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“But as I say, let’s play a game of science fiction and imagine for a moment: what would it be like if it were possible to have an academic equivalent to the peer-to-peer file sharing practices associated with Napster, eMule, and BitTorrent, something dealing with written texts rather than music? What would the consequences be for the way in which scholarly research is conceived, communicated, acquired, exchanged, practiced, and understood?”
Gary Hall – Digitize this book! (2008)
Ubu web was founded in 1996 by poet Kenneth Goldsmith and has developed from ‘a repository for visual, concrete and (later) sound poetry, to a site that ‘embraced all forms of the avant-garde and beyond. Its parameters continue to expand in all directions.’ As Wikipedia states, Ubu is non-commercial and operates on a gift economy. All the same – by forming an amazing resource and repository for the avant-garde movement, and by offering and hosting these works on its platform, Ubu is violating copyright laws. As they state however: ‘should something return to print, we will remove it from our site immediately. Also, should an artist find their material posted on UbuWeb without permission and wants it removed, please let us know. However, most of the time, we find artists are thrilled to find their work cared for and displayed in a sympathetic context. As always, we welcome more work from existing artists on site.’
Where in the more affluent and popular media realms of block buster movies and pop music the Piratebay and other download sites (or p2p networks) like Mininova are being sued and charged with copyright infringement, the major powers to be seem to turn a blind eye when it comes to Ubu and many other resource sites online that offer digital versions of hard-to-get-by materials ranging from books to documentaries.
This is and has not always been the case: in 2002 Sebastian Lütgert from Berlin/New York was sued by the “Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur” for putting online two downloadable texts from Theodor W. Adorno on his website textz.com, an underground archive for Literature. According to this Indymedia interview with Lütgert, textz.com was referred to as ‘the Napster for books’ offering about 700 titles, focusing on, as Lütgert states ‘Theorie, Romane, Science-Fiction, Situationisten, Kino, Franzosen, Douglas Adams, Kritische Theorie, Netzkritik usw’.
The interview becomes even more interesting when Lütgert remarks that one can still easily download both Adorno texts without much ado if one wants to. This leads to the bigger question of the real reasons underlying the charge against textz.com; why was textz.com sued? As Lütgert says in the interview: “Das kann man sowieso [when referring to the still available Adorno texts]. Aber es gibt schon lange einen klaren Unterschied zwischen offener Verfügbarkeit und dem Untergrund. Man kann die freie Verbreitung von Inhalten nicht unterbinden, aber man scheint verhindern zu wollen dass dies allzu offen und selbstverständlich geschieht. Das ist es was sie stört.”
But how can something be truly underground in an online environment whilst still trying to spread or disseminate texts as widely as possible? This seems to be the paradox of many – not quite legal and/or copyright protected – resource sharing and collecting communities and platforms nowadays. However, multiple scenario’s are available to evade this dilemma: by being frankly open about the ‘status’ of the content on offer, as Ubu does, or by using little ‘tricks’ like an easy website registration, classifying oneself as a reading group, or by relieving oneself from responsibility by stating that one is only aggregating sources from elsewhere (linking) and not hosting the content on its own website or blog. One can also state the offered texts or multimedia files form a special issue or collection of resources, emphasizing their educational and not-for-profit value.
Most of the ‘underground’ text and content sharing communities seem to follow the concept of (the inevitability of) ‘information wants to be free’, especially on the Internet. As Lütgert States: “Und vor allem sind die über Walter Benjamin nicht im Bilde, der das gleiche Problem der Reproduzierbarkeit von Werken aller Art schon zu Beginn des letzten Jahrhunderts vor sich hatte und erkannt hat: die Massen haben das Recht, sich das alles wieder anzueignen. Sie haben das Recht zu kopieren, und das Recht, kopiert zu werden. Jedenfalls ist das eine ganz schön ungemütliche Situation, dass dessen Nachlass jetzt von solch einem Bürokraten verwaltet wird. A: Glaubst Du es ist überhaupt legitim intellektuellen Inhalt zu “besitzen”? Oder Eigentümer davon zu sein? S: Es ist *unmöglich*. “Geistiges” Irgendwas verbreitet sich immer weiter. Reemtsmas Vorfahren wären nie von den Bäumen runtergekommen oder aus dem Morast rausgekrochen, wenn sich “geistiges” Irgendwas nicht verbreitet hätte.”
What seems to be increasingly obvious, as the interview also states, is that one can find virtually all Ebooks and texts one needs via p2p networks and other file sharing community’s (the true Darknet in a way) – more and more people are offering (and asking for!) selections of texts and books (including the ones by Adorno) on openly available websites and blogs, or they are scanning them and offering them for (educational) use on their domains. Although the Internet is mostly known for the pirating and dissemination of pirated movies and music, copyright protected textual content has (of course) always been spread too. But with the rise of ‘born digital’ text content, and with the help of massive digitization efforts like Google Books (and accompanying Google Books download tools) accompanied by the appearance of better (and cheaper) scanning equipment, the movement of ‘openly’ spreading (pirated) texts (whether or not focusing on education and ‘fair use’) seems to be growing fast.
The direct harm (to both the producers and their publishers) of the free online availability of (in copyright) texts is also maybe less clear than for instance with music and films. Many feel texts and books will still be preferred to be read in print, making the online and free availability of text nothing more than a marketing tool for the sales of the printed version. Once discovered, those truly interested will find and buy the print book. Also more than with music and film, it is felt essential to share information, as a cultural good and right, to prevent censorship and to improve society.
This is one of the reasons the Open Access movement for scientific research has been initiated. But where the amount of people and institutions supportive of this movement is gradually growing (especially where it concerns articles and journals in the Sciences), the spread concerning Open Access (or even digital availability) of monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences (of which the majority of the resources on offer in the underground text sharing communities consists) has only just started.
This has lead to a situation in which some have decided that change is not coming fast enough. Instead of waiting for this utopian Open Access future to come gradually about, they are actively spreading, copying, scanning and pirating scholarly texts/monographs online. Although many times accompanied by lengthy disclaimers about why they are violating copyright (to make the content more widely accessible for one), many state they will take down the content if asked. Following the copyleft movement, what has in a way thus arisen is a more ‘progressive’ or radical branch of the Open Access movement. The people who spread these texts deem it inevitable they will be online eventually, they are just speeding up the process. As Lütgert states: ‘The desire of an increasingly larger section of the population to 100-percent of information is irreversible. The only way there can be slowed down in the worst case, but not be stopped.
