CULTURE vs. COPYRIGHT

On Major Trends in the Contemporary Economy

anatoly — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 09:36:29 +0000

This is just a few words on:
The Pirate Party’s solution for the global job crisis: valuing the swarm economy
By Michel Bauwens
29th March 2011

I’m not ready to present a substantial analyses of the Michael Bauwens’ and Rick Falkvinge’s ideas, but only some other notions they invoked:

Open Source and alike movements correspond to Marx’s prediction that “free time economy” will emerge as the logical development of free market.

OTOH, “knowledge based economy” corresponds to the same notion, as well.

Both mentioned trends require self-determined activity and creativity from a “worker.”

The later, in my view, is in radical contradiction to yet another trend: that of monopolization.

I don’t know for sure what kind of monopoly is worse: IP or casual one, but do believe that IP is the worst.

I doubt that any partial solution to the mentioned contradictions would provide for painless transition from “old economy” to some “new one.” I think it is necessary to come up with theoretical models to address major factors and players in those global collisions and possible consequences to any global action.

Is Copyright Similar to a Fundamentalist Religion?

anatoly — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 12:49:03 +0000

Few thoughts on _Copyright as a Fundamentalist Religion_ by Rick Falkvinge.

There is one more noteworthy analogy between pro-copyright social structures and church. It is believers, people. It is them who church relied upon and it is them, law obedient brain washed pro-copyright believers who really support copyright monster.

This point is the most striking one for me: “striving artists” support copyright. The great majority of musicians, painters, poets, writers, etc. barely make pennies out of their art, and they stand up for “their rights” whenever you question these. Virtually everyone who I talked to for years would support idea of art as realm of ultimate freedom, but would never come along with me to conclusion that copyright is in radical contradiction to this idea.

People would agree that you can sell your work to make money (not rights, but work), but they don’t come along to conclusion that salable rights are not necessary then.

People would agree that a law is to implement justice, that law cannot be a compromise in itself, which is the case with copyright, but they don’t come along to conclusion that copyright law contradicts very idea of law and justice.

And so forth.

Is Copying an Act of Love?

anatoly — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 14:19:11 +0000

Copying is an act of love is a post on Copyheart.org by Nina. I commented there I agree and I do, but must explain what exactly I mean.

If I copy a work of art I appreciate it at least. I copy because I value the work. I pay homage to the author and I appreciate the author’s job. It implies that the author understands what I need and responds to this need. Does the described relationship amount to love?

Not exactly. Love is unconditional acceptance of something or somebody as a whole, in entirety. This is not exactly the case when we copy a work of art. It can be love, like the love at the first sight, but not necessarily is. We can quite safely state that copying bears potential of love, expects it, presumes it, but is not necessarily actual act of love. It is quite similar to relationship between two in becoming. They may like each other, may hope for love, but…

The another important aspect to this is what is the work on the author’s side. I discuss this in detail in the book (Chapter 2. Inquiry on the Nature of Arts), but the aspect of love was missing, so I am grateful to Nina and am happy to bring this up now.

What is meant here? In the book I asserted that an author actually creates his new audience with the new work. Thus, we see it almost by definition that the author does love the audience! The author creates his loved subjects by the very act of creation. Every single creator, no matter what he or she creates is in Jeppetto’s shoes, who made Pinocchio to be his loved and responding with love son. And as soon as the audience shows up it responds to this love of the creator.

One more point and I stop. When an “author” says someone “steals” from him by “unauthorized copying” he signs a psychological death verdict for himself, because it is plainly impossible to love and create for thieves.

