Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, Education

Fan remix and the IP underground: vidding well

A terrific epigram for the state of copyright today:

Luminosity is the best fan that shows like Friday Night Lights, Highlander, Farscape, and Buffy ever had—but she can’t use her real name in this interview for fear that their producers will sue her.

She goes on:

How do vidders find one another?
I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you—no, seriously, this is a highly contested issue within the vidding community. Even though we believe our work is legitimate and transformative art, a lot of vidders prefer to stay out of the spotlight until the legal situation is clearer.

Having to hide under pseudonyms, meet in secret, share in the shadows - copyright law has brought us to a pretty place. 

The whole interview is worth reading.

(via Reasonblog)

Molecular rights management: new intellectual property meme

Molecular rights management is a meme experiment launched by Jamais Cascio.  It's IP protection for nanotechnology.  One imagines nanobots that can't be copied, or moved from a certain location, or applied to a different medium.

MRM is likely to emerge for two primary reasons: the continued need for intellectual property controls, so as to prevent a wave "napster fabbing;" and the need for security to prevent the production of controlled goods ("assault rifles," figuratively or literally).

A glimpse from the future as it approaches.  Or looking forward in classic extrapolation, seeing two trends (DRM and nano) rise and intersect.

A history of modern mashups

"Remix Culture: The Early Years" samples a series of mashups and related art from the past few years.  A useful blitz history - and with a copyright argument at the end.

(via Brian Lamb via his del.icio.us)

Alienating copyright, or copyLeft for real

A truly left-wing copyright proposal comes from Dmitri Kleiner.  He proposes disallowing commercial use of intellectual property by commercial interests.  That was noncommercial entities - workers - can exploit their own labor.

When you hear critics complaining that Larry Lessig has a left-wing approach to IP, please refer them to this article for the truer item.

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

Copyright fiction, the latest iteration

"Gucci DRM" is a short-short story about digital rights management (DRM).  Which puts it in the very selective membership of intellectual property fiction.  I can't imagine a story about 2015 without augmented reality, but it is a short-short.

Speaking of IP fiction, two years ago I wrote up an initial copyright fiction corpus.  Has anything emerged since?

We can also consider copyright fiction to be a subset of literature of information.

(via name-checked BoingBoing)

To kick Helprin

I read Mark Helprin's awful, sad opinion piece in favor of eternal copyright this Sunday.  It gave me a pleasant dose of mocking-based laughter for the minute required to read the thing.  Some asides occurred to me along the way - is it funny that he steals from Mark Twain without mentioning him? and that he claims to have written the Great American Novel?  Ultimately it just wasn't that interesting.

Larry Lessig and others are wiki-fying a response.  But it does feel a bit like debating a creationist.  Perhaps Helprin's whine is simply better off forgotten, Stephen Downes notes.

The end of copyright: Bruce Lehman

Bruce Lehman, the man who led the development of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA, 1998) has now decided that that policy hasn't worked out well (link to another Bryan blog). But I wanted to quote this one other,  breathtaking observation, which speaks to the history of information:

"The cat's out of the bag... Our attempts at copyright control have not been successful... We are now in, if not entering, the post-copyright era... ."

Many of us have been making that argument for years, and it's still a controversial idea.  But it's amazing to her Bruce Lehman say that.

Lehman also thinks we're going back to patronage.  Meh, I'm not sure I see that as the dominant mode.  It is happening in some ways.

(via BoingBoing)

NPR on the side of internet radio

National Public Radio, America's big nonprofit radio entity, is now fighting a good fight against excessive fees for internet radio.

Gorbachev versus Gates

Like an alternate history of the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev is trying to influence Bill Gates.  This is 2007, however, and the matter concerns alleged digital piracy.

    “We have great respect for the work of Microsoft’s programmers … and are in no way casting doubt on the principle of punishment for intellectual property violations.    “However, in this case we ask you to show mercy and withdraw your complaint against Alexander Ponosov.”

US linked to Swedish torrent raid

Today's story about international intellectual property battles: apparently the United States was involved in getting Swedish police to raid Pirate Bay.

At an April meeting, the US delegation expressed its displeasure at the site.

    Officials from the State Department, the Department of Commerce and the U.S. trade representative's office told visitors from the Swedish Ministry of Justice in April that Sweden was harboring one of the world's biggest Web sites for enabling the massive and unauthorized distribution of movies, music and games.

The raid on The Pirate Bay took place a little more than a month later.

It wasn't just the US government that was concerned about the issue, of course. The MPAA was not amused, either...

Ars Technica goes on to suggest the US is pressuring Russia to crack down on AllofMP3.com