Media Digestion

As my group has been refining the our chapter for the Digital Civilization book I have been trying to articulate the answer to a question: What is it about the copyright system that is so wrong? Why is it wrong to let someone protect their creative expressions for a century? They created it, so they should be able to reap the financial benefits of it, right?

Except that that's not how culture works best.

Validation From a NYT Columnist

David Bornstein, a regular contributor to the New York Times' Op-ed page, founder of dowser.org, and recent TEDxBYU speaker was in the Brimhall building Friday, and I talked to him. He had just finished a workshop, talking to journalism students about the importance of injecting possible solutions into their articles, when I caught briefly caugt up with him.

He was being hurried along by an attendant from the Ballard Center so I only had time for one question. I asked him about how he comes up with big ideas. I had a hunch that reading lots of good books was a part of it (I've thought this for years), so I asked if that was a factor. He looked me right in the eyes and said that I was right, he reads good books and that helps. He mentioned how reading biographies of courageous people in history helped him have the courage to take action. He said that besides reading books, just associating with people who think big thoughts is important. Those weren't his exact words, but that was the gist of his response.

So that's good. Maybe no surprises for anybody, but I thought it was cool.

Map Your Tweethis!

Here's a concept illustration I made for the IP & CC thesis. Of course the one in the ebook would be a little more refined. I think it'd be cool to get really close to the map style of Tolkein.

The purple line is the path we are advocating, which involves rapid innovation and alternative media licensing. Creative Commons is represented as a way station along that path (to help the weary traveler.)

The red line is the typical path that businesses, artists, and media producers take. Mount Patent Law and Mount Copyright loom daunting on that path. It's red because of the many dead and wounded enterprises that litter the trail.

My IP & CC Annotated Bibliography Contribution

I researched the leading books and figures on this subject mostly tonight. I had researched Lessig's arguments and contributions previously which helped. Google Plus didn't work well for me in the process of finding thought leaders, but enough poking around through google searches got me to some worthwhile information. I was surprised that many key writers on this topic don't have easily accessible blogs.

Pop Culture, Our Newest Lexicon

How Pop Culture Is a Lexicon

In my last post I wrote about Larry Lessig's assertion that an outdated legal approach to Internet share/remix culture is hurting the children raised in that culture. According to Lessig, we can't stop kids from using using digital tools to run wild, create derivations, and express themselves. Since we can't beat them  (and maybe we don't want to squelch such humanity anyway) and the demand is only going to increase, we might as well redesign our creative infrastructure to accomodate this new way of communicating.

Here's what the debate between copyright holders and renegade remixers boils down to: What kind of media use is communication-based and what kind is for personal consumption. Lessig refers to Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute for a summary of how remixing content is often a fundamentally social activity:

And it's not just that it yields a different kind of product at the end, it's that potentially it changes the way that we relate to each other. All of our normal social interactions become a kind of invitation to this sort of collective expression. It's our real social lives themselves that are transmuted into art. 

The coup-de-gras of his argument is that remixing is "about individuals using our shared culture as a kind of language to communicate something to an audience."

Remember the Louisiana Purchase?

In the 1800s the United States tripled in size. But with expansion came dangers; Great Britain's mismanagement of their American colonies had resulted in rebellion, a costly war, and the birth of a new nation (and competitor.) Congress didn't want the same sort of thing to happen with the Western territories, so they passed the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, an effort to effectively manage growth.

Here's how The Houghton Mifflin Companion to US History summarized the act's significance:

The Northwest Ordinance was one of the most important acts passed by Congress under the Articles of Confederation. It laid out the process through which a territory could move to statehood, it guaranteed that new states would be on an equal footing with the old, and it protected civil liberties in the new territories. This ordinance was also the first national legislation that set limits on the expansion of slavery.

Among other things, the act guaranteed limited self-government to a territory as it grew, and promised that once it reached 60,000 people it could write a state constitution and apply for full-fledged statehood.

Now, there were problems about how Congress kept these promises. Sometimes political reasons (mostly related to slavery) caused them to drag their feet in admitting some states when they were technically qualified. However, the feeling of fair treatment and promise of eventual statehood that was fostered in the territories by the Northwest Ordinance were crucial in avoiding the creation of splinter countries in those areas.

(It should be noted that the US did experience one major attempted breakaway, which resulted in the Civil War, but that was primarily a dispute between already existing states, so it's not really relevant to the example at hand.)

The lesson we can learn here for our digital world is that inevitable growth needs to be effectively managed or else it can become a curse. A Larry Lessig TED talk discusses the inevitable expansion of today's youth into the frontier of remix culture.

It is technology that has made them different, and as we see what this technology can do,we need to recognize you can't kill the instinct the technology produces. We can only criminalize it. We can't stop our kids from using it. We can only drive it underground. We can't make our kids passive again. We can only make them, quote, "pirates." And is that good? We live in this weird time. It's kind of age of prohibitions, where in many areas of our life, we live life constantly against the law. Ordinary people live life against the law, and that's what I -- we are doing to our kids. They live life knowing they live it against the law.That realization is extraordinarily corrosive, extraordinarily corrupting. And in a democracy, we ought to be able to do better.