Still we have not yet answered the question of why publishers (and their pirated authors) are not more upset about these kinds of websites and platforms. It is not a simple question of them not being aware that these kind of textual disseminations are occurring. As mentioned before, the harm to producers (scholars) and their publishers (in Humanities and Social Sciences mainly Not-For-Profit University Presses) is less clear. First of all, their main customers are libraries (compare this to the software business model: free for the consumer, companies pay), who are still buying the legal content and mostly follow the policy of buying either print or both print and ebook, so there are no lost sales there for the publishers. Next to that it is not certain that the piracy is harming sales. Unlike in literary publishing, the authors (academics) are already paid and do not loose money (very little maybe in royalties) from the online availability. Perhaps some publishers also see the Open Access movement as something inevitably growing and they thus don’t see the urge to step up or organize a collaborative effort against scholarly text piracy (where most of the presses also lack the scale to initiate this). Whereas there has been some more upsurge and worries about textbook piracy (since this is of course the area where individual consumers – students – do directly buy the material) and websites like Scribd, this mostly has to do with the fact that these kind of platforms also host non-scholarly content and actively promote the uploading of texts (where many of the text ‘sharing’ platforms merely offer downloading facilities). In the case of Scribd the size of the platform (or the amount of content available on the platform) also has caused concerns and much media coverage.
All of this gives a lot of potential power to text sharing communities, and I guess they know this. Only authors might be directly upset (especially famous ones gathering a lot of royalties on their work) or in the case of Lütgert, their beneficiaries, who still do see a lot of money coming directly from individual customers.
Still, it is not only the lack of fear of possible retaliations that is feeding the upsurge of text sharing communities. There is a strong ideological commitment to the inherent good of these developments, and a moral and political strive towards institutional and societal change when it comes to knowledge production and dissemination.
As Adrian Johns states in his article Piracy as a business force, ‘today’s pirate philosophy is a moral philosophy through and through’. As Jonas Anderson states, the idea of piracy has mostly lost its negative connotations in these communities and is seen as a positive development, where these movements ‘have begun to appear less as a reactive force (i.e. ‘breaking the rules’) and more as a proactive one (‘setting the rules’). Rather than complain about the conservatism of established forms of distribution they simply create new, alternative ones.’ Although Anderson states this kind of activism is mostly occasional, it can be seen expressed clearly in the texts accompanying the text sharing sites and blogs. However, copyright is perhaps so much an issue on most of these sites (where it is on some of them), as it is something that seems to be simply ignored for the larger good of aggregating and sharing resources on the web. As is stated clearly for instance in an interview with Sean Dockray, who maintains AAAARG:
“The project wasn’t about criticizing institutions, copyright, authority, and so on. It was simply about sharing knowledge. This wasn’t as general as it sounds; I mean literally the sharing of knowledge between various individuals and groups that I was in correspondence with at the time but who weren’t necessarily in correspondence with each other.”
Back to Lütgert. The files from textz.com have been saved and are still accessible via The Internet Archive Wayback Machine. In the case of textz.com, these files contain ’typed out text’, so no scanned contents or PDF’s. Textz.com (or better said its shadow or mirror) offers an amazing collection of texts, including artists statements/manifestos and screenplays from for instance David Lynch.
The text sharing community has evolved and now knows many players. Two other large members in this kind of ‘pirate theory base network’ (although – and I have to make that clear! – they offer many (and even mostly) legal and out of copyright texts), still active today, are Monoskop/Burundi and AAAARG.ORG. These kinds of platforms all seem to disseminate (often even on a titular level) similar content, focusing mostly on Continental Philosophy and Critical Theory, Cultural Studies and Literary Theory, The Frankfurter Schule, Sociology/Social Theory, Psychology, Anthropology and Ethnography, Media Art and Studies, Music Theory, and critical and avant-garde writers like Kafka, Beckett, Burroughs, Joyce, Baudrillard, etc.etc.
Monoskop is, as they state, a collaborative wiki research on the social history of media art or a ‘living archive of writings on art, culture and media technology’. At the sitemap of their log, or under the categories section, you can browse their resources on genre: book, journal, e-zine, report, pamphlet etc. As I found here, Burundi originated in 2003 as a (Slovakian) media lab working between the arts, science and technologies, which spread out to a European city based cultural network; They even functioned as a press, publishing the Anthology of New Media Literature (in Slovak) in 2006, and they hosted media events and curated festivals. It dissolved in June 2005 although the Monoskop research wiki on media art, has continued to run since the dissolving of Burundi.
As is stated on their website, AAAARG is a conversation platform, or alternatively, a school, reading group or journal, maintained by Los Angeles artist Sean Dockray. In the true spirit of Critical Theory, its aim is to ‘develop critical discourse outside of an institutional framework’. Or even more beautiful said, it operates in the spaces in between: ‘But rather than thinking of it like a new building, imagine scaffolding that attaches onto existing buildings and creates new architectures between them.’ To be able to access the texts and resources that are being ‘discussed’ at AAAARG, you need to register, after which you will be able to browse the library. From this library, you can download resources, but you can also upload content. You can subscribe to their feed (RSS/XML) and like Monoskop, AAAARG.org also maintains a Twitter account on which updates are posted. The most interesting part though is the ‘extra’ functions the platform offers: after you have made an account, you can make your own collections, aggregations or issues out of the texts in the library or the texts you add. This offers an alternative (thematically ordered) way into the texts archived on the site. You also have the possibility to make comments or start a discussion on the texts. See for instance their elaborate discussion lists. The AAAARG community thus serves both as a sharing and feedback community and in this way operates in a true p2p fashion, in a way like p2p seemed originally intended. The difference being that AAAARG is not based on a distributed network of computers, but is based on one platform, to which registered users are able to upload a file (which is not the case on Monoskop for instance – only downloading here).
Via mercurunionhall, I found the image underneath which depicts AAAARG.ORG’s article index organized as a visual map, showing the connections between the different texts. This map was created and posted by AAAARG user john, according to mercurunionhall.
Where AAAArg.org focuses again on the text itself – typed out versions of books – Monoskop works with more modern versions of textual distribution: scanned versions or full ebooks/pdf’s with all the possibilities they offer, taking a lot of content from Google books or (Open Access) publishers’ websites. Monoskop also links back to the publishers’ websites or Google Books, for information about the books or texts (which again proves that the publishers should know about their activities). To download the text however, Monoskop links to Sharebee, keeping the actual text and the real downloading activity away from its platform.
