Doctorow on Swartz

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing on Aaron Swartz.

in your country

NYT's lobotomy needs a lobotomy

Turns out it was Time.com and Politico, both well-financed, reputable news media organizations, that blithely stepped over the line and took what was not theirs. (**(&*(

The Intellectual Property thing has apparently gotten even dumber in the world of print journaljism. The above is from David Carr, in the New York Times, accusing news organizations of "stealing" the news.

The simple fact is, the Rolling Stone story was no longer a story about a general. The effects it triggered themselves became front page news - understanding Obama's actions with regard to General MethChrystal required awareness of the story that caused them. The story at that point was itself news.

Only the New York Times would fail to see this. Fail to see that news is inherently public property. Rolling Stone blew it by failing to be first to post its own story (then posted a really lame mark-up), but the Times blows tout court when it confuses actual news events with proprietary reportage about them, because it fails to see that these linguistic entities can indeed bleed "across the line."

Education before JSTOR

Frank Furedi:

The transition from one generation to another requires education to transmit an understanding of the lessons learned by humanity through the ages.

How true. Unless you're JSTOR.

One man's intellectual property is another man's nothing

17
These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they
are not original with me,
If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to
nothing,
If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are
nothing,
If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.

This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,
This the common air that bathes the globe. #

re-esemplastic rethread

Afterthought with regard to the thread in the preceding post, much of which focuses on the Berkman Center's mode of presenting talks. For me, the Berkman Center was just cited as an example of how current practice tends to put valuable intellectual property out there and then leave it to its own devices. David Weinberger explains that the Berkman's support of an author like Lewis Hyde has other facets, and that putting his lunchtime talk out there is better than not doing so, even if follow up responses to it do not get tracked.

I want to move off of Berkman to try to make a point that otherwise might be lost. Conversations don't often neatly begin and end. Some have been going on for a few thousand years. Ten years ago, it was suggested that "markets are conversations," but the definition of "conversation" remained somewhat open-ended, like the thing itself (it extended into a deep and mostly tacit theory of voice, among other things).

We in the US and elsewhere have had the habit, for perhaps too long, of assuming that conversation can be bottled up inside a piece of thingliness - a vessel like a book, a CD, DVD, digital file, painting, etc. -- and presented as a self-sufficient, closed object which can then be sold. I don't think that's what "markets are conversations" was intended to mean, but the closing of the conversation, like the enclosure of the commons, leads to improper notions of something as "a property," and then, "intellectual property."

What if intellect cannot be localized because much of what we think and say is already in a dialogic (or, allegoric) relation to other words that have been thought and said? If intellect doesn't lend itself to a local habitation and a name, then "intellectual property" is an oxymoron, or worse, a senseless grouping of phonemes.

Yet in our daily practice, as we're used to slicing up the stream of time into end-stopped segments, we share and sell moments in larger conversations, themselves moments in even larger conversations.

My point vis a vis Hyde was that even as he spoke of a commons and its loss through stages of enclosure, there was both a fidelity and a betrayal of his thinking in how it was situated. It is freely shared - qua segment, qua object, qua Berkman moment; but by bracketing it off from any further precedent or subsequent context, its necessary relation to its origin and its destiny, its power to bear witness to further repercussions of its own impact, is denied.

This is not merely a Berkman phenomenon; it's a representational phenomenon deriving from a scheme that believes intellectual objects have an integrity which in fact they do not possess.

Twitter might be a helpful gloss: no one on Twitter is the source of any given conversation, nor is it the case that a conversation takes place between the same interlocutors. Conversations are witnessed, piled in on, diverted, commented upon, rejoined, attitudinalized, left for dead, by a series of folks who may never directly speak to one another. On Twitter, conversation might be said the be the soul of indiscretion.

So, where the roots of ideas of intellect and property are being seriously examined, the representation of moments in their conversations would do well to explore how they can bring forward the links among themselves and their exfoliations.

Desideratum: A reverse wordcloud - where the words in a post that are cited, linked to, retweeted, etc., grow and (somehow) contain links to posts that link to them. Sort of like Eliot's Tradition and the Individual Talent, where later texts within the tradition contain and esemplastically transform earlier ones.

Hyde and seek

Interesting talk by Lewis Hyde on the commons - thanks to Jon "Wirearchy" Husband for the pointer. David Weinberger live-blogged it here.

What is proper to Hyde's talk - just the talk? It seems the Berkman Center thinks so. The Berkman offers a ton of interesting talks on its site. What's not here is any follow-up discussion, exploration. Where does responsibility toward ideas and their dissemination begin and end?

Means and ends of immaterial production

"I don't feel a loss of control over my own productive activity when I contribute to a Wikipedia entry that may benefit others. On the other hand, I might be more likely to feel this loss of control when I discover, say, that details of my online activity have been collected, sorted, and packaged as a commodity for sale to people who may use it to deny me access to a job or to manipulate me based on perceived vulnerabilities, fears, and other personal details about my mental or physical well being." ~ Mark Andrejevic on the IDC list.

This line of inquiry could help clarify intellectual property confusion as well as the thinking of "exploitation."

Ach Ja, Die Stoffe ist der Geist

Sigh

"Intellectual property has to be just as protected as material property. All creativity will be destroyed if you have a mentality that everything should be free."

