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I am running a bit behind on my conference and symposium notes, but here are a few of my observations based on the screening of ‘RIP: A Remix Manifesto’, by Brett Gaylor, at CoDE a few weeks ago. I wrote about RIP before here and here. The screening was followed by an interesting panel discussion between Bill Thompson, Becky Hogge, John Naughton, Jussi Parikka and Geoff Gamlen.
The discussion focused mainly on three themes: remix culture, copyright and business models. Concerning remix culture, the idea was discussed whether culture can be narrowed down to re-mixing or sampling. What about original ideas? As Geoff Gamlen stated, without originality, we will end up in a cultural vacuum. Remix is still quite important, but it focuses more on adding value or re-contextualising things. Remix is an example of collaborative culture more in general and collaboration as a process of culture creation and/or production. These processes are new and at the same time very old, where Henry Jenkins has for instance shown that 19th century folk production was also build on these principles. As Bill Thompson however remarked, it seems that the current media does not want this kind of collaborative production. This has led to, as Jussi Parikka explained, a culture wars. As the documentary showed, you can’t stop copying.
On the issue of how to create revenue from remixes or remixing, Becky Hogge remarked remix is also used as a capitalizing/commodifying idea. However, labor time going into remixes needs to be compensated in some way, and as Jussi explained, we need business models for this. Big corporations are also incorporating open source. Open source has become a business model that can be applied by different people and companies from various backgrounds.
Next John Naughton touched upon the third theme of the larger copyright system. He described how the debate is derailed: file sharing is not automatically theft. There is nothing wrong with copyright but the copyright system in this world is obscene at the moment, John claimed. The current copyright regime is completely unfit for purpose, as the documentary has also shown. Bill argued that this is a deficiency in the democratic process; we thus need to focus on congregational change. The legislation machine is not listening to the requests for reform. Becky recalled her experiences as a legislation lobbyer for the open rights movement and stated how everything revolves around money: copyright is bought by intense lobbying operations which influence legislation.
Going back to the theme of revenue from remixes and remixing, Geoff remarked how the current system is inhibiting, as he would very much like to sell the work that he makes with his collective. He explains how they found other ways to make a living other than releasing remixes. According to Geoff they have never found any opposition from copyright owners.
Returning to the theme of remix culture, John asked whether remix unchecked is the end of originality. This is the rhetoric of people like Jaron Lanier. But as John remarked, there is no way to stop people from being creative. This also poses the question whether creativity is only fuelled by the money that comes from copyright; to what extend are creative people motivated by money?
On the theme of copyright again, the question of moral rights came up. Does a creator have inalienable rights to control the way her or his creative expressions are used? Are moral rights still relevant in the digital age? Jussi explained how this leads back to an ontological point about creativity. We always create from a reservoir of culture, think for instance about language and sound. So even if you have moral rights, this does not mean you control the next step. But what if, as Geoff stated, if it is not possible to control it anymore, your cultural contribution becomes a characteristic part of a remix you don’t agree with?
Returning again to business models, Becky claimed the film did not really tie up the idea of how to pay/reward people for their work. As the great corporations do not let alternative business models come to the rise, they actually make piracy happen, she claimed. John remarked how the film as a political argument reaches a large number of people by focusing on remix culture. But it likewise misses a large group of people: everyone over 40. They don’t see the importance of remix culture, according to John. The film also does not really focus on how remix applies to other or older parts of culture. Every vibrant culture continuously borrows from what comes before.
Going back to the models bit, the discussion returned to the question of who makes money out of remix? As Geoff explained, Girltalk for instance gets paid for being a DJ, not for publishing his work. It is a rare thing to get paid for remixing. As Jussi remarked, this is not something uncommon, there are only very few artists and writers (as well as academics) who actually make money with what they do, most of them can’t live of their work. Geoff commented that there must be a way to think out a digital rights system that works and at the same time provides money for cultural producers. Jussi described how capitalism functions as an absorption machine; it absorbs contradictory mechanisms. Remixing seems to be adverse but corporations are slowly coming up with business models to incorporate remixing. Remix is thus not anti-capitalist, and as Geoff added as a final remark, it is not against corporate interests at all.
TXTual Healing by Paul Notzold
Last week I attended a fascinating roundtable at Kingston University London which focused mainly on the position of electronic literature within the literary and artistic field and within academia more in specific. The roundtable, entitled From the page to the screen to augmented reality: new modes of language-driven mediated research, had as one of its preconceptions the idea that electronic literature is not given the attention and with that the status it deserves, especially within literary criticism. Within electronic literature one can say there is a very broad understanding of language in a multi-modular way. With the use of new technologies in language-mediated practices, new research platforms and research methods are being explored which has led to a rich variety of products. What unites creative practitioners and researchers is their exploration of the word and the abstract character of language and its materiality in different media in an experimental practice. The main question remains: why isn’t this work part of a more mainstream platform?
