Dan Lockton links to Juan Freire – From the Analogue Commons to the New Hybrid Public Spaces – we make money not art quoting an interesting excerpt:
“Many people are horrified by the fact that knowledge flows continuously. They wouldn’t have any qualms about electricity flowing around us freely but they find the idea of a never stopping flow of information highly disturbing.”
Well, what can I say?
A lot of the angst about losing control over the flow of information arises from the fact that such control (copyright), in enabling an exchange mechanism, is consequently regarded as critical for artists who it is thought have to sell their information (digital art) to their audience using this control.
But it was always an unnatural control. The crown’s interest in controlling the press was subsequently delegated to the press. Today, the press (or corporate publishers), no longer given the simple task of just controlling themselves (and the odd pirate), are now tasked with controlling the entire populace and understandably are saying “Sorry Gov. You can have the job back. They’re your people. You control the information superhighways you built for them. You prosecute them.”
We will see how successful the state is in regulating and exerting control over the Internet, ensuring that no citizen dares exchange information without permission from its rightful owner (without extreme risk of prosecution). This control also coincides with a misplaced belief by government that constraint over the public communications by terrorists and other organised criminals helps dissuade people from supporting their cause or joining their anti-social activity. I’d say it was better to engage in conversation and moderate it, than to stamp it out in preference for warfare.
However, despite the inability of the state and its press to control the public domain, an artist still has natural control – over their private domain. They can still engage with their audience and make bargains to exchange art for money. How? Via the very same uncontrolled communications infrastructure. One that enables them to communicate with their audience and make bargains with them: art for money, money for art.
Do not weep for the state nor their publishers who both believe they must still control the flow of information in the public domain.
All each artist and member of their audience needs is to control their own private domain and to have a free market in which exchanges can be made without interference, whether by the state (monopolies or license fees) or those they’ve unethically privileged (copyright and patent holders).
Unfortunately, there’s going to be a lot of grief as everyone makes the transition, while state and incumbents inevitably fail to prevent it.
Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine have now engaged Cambridge University Press to publish their book Against Intellectual Monopoly, which is, hypocritically, subject to the artificial reproduction monopoly of copyright. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether this indicts the authors for their selection of publisher, or the reputedly academic publisher for failing to educate themselves with the words they lay claim to and neutralise their monopoly – or both.
Check out what Casey Bowman has to say apropos the publication of this book:
freepirate.blogspot.com/boldrin-and-levine-have-published-book.
It’s very disappointing, but not too surprising to the cynics among us, to deduce that even the ‘Pirate party’ is being infested by hand wringing moderates/reformists, so in fear of being identified as a den of IP thieves that they are antipathetic toward abolition or those who propose it.
Contrast this with Bill Stepp’s comparison of those privileged by copyright to suspend the public’s liberty, with those once privileged to own slaves:
In accord with Bill, those who advocate appeasement and so dare nothing more radical than the aspiration of a kinder copyright and a less frivolous patent system, may be compared to those who’d bless the god given right for men to keep slaves, but who’d compassionately call for some regulation of working and living conditions. See A Balanced Approach to Copyright?
I was amused only recently to discover that abolishcopyright.com not only admits defeat in its first post (that abolition is impossible), but then compounds this surrender with a Stockholm syndrome endorsement of copyright albeit with a shorter term.
That a world without the privilege of copyright/patent is so difficult to countenance, let alone grok, has led me on past occasions to conclude that the only way of achieving its abolition is to portray this as reform, as a set of apparently more constraining intellectual property rights – possibly having to retain the misnomer of ‘copyright’ to name it (when the term will at least then truly represent a restoration of the ‘right to copy’ and cease being a misnomer).
Nevertheless, latter day pirates do need to be identified correctly, the good from the bad. The good pirates should be recognised as those in pursuit of natural rights, necessarily including liberty unconstrained by mercantile privilege, not as apologetic reformists who simply desire greater kindness from their privileged masters. The bad pirates, at the other extreme, are those nihilistic libertines who would privilege themselves above all others. See The Freedom of Pirates or the Liberty of Civilised Men.
Anyway, do give the book a read.