Apropos the lates Norwegian debates

From this excellent book by Lawrence lessig. The book can be bought here and is available under a Creative Commons license here.

...in our tradition, intellectual property is an instrument. It sets the groundwork for a richly creative society but remains subservient to the value of creativity. The current debate has this turned around. We have become so concerned with protecting the instrument
that we are losing sight of the value.

The source of this confusion is a distinction that the law no longer takes care to draw — the distinction between republishing someone’s work on the one hand and building upon or transforming that work on the other. Copyright law at its birth had only publishing as its concern; copyright law today regulates both.

Before the technologies of the Internet, this conflation didn’t matter all that much. The technologies of publishing were expensive; that meant the vast majority of publishing was commercial. Commercial entities could bear the burden of the law — even the burden of the Byzantine complexity that copyright law has become. It was just one more expense of doing business.

But with the birth of the Internet, this natural limit to the reach of the law has disappeared. The law controls not just the creativity of commercial creators but effectively that of anyone. Although that expansion would not matter much if copyright law regulated only “copying,” when the law regulates as broadly and obscurely as it does, the extension matters a lot. The burden of this law now vastly outweighs any original benefit—certainly as it affects noncommercial creativity, and increasingly as it affects commercial creativity as well.

Om Twitter-terrorisme og Creative Commons

Min bror Mikkel har skrevet En Twitter-terrorists bekjennelser. Han har brukt #-tag funksjonen på Twitter, som Dagbladet og andre store aviser bruker til å stjele tweetsene til folk og legge dem ut på artiklene sine. Jeg har selv irritert meg massivt over dette, og synes Mikkel delvis setter ord på min irritasjon når han skriver:

Det føltes rett og slett feil at Dagbladet så nonchalant høstet småfolks meninger om storfolk.

Mellem linjene lå det en rekke synspunkter som jeg er uenig i: At storfolks meninger er verdt penger, mens småfolks meninger bør være gratis. At man ikke engang trenger å vurdere å gi kompensasjon, at man kan bemektige seg tankene og meningene deres uten å innhente tillatelse. Dels fordi man som en stor medieaktør har muligheten, men også fordi småfolk bare bør være lykkelige over å få lov å komme til orde. At alle småfolk innerst inne er wannabes, som intet høyere ønske har enn å bli kringkastet, få sine femten minutter på Paradise Hotel.

I tillegg til dette kommer nok også en implisitt antakelse at alle på Twitter allerede er folk som vil gi blancofullmakt til å komme seg i offentligheten, fordi alle som Dagbladetjournalister kjenner på Twitter som regel er medieaktører - enten de er politikere eller jobber med noe i media. Det er et problem hvis man lever inne i mediaboblen og går ut fra at Twitter bare er @martineaurdal og @bardvegar. Twitter er om ikke annet også @olanordmann som driver med #noe-innen-nye-medier eller er #student.

Anyway, copyrightavtalen Mikkel refererer til ligger her:

We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Twitter service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. You can remove your profile at any time by deleting your account. This will also remove any text and images you have stored in the system.

I utgangspunktet er jeg åpen for at denne typen feeds bør kunne finnes - for eksempel hadde New York helt sikkert hatt godt av et samlesite for taggen #911 på 11. september, og jeg observerte jo en del aktivitet rundt demonstrasjonene i Oslo som kunne ha vært nyttig å samle opp på ett sted. Men når store nyhetssiter samler opp Twitterstrømmen min og dermed bruker mitt innhold til å få eyeballs-to-ads og altså tjener penger, fullstendig uten å spørre meg om det er greit å bryte inn i copyrighten min.

Men det er ikke teknisk mulig å spørre alle i denne situasjonen, og det hadde vært et sosialt gode om vi kunne få til denne typen sider i forskjellige situasjoner. Kanskje til og med under #hlm eller #aker. Jeg lurer på om den gode løsningen er at alle Twitter-feeds i utgangspunktet havner under en Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike-lisens, som man som bruker kan velge vekk og sette sin feed under copyright. Og så kan Twitter opprette en måte å oppsøke bare Creative Commons-twitterfeeds. Dealen med institusjoner som Dagbladet osv. må da, siden lisensen er non-commercial, være at de oppretter Twitterfeeds på egne sider uten reklamer, der de ikke kan tjene penger på at min bror kaller Røkke for stygge ting under sin egen copyright.