This question was one of the main topics of the keynote speech by Jay David Bolter entitled Elite and popular: digital art and literature in an era of social and locative media. Bolter paid specific attention in his talk to the cultural position of digital literature focusing on two major questions:
- How does digital literature relate to the traditional (academic) literary community or to the traditional art community?
- How does it fit into our culture’s media practices today?
To explore the first question, Bolter recollects one of the oldest debates on digital literary forms, the debate on hypertext in the 80′s and early 90′s. Recalling an 1992 NYT article by Robert Coover as a representative of the hypertext movement, it was thought hypertext could create a revolution in reading and writing. The reaction of the literary community to that claim could be seen as hostile and defensive: hypertext takes from the author the authorial voice. And, as Bolter states, although digital literature has developed and changed in manifold ways—blurring boundaries—the response of the literary community has not changed. Interestingly enough Bolter claims that where the academic community has ignored digital literature, within the art community digital art has had a more welcome incorporation. Although digital artists even so complain that they are not getting the recognition they deserve, the digital art community is much more involved in a dialogue with the wider art community than the digital literature community with the wider literary community. Bolter explains this situation by pointing out that art has from the beginning been opening up to multimedia and has been expanding its domain to that which was available, extending the definition of what constitutes art at the same time. Because of this specific precondition, digital art has had it easier to connect to these evolving conditions.
Screen. Installation by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Andrew McClain, Shawn Greenlee, Robert Coover, and Joshua Carroll. Video by Michelle Higa
When we look at the dialogue between electronic literature and the literary academy, the latter community has not been of much help. As Bolter states, the literary academic community does not want to concern itself with the questions brought up by experiments with electronic literature because of the specific cultural position literary scholarship has occupied. This cultural position is reflected in the tight relationship between the technology of print and the cultural research practice of literary academics. This is the kind of scholarship that can be defined as print scholarship. Paraphrasing Elizabeth Eisenstein, Bolter recollects that modern textual scholarship came about with the coming of the printing press. Modern textual scholarship is strongly coupled to the notion of fixity, to the notion of a stable text and author and to scholarly precision in the fixity of the text. So the printing press became the necessary tool for the kind of scholarship that developed. And, as Bolter argues, today the literary academy is still very much defined by the kind of practices that are defined by this fixity and stability of texts. This is also visible in digital text editions and digital scholarship which try to emulate the printed text, for instance the Perseus Project. The print methods are adopted in the digital world as scholarly traditions of the classics are being refashioned. And as Bolter points out, digital technology is particularly effective in doing this. The digital technology can even be said to be better than the printing press in preserving, transmitting and fixing by the use of digital technology.
Perseus Project
Before the start of the workshop the participants were send a list of questions to focus on (which you can find here). Bolter breaks these questions down into two streams
1. Questions on the formal/material and questions on the medium
Bolter claims that the literary community is not interested in both these questions where their focus remains on the printed text. However, electronic literature is not so much interested in emulating print literature. This idea of born-digital text re-mediating printed text was a phase common in the very beginning of electronic literary experimentation. Yet, as Bolter states, today electronic literature has evolved. Not even purely verbal digital texts are interested in mirroring printed text anymore. Electronic literature has become much more interested in the mixing of modalities. This has led to the question whether electronic literature is (still) literature or whether it is or has become art. A comparison is currently made between (experimental) electronic literature and the historical avant-garde, especially there where it concerns thinking about digital forms. However, as Bolter argues, seeing electronic literature in the light of this tradition is a phase within the development of digital literature that are we are moving beyond now as well. Nowadays the study of the materiality of the digital is central to the thinking about digital literature (like it is with other media forms). Where in the print era the focus would be on media specific analysis and on the technology of inscription, nowadays the focus is on multi-modality and the mixing of forms rather than on the plurality of forms. As Bolter claims, the literary academic community will not be off much help here either. His recommendation is to turn to the art community, where they have been thinking about the condition of the medium, in a multi-medial way, for many many years and where they have developed a solid body of criticism and theory to help us.
2. Questions of cultural practice and research.
Again here, Bolter claims, the kind of questions the traditional academic community wants to have answered are not well-related to the development of literary technology. For instance the tools they want to use for research are still very much focused on thinking about text in a print-based way: they focus on lexicography, archiving, philology etc. and not on the new practices that the digital informs. Once more Bolter states, the contemporary art scene and community are the places to look at for interesting dialogue.
