default on payment’ ceases to be a problem.
As for free software feature/bug fixing bounty systems I presume you’re aware of microPledge.com ? I think they’re also waiting for the imminent climate in which funding for non-copyright revenue mechanisms starts flowing. However, their system sounds similar to the one you’re thinking of.
Once I’ve got the subscription control features implemented in 1p2U (start/stop subscribing, set subscription rate and limit) I’ll release the source code to it. Then I’ll hook it up to PayPal.
Very interesting 1p2U idea – I assume multiple people can donate to the blogger, thus allowing the market to increase / reflect the value of the anticipated blogged content?
Arizona Patent Attorney, well, an unlimited number of subscribers or sponsors can offer a penny in exchange for the blogger’s publication of a new item, i.e. contingent upon it. You might infer market value from the number of sponsors. This also provides a proportionate incentive to the blogger to blog – which may be important to some bloggers. The better their blogs become, the more subscribers they attract. The poorer, the more they lose. Obviously subscribers will be a fraction of readers, but the wise blogger does not sue their potential customers, nor lock their blog behind a paywall.
Just as we are getting to grips with hyperlinking or streaming as a means of ‘sharing’ published works without daring to permanently copy them (risking copyright litigation), some authors are taking it upon themselves to copy their blog articles across the web (or are encouraging others to do so). I’m sure we’ll figure it all out eventually, when it’s appropriate to copy, link, or stream, and to do so without persuasion from an 18th century privilege.
When you have recognised that a monopoly in making and distributing copies of intellectual works is impossible (let alone unethical) in this information age, you must eliminate copyright from any role in the future of business models concerning the exchange of intellectual work. What’s left, however preposterous or incredible, must be the truth.
If you cannot sell copies, you must sell the intellectual work. It is obviously the latter work that is expensive and valuable, and the former that can be done with negligible skill, materials, and expense. What’s so amazing is the indoctrination that makes people insist the opposite, that artists should give their work to publishers for nothing, but the prospect of a royalty on sale of copies that all bar the publisher are prohibited from making. A royalty that often fails to materialise despite colossal monopoly profits ending up in publishers’ creatively accounted coffers (until the inertia of the monopoly is inexorably exhausted).
Forget the anachronism of the traditional 18th century publisher, a hangover from Queen Anne’s Stationers’ Company. It’s time to shift one’s paradigm to a more ethical relationship, one between artist and audience, that recognises that he who does the work should be paid the free market rate. Those fans who want the artist’s work pay the artist for it – at a price both agree on. The audience pay for the communications infrastructure and reproduction machinery that copies and distributes all artists’ work. What other work is left to pay for? Or are we supposed to keep publishing corporations forever in the lifestyle to which they would remain accustomed? Is copyright truly sacred?
Eric Hellman stands to cross the Rubicon, to shift paradigms from business based upon the unethical privilege of a reproduction monopoly in copies to a business based upon free market exchange of intellectual work. Perhaps you’ll join him?
Thanks for making me aware of “Contingency Markets”. But when Julius Caesar and his legion crossed the Rubicon, he broke the law of imperium and made war inevitable. That’s not what I’m doing. First of all, by creating a Bounty Market for ebooks I’m would not be breaking any law. I’m not interested in war, either, I think of it as constructing new social practice to replace in part an incumbent system fracturing from deep internal contradictions. Hope that still seems worth joining!
Eric, thank you for making others aware that it is possible to exchange intellectual work for good money without a state granted monopoly.
As to war, you may not have noticed the pirates on the digitally diffused seas, the many bankruptcies and imprisonments of impudent music and movie sharers, but we are in the midst of a cultural, civil cyberwar. War is already upon us!
When an impossible monopoly exhibits exhaustion even with suspended disbelief, then necessity mothers the invention of an alternative exchange mechanism. The sooner bounty markets, threshold pledge systems, crowdfunding mechanisms, and micropatronage facilities are developed, the sooner the copyright wars can end.
By ‘cross the Rubicon’, I meant that once your eyes are fully open to the extreme anachronism of an 18th century privilege against copying being enforced in the information age of our 21st century, and once you realise you need no longer cling to copyright (as if to the edge of a shipwrecked hull mere feet above the beach) because there is an alternative, then you let go – and there’s no going back! Having resolved ‘deep internal contradictions’ you have joined the culturally liberated ‘enemy’. You cannot unlearn such enlightenment.
Those who commit the thought crime of recognising the invalidity and injustice of immortal corporations and their amassed privilege have effectively broken imperium. Others cross the Rubicon almost every day: 23rd Oct The Golems of Wall Street and 25th Oct Jurassic Ballot: When Corporations Ruled the Earth. The inevitable war between immortal corporations and mortal human beings is engaged, at least in the hearts and minds of those who possess them.
Eric, as for republication, it is the copyright inculcated permission culture that instils adherence to the press tradition of seeking a (self-)publisher’s permission prior to any promotion of an author or their work. Really, you should remove all possible obstacles to your work being disseminated as widely and as rapidly as possible.
Ask Nina Paley. She finds that even Creative Commons is developing an intrinsic “Share, unless there’s the slightest chance of commercial use occurring” connotation (which creates a decision cost and thus “don’t share” is the safe default). Cory Doctorow even goes so far as to say“Asking permission to use a CC-licensed work isn’t polite, it’s rude – adds work to the creator’s day, undermines the value of CC”.