Another part of the text sharing content consists of platforms offering documentaries and lectures (so multi-media content) online. One example of the last is the Discourse Notebook Archive, which describes itself as an effort which has as its main goal ‘to make available lectures in contemporary continental philosophy’ and is maintained by Todd Kesselman, a PhD Student at The New School for Social Research. Here you can find lectures from Badiou, Kristeva and Zizek (both audio and video) and lectures aggregated from the European Graduate School. Kesselman also links to resources on the web dealing with contemporary continental philosophy.
Society of Control is a website maintained by Stephan Dillemuth, an artist living and working in Munich, Germany, offering amongst others an overview of his work and scientific research. According to this interview conducted by Kristian Ø Dahl and Marit Flåtter his work is a response to the increased influence of the neo-liberal world order on education, creating a culture industry that is more than often driven by commercial interests. He asks the question ‘How can dissidence grow in the blind spots of the ‘society of control’ and articulate itself?’ His website, the Society of Control is, as he states, ‘an independent organization whose profits are entirely devoted to research into truth and meaning.’
Society of Control has a library section which contains works from some of the biggest thinkers of the twentieth century: Baudrillard, Adorno, Debord, Bourdieu, Deleuze, Habermas, Sloterdijk und so weiter, and so much more, a lot in German, and all ‘typed out’ texts. The library section offers a direct search function, a category function and a a-z browse function. Dillemuth states that he offers this material under fair use, focusing on not for profit, freedom of information and the maintenance of freedom of speech and information and making information accessible to all:
“The Societyofcontrol website site contains information gathered from many different sources. We see the internet as public domain necessary for the free flow and exchange of information. However, some of these materials contained in this site maybe claimed to be copyrighted by various unknown persons. They will be removed at the copyright holder’s request within a reasonable period of time upon receipt of such a request at the email address below. It is not the intent of the Societyofcontrol to have violated or infringed upon any copyrights.”
Important in this respect is that he put the responsibility of reading/using/downloading the texts on his site with the viewers, and not with himself: “Anyone reading or looking at copyright material from this site does so at his/her own peril, we disclaim any participation or liability in such actions.”
Fark Yaraları = Scars of Différance and Multitude of blogs are maintained by the same author, Renc-u-ana, a philosophy and sociology student from Istanbul. The first is his personal blog (with also many links to downloadable texts), focusing on ‘creating an e-library for a Heideggerian philosophy and Bourdieuan sociology’ on which he writes ‘market-created inequalities must be overthrown in order to close knowledge gap.’ The second site has a clear aggregating function with the aim ‘to give united feedback for e-book publishing sites so that tracing and finding may become easier.’ And a call for similar blogs or websites offering free ebook content. The blog is accompanied by a nice picture of a woman warning to keep quiet, very paradoxically appropriate to the context. Here again, a statement from the host on possible copyright infringement: ‘None of the PDFs are my own productions. I’ve collected them from web (e-mule, avax, libreremo, socialist bros, cross-x, gigapedia..) What I did was thematizing.’ The same goes for pdflibrary (which seems to be from the same author), offering texts from Derrida, Benjamin, Deleuze and the likes: ‘None of the PDFs you find here are productions of this blog. They are collected from different places in the web (e-mule, avax, libreremo, all socialist bros, cross-x, …). The only work done here is thematizing and tagging.’
Our student from Istanbul lists many text sharing sites on Multitude of blogs, including Inishark (amongst others Badiou, Zizek and Derrida), Revelation (a lot of history and bible study), Museum of accidents (many resources relating to again, critical theory, political theory and continental philhosophy) and Makeworlds (initiated from the make world festival 2001). Mariborchan is mainly a Zizek resource site (also Badiou and Lacan) and offers next to ebooks also video and audio (lectures and documentaries) and text files, all via links to file sharing platforms.
What is clear is that the text sharing network described above (I am sure there are many more related to other fields and subjects) is also formed and maintained by the fact that the blogs and resource sites link to each other in their blog rolls, which is what in the end makes up the network of text sharing, only enhanced by RSS feeds and Twitter accounts, holding together direct communication streams with the rest of the community. That there has not been one major platform or aggregation site linking them together and uploading all the texts is logical if we take into account the text sharing history described before and this can thus be seen as a clear tactic: it is fear, fear for what happened to textz.com and fear for the issue of scale and fear of no longer operating at the borders, on the outside or at the fringes. Because a larger scale means they might really get noticed. The idea of secrecy and exclusivity which makes for the idea of the underground is very practically combined with the idea that in this way the texts are available in a multitude of places and can thus not be withdrawn or disappear so easily.
This is the paradox of the underground: staying small means not being noticed (widely), but will mean being able to exist for probably an extended period of time. Becoming (too) big will mean reaching more people and spreading the texts further into society, however it will also probably mean being noticed as a treat, as a ‘network of text-piracy’. The true strategy is to retain this balance of openly dispersed subversivity.
This month it’s again time for the World Ebook fair! The fourth annual World Ebook Fair, this year from 7/04/09 to 8/04/09 will offer Open Access to their sponsors ebook collections consisting of more than 2 million books. During this month these ebooks will be online available for free (otherwise a membership of $8.95 per year to the World Public Library will get you free access to more than half a million ebooks). Aggregating content from amongst others Project Gutenberg, the World Public Library and the Internet Archive, the World Ebook Fair sets as its goal ‘to provide Free public access for a month to 2 Million eBooks.’ Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg (the first and largest single collection of free electronic books) and the inventor of ebooks way back in 1971, states on the project website: ‘Today There Are 2 Million Free Electronic Books On The Internet. Download Your Selections From 2 Million eBooks for the Month of July’. And they are adding more than a 1000 ebooks every day.
The fair is already a big success. As Book Publishing News states:
“The first day of the Fair saw over 1 million downloads, including popular titles such as Jane Austen’s “Emma,” Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women,” and Joseph Conrad’s “Nostromo.”
New high speed Internet connections and Web servers are in place to handle the vast reponse expected from the public, seeking free access to much of the world’s great literature. This year, many readers will use their iPhones, Sony Readers, Kindles, MP3 players and a host of other devices, in addition to desktop and notebook computers.”
So with almost four more weeks to go, get your share whilst you can. There is an advanced search option for language, title, author etc. and you can also browse the collections. Once in the search mode you can also select different categories (literature, philosophy, poetry etc.). The books are mostly PDF’s and don’t have the nicest lay outs but hey, their free! You can also find many mp3 audio files (which is of course very nice, you can listen to your favorite book on your iPod!).
With a quick search I found Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico−Philosophicus, Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo and some Dutch literature classics, Multatuli’s Max Havelaar, Lodewijk van Deyssel’s Een liefde and Jacob van Lennep’s Ferdinand Huyck (with illustrations!). And there is much much more. What a resource… I absolutely love ebooks!