Doctorow on Norwegian Piracy Study

Cory Doctorow is, as always, making a lot of sense – this time about the Norwegian BI study that shows that pirates are 10 times as likely to buy music as non-"pirates". He makes two key points. First he explains the result in an intuitive manner:

There's a simple explanation for this: if you really love music, you do lots of music-related things. If you're in the 20 percent of fans that buys 80 percent of records, you're probably in the 20 percent of downloaders that download 80 percent of music, the 20 percent of concertgoers that buy 80 percent of the tickets, and so on. The moral is that music superfans love music and structure their lives around it.

Which means that when the music industry targets "the worst offenders" in its legal campaigns against downloaders, the people they're attacking are the ones who are spending the most on music.

Second, he looks at piracy as progressive taxation according to artist success. This closely aligns with my experience of music pirates. Very few people want to buy Britney Spears, because they're not invested in the artist. They are heavily invested in a particular song. We want to download "Hit Me Baby (One More Time)" and play it at our high school reunion. We don't want the complete Spears oeuvre. As one commenter on Boing Boing puts it "I no longer buy records that suck. And I check out more bands. That's what piracy does for me."

So artists such as Spears, who depend in their business model on constantly attracting attention from newly converted, but fundamentally low- and short-term-interest around hit singles, rather than a complete catalogue, will lose some money:

As Doctorow puts it:

Now, does this mean that downloads end up interfering with sales of music, or not? My guess is that it's a little of both. As Tim O'Reilly wrote, Piracy is Progressive Taxation. Obscure acts probably get more sales than they lose. Modestly well-known acts probably lose and gain about the same. Very famous performers probably lose a little. This has been the conclusion in the quantitative studies in music and books to date, and it makes sense to me.

Me too.

Quality, not quantity

photo: Wikimedia Commons

Came across this little comment at the end of a (not that interesting) Guardian piece on the Pirate Bay verdict:

The celebrity and technophile Stephen Fry added controversy to the debate today by commenting on the case on Twitter: "Pirate Bay not saints. But we've got to think about this rationally & sensibly. Shouting 'thief' all the time is no help. I stole in cassette age."

Takeaway conclusion: the Pirate Bay verdict is so mind-numbingly stupid that an actor/comedian with a mood disorder can write something smarter in 140 characters.¹ The verdict itself is 194.000 characters. That's more than thirteen hundred times more characters. It's not the size that counts, as the Norwegian foreign minister explained to the national convention of the Norwegian Labour Party yesterday.

Btw, remember what I was saying earlier, about how the Swedish Pirate Party gained 5.000 members on the day of the verdict? There seems to be a certain amount of dissatisfaction among the key groups of music/film/software-customers (a.k.a. middle-class people who use computers), if I'm reading this straw poll at the Guardian correctly.

*

1. A mind-bendingly clever and well-read technophilic one, mind. And one who makes very interesting documentaries about his mood disorders, which, to put a nice little twist on the story, get pirated onto YouTube so you can watch them in reasonably high definition before eventually, according to the latest data, actually buying the DVD or watching the film on your TV the next time it reruns.

Pirater – mer "kunder" enn "pirater." Arrrr

BI bekrefter i dagens Aftenposten at "piratene" er de beste "kundene". Først lytter de gratis, så kjøper de platen eller går på konserten eller kjøper en t-skjorte fra artistene. Jøss, dette har vi jo ikke visst siden tidenes morgen og Napster-rettsaken.

Dermed har den siste dommen i Pirate Bay-saken ført til at plateselskapene - nok en gang - har klart å bruke en masse tid, krefter og penger på å fornærme, kriminalisere og frastøte sitt nøkkelpublikum i stedet for å jobbe med gode løsninger, som TONO-avgifter og Spotify-aktige streamingløsninger.

In other news: Pirate Bay-dommen har ført til et enormt medlemsboom for Piratpartiet. Samme dag som dommen falt registrerte partiet 5.000 nye medlemmer. ¹ Ti poeng hvis du klarer å sette informasjonen i første avsnitt i denne bloggposten i sammenheng med informasjonen i tredje avsnitt.

1. Aftenposten, 20.04.09, Kultur, s. 6.

I feel violated

I finally - thank you, Flickr stats - found the page that was referring readers to my photo "Punishment", driving the viewings of that photo way up to 14.000 hits. Turns out, it was a Japanese gaming site. I'm happy that they wanted to use the photo (and happy that 14.000 people thought it was interesting enough to click on!), I just wish they could have asked first, especially since it's obviously a commercial, possibly even corporate, site with advertising. That upsets me. Rule 1 for collaborative media: always ask first. Unfortunately, the whole thing is in Japanese, so I can't find an email address to adress the problem.

Note, also, how the photo amply illustrates the evil, corporate fist smashing down on my rights as an artisté.