Simon Biggs – reRead, Interactive Installation 2009
Bolter goes on to discuss the second question stated at the beginning of his talk: ‘How does digital literature fit into our culture’s media practices today?’ Here he turns to the practices commonly associated with web 2.0 or social media as another possible solution. We are experiencing new forms of digital communication on an enormous scale. These are facets of digital culture that form the popular background for any form of cultural production. As Bolter explains, this plenitude of contemporary media culture is increasingly hard to encompass in a general way. The main reason for this is ‘the loss of centrality’. We don’t really have a center for our culture anymore when it has become so diverse. There are now so many consumers, producers, and modes of production. It is increasingly difficult to claim that there is any form or practice that occupies a centrality. As Bolter clarifies, this is not any different from the situation in the 20th century, but we may have a different sense now of our cultural condition: we are drifting from the print era to a multimedia condition. In the era of print we still had the hope or aspiration of a cultural center. Again this relates to idea that we could fix our culture, that there are certain things that have centrality for our culture. Digital media make us aware of this plenitude perhaps in a way we did not know existed before. We now become aware of the many different forms that are available, non of which comprehend the digital community. We now have more users/producers than with any previous literary form. There are also many new forms that are just beginning to make an impression, like for instance augmented reality technologies, which allow us to write on the world. By writing in a mark-up language we are creating augmented reality experiences that create environments and we overlay these over real spaces. These kind of user created environments add again to this plenitude.
Still from TXTual Healing by Paul Notzold
As Bolter repeats, we have so many choices now in terms of media forms and expressions that we cannot claim centrality anymore. What constitutes art in this domain when we have writing forms available to millions of people who do not necessarily participate in art communities? Bolter mentions the example of TXTual Healing created by Paul Notzold which mixes ‘elite’ and ‘popular’. The question is, is this art? Is it literature? Does it matter? Is that still a question we need to ask? Bolter argues for an expanded notion of digital writing, one that is not interested in connecting to any literary or artistic community but one that sees digital writing as a new media practice that loosens itself from these stamps,
For his concluding remarks Bolter focuses on the future of literature. The strong institutional inertia can enable literary forms in print to develop continuously. One consequence of this is that literature will be one of the limited types of writing that remains committed to print where so much more writing is connected to new media. This will be detrimental to literature’s status as it necessarily marginalizes itself if it stays committed to this medium. And if literature self stays anchored to print so the literary academy will also stay anchored in a kind of research that remains committed to print. Should digital literature set out a dialogue with the academic community to set out a new path and cultural practice? Bolter argues for another strategy: digital literature should set up a dialogue with the arts community and should focus on popular writing practices. It should relinquish the role of ‘the avant-garde of literature’ and it should find itself committed to other forms of dialogue with more popular forms of writing.
rr ii, by Joerg Piringer is a visualized sound poetry or a sonified visual poem. the material of the acoustic and visual part consists only of electronically modified representations of the sound R.
What interested me the most in the debate that followed after Bolter’s keynote is how much it is akin to the debate surrounding the digital monograph in the Humanities (and to the debate surrounding the Digital Humanities more in general) in the sense that it very much focused on the issue of what defines electronic literature, the power struggles that revolve around this process of defining, and the question what kind of strategical position electronic literature should uptake.
Another similarity I found whilst listening to the discussions between the electronic text practitioners and researchers, with respect to the discourse surrounding the digital monograph is that also in the field of electronic literature the discussion can be stripped down and analyzed on three different levels: a medial level, an institutional level and a political economy level. In the following I shall try to summarize my notion of what the roundtable discussion was about along these three lines.
Still from Still Standing by Bruno Nadeau and Jason E. Lewis
The discussion on the medium focused mostly on how to redefine reading in a digital environment. Where are readers now and what are readers? The new generation seems to be lost on print literature. A whole new generation emerges that no longer reads in the traditional sense. Bolter reposed this statement by stating that text still has a strong position within education. This has lead to a situation in which many students don’t now how to read digital literature. A new reading logic needs to be developed, or a new logic of reading with which you start from scratch with every new project. This reading logic is also more than with print-based text very much connected to the body. We read a digital text differently because we interact with it. we loose something of its signification but we also gain things between the signification of the text and its manipulation. Digital text focuses more on play and esthetics. For instance in the work Still Standing, by and Bruno Nadeau and Jason E. Lewis, the meaning of the text lies in the body’s interaction with text in space. But perhaps the problem is not (only) with the reader but also with the writer. Interaction design is not a strong feature in most digital literature pieces. When a complicated use-interface is used, this is a problem of the writer and not of the reader. Finally the discussion centered on the problem of defining electronic literature where it is very much coupled to the idea of print, where for centuries literature was actually oral. There is actually a difference between textuality and literature.