Now is the time to figure out how we're going to manage the content flood we're already witnessing. The counter-culture that our current, antiquated system causes isn't healthy and could cause serious rifts in society.

*Photo credit: Public Domain image found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United-states-territorial-acquistions-midcentury.png

CC's Cool Mission Statement

So far my assignment in the Intellectual property and Creative Commons group is to summarize what Creative Commons (CC) is. I like the way they describe themselves on their About page:

"Our vision is nothing less than realizing the full potential of the Internet — universal access to research and education, full participation in culture — to drive a new era of development, growth, and productivity."

The way they try to achieve that mission is they create licenses that content creators can choose instead of traditional copyright licenses. CC licenses are much more share and remix-friendly than traditional copyrights.

I like their vision because it provides one answer to the question I posed in my last post: is the digital public as entitled to share, remix, and redistribute media as they seem to feel like they are? Creative Commons' answer seems to be: "No, they aren't entitled to break the rules of the traditional copyright model. However, wouldn't it be awesome if we could make that model obsolete,? Move past it? Wouldn't it be cool to fully develop the openness culture we're just starting to experiment with? Because it's possible."

I like their approach.

Right to Consume; Right to Remix

Public demand for the opportunity to consume, share, and remix media is at an all-time high. (Consider how pervasive copyright infringement is.) What is causing this appetite? And is this sense of entitlement to media harmless?

Here's an example from my own life abiout of how people's attitudes about media availability are shifting:

When I was in middle and high school, I understood that you had to pay for music or you were breaking the law and stealing from the music artists (or at least, the record companies.) I didn't question the validity of such a system. When I was in high school I loved to get iTunes gift cards. I was excited about how easy it was to buy any song I wanted. But later, Pandora and Spotify changed me. Now I expect to get my music free and legally. And I do. I may not ever go back to buying CDs (or iTunes songs.)

My experience is a small example of the sense of entitlement to movies, songs, pictures, etc. that members in our digital society are developing. The powers who make money selling their media and the growing masses demanding the right to use that media on their own terms are warring over the borders of the public domain.

Are we really entitled to us other people's work?  Under what conditions?

The unspoken argument in favor of asserting someone's right to use media regardless of copyright is,
"Because we can."

They're right that we can. But isn't it possible that technology may have temporarily outrun our collective morality?

A Reflective Post

It's time that I record my thoughts about my learning experience in Honors 212.

I find myself more interested in philosophy than emerging technology. One textbook I've been reading (to learn about Control) is Dr. Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen. She described the development of personal computers using the opposing concepts of modernism and postmodernism.

modernism: looking at the world as a series of definite systems that can be reduced to simple processes and understood by scientific inquiry.

postmodernism: admitting that the complexity of the world is beyond human comprehension but learning the gist of how things work by exploration.

I've been a sort of postmodernist for years and didn't know it because I didn't know there was a definition for it. (That's one of the cool things about reading books: you can learn things that you didn't intend to which are really cool.)

I've been applying the postmodern view more explicitly. A couple weeks ago my friend told me about a book she's reading about a Chicago doctor that worked in a hospital that treated the local poor. He also lived in a house among those same people and wrestled with questions about how much to get involved helping the people around him. I told my friend that that was a postmodern approach to caring for the poor; the doctor didn't have a detailed plan to end poverty in that area. He just jumped in to the situation and learned what would help by experience.

I keep meaning to get psyched about digital concepts, but I get sidetracked by philosophy.

And physics. This class has also fanned the flames of my mostly neglected interest in the history and development of modern physics and cosmology. I like learning about how P.A.M. Dirac used mathematics to predict the existence of neutrinos, left the idea because he thought it was outlandish, only to have his theory proven correct a few years later by scientists operating a cloud chamber who were trying to do something else. I like reading one physicist's argument that human's shouldn't rule out the existence of a closed universe. I like Issac Asimov teaching me about the composition and motion of a comet by helping me imagine that I'm riding one as it flies past Earth.

How do those concepts relate to Digital Civilization? Well, on the surface, they don't really. But I could compare innovation in physics to innovation in digital concepts. (Maybe there's a connection to be made between the revision that needs to take place in copyright law and the efforts of Bohr, Schrodinger, and others to redefine atoms.)

I want to contribute to the class project. Either I'll pick a group and hope that I gain an enthusiam for the concept as I study it more or I'll lobby for a chapter in the book dedicated to digital philosophy and psychology. We could study how DigiCiv is changing the way people think. And how science has changed the way people think throughout history (think about Galileo destroying he contemporary view of what revolves around what in the heavens.)

*Image for copyright symbol came from this webpage.