The Artist Pretending It's Art, The Question is: Where Do You Pay?

Penny Black Printing Press, takomabibelot, 2009

What separates entertainment from art? If "all art is quite useless" then the last blockbuster you saw in the cinema is probably more so. But it makes a hell of a lot of money for those who control the media, hence these quite useless products are copyrighted for nigh a century. Our culture is far from ours in possession. How can it be called culture if can't share it? Last month I asked Who will be the first to give it all away, and Who will be the first to take it all for nothing?

 The web was the first gift, it's architecture free from commercial claims. The second question has already been answered by the millions running torrents over the global network, and the unlucky few who have been subject to legal action (that often never goes to trial). The latter is a direct result of the disruptive innovation of the former. The buying and selling of music is a very recent development in the history of music (which is entangled with language and similarly as old) made possible by the invention of recording media in the late 19th century - only then forming a concrete object with value.

The Information Chase

Banksy Leake Street London, The_Magician, 2008

The Leaning Tower of Pisa. An object which would long ago have toppled to the ground, if it were not for all those counterbalanced lead weights and years of continual stabilisation work. When the Italian government requested help in saving the structure, it was seen to be more important to preserve the tilt for tourism than make it a naturally stable building as it was intended and like any other. The earth shifting beneath it put it on the cusp of collapse centuries ago. The tower is as much a symbol of man defying physics as it can be a metaphor for the copyright industries.

Seen and Not Seen

Home Sewing is Killing Fashion, Bo Peterson, 2006

I've become completely sick of Hollywood. Perhaps the odd classic blinded us to the fact that everything else was always shit? It seems 90% of films since around 1980 have been remakes, or "reimaginings". I'm alright with that if it improves upon the original - case in point, The Thing. But what seems ever more apparent is a churn of films from the past quarter-century being refilmed. Refilmed with the intention of milking everyone again. Name a Japanese or Korean horror film, a Hong Kong action film, any successful foreign film; and you'll find either part or all of it has been ground into a recent Hollywood production. Let The Right One In has a Hollywood remake in production before it even has a full release. Why?

Property, Theft, and Thoughts Thereof (Part One)

Theft is defined by Wikipedia as follows:

Theft (also known as stealing) is in general, the wrongful taking of someone else's property without that person's willful consent.

File-Sharing cannot be theft, because the file is not taken away from anyone - it is only replicated. Of course, it's done without the consent of the record labels - though file-sharers themselves do consent by their very actions. Therefore, it is not theft.

The Ripple Pool

If Record Labels can copyright sound waves, presumably I can go swimming and copyright the unique waves I make?

Why are people paying £0.99 for music over iTunes? 90% of that goes straight to the record label and you think legal downloads can't get any cheaper?
What is the defining characteristic of a legal download? There's no huge warehouse of MP3s as there is for physical products - just a server and a file - Yet it costs 99p.

When legally downloading, you get a copy of the file from the server, but you're restricted in what you can do with it.
When illegally downloading, you get a copy of the file from another computer, and you can do what you want with it.

I don't think 99p is required to cover the costs of production. Do I charge myself £0.99 when I backup my computer? Do I install Digital Rights Management to limit myself to only three backups? I just copy the files - I don't need a factory to do it. Look at Daniel Beddingfield. He recorded his entire debut album at home on his computer - yet the record label made a fortune from him.

Owning a CR-RW drive is equivalent to owning the means of production of entertainment.
The only thing standing in the way of communal ownership of the internet are the ISPs.

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Copy and Paste Threatens Our Way of Life

Originally, Pirates were sea-going persons who stole other people's merchandise and sold it (or for some reason, buried it, allowing someone else to get it via an elaborate story).

Today, the only people who can accurately be described as pirates are those in certain street markets selling dodgy videos and CD-Rs. Those internet users who upload music are not making a profit - remember that it is only the capitalists (eg, major music labels) who would use the internet to make money.

The corporations talk of [internet] piracy as the reason prices must rise. Firstly, the internet drives prices down (to the maximum of free). Secondly, prices will stay high for as long as that product is scarce. Digital media has made scarcity unthinkable; thus, through taking downloaders to court and raiding pirate server locations ; artificial scarcity is enforced. Imposing restrictions on legally downloaded music has the same effect.

An extract from my Holiday Diary, Written in Albufeira, Portugal - 22/07/05
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Surfing the High-Seas

You can tell life's become absurd when software predominantly used to break copyright, is itself copyrighted - In particular I refer to KaZaA (not that I'm using it... *cough*).

Kazaa's owners, Sharman Networks, had the ad-stripped Kazaa-Lite banned. They should know that if Kazaa-Lite is on "the network", they have no way of driving it into the ground (the ultimate irony). Even if file-sharing technology was banned, which looks increasingly possible but probably ineffective for the above reasons, there is still always the old-school way... disk-based shareware/freeware.

I remember the final few years of share/freeware; Test Drive II, Crystal Caves, Wolf 3D, Commander Keen; from my pre-10yo forays into Personal Computing. They just don't make DOS like they used to - to the extent that Win doesn't have real DOS anymore. Once the disk is out-there and endlessly-copied, you have a low-tech file-sharing network. Of course, this is comparing cup & string to e-mail.

Regardless, you can't stop people copying copyrighted material - we're not in the age of the first printing-press, we're in the age where everyone has the capability to publish and distribute. It's just that copyright is a relic of that age.

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