Still from Birds Singing other Birds Songs, by Maria Mencia.jpg
In the discussion on how to define electronic literature within an institutional setting the statement was made that if electronic literature does not establish a connection with print, it will never get established as literature. This connection with art that Bolter proposes, turns it into a separate category. Maybe we should focus on a third space in which connections are sought both with the art world as well as with the literary aristocracy. This third space within an institutional setting could focus on digital culture where it can connect to broader forms of digital textuality. In this way electronic literature does not necessarily have to loose its ‘literaryness’. This third space is not about creating a new field but about re-conceptualizing the idea of electronic literature and asking different questions. This third space could also rise above the division made within the traditional academic community between theory and practice and the institution’s suspicion of practitioners. It could focus on interdisciplinarity and practical experimentation. The problem also has to do with the institutional difference between Art and Humanities departments. As a researcher-practitioner, are you in Arts or in the Humanities? It is about creating a new space within the institution. For now digital literature is hidden away in different spots within the university, from the literary department to the department of media or computer science.
As Scott Rettberg explains, the choice for the term electronic literature was a strategic choice, instead of going for a definition like a ‘language-based digital art form’ in which the idea of text as a specific material (like clay/paint etc.) would have been lost. As Rettberg states, digital textuality/electronic literature was a successful institutional strategy to frame it. Not that it is not digital art or that it is a fundamentally different thing, but we should have a lens that borrows something from the literary tradition.
Another part of the debate on the institutional context focused on how to establish quality criteria for electronic literature. How does a research-practice fit within the academic framework? What constitutes peer review for a performative piece, an installation, for electronic literature, and how do you get that recognized within an institutional framework? How can we create new peer review structures? How do you both fulfill academic ánd artistic criteria? How do we create interesting opportunities for practitioners to create work together, collaborative, and to learn techniques and strategies within an institutional setting? How do we create a new methodology?
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz demo video by Joerg Piringer
The discussion on the position of electronic literature within the publishing industry and the wider realm of scholarly communication focused on the usual topics, from the debate of how to position oneself in the spectrum of closed and open models, to issues of copyright, governance and ownership of material. It also focused on the ubiquity and lack of transparency of various new media of publishing like Facebook. Are these the places were electronic literature should focus on, is that were they should be publishing? But what about the control over people’s data? Should we claim back these spaces as public spaces, or should we subvert these big company owned environments?
The discussion delved deeper into issues of openness and accessibility. Electronic text practitioners that work within a university setting have the opportunity to make their work openly available because they already have a salary, which in a way gives them the opportunity to be experimental. The problem is however that the present publishing system obliges you to give away your copyright. Within the Electronic Literature Organization however, they use a Creative Commons License [see update underneath]. The problem is that you can’t just put your work on the web, you need to think about copyright issues. This problem becomes more urgent when we think about developing economic structures for creative-practitioners outside of (or on partly within) academia. The culture of free can be detrimental for practitioners outside of the university. What kind of value does free put on your work? On the other hand you could argue that the economic value of art does not only lie in a consumable product (this is a very 19th century economic model), it lies in many things, amongst others in the process of creation and the context in which it is produced and exhibited. Also new models are being set up which recognize this problem and which try to find a solution. Still, the models are most likely going to change. As an electronic writer you need to become a strategic producer within this new framework.
The Electronic Literature Organization hosts many beautiful works on their website. You can find some stunning collections here, here, and here.
Update 02-08-2010:
Davin Heckman from the Electronic Literature Organization was kind enough to provide me with some additional information about the ELD and its copyright license by mail. Underneath a digest of his email.
The ELD does not publish any works except the brief, descriptive entries themselves. As the ELD Handbook states:”Basically, if you write them, you are free to publish it elsewhere as you wish. In addition, the work published here is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported license: <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/>. In a nutshell, this means that others will be free to use your work for non-commercial purposes as long they provide appropriate attribution and do not alter it (unless, of course, you give them permission to do so).”
The ELO provides the umbrella for the ELD and ELC. Basically, the ELC and ELD are two separate projects. The ELC is a peer-reviewed venue for publishing works of electronic literature, to give artists a venue for publication, to give new readers an interesting way “in” to the field. The ELD is much more open in terms of what we can index. There is, however, an editorial process in place to make sure that the entries themselves meet certain criteria that might make them suitable for use in scholarly projects. The ELD is more of a bibliographic project, geared towards providing a user-built guide to the field as a whole.
Or better yet, who should own research? Last Thursday CRASSH―the Cambridge based institute for Cultural Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities―assembled an expert panel from the publishing and library community to tackle this question. Linda Bree (Cambridge University Press), Rupert Gatti (Open Book publishers), Gary Hall (Open Humanities Press) and Elin Stangeland (DSpace Cambridge), engaged in a discussion with the CRASSH Postdoctoral community on copyright and ownership of research. The exchange soon evolved into a wider debate on subjects as diverse as authorship, (Open Access) publishing and business models, peer review, branding and credibility, and deposit mandates and PhD theses. Google Books, Internet control and plagiarism also seeped into the discussion. The atmosphere was open and the crowd in a problem-solving mood. All the more surprising (and fulfilling) considering the fact that the principles of the panelists and the audience could be located on a sliding-scale from more traditional to highly experimental.