Some small stuff from around the world or the web or the world that is the web that deserves some attention here in this and future posts to be. First of all the oldest bible (ok maybe no small stuff), the Codex Sinaiticus, has been digitized and has concurrently been made accessible online. As the project website states ‘Codex Sinaiticus, a manuscript of the Christian Bible written in the middle of the fourth century, contains the earliest complete copy of the Christian New Testament’. I attended a lecture by David Parker, one of the project members, last year as part of a symposium on Text comparison and digital creativity, at which Parker presented the project as it was enfolding and discussed the difficulties and challenges the online presentation of a document that has been scattered around different institutions, presents, making it truly a ‘virtual’ Codex Sinaiticus. Collected once more into one online object, now you can actually browse through the quires and folio’s of the manuscript and zoom into details that fancy your interest. And you can even adjust the lighting and surely do many more interesting things that I have not as of yet explored.
The goals of the project revolved around the historical research, conservation, digitization, transcription and dissemination of the manuscript. The study of the production of Codex Sinaiticus has proved invaluable for the study of book or manuscript history and production. The history of Codex Sinaiticus has also been very important for the development of the idea and the creation of the concept we nowadays refer to as ‘bible’ as a collection of canonical books:
‘The ability to place these ‘canonical books’ in a single codex itself influenced the way Christians thought about their books, and this is directly dependent upon the technological advances seen in Codex Sinaiticus. The quality of its parchment and the advanced binding structure that would have been needed to support over 730 large-format leaves, which make Codex Sinaiticus such an outstanding example of book manufacture, also made possible the concept of a ‘Bible’. The careful planning, skilful writing and editorial control needed for such an ambitious project gives us an invaluable insight into early Christian book production.’
The presentation of the manuscript on the website is marvelous. And what a chance to brush up your Ancient Greek! You can check it out for yourself here.
The story around Free continues (talking about a nice marketing strategy). A review from Malcolm Gladwell (yes, the Blink and Tipping Point guy) in The New Yorker elicited a response from Anderson on his blog, causing another Internet aficionado, Seth Godin, to again take sides (Anderson’s side that is). Seems like a dinosaur fight (though very gentlemanlike of course). Gladwell’s argument revolves around the notion that the money, or better said, the payment for services provided, has to come from and end up somewhere. As Gladwell states: ‘It would be nice to know, as well, just how a business goes about reorganizing itself around getting people to work for “non-monetary rewards.”’ He thus states that ‘free is just another price’ and information can’t actually want to be free, as it can’t really ‘want’ anything; the actors in the system want it to be free in order to make some money around free (‘free represents an enormous business opportunity’). Next to that Gladwell argues that whereas the costs of the digital product might be nearing zero, the costs to produce the product or content still make up a large amount of the price, as John Naughton also elaborates on in his review in The Observer.
Anderson responds by stating that the circular reasoning of which Gladwell accuses him does no longer pertain in a gift economy in which content is truly being produced without the aim of creating money. The circle ends when it concerns money and expands into the realm of the nonmonetary. In Andersons words: ‘Somewhere down the chain, the incentives go from monetary to nonmonetary (attention, reputation, expression, etc).’ Godin takes this argument even further stating that ‘In a world of free, everyone can play’, meaning that in an abundance and attention economy as the world wide web is, many people are willing to write for free. This does not mean everybody will write for free and no one will pay for online content anymore.
As Drake Bennett writes in his review for The Boston Globe, this idea of a minority of fee-payers for the deluxe services in a freemium model, is one Anderson sees as highly probable. From the review: ‘The advantage of freemium, Anderson argues, is that in a digital world, the cost of widely disseminating the free stuff is low enough that you don’t actually need that large a percentage of premium clients to make it work. Indeed, in general, Anderson sees the mind-boggling scale of the Internet as central to its ability to sustain free institutions, especially totally free ones like Wikipedia, which survives on the altruistic efforts of a minuscule proportion of its planet-wide set of users.’ Selection might also become more valuable in an attention economy, becoming another basis of potential revenue, picking the pearls from the heaps of free. As Godin writes: ‘The reason that we needed paid contributors before was that there was only economic room for a few magazines, a few TV channels, a few pottery stores, a few of everything. In world where there is room for anyone to present their work, anyone will present their work. Editors become ever more powerful and valued, while the need for attention grows so acute that free may even be considered expensive.’
Meanwhile, Chris Anderson had been busy thinking about ways to offer Free for free, whilst of course creating the necessary viral buzz around that at the same time. Latest news is the free availability of the MP3 audio book download, either as a free download via Wired or via the online radio community Spotify. Next to that Anderson thought of an elaborate scheme to offer not only the e-book as a free download but also to distribute free paper-back and price-reduced hard-back copies via Random House and BrandRepublic.com, sponsored by Adobe. Although a little UK centered, I am already very glad with my audio download and will await the e-book. I will keep you posted when it goes live.
And here it is, from Scribd. Not sure if I can lawfully embed this though, since it has a traditional copyright notice (why no CC license Chris?). But hey, then don’t offer the embed option I would say 
Looking forward to reading Free, the long awaited book by WIRED main man and digital prophet Chris Anderson, author of the book with the already institutionalized title ‘The Long Tail’. In The Long Tail Anderson argued that the Internet will offer a new future (and bright business opportunities) for all those precious backlist titles and other long lost ephemera, now again findable and traceable thanks to the ultimate search powers of the world wide web. This theory, set out first in an article with the same title, has recently been criticized, but still gives a nice insider view on what the net is really all about: seek and thou shalt find.
Anderson’s new book Free: the future of a radical price, to be released July 7, is also based on an article released previously on/in WIRED. In this article, and more elaborately in the book I presume, Anderson discusses the omnipresence of free on the Internet, giving rise to what many believe is an inherent law of the web: everything online will eventually be free (in Anderson’s words: ‘It’s now clear that practically everything Web technology touches starts down the path to gratis, at least as far as we consumers are concerned’).
But how to make money with free? How to create incentives for people to produce content if everything online is free? How can we build an economy around freemium?