What is far more important is to ensure that your work is not plagiarised, that it is not misattributed to another – even unwittingly or by implication. I’d say you have some grievance against C4SIF because it appears in the RSS feed and on the web site that your article is attributed to Stephan Kinsella. Bloggers should either butt out and publish an article as by its original author, or should (under a different title) introduce and blockquote the article. As you can see from my comment there, it wasn’t clear to me even then who was posting it or when.
Note that in its republication, C4SIF added a license claim onto the post that wasn’t there in the original. That goes well beyond the sort of “use” that Cory Doctorow talks about. And I agree with you about the confusing attribution.
Eric, do you mean the CC-BY license at the foot of the web page? That could only license the copyright held by the site. It can’t claim that all work published on the site is similarly licensed.
Drew, yup, sounds like a good idea to me. Amazingly, quidbooks.com is still available! So you could use the ContingencyMarket.com to create a web facility that enabled any author’s devoted readers to sponsor the production of their next book @ £1. If you have at least 10,000 readers it might be quite lucrative. (Probably more likely for the second novel than the first.)
that could play too but I was particularly speaking of paying authors of existing books that you like to put them under a Free license such as the Creative Commons BY-SA license.
This might be difficult depending on what agreements they have signed and with whom.
That’s a good point Drew, but it could risk inadvertently entrenching the idea that copyright was good/necessary – just as some people think the GPL demonstrates that copyright is necessary.
I’m reminded of the Broken Window Fallacy, that suspending people’s cultural liberty spurs them to pay for that which they might otherwise take for granted (as if that was justification).
But hey, although I’m focused on non-copyright revenue mechanisms, I’d not stop others using the Contingency Market to explore interim mechanisms that provide financial persuasion for copyright holders to liberate their audience – where ethical arguments are insufficiently persuasive. Record labels could find this a viable way of realising the value of their back-catalogue – before it’s too late.
Is ACTA, the reprise of the Statute of Anne (to favour a beholden Stationers’ Company for the ulterior purpose of suppressing sedition), the proper future for mankind’s culture, or the last and futile reinforcement of an unethical 18th century anachronism, a cultural yoke?
Are we beginning to see a new enlightenment, a recognition of the corruption and injustice of copyright, or the last glimpses of the enlightenment that could have been but for new repressive laws that enable the censorship of dissident websites, and disconnection of dissidents, critical of, inducing infringement of, or infringing copyright – on accusation alone1?
Just how powerful do you want corporations to get? To be at least equal to, and ideally superior to, human beings? To have control over mankind’s culture? To have control over mankind’s technology? To be so enriched and empowered that they have control over ‘democratically elected’ governments and tax funded infrastructure and services?
If you think that people should not only come first, but that legislatively created and privileged entities are an abomination, then a first step would be to at least stop believing in one of their unnatural powers, their privilege of copyright, to instead recognise our human and natural right to copy, as derogated by copyright from our cultural liberty. Once you’ve recognised the cultural liberty that copyright has taken from us you can then understand why it should be restored, in the interim by copyleft licensing, and ultimately by copyright abolition.
Some artists, even some lawyers, have begun to question copyright. Here’s a short video showing some of them, who’ve most recently dared to voice such questions:
1 It doesn’t even have to be copyright related. Given an evidence-free pretext these laws can be used to excommunicate any site or anyone, e.g. those facilitating the means to reveal the state’s corruption – ask Julian Assange of WikiLeaks.
I shall juxtapose two artists scrubbing the decks on the high seas1.
Hårda Bud illustrates the history of that mercantile privilege we owe three centuries of thanks to Queen Anne for:
Nina Paley provides us with a clue that artists who prohibit commercial use of their work should be unsurprised if they remain excluded from the new, ‘pay it forward’2 marketplace:
Naturally, you are free to take any liberties you wish with these published works. However, should a privilege ever be granted to constrain your liberty then its holders constrain you thus: the liberties you take may not be withheld from those to whom you give these works (or your combined/derivative works), who you must similarly constrain.
I recommend the movie They Live to get a better understanding of the perspective in which corporations, our immortal overlords, should be regarded.
The book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power is also worth a read.
And now Rob Myers brings Invaders from Mars by Charlie Stross to my attention.
In addition to recognising corporations as alien usurpers, Mr Stross also recognises that something is broken about one of their privileges, copyright, but I suspect he is yet to enjoy the epiphany that it is copyright that is the ever weaker breaker, and the back of our cultural liberty that was almost broken. Fortunately, the information age and communications revolution sees us less indoctrinated mortals escaping the alien yoke of this corporate privilege in ever greater numbers.
The corporations pretending to be people, their corporate states pretending to be of the people, their privileges pretending to be the rights of the people, have all nearly completed their infiltration of mankind. Wikileaks is a crack widening in this invading empire’s defences, revealing the truth and corruption under their glamorous veneer. Piracy is the act of remembering that mankind’s knowledge and culture belongs to man, not corporation. Resisting and undoing the subliminal programming is not easy, but it must be done.
Remember natural rights. Remember Thomas Paine. Remember liberty.
I am taking the liberty to republish these percipient words by Charlie Stross, whether he feels he should appoint a publishing corporation (able to wield the privilege covering his work) to sue me for doing so or not.
Invaders from Mars
By Charlie Stross