Linda Bree described herself as “the one in traditional publishing”, which, according to her, entails giving away forms of control. By default, she explains, the system revolves around the single author doing a substantial research (preferably in the form of a book). This research is then reviewed, published, disseminated and marketed. The researcher gains in this process by gathering career benefits, where the publisher receives a financial gain―which in academic publishing mostly means not going bankrupt. So, Bree explains, we find ourselves in a semi-commercial situation. In this context the publisher is not so much involved content-wise, but s/he does have a big say in the way research gets presented. This is an important aspect of the publisher’s work and is based on the possibility of presenting a work within certain financial limits. Because all of the above mentioned processes cost money, from reviewing to marketing. And they are all essential in the end for the scholar to, as Bree calls it, get a “nice published book” and to achieve the idea of “I wrote this”.
Although you could say that giving away this amount of control over one’s work costs quite a lot for an author, Bree defends her and CUP’s position by stating that the transference off control to the publisher is a necessary process. The publisher has invested money along the way and needs to attain revenue. And CUP does give some rights to re-use the work (often fee-based). However, the current technological changes in the publishing process have now given individual scholars the possibility to assert more control over their research (through Open Access and electronic publishing). The individual scholar now has much more choices than in the traditional model (which as Bree admits, is in many ways not sufficient anymore). The seminal question an author thus needs to ask himself is what kind of added value traditional publishing gives him (in forms of branding and other benefits) and whether this is worth the loss of control?
Elin Stangeland from DSpace Cambridge explains the special position Cambridge scholars have in the UK, where they (and not their universities) actually hold the copyright to their research. Giving away forms of control can take place in various settings, as an author can also give a publisher a license to publish (as with a Creative Commons license). Other options for a scholar to keep more in-control include publishing your work with an Open Access book or journal publisher (according to Stangeland, half of the journals in the DOAJ are HSS journals) and self archiving. Scholars can also try to retain their rights from a publisher. Often traditional publishers—like CUP—also provide a hybrid option, where the author can opt to make his specific work openly available. DSpace—which can both be used for books and articles—takes care of the storage and dissemination of the researchers work. They also offer services and advice, like the copyright toolbox (developed by SURF and JISC), and provide information on funders’ policies concerning self-archiving requirements. And they are looking ahead, actively thinking about the archiving of research data (and the management hereof), new citation and reward systems for publishing in the digital humanities and developments concerning the social and semantic web.
Rupert Gatti explained how he—an economist at Trinity College—started Open Book Publishers out of frustration: publishers were not responding quickly enough to the digital developments. Publishers will not sell books they deem to be in un-publishable areas (even though they match their quality criteria) and if they are published, these books are only bought by elite libraries in the west. But the POD revolution and the Internet brought new possibilities to disseminate research. And as Gatti states, dissemination is an important justification of research. Society needs access to research, were the current model prevents dissemination. Open Book publishers takes another route where their publications are completely searchable though Google Books and authors and readers have the freedom to transform and distribute the research. As publishers they have a non-exclusive right to publish (via a CC license). And they don’t give in on the quality aspect: OPB’s books are just as rigorously peer-reviewed as books in the traditional model. OPB is not for profit (and in case they do make a profit they share it 50/50 with their authors) and for a large part counts on the work of volunteers. And they take care of the ‘lap value’, as Gatti calls it, where they publish (affordable) hard and paperback copies of their publications—using the same printer as CUP does, Gatti adds. As Gatti concludes, there are alternatives to the traditional model and they are growing quickly.
After shortly describing the development of the Open Humanities Press—an international Open Access publishing collective—Gary Hall focused on one of the more experimental projects the press is undertaking. For next to more traditional forms of publication, OMP wants to experiment—through its Liquid Book Series—with changing the physical conception of the monograph. Liquid books offer open editing and free/libre content on a Read/Write basis and can for instance consist of a collage of different media and texts; snippets, pages, references, podcasts, youtube clips, etc.. This form of publishing directly confronts the idea of the author. Remembering Barthes, Hall explains how by giving a text an author, we at the same time give it a limit. Liquid Books are an experiment with the decentralization of the author. In a way this decentralization is already on its way. With the massive rise of authorship through the online medium the (discourse on the) author has again become more open, decentralized and distributed. With Google as our major spotlight and Internet filter, the performers of different roles (authors, editors, compilers) are not always identifiable. Everyone is potentially an author or an editor online.