Two nice reviews in the Guardian (here and here) look at the book from different perspectives. The first one is mostly interested in the potential of the web for free business models, as an extension of the public domain. The last on the other hand criticizes Anderson’s lack of attention for what this trend will eventually lead to and this might perhaps have to 
do with the problem of incentives for creating content when everything is free. But as Anderson shows, free does not mean money can not be made in another way (for instance through advertisements, cross-subsidizing, premium services, offering experiences, online vs. offline models etc.). Next to that the principle of the gift economy also plays a large role online. As Anderson states, money is not the only motivator to produce, and our economies are increasingly based on values like respect and time (reputation economy and attention economy). Still, on a very basic, practical level, something does sting here, foremost a lack of certainty that the free will actually make revenue in another way (granted in the old model sales are not certain either). So, I am looking forward to see how Anderson tackles this problem at a less theoretical level. A first preview part of the book has been published on/in WIRED here. Also via WIRED video, you can find a video of Anderson talking about Free underneath. And for the rest the wait is until July 7th.
On a side note: the book has been accused of plagiarism, taking uncredited source material from amongst others Wikipedia. Well, that only shows free has limits. Even free sharing of information still means we need to refer to our sources. Seems to me one of the basics of the reputation economy and this little stunt is definitely harming Anderson’s.
Via Transversalinflections I learned about Re.Press, an Australian publisher of Open Access titles in Philosophy. Their business model is based on a free Open Access edition in combination with print sales, the model at the moment many presses are experimenting with (amongst others: Open Humanities Press, Open Book Publishers, National Academies Press, fellow Australians ANU E Press, Rice University Press, AU Press, and Bloomsbury Academic.
Re.Press already established a wonderful collection of titles, amongst others The concept of model by Alain Badiou, Graham Harman’s new book on Bruno Latour and forthcoming titels on Walter Benjamin and on first love by Sigi Jöttkandt, also co-founder of Open Humanities Press. I especially like Re.Press’s statement from their website:
“In line with this ambition, re.press is itself a new kind of publisher. Attentive to the latest developments in contemporary technologies, re.press publications are available globally, wherever there is access to the internet. We seek to make as many of our publications as possible available as open-access files, free to anyone who wishes to download them. Our hard-copy books are print-on-demand, minimizing waste and cost. Yet our publications also maximize design values, boosting clarity and aesthetic qualities.”
They clearly state in there Open Access policy that they believe, as I concur, that the digital and the print fulfill different functions (at least will do so for the time being) making it possible for them to thrive side-by-side. And this dual existence can even strengthen (traditional) Humanities/Philosophy publishing and scholarly communication :
“Our academic titles are published under an open access licence ensuring 
the greatest possible exposure for our authors’ work through the almost unrestricted distribution channels of the internet. This does not mean that re.press is a digital publisher: we are a publisher of ‘real’ books that are available in bricks and mortar booksellers (as well as on-line retailers). However, our open access titles are also available free of charge in digital form. We do not consider the digital version a replacement for the physical book. On the contrary, we believe that the two mediums perform different functions, offering the best of both worlds. In fact, it is our hope that open access publishing will strengthen traditional publishing and scholarship more broadly by releasing ideas and thinkers from the constraints of the market. You can support our endeavour to make our books widely available as open access titles by encouraging your library to buy a print edition (from the usual sources) or by buying one yourself.”
Via the Re-press link section I discovered another very interesting ‘Ópen Access’ initiative, to be more precise, a record company, called Records on Ribs. They actually seem to bring into practice the Maecenas model I described before (and up to now thought to be kind of hypothetical): they give away their music for free (with Creative Commons licenses) and offer deluxe editions for sale and hope that community support will generate some extra revenues. So they actually take donations targeting the ‘good-music-loving-and-supporting hearts of their community.
I love their manifesto so I am going to publish that integrally here now. Read and weep:
Manifesto
Records on Ribs gives away it’s music for free. Records on Ribs is against nothing. We are not here ‘in reaction’ to anything. We are merely putting into practice what we believe. And this is what we believe… To sell music for profit is to deny its worth. It is to reduce it to numbers, spreadsheets, targets. Desire cannot be quantified thusly. Tapes, CD-Rs and the internet give us the opportunity to distribute music for free without losing significant sums of money.
Anyone could do what we are doing. A free for all. Brilliance obscured by an avalanche of mundanity.
So what? There is an avalanche of mundanity already in the shops, and it costs you £9.99 a go.
We only ask that you listen with open hearts and minds. And if one hundred, one thousand, one million people want to do the same as us then good luck to them. What a world that would be! Desire freed from profit.
We accept donations, but do not expect them. What we do costs us little, but we cannot avoid making a loss. Nor can the artists who have to buy equipment and take time to rehearse, perform and record. Any money you give us will go to loosen these burdens and will be gratefully received.
You can also buy lovingly crafted CD-Rs of our albums (made to order). We like to think they are objects worth owning, because we know you are all commodity fetishists when it comes to music, and an MP3 isn’t quite the same. We are hoping to do vinyl one day in the future.
All the best
The Records On Ribs Team
Are there more record companies working with such a model I wonder? And does it work, does it create enough revenue to be sustainable?
I have been browsing through my old bookmarks and data sources lately and found some interesting things I would like to draw your attention too. First thing is the video underneath on fair use of online video resources from the Center for Social Media at American University. Now what is fair use again? In the accompanying text it says:
“Fair use is the part of copyright law that permits new makers, in some situations, to quote copyrighted material without asking permission or paying the owners. The courts tell us that fair use should be “transformative”—adding value to what they take and using it for a purpose different from the original work. So when makers mash up several works—say, The Ten Commandment , Ben-Hur and 10 Things I Hate about You , making Ten Things I Hate about Commandments —they aren’t necessarily stealing. They are quoting in order to make a new commentary on popular culture, and creating a new piece of popular culture.”
Hmmm, although still vague, the video offers some true potential to online creativity, counter posing strict copyright rules with examples of what exactly is permitted under the nomen of fair use, balance, community codes and prevention of censorship. And it seems quite a lot actually. But how exactly do I know when it’s fair use? The video states ‘so long as you don’t use so much that your work becomes the substitute for the original.’ Or ‘don’t use more than you need to illustrate your point.’ These still seem unclear boundaries to me, but at least fair use rights do offer a lot of opportunities for remix and mashup artists to make an argument for their case. Still ‘this code of best practices does not tell you the limits of fair use rights’, it says on the website. It seems it has to be ‘reasonable’ use. Diving deeper into the explanations on the website.
Remix Culture: Fair Use is your friend
“Fair use is flexible; it is not uncertain or unreliable. In fact, for any particular field of critical or creative activity, lawyers and judges consider expectations and practice in assessing what is “fair” within the field. In weighing the balance at the heart of fair use analysis, judges refer to four types of considerations mentioned in the law: the nature of the use, the nature of the work used, the extent of the use and its economic effect. This still leaves much room for interpretation, especially since the law is clear that these are not the only necessary considerations. In reviewing the history of fair use litigation, we find that judges return again and again to two key questions
1) Did the unlicensed use “transform” the material taken from the copyrighted work by using it for a different purpose than that of the original, or did it just repeat the work for the same intent and value as the original?
