Smart Energy

Defective By Design writes:

The BBC should have chosen free and open standards that work well and are available today—software that you can install on every major operating system including Microsoft’s. Free software.

Instead, they have given Microsoft complete control.This deal isn’t about supporting Microsoft Windows users. It’s about excluding everyone who doesn’t use Microsoft Windows. It says that everyone who does not agree to use DRM and proprietary software made by Microsoft cannot view BBC TV programs over the Internet. Read more.

Freedom of Expression

review by Brian Charles Clark

Freedom of Expression
by Kembrew McLeod
Publisher: Doubleday, 2005

Novelist Michael Chabon, in a recent review of a new edition of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, concluded by stating “Every novel is a sequel. Influence is bliss.” Those lines could have been an epigraph for Kembrew McLeod’s Freedom of Expression. McLeod is a sociology professor and an expert in the study of popular culture—just the sort of academic over which right-wingers love to excoriate “liberal” universities. But Freedom of Expression justifies society’s investment in scholars like McLeod: his book is learned, ranges widely over key areas of the copyright and intellectual property wars, and (here’s something you don’t hear everyday in regard to a scholarly work) is damn funny. Read the rest of this entry »

A draft of the new Creative Commons license has just been published. According to bOING bOING, in its first 3.5 years, 160,000,000 works were released under the license.

A follow up to my previous post: Fred Wilhelms reports in CounterPunch that “if SoundExchange had exploited [the] sense of community that music creates, I doubt there would be more than a handful of artists left on the list, and those would be ones who, for whatever reason, didn’t want to be found.” Wilhelms has been receiving reports from folks all over the planet: they’ve been googling “lost” musicians, calling friends of friends and, by goddess, the unpaid musicians are signing up with SoundExchange in order to be paid. | In addition to the What is DRM? faq, there’s the Set-Top Cop blog created by Cory Doctorow’s USC students that is chock full of interesting news, opinions and links. | Along these same lines–that is, the open source and creative commons lines–Odiyya, over at the David Suzuki Foundation (O, Canada!), writes, “For the reckless capitalists and right wing pundits of our culture, nothing is more fearsome than confronting the fact that we as people are indeed a part of the natural systems of this planet, and in the long run, our society will ultimately be accountable to the measure of its sustainability. To them I say, get ready for the reckoning. There’s a lot more to come.” The occasion for this comment was the “theft” (as some would view it) of research published by the Foundation. Problem is, as David Suzuki says, the Foundation wants its research used in any way, shape or fashion people see fit. Scientists (and others) jockeying for academic or corporate position, take heed: if you don’t share it, we’ll steal it. And if we don’t steal it, it wasn’t worth shit to begin with.

“Unbounded Freedom by Rosemary Bechler is a new publication from Counterpoint to be launched in partnership with the London Book Fair on 29 September 2006.” The report is free, of course, because it’s under a Creative Commons license. Cool. Meanwhile, the British Library has published a Manifesto calling for the simplification of copyright and IP law in the digital age, as well as for reasonable and restrained statutory limitations.

Fight the power on October 3, which Defective By Design has named Digital Rights Management Day. In a nutshell, DRM is evil. DRM is what made Sony think it was OK to sell CDs that install spyware on your computer. DRM is what makes Apple think it’s OK to be a monopoly, and to have iTunes downloads only compatible with iPods. DRM is what make both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD suck big time. DRM is part of the on-going campaign to close down the creative commons and make us all pay every time we surf the web, click the remote, or rip a CD. As the RIAA likes to ask, “Think you own this music? Think again.” Gonna say it again: DRM is evil. Defective By Design wants your suggestions on how to make people aware that DRM is (once more, with feeling) evil and how to shake up the media conglomerates so they quit acting like power-mad behemoths and let the world be filled with art and information. Read the rest of this entry »

The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control Is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System

review by Brian Charles Clark

The Anarchist in the Library is Vaidhyanathan’s second book on copyright and intellectual property (IP) after his 2003 Copyrights and Copywrongs. Where the earlier book was a straightforward and lively history of this area of law and culture, in The Anarchist in the Library Vaidhyanathan tries to put a socio-philosophical spin on the same material to achieve an apocalyptic excitement. For a number of reasons, it doesn’t work.

Vaidhyanathan tries to cram all the complex issues surrounding copyright and IP, which include those of music downloading and sampling, software and media “piracy,” print publishing, control of libraries (as in the Patriot Act), control of computer networks as well as the little publicized area of IP in science (genomics, pharmaceuticals, and so on), inside two buckets: the totalitarian “controllers” and the free-for-all “anarchists.” The alleged “clash” between the two buckets, Vaidhyanathan claims, is “crashing the system” and “hacking the real world.”

The problem is, those two categories don’t reflect reality. The categories of people he’s describing—totalitarians and anarchists—are mere caricatures of copyright combatants. Yes, many CEOs and Republicrats (since the two parties are largely indistinguishable on this topic) would like to tighten the screws and enclose the creative commons by extending copyright for longer and longer periods of time, restricting freedom of data movement and controlling media copying and (re)distribution. And yes, a few of the “hackers” of the creative commons want to completely defy all law and make everything available for détournment all the time. There are, however, large masses of people—consumers, especially, but politicians and business people as well—who are more or less in the middle and who do and will exert authority and change on the situation. Vaidhyanathan doesn’t ignore this middle ground but he only mentions it in passing, as it isn’t convenient to his hyperbolic thesis of apocalypse. Read the rest of this entry »

Funkendub just finished a remix of Lisa DeBenedictis‘s song “The Cuckoo.” You can find the remix here — and check out ccmixter, a somewhat cool site for musicians interested in keeping the creative commons unenclosed.

“The Cuckoo Unenclosed” is a moody ambient downtempo tune using bits and pieces of the incredible and delicious music available for remix at ccmixter. And once a remix is posted there, that too becomes available for remix. May the circle remain unbroken.

Freedom of Expression

review by Brian Charles Clark

Freedom of Expression
by Kembrew McLeod
Doubleday, 2005

No Trespassing
by Eva Hemmungs Wirtén
U. Toronto Press, 2005

In recent decades intellectual property (IP) law has become the handmaiden of transnational capitalism. “Fair use”, at least in the United States, has become a hollow shell: tap it and it shatters into a thousand sharp-edged lawsuits. Two recent books delve into the history of and effects on creativity resulting from globalized IP law. The overall picture for scientists and artists in all media is gloomy. As novelist Michael Chabon concluded, in a recent review-essay on the sources of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, “Every novel is a sequel. Influence is bliss.” Influence is bliss indeed, at least until it falls under the boot heel of regressive capitalism. Now royalties, licensing fees and corporate secrecy make creative ‘gene swapping’ too expensive for most artists and scientists.

“Follow the money” is the credo of investigative journalists. As Eva Hemmungs Wirtén argues in No Trespassing, it’s also the logic of empire when scoping out the landscape of IP law in general, and copyright law in particular. No Trespassing is tightly focused on book culture: the rise of copyright law in Western Europe and the U.S., the role of translation in commodifying authorship, and the blood-drawing lawsuits that result from the bliss of influence and the influence of technology (the photocopier in particular). Wirtén’s book, with its tight focus, deep historical view, and thorough-going scholarship make it a well-written complement to McLeod’s more free-wheeling Freedom of Expression. Read the rest of this entry »