The Good German Parliamentarian ist soooo richtig. The elan vital of lobbyists, middlemen, advertising yeggs, their bartenders and valets could seriously be impaired by the dissolution of their host.

Towering Germanic intellects such as these might benefit from a talk with Steve Albini.

Update: The problem with music - dead link on textism.

High C/.s

Your cyber-IMproPRieties have hISTories

At this late date, someone seems to be talking sense about the IMproPRieTies of the history of property - and about the ancient history of "cyberspace" -- Ben Peters, TOWARD AN ANALOGY IN CYBER HISTORY: JUDEO-CHRISTIAN TRADITIONS OF TRANSGRESSION IN MATERIAL PROPERTY. Link.

bloodlines of legitimation

AKMA notes the curious fact that the "legitimate" online offerings from music companies typically offer no added value, no lyrics, no liner notes, nuthin', in other words, that would differentiate the "legitimate" from the pirated file.

I'll add this one to the pile of examples of USian Grifterism (a pile which includes, among other things, certain forms of mortgages, FEMA, several major corporations and the entire Bush Administration).

For the record co's, the thing that makes their pay-for-it files "legitimate" has nothing to do with the listener, or with the music, or with the quality of the file. It has to do with the contractual relationship of the corporation to the property.

This is the working definition of legitimacy in USia. It's also the reason we have no culture, no community, and no public forums for consensual intelligence. Legitimacy by contract is not love. It is the blood of USia, and it's poison.

imhfo, of course.

fARTstor

Apopos of JSTORiana, Juke puts us in mind of another mode of expropriating our intellect in order to sell it back to us: The AMICA library, which, despite its name, may not be the friendliest purveyor of cherished cultural flotsam. Apparently this fine "library" purports to own images - some of which at least are freely available to the public at no charge from the superb Library of Congress online archive -- and sells them back to us for the mere pittance of $150 a year subscriptions (individual rate).

Can we just stipulate that so long as USia maintains its commanding lead in the world decathalon of universal stupidity, scams like this will not starve for lack of suckerage?

AMICA is not alone. On the model of JSTOR, behold ARTstor, a digital library with half a million images in art, architecture, humanities and social sciences. #.



ARTstor, another Andrew W. Mellon intelprop gatekeeper, bills itself as "Images for Education and Scholarship." It is avowedly emulative of JSTOR, but currently refuses participation to individuals on any terms. Its blog is free and open to the public. There we learn that:

ARTstor recently announced a collaboration with Art Resource and Scala Archives (Florence, Italy). Through this collaboration, ARTstor will ultimately make available approximately 12,000 high quality images of European art and architecture, with a special focus on the archaeology, art and architecture of Italy and on the collections of the major museums in Italy and other European countries.

We are pleased to announce that we have released additional images of major Italian and other European work from Scala Archives, bringing the total number of Scala images now available to ARTstor users to approximately 7,800.

"Available," "have released," -- code reminiscent of the language of country clubs, whose amenities are "free" to every single child of the earth whose membership obligations are current and paid in full.

In the course of their education, some children will see these images and read this scholarship, and some will not.

AMICA mia, amigo mio, mon amis, ARTstor my hypocrite, mon frere, what will you sell us next? MUZAKstor, LIFEstor, DNAstor, AIRstor, VISIONstor, H2Ostor, JOCKITCHstor, BOOGERstor -- the possibilities stagger.

IP is the DNA of Corpse USA

He begins by quoting Goethe in the 1830s about his writings as "the work of a collective being that bears the name of Goethe" (quoting Goethe) vs. Emerson in "Self-Reliance" writing, "Insist on yourself; never imitate..." Lewis says our protocols around "intellectual property" side with Emerson. Defending "IP" against being enclosed can be seen, Lewis says, as defending a particular way of being human.

Which could suggest -- though David Weinberger doesn't choose to go there in his interesting post on Lewis Hyde's take on Intellectual Property -- that propounding the enclosure of IP is tantamount to putting forward a way of not being human.

Corporations are not human, and they love closed IP. They love trapped workers too. See, if the worker has nowhere else to go, for employment, for health care coverage, for socializing, then he is truly deprived of essential and basic modes of freedom. He has the appearance of freedom -- he can choose to come in at 8 a.m., or 8:30 a.m., or 9 a.m., or 9:30 a.m., so long as he leaves at the requisite time, 8.5 hours further on into the day. A measure of his life is lost; he gets to "choose" which measure - within "reason".

He, like the rights to "Leader of the Pack," is the property of the corporation, because without it, the structure of his existence would collapse. In the US, the corporate form was allowed to develop freely to the point that it no longer was a creature in a democratic landscape, but instead made the landscape into a service industry dedicated to the rapid and unquestioning support of the corporation.

That is to say, the corporate form requires the absolute Emersonian emphasis upon the singular individual, because by telling You to Be All That You Can Be, it is dissolving the general bonds of human mutuality that gave all of us collective power, common ground, the freedom from fear of penury that binds individuals to corporate death.

The paradox, then, is that the benefits of human community, the interlacing of needs and mutual support, have been vacuumed from the general society; removed from people, they are in the service of corporations, which now have the status of persons. Where once humans were persons, and the social net supported their personhood, now corporations, by subsuming healthcare, retirement budgeting and other basic needs to their own private spheres, are the only persons that matter in the society. Non-human persons, to be sure, but still, persons. The rest of us, isolate singularities of protein, bowl alone and fear evil.