2) Was the material taken appropriate in kind and amount, considering the nature of the copyrighted work and of the use?
Both questions touch on, among other things, the question of whether the use will cause excessive economic harm to the copyright owner.”
These guidelines actually give people quite some power to defend their use of copyrighted material, as long as it ‘adds’ something. A report which can also be found on the site ‘points to a wide variety of practices—satire, parody, negative and positive commentary, discussion-triggers, illustration, diaries, archiving and of course, pastiche or collage (remixes and mashups)—all of which could be legal in some circumstances.’
Still, mashups stay contested as the video underneath shows. The discussion continues…
To show a beautiful example of the potential of a remix or collage (or assemblage) of a movie (made as long ago as the early 30’s) you can find underneath part 1 of the mesmerizing work Rose Hobart by Joseph Cornell (which I found through the equally astonishing article ‘Theatre of the spirit: Joseph Cornell and Silence’ by Catherine Corman, in Paul D. Miller’s Sound Unbound). The film is a collage of footage from the 1931 movie East of Borneo, from which the sound was stripped and during live performances accompanied by a record of Brazilian music. The movie is an ode of Cornell to actress Rose Hobart, focusing almost exclusively on the scenes she appears in. Corman quotes Cornell calling the film ‘a communication of her essence as a human being’. Thank god for fair use.
Last Wednesday one of Holland’s most famous and disputed anti-copyright defendants, Joost Smiers, presented his new book (or essay) co-written with partner-in-crime Marieke van Schijndel, at cultural hot-spot De Balie (a former courthouse in Amsterdam). Surrounding the presentation a debate evening was organized based on the utopian notion of ‘imagining a world without copyright’. The essay, entitled Adieu auteursrecht, vaarwel culturele conglomeraten (Goodbye copyright, farewell cultural conglomerates) was presented to economist Arjo Klamer. Klamer gave a sparkling speech – setting the tone for the following discussion – by claiming that Smiers and Van Schijndel’s essay was just not radical enough. By referring to well known numbers (10% of the cultural producers claim 90% of the remits) and hopelessly cumbersome and complicated processes of IPR regulations, upholdings and claimings, Klamer wondered why we even have such a system. He went on to systematically explain how property right is closely intermingled with a product, an object one can trade. This proprietary right is the basis of our market thinking. This market can only function through the merits of a state that enforces this proprietary right. Klamer calls this a conspiracy between the market and the state. He explains that in the utopian thinking of Smiers and Van Schijndel, the abolition of copyright serves mainly to break down the power of the large cultural conglomerates that control the cultural market in order to encourage a fairer system of competition. They claim this would be more democratic, will encourage free communication and will be beneficial for our cultural life.
Klamer wants to go even further. He claims that the authors still grasp too much to the idea of music and art as products. Klamer questions the whole idea of cultural products and product oriented thinking. He claims the way we look at these cultural artifacts or expressions as products is a simple metaphor for our ability to buy them. But artistic expressions are no products, they are ‘words’, they only get their ‘meaning’ when they are uttered, they function in a larger context and in this way are dependent on us, the ‘utterers’, the consumers, the potential readers. His starting point is not the product but the metaphor of the conversation [the term discourse to me sounds even better]. Art is a conversation, music is a conversation, science is a conversation. Nobody owns a conversation; it can be compared with friendship [also an inalienable, tangible good]. A conversation is a good people share together in a community, you cannot enforce it (not even the state), you cannot steel it and you cannot free-ride on it; and it is based on the principle of reciprocity [think of the gift economy about which I will write some more in the future].
But money comes into this system too. Klamer calls this the third sphere, the ‘in-between sphere’. Science still functions like this to a large extent. The scientific community works from the common understanding that knowledge is something we all share, science is the conversation we all build upon. Who owns an idea? Even Nobel Prize winners base their ideas on endless conversations with others. IPR does not do right to this conversation and to the quality of the conversation. In science this problem is solved by the providing of services (Klamer gives the example how in the US many artists have a position at the university were they teach and work. There art work is seen as a kind of service to the community in which art is ‘less commercialized’). Klamer’s final statement: leave the state and the market for what they are and let’s acknowledge cultural expressions for their true value, which is much better realized or finalized in the social space, the ‘third space’ in which communal goods reign. This is the sphere we want to contribute to, from which we can get acknowledgement and establish reputation. For the real and true scarce good is attention. This is what distinguishes the one from the other nine, both in science and in art. This is not a fair system and it will never be a fair system. And this unfairness lies not in the power and the influence of the cultural conglomerates, Klamer states, attacking Smiers and Van Schijndel’s premise; the scarcity of attention is a social phenomenon. This scarcity is also exactly what can be liquidated (see for instance how Damien Hirst plays with this notion). This is not to say that the market and the state should rule this world, and in this sense Klamer states the presented essay is still of the utmost importance. Cultural life exists in the third sphere and is realized in (this) community with others, people who feel committed to a bigger interest instead of in the creation of a product for their own profit. Reciprocity, conversation and attention: that is what this sphere is all about.
After Arjo Klamer finished his speech, Joost Smiers gave a short exposition of the book. He stated that with the abolishment of copyright the market will no longer function as radical around the numbers of one and ten: the public will be much more able to follow their own taste [ignoring the fact I think that the long tail maybe does not exist as recent research has contested]. Smiers does however throw away notions like Creative Commons, stating that they no longer merit the ownership of products and this is an issue he does not want to discuss. He does not believe we should do away with the ownership of cultural goods [on a side note, I feel Smiers is conflating Creative Commons licenses, which are alternative copyright license and thus still centre around the notion of ownership, with the more radical parts of the free culture and free information movement. They are interlinked but not the same!]. Smiers asked the question what will happen to the market once we abolish copyright, how will the market function? He strongly believes entrepreneurial people will be needed in such a new system and this will offer opportunities for those who are active.