On Trademarks

anatoly — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 13:05:23 +0000

I never took on the concept of trademark as such. For no reason. I actually didn’t specifically contemplated about patents either. All my thinking thus far was aimed at copyrights. Why? Because, first, copyrights, in my view, cause the greatest danger to culture and thus to contemporary civilization, and, second, copyrights commonly perceived as the least harmful kind of so-called “IP” (Intellectual Property). I want to slightly fill in the gap in my thinking today, for I encountered once again an argument (a comment on a Mike Masnick’s post at his Techdirt blog) that in fighting IP abuses it is necessary to distinguish between different kinds of IP, because they are regulated by different laws and are based on different rationale.
Well, it is probably necessary, but for what purpose? Casually the argument is used to justify one kind of IP against another or just to fight the very term “IP” for some reason.
I don’t see the either one as a right cause. I believe those who came up with the idea of IP were somewhat right for copyrights, patents and trademarks have a lot in common, since they all belong this or that way to cultural phenomena and drastically differ in this respect from material things.
Having said that I immediately conclude that trademarks are of no use and cause only harm. And now I can think about this specific harm or, which is much more interesting, what would be this world without trademarks whatsoever.
The first hypothesis is very easy to come up with, because I take it as an axiom that all relationships in the world of culture act in the opposite direction to those which seem analogues in the world of civilization (see Discrepancies between Two Worlds on this site). The simplest implementation of this idea here is just to presume that common rationale behind trademarks works right on the contrary to what happens in reality.
Let’s see. Suppose, there is no any restrictions in naming of a product, a company, a book and (it’s extremely important!) everybody knows and understands that. That is, a consumer, a customer, an audience do know they have to distinguish what they buy by its substance, not by name. This develops the situation when a product maker wishes to put on the product as much of the info as he possibly can and the law must be concerned with lies only.
Would it be profitable to make and sell counterfeits in such an environment or would it be better to develop your unique, let it be small and cheap, based on copying brand? When a customer is driven to look into and go after the substance the answer seems to be obvious. Thus, trademarks _must_ cause the opposite. Today a customer mostly relies on a brand name for the law defends it and pays less attention to the substance which is that very situation when a counterfeit becomes temptation for a product maker.

Would books be printed without publishing monopolies?

anatoly — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 21:42:19 +0000

I want to address one idea from There Are Three Parties To Copyright by Rick Falkvinge. He writes: “The argument that nobody would print books without copyright should have no bearing on today’s legislation, as nothing needs to be printed for culture and knowledge to be disseminated today.”

I honestly do not understand how copyright does any good for publishing business at all, not just nowadays. Actually, I do understand that it does not, for if copyrights are not here all books will be accessible for all publishers. This is fundamental, simple, pure idea to base the book market on. If we ask why publishers wouldn’t like such a situation, the answer is obvious: a businessman does not like competition, and formula “all books for all publishers” creates an extremely competitive environment. In the book Culture vs. Copyright this idea was touched in my first graders’ dialogue (on this site: First Graders on the Magic Planet) and is analyzed in more detail in Three Models.

The Creator-Endorsed mark

Ilya Volynets-Evenbakh — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 08:55:38 +0000

One important component of successful Authoright world is the ability of a distributor to indicate he is supporting the author.

Well, what do you know! The great people at QuestionCopyright.org are working on this exact concept. Their Creator-Endorsed Mark is an attempt to implement the way for a publisher to show his support for the author of a work in a recognizable, and, what’s important, legally-binding way, by using a trademark law.

Authoright and licencing

Ilya Volynets-Evenbakh — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 11:59:01 +0000

Authoright, at its core, is a perpetual right of makers of an “intellectual product” to be credited for their work. In case of a writing, this includes authors, publishers, and distributors. It also means otherwise unrestricted distribution and creation of derivative works. Most common way of achieving this effect today, is creating a license, which works within certain jurisdiction, and presuming that each person making use of the work, enters a contract with author and distributor under that license. Such is the case of the all-famous GNU GPL, as well as Creative Commons licenses.
There is, however, a problem with this approach… More then one, in fact.

First of all, such licenses have to work within certain jurisdictions. Which does download of “Culture vs. Copyright” fall under? State of California (where our servers are located)? The location of the person downloading the book? Something sort of international law? As far as I understand any of the above can be the case, depending on the location of both sides of the transaction. Thus, now, depending on the jurisdiction, the license should be supported by different laws. In case of the US, it is the Copyright Law.
This is where we move on to the next problem. The US Copyright Law (as well as similar laws of many other countries) give the author huge amounts of exclusive rights, which he or she can sell or give away, as they wish. Problem is that in US these rights are limited in time, so, while we can create a situation where the work is distributed under Authoright-like conditions for a while, there is no way to ensure it will continue to be so indefinitely.
There are attempts to address the first problem. For example, there is an “International” subproject of the Creative Commons project. It would be nice to have a similar effort focused specifically on the Authoright idea. Of course, neither any of CC licenses, nor GNU GPL versions were tested in court so far. At least not to my knowledge. How well would this web of license versions for different jurisdictions hold, should some author try to take some CC license violator to a court is still a big question.
The second problem, however, does not seem to have a real, even if messy, solution. Best we can do is state the way we want our work to be used and distributed, and hope that following generations will respect these wishes.
Bottom line is: until Authoright itself is an international law, we are stuck with legal hacks, which will break over time.

The site is up and running

anatoly — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 17:10:35 +0000

Finally, our site is up and running. Thanks to close cooperation between Ilya and Sasha with Anatoly’s participation for three weeks everything seems in place.