The discussion that followed focused for a large part on the differences between the traditional subscription and the new Open Access models. Worries about the sustainability of Open Access models and their quality assurance were systematically taken away by the panelists. As all panelists confirmed and agreed upon, there is no such thing as one sustainable model for publishing books. In the future there is likely to be a mix of eclectic models with various revenue sources. Where it comes to quality standards, Gatti for one emphasized that the thorough peer review methods of OBP confirm to the highest standards (comparable to those of CUP for instance). Bree however emphasized that for young authors—publishing their first book—the brand of a publisher also plays an important role. She clearly advised young authors to think about this when making their choice on where to publish. Gatti replied by stating that the more open availability of Open Access publications (and in OBP’s case the lower pricing of their print books) is also an important aspect of the marketing and dissemination of publications.
In this respect it is again about the added value of the publisher and about which addition you value the most. And as this seminar showed, with the increased possibilities for authors to publish their research online, publishing is now more than ever about making choices. What the right choice is in this respect, especially concerning the ownership of research, is up to the researcher. Perhaps now more than ever, s/he is in control about how and where to publish.
At the moment I am busy researching Open Access Week 2009, which will be from October 19th until the 23rd. It will be an international event, which aims to:
“(…) broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access to research, including access policies from all types of research funders, within the international higher education community and the general public. The now-annual event has been expanded from a single day to accommodate widespread global interest in the movement toward open, public access to scholarly research results.”
Last years Open Access Day thus got expanded into a genuine week and now it seems the Dutch Libraries and Institutions of Higher Education are actually organizing stuff (last year was rather disappointing in this respect, where it was a big success in the US). It seems we have the efforts of SURF to thank for this, as they are at the moment aggregating information about the events that are being organized by the different organizations during Open Access week. SURF also issued the special promotional Open Access Year movie which I posted before here. Anyway, our library is organizing some nice Open Access get-togethers and promotional events, and as I was asked to do some brainstorming for them I came across some nice copyright movies made by non-professional organizations. And I can tell you, they are way better than most of the professional clips – maybe less informative (I hate the word ‘educational’) but certainly funnier (and less boring).
Ok, maybe rather corny, but I for instance do prefer the sock-puppet version of explaining authors copyrights to the ‘funny’ actor video. See for yourself underneath. (oh and thanks to www.canus.nl for directing me to the sock-puppet movie!). By the way, I love publishers and would never compare them to rats of course…
I found other nice user generated copyright movies on copyright through a contest hosted by the Center for the Study of Public Domain at Duke Law School, set up amongst others by James Boyle, the author of the great book The Public Domain, which is available as a free download. According to the website, the contest:
“(…) asked entrants to create short films demonstrating some of the tensions between art and intellectual property law, and the intellectual property issues artists face, focusing on either music or documentary film.”
I especially liked the People’s Favorite Stealing Home, by Terry Tucker and Andrew Fazekas, which you can see here. You can find the other winners here.
Stay tuned for future info on the 2009 Open Access weeks events!
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….
Brett Gaylor photo by Steve Garfield CC BY-NC-SA http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevegarfield/3361531377/
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.
To continue the freedom of knowledge and information debate on a more
practical level,
as most of you might have heard, bittorrent tracker The Pirate Bay (which I have written about before here) is currently on trial. Interesting enough the people behind The Pirate Bay and similar Swedish organizations, like Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge, use the freedom of information argument to defend piracy. As he states:
“On the one side, there is the public. Every human with access to the Internet has received fingertip round-the-clock access to all of humanity’s collective knowledge and culture. This is a fantastic leap ahead for mankind – much larger than when public libraries arrived 160 years ago, and comparable to how society changed with the arrival of the printing press.
On the other side, there are the current people in power, who would like to harness this power to build a surveillance machine – collecting information about regular Joes, and actively preventing the free exchange of ideas – that would make George Orwell look like a cheery, skipping optimist. Many powerful institutions are pulling in this direction.”
The trial is already been called the ‘political trial of the century’ and seems to be going favorably for the Pirate Bay. Via BoingBoing I discovered that in honor of the trial of the Pirate Bay’s founders, the people behind the documentary series ‘Steal this film’ have released a new trial edition of what is eventually to become a movie on intellectual property right and file sharing. You can download it from their website. The first part of this documentary can be found in many places, including here.
This is actually a very interesting documentary (series), which follows the same idea as the remix documentary RiP I wrote about before, putting raw (searchable) footage and snippets of what is to become the final documentary online, together with more or less finalized versions of the documentary (like a sort of preprint in scholarly communication lingo).