In the first debate Annelys de Vet (graphic designer at the Sandberg Institute) and Nirav Christophe (lector theatrical creation processes and open dramaturgy) engaged with each other and the public. De Vet argued that copyright is a closed manner of handling things; it is a standstill opposed to an open movement. Artists don’t design products, they create processes in a context of processual design in which they are part of a larger whole. Artists don’t quote; they are part of a dialogue or a conversation. Copyright is based on a world of fear where she wants to work and collaborate in a world based on trust. Christophe concurs that theater is foremost a dialogue and thus serves as a good metaphor for the evenings debate. For theatre is always a half-product: as a theater writer your play only comes into existence once it is finished by others. A theatre writer is used to people making adaptations to his texts, making their own interpretations; it makes the texts better. Theatre does not create products, it creates processes. Christophe states that copyright is foremost also a philosophical problem. What is the relationship of the author to his text? Is the text yours? Since Roland Barthes and the death of the author it is no longer maintainable that texts produced by an author are the possession of that author. Only the experience of them being read or uttered, the interaction, makes them come alive. A cultural experience is only created during a certain amount of time in a process that is often created together with others, even together with the public.
De Vet thus concludes that art should be seen as a dialogue, as a process. The oeuvre of an artist consists of all kinds of different moments, in which the links between these moments create the meaning and this is not linkable back to a product. There is so much pressure on artists nowadays to be original, and so much fear to appropriate, to copy. Yet De Vet encourages this, it will still be different, it will always be used in a different context, it will follow another trajectory. Being unique and signing your work can go hand in hand with the above attitude, they are not each others opposites. Many people are involved in the creation of a design; design is about the creation of a dialogue. Copyright has no relevance in this process, claims De Vet. Christophe concurs and states this is a more realistic view of the modern artist than the romantic 19th century conception of the individual performer. De Vet and Christophe see the economic difficulties of their notions but are up to the challenge of thinking in different ways.
Questions from the audience phrased the fear of plagiarism: what if one copies or steals my work? What if I get ‘screwed over’? As we know from the debate between Habermas and Foucault, conversations are not always open and honest. This is a way to idealist stance. De Vet replied that no system is perfect, in a 1 to10 system people are ‘screwed over’ too. She wants to keep a positive stance based on trust. Media sociologist Jaap van Ginneken replied by stating that under the current copyright system Walt Disney steals everything and then patents it again as its own. Even the Lion King is an adaptation of a Japanese story. So big business seems very efficient in screwing you over too. Joost Smiers remarked that for wrongful appropriation (for instance by a fascist regime) you have alternative laws, you do not need copyright for that. Next to that a system of shaming will probably develop. Other mechanisms will thus develop to maintain the system
In the second debate we met Hans Abbing, emeritus professor in art sociology and Jan-Willem Sligting, programmer at Paradiso and musician. Sligting remarked that copyright is such a different concept where it covers multiple domains, from law to philosophy and economy. Referring to Thomas More and Utopia, he states that a world without copyright will unfortunately just be that: an utopia. But Abbing dives into this make believe world, stating the time is ripe: copyright is increasingly contested online and the current economic crisis urges for the need of equal playing fields. First of all it will improve the situation of artists, where their incomes while become more equal. But most of all the consumer will benefit. There will be more space for diversity and niches. But Abbing also doubts this fantasy. Diversity is not inherently connected to copyright. A society can only handle a certain amount of diversity: you cannot know the details of everything. We need to trust on others, on selection, our attention span is always crooked. The consumer wants selection and we shouldn’t trust too much on the premise of ‘small is beautiful’. And what about that level playing field? How does this relate to different regions on a world scale? We also need big corporations. We should just as well fear social monopolies. Don’t underestimate the power of funders for instance.
Klamer still emphasizes the benefits of contributing to something that is bigger than you. In science and religion the financing is done by way of gifts (gift economy), which according to him is a very valuable system as we are reimbursed for our services. According to Abbing however, gifts only work in small societies on a personal level. Gifts on the Internet will never have a real shape, this will not work according to him.
Sligting however mentions initiatives like Fabchannel and SellaBand which have business models which are centered on the community. Abbing states that there are a lot of experiments going on but that they need to be based on reciprocity, people will not just donate something, and they want to feel connected to a cause. Simple commercial artifacts (t-shirts, stickers) already help a lot.
Arjo Klamer remarks that science is also totally based on reciprocity: services for reputation. There is however a fierce strive for recognition in this field. This situation is very similar to the independent arts; Klamer claims that such a reciprocal model will be very well applicable to this sector too. Using copyright in this realm is abnormal, it does not work like that in other cultures and it should thus not be norm giving. We need to be more creative with how we establish value. Think about the potential of deluxe editions.
Comments from the crowd focused on the elitism of the debate: not all art is equal, the 1/10 rule is there for a reason, simply because not all works are good. We also need to discuss quality in this context. With a final statement Joost Smiers ended the debate, using the scientific metaphor of the paradigm shift: if a model no longer works we need another one. A world without copyright is not imaginary. We need to break through this dominance to establish a more normal and competitive market in which more people will earn more money. Smiers’ goal is to support this notion with hard figures. It is not an utopia. Smiers wants to create alternative business models and will keep developing them in the future.
My feeling about the evening was that from a theoretical point of view it hopelessly complicated matters and on a practical level didn’t offer any solutions. Although the debate an sich was very interesting, I think the attack on the big conglomerates by Smiers and Van Schijndel should not be the primary goal of the abolishment of copyright. I feel the fierce attacks on the state and the market that were uttered during the evening (notwithstanding the fact that their powers and reach might actually be too large) unnecessarily complicated the issue, and made it more disputed than it already is. Compare the debate between Lawrence Lessig and Kevin Kelly in which Kelly compared Web 2.0 with socialism (I agree with Lessig in this matter).
Even if we accept the notion of art as a process and dialogue, this does not mean we have to do away with the big companies and commercialization. Making money with their work, in what way they deem fit is still a free choice of creative producers, and commercialization of an experience economy, more akin to the processual and fluxual nature of the current art procedure, is already well on its way. This is why I applaud initiatives like Fabchannel, SellaBand and also Creative Commons, who, on an alternative note, try to create new business models based on sharing, community and reciprocity. Without loosing the option to liquidize these created values. This criticism connects to that of the confused public, which during the evening continually begged for practical solutions and did not receive any. The debate remained too theoretical on many levels, without offering truly new potentials. And doing away with initiatives like Creative Commons, that in a very practical manner try to do something refreshing with the whole IPR problem, to me seems just stupid. The total lack of references to new business models by Smiers and Van Schijndel was also very disappointing. Maybe the practical solutions can be found in their book, however, it is not available Open Access on the net and unfortunately, after this evening, I felt neither compelled nor convinced to buy the book. Felt kind of like a lost chance….
For some time now (and more pressing recently) I have been exploring the possible future of the monograph, of the academic book, in the Humanities. The transition of this tangible medium to a digital environment is one that is (necessarily) slow and cumbersome, due to its strong ties to traditions, habits, practices and honor and reward systems in the aforementioned scholarly field. But also the fixity of the text and the easy practicality of the codex format are factors that have to be taken into consideration when thinking about the benefits of the printed book. How can we make a smooth shift, how can we ensure an easy transition for the monograph from print to digital, without loosing these obvious advantages?