The documentary follows roughly the same logic as Lawrence Lessig’s book Remix, arguing that it is of no use to criminalize a whole generation of downloaders or ‘pirates’ for that matter, and that it is much more productive to search for an alternative solution to this problem, or in other words to search for an alternative business model that will sustain the free flow of cultural goods and information. The documentary includes a very nice book history analogy, referring not only to the coming of the printing press but also to historical notions of book piracy, with contributions from famous book historians like Elisabeth Eisenstein and Robert Darnton. The documentary includes interviews with other renowned figures like Yochai Benkler, and Rick Prelinger from the Prelinger Archive. I like the way he makes the following statement near the end of the documentary:
“I think we need to have a broad conversation that is probably going to be an international conversation where people who make things and people who use things, I am talking about cultural works, sit together and think about what kinds of rules best serve these interests. I don’t know that we are going to agree, but I think we need to ask a little bit more about utopia, we need to really figure out what kind of a world we would like to live in and then try to craft regulations to match that. Being reactive doesn’t cut it.”
I saw Rick Prelinger speak at a Creative Commons conference in de Balie in Amsterdam a year ago, together with speakers like Kenneth Goldsmith from Ubuweb and people from Fabchannel, discussing alternative business models. The panel I attended discussed amongst others:
“…the public content zone beyond that of user-generated-content: the possibilities and problems related to making professionally produced cultural productions publicly available on the internet. What kind of revenue models exist for that? How is the public interest in accessibility squared with the need of professionals to make a living? What new and alternative distribution models emerge for professional cultural producers and cultural institutions?”
I think this is the important discussion, as Rick Prelinger also stated above, we need to find a solution for both producers and consumers of cultural and knowledge products and content. For as the documentary and Lessig’s books also show, the potential value of the free availability of all this information on the Internet is huge, stimulating new cultural creativity and knowledge production in. Next to that this development can even be very beneficial for society and the economy in general. In fact, as a recent Dutch report on file sharing showed, file sharing can even foster (the Dutch) economic growth in the long run.
Update April 30th 2009: Another report from researchers at the BI Norwegian School of Management shows that people who pirate the most from P2P sites are also the ones most likely to buy legit downloads. Of course there is some discussion about these findings, but the conclusions are interesting nevertheless. (via: Ars Technica)
Be sure for more posts on alternative business models in the future.
From the 19th to the 21st of January I was in Berlin to visit this magnificent city and to go to the APE (Academic Publishing in Europe) conference. From their website:
“APE Conferences encourage the debate about the future of scientific publications, information dissemination and access to scientific results. They offer an independent forum for ‘open minds’ with a free exchange of opinions and experiences between all stakeholders.”
This year’s edition was themed “The impact of publishing”. The Preconference day, which focused on information competence, was organized by Anthony Watkinson of University College London and Matthias Wahls of Brill Academic Publishers. I will focus here on what I deemed the most interesting parts. The first panel was on Licensing: collective and specific and featured Wilma Mossink from SURF and Marc Bide the incoming director of EDItEUR, who both talked about licensing schemes. Mossink focused on national and international initiatives and possibilities for cooperative licensing schemes and frameworks like Knowledge Exchange (a cooperation of JISC, DEFF, SURF and DFG) to enhance access to scholarly information on the Internet. These initiatives want to help out the smaller publishers who don’t have much money and time to invest. Knowledge Exchange serves as an umbrella organization aimed at supporting the use and development of ICT infrastructure.
Where Mossink went on to discuss initiatives like AGORA and HINARI and different Open Access frameworks for licensing models, Mark Bide focused mainly on the challenge of how to communicate these licenses in their new technical environment. Problems like correct interpretations of licenses and how to express licenses in machine-readable forms in order to support machine to machine communication (especially important when using a search engine like Creative Commons when searching for certain kinds of CC
licensed material) are important to consider. The goal is to communicate clearly what you can and can’t do with the digital content the license refers to. Bide stressed that we need a method of communicating publishers policies that is flexible and extensive and that supports any (future) business model. Because, he warns, if publishers don’t care about communicating licenses, nobody will, especially not the search engines.
One of these publisher initiated initiatives is ACAP: Automated Content Access Protocol, which was launched in 2007. This is an initiative that focuses on machine to machine licensing (where for instance Creative Commons focuses on machine to person licensing communication). Like Creative Commons, ACAP is a general protocol for all kinds of content where initiatives like ONIX (books) and PLUS (photography) are more sectoral.
Bide argues that the need for standardization of licensing protocols, particularly of their semantics, needs to be recognized. Convergence is needed: there are too many standards and we need to get them out of their sectoral seclusions. It is all about the communication of licenses and permissions, not about their enforcement. This convergence of standards applies also to Open Access licenses, which are creating difficulties on how to define open access. We need to make clear with which particular kind of license content is truly Open Access and with what license it is not.
Another interesting panel focused on Discovery: helping users find what is appropriate and featured Jan Velterop. He focused on 
what one can do to make scientific literature even more useful. Since we have access to too much information, we need to find a way to navigate the information. In order to do this, we need to connect elements of knowledge to each other: we need to publish articles and visualizations.