There are quite some experiments going on online in the field (or rather the discipline) of ‘Digital Humanities’. When it comes to adapting the academic book to the web I distinguish three forms of adaptations (each link leads to an example):
These are very broad categories of course but let me explain the logic behind these divisions. The first focuses mainly on experiments with the format, using the possibilities of new digital media tools to present the text in a multi-medial, modal, in different ways approachable manner. The second is an example of new ways of collaboration and internal cooperation of Humanities scholars online. The third example shows how connections can also be made with the community at large, with the wider network of scholars, students and otherwise interested readers. It offers an outreach to a wider community.
All three are also examples of ‘remix practice’ or of remix culture:
- mixing of media
- mixing of ‘authored texts’ within a formal communication context
- mixing of ‘user generated content’ within an informal communication
context
All three different categorization can be seen as new ways of expanding the narrative of the monograph in a ‘remixed’ manner or fashion. The stable form of the text based version gets challenged by the input of ‘foreign’ elements, be they from other narratives, other voices or other discourses. These elements are then inserted (or not really ‘inserted’ as they have increasingly been part of the creation process from the start) into the narration in a continual manner, melting together into a new never-ending ever-updateable ‘form’. We can also go beyond these categorizations, where there is the possibility to include all three forms of experimentation in one ‘digital humanities project’ or ‘publication’: a web-based wiki-shaped networked narrative. Will this be the future of digital scholarship in the Humanities?
All three forms of experimentation still offer the possibility to create or extract a ‘solid form’, a stable published text, whilst at the same time they give an increased insight into knowledge creation, into the process of Humanities scholarship and communication as it grows and forms and gathers strength and form. In this way these experiments form a beautiful bridge between product and process, between the old and the new, between print and digital, holding on to the best of the print past and the possibilities of the digital future. Monographic experiments as a new monographic potentiality.
Brett Gaylor, the director of the Open Source documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto, is experimenting with the ‘Maecenas model’ (by others dubbed the ‘pay–as-you-like’ or Radiohead/NIN model) while launching his documentary online as a free download. I have written about RiP before here and since then the (CC licensed) feature length film has only gained more popularity and media attention.
WIRED dedicated a whole article, consisting of an interview with Gaylor, on the movie and discusses its business model, the release and popularity of the movie and the ‘copyfight movement’ Gaylor is involved in.
Why would Gaylor choose the Maecenas model? When we consider other possible free online content (or Open Access) business models, the Maecenas model does seem to be a more logical model than the model I wrote about yesterday which Bloomsbury Academic is applying to Lawrence Lessig’s book Remix. For in this model there is a clear cut end product, a printed book that can be bought to cover the costs for the production and the free online dissemination of the product. In the case of RiP, this seems a less logical path to follow: the whole idea behind this documentary movie is of course that there is no end product: in the process of continually remixing, reediting and mashing-up the material RiP consists of, the documentary could better be seen as a (continuous) project than a product. As WIRED states: ‘in the realities of remix culture, where there is no such thing as a final cut’. This of course does not mean that certain ‘snapshots’ of the documentary can not be ’materialized’ and sold as products to cover for the costs. And Gaylor does this too, releasing DVD versions of the movie and showing his documentary in a theatrical run at movie theaters and festivals. So in a way, he is betting on two horses. However, Gaylor’s alternative choice for the Maecenas model seems very interesting for the current project. In this specific case it seems like a very good idea to apply this community based model, where RiP collected quite a large network of remix collaborators and enthusiasts around its project core and attracted lot of similar minded folks interested in the goals and values Gaylor tries to spread and promote with his movie, who might definitely be interested in promoting this project further.
However, one of the additional problems of financing and even possibly profiting from such an inherent collaborative and community based project is how to divide the costs and the benefits? As Gaylor states in the WIRED interview:
“But since we have so many partners that helped us make the film, including theatrical and television distributors, it was a delicate balancing act to make sure the good faith they showed in making the film would be rewarded, that we wouldn’t undercut their efforts to promote and recoup on the film by giving it away.”
This of course also refers to the problem of attribution in such an ‘authorless documentary’ or collaborative approach: who will get the money? Will it go to Gaylor, (who of course in this case is still very much the master mind and creative brain behind the project) will it go to the foundation Open Source Cinema, which Gaylor has founded?
For Gaylor this does not seem to be the biggest problem however. His goal is to make the documentary as largely available as possible, arguing that that should be what copyright should be about in the first place. Gaylor in WIRED:
“We’ve gone to really great lengths to make this film as accessible as possible,” […]“It’s already on the Pirate Bay, and that’s great — it’s another delivery format. We didn’t put it there ourselves, though; we didn’t need to. Had we gone that route, it’s fairly likely, given the realities of the film-distribution universe, that we wouldn’t have these other opportunities to get the film to people who still watch TV, rent DVDs or go to movies, which is, in fact, most people. We wanted those people to watch this movie.”
When asked about his views on copyright he favors a balance between creating an incentive for producers and at the same time creating as wide accessibility to the consumer population as possible:
“The classic copyright ones: Providing an incentive, while at the same time ensuring the public’s access to the work. Ultimately, that’s what I, and most people in this movement, are pushing for — a balance. So the film release was a lot more “free as in speech” than it was “free as in beer,” because it was important for me that average folks could see the film on TV or in theaters. And eventually, after a limited term (measured in months!), the film will fall into the public/pirate domain and be copied freely.”
Gaylor also has some interesting thoughts about the future of remix culture and business models concerning movie distribution in such a context. He talks about going to the cinema as maybe becoming a (money making) experience event on the same scale as going to a concert. This could then serve as a way to cover for the costs that will be lost when the content will be available as a free download or as a pirated version:
“We’ll see how I feel about that in a year. The remixing is just starting to take off, and I envision a time when these sorts of interactions will create an environment where a theatrical screening is to filmmakers what live performances are to musicians. The ability to create something unique for a particular screening or event allows you to offer an added value to that audience member, as well as have something unique that’s different from what you can get on a DVD or online.”
And this is interesting indeed, while things might be increasingly online for free the logical option seems to be to charge for events that are unique and cannot be recreated in a ‘reproductive’ manner in an online environment. And this means that, paradoxically enough (or is it even that paradoxical?), Event becomes a capitalist commodity, whereas that what can be reproduced and spread easily online will more and more become available for free. Talk about turning around your business model.
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