This requires new skills, not only for the researcher (who needs to become a real knowledge worker), we also need a change in culture. Velterop argues that we need to focus on concepts: it’s all about concepts (and thus about meaning) and not about keywords. He mentions for instance the word ‘Jaguar’. As a keyword this refers to both cars and animals. If you focus on the concept you take out the ambiguity. Now, when you search for information you want to connect these concepts. This is what, as Velterop explains, semantic relationships and semantic highlighting do. Concepts are interconnected and interlayered. Velterop’s company, Knewco, offers a free service that does exactly that, so he states.
From the Knewco website:
“Where search engines are concerned with the whereabouts of information, Knewco is concerned with the meaning, significance and connection between elements of knowledge. Knewco offers – free – services based on putting knowledge from different and disparate sources together, in a conceptually coherent and consistent way. The knowledge is disambiguated, redundancies are removed, and keywords and terms are normalized into concepts.”
As Velterop explains in his lecture, Knewco wants to remove the ambiguity and redundancy. They do this by making so called ‘smart triplets’ in concept spaces on an ontological, observational and hypothetical level. Velterop argues that by using this functionality, scientific publishers can add semantic functionality to their material by way of highlighting.
As Velterop concludes: the basic idea is just to make relationships between stuff, to bring back the serendipity, enabling you to find the things you did not even know you were searching for. This introduces new ways of thinking about information and this technology can have direct consequences also for the way researchers might be writing their articles in the future. You can find more about Knewco here and here.
More information about the APE conference will follow soon.
Happy days for Creative Commons and NIN! Trent Reznor managed to make a huge profit selling his bands 2008 album Ghosts I-IV online, topping Amazon’s best selling list for 2008. Strange enough, the album was legally available for free at the same time (even on the same website). This nice article over at Ars Technica gives one possible reason for this phenomenon (next to obviously the much heralded ease of using Amazon, and might I note the lack of awareness of many law abiding citizens of the existence or workings of sites like The Pirate Bay, where the album could also be downloaded legally for free). According to the article in Ars Technica, the music lovers bought the album on Amazon because ‘fans understood that purchasing MP3s would directly support the music and career of a musician they liked’. (One wonders though, wouldn’t the ‘fans’ buy the album from NIN’s website rather than from Amazon?). It’s like the Radiohead model all over again (didn’t NIN invent that basic model anyway?) but now even better! The same article makes the suggestion that small indie record labels could probably profit from this model too: use that dedicated fan base that does not mind to pay a little extra money to support their favorite artists.
It looks like we might be slowly returning to the old Maecenas system, or Maecenate, when it comes to culture, flourishing as it did in the old Rome of Virgil and Horace, and still visible today in many a countries’ subsidy system, stimulating (historically) mostly the so called ‘high arts’ which in some cases and some countries have known some kind of patronage or state subsidy for ages (the Dutch system is a good example in this respect).
What seems clear however is that this new digital Maecenic culture will be quite different in many respects from so called subsidy systems. It will be way more ‘democratic’ for one, no longer favoring art picked out by committees of wise experts but directly benefiting those chosen by the public to merit their money. It will also not be a ‘traditional’ Maecenic culture in which a few rich people out of philanthropy and the goodness of their hearth give their money to the arts or the projects they endorse. This new Maecenic culture will probably be upheld by large communities of people of all income classes, all offering a little money to support their favorite band, artist or cultural entrepreneur (think of those small labels again).
Now is this a bad development? Does this mean that, might such a system in the future prevail, all art should be foremost about marketing, about creating a sustainable community and those with the most fans get the most money? Not necessarily. Sure there will be large communities supporting crappy artists, but as NIN shows (which although definitely a big band you will find harder to categorize as ‘mainstream’ like you might do with for instance Radiohead, and by the way, both bands have been credited with making qualitatively high and good music according to ‘artistic standards’, whatever they are), ‘alternative’ bands can also make an income this way, maybe supplementing this new kind of business model with added value products, merchandising and intensive touring, so it does surely also offer possibilities for those small little indie pearls out there.
Finally, and I will go in to this some more in the future for sure: could this model work for books? Why not? Some have tried already: Cory Doctorow is one of the most successful examples of this model. He has given his books away for free for years already and has made a lot of money with this scheme. The difference between music and books in this day and age of course being that the made the profit from his printed books, whilst the digital versions are available for free online. And a lot of these print sales can be explained by the by some felt ‘awful screen reading experience’. But with the rise of digital books and with Kindle editions being available of a growing amount of various book titles, competition will begin to rise between free digital books and paid for digital content in this segment of the media market too. And why not help out good old Cory and his mates by sponsoring them in the good old Roman way, thanking them for their generous sharing of their cultural creations in an alternative way? I know some artists who would like such a model…. Interesting times, interesting developments….
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