Authorship: Copyleft Basics

CCR 747 ::: S13

Tuesday, March 26, 13

John Perry Barlow


The Economy of Ideas
(1994)


The enigma is this: If our property can be
infinitely reproduced and instantaneously
distributed all over the planet without cost,
without our knowledge, without its even
leaving our possession, how can we protect
it? How are we going to get paid for the
work we do with our minds? And, if we can't
get paid, what will assure the continued
creation and distribution of such work?


ideas vs expression


That is, when the primary articles of commerce in a
society look so much like speech as to be
indistinguishable from it, and when the traditional
methods of protecting their ownership have become
ineffectual, attempting to ﬁx the problem with broader
and more vigorous enforcement will inevitably threaten
freedom of speech. The greatest constraint on your
future liberties may come not from government but
from corporate legal departments laboring to protect
by force what can no longer be protected by practical
efﬁciency or general social consent.


Information is an activity.
Information is a life form.
Information is a relationship.


Can information want to be
free?


Information wants a beer.


Information wants a hug.


Familiarity has more
value than scarcity.


A Declaration of the
Independence of Cyberspace
(1996)


Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought
itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our
communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and
nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or
prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or
station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his
or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being
coerced into silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement,
and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and
there is no matter here.


spaceless place
intangible property
inﬁnite replicability


Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate
themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim
to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would
declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than
pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be
reproduced and distributed inﬁnitely at no cost. The global
conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to
accomplish.


The Next Economy of Ideas
(2000)


social capital


All these examples point to the same conclusion:
Noncommercial distribution of information increases
the sale of commercial information. Abundance breeds
abundance.

This is precisely contrary to what happens in a physical
economy. When you're selling nouns, there is an
undeniable relationship between scarcity and value. But
in an economy of verbs, the inverse applies. There is a
relationship between familiarity and value. For ideas,
fame is fortune. And nothing makes you famous faster
than an audience willing to distribute your work for
free. ... (1 of 2)


I enjoy a similar beneﬁt in my current incarnation. I'm
paid reasonably well to write, despite the fact that I put
most of my work on the Net before it can be
published. But I'm paid a lot more to speak, and still
more to consult, since my real value lies in something
that can't be stolen from me - my point of view. A
unique and passionate viewpoint is more valuable in a
conversation than the one-way broadcast of words. And
the more my words self-replicate on the Net, the more
I can charge for symmetrical interaction.


Theresa:
... thinking about the academic author in this no-man's land, "a
world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded
by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth"....is
there such a thing as an academic author in cyberspace and, in
saying that, what might happen to the cultural capital of the
academic author writing in cyberspace work? We talked a bit in
seminar about how the academic author writing in cyberspace
might not gain much cultural capital for that work in the
workings of academia, but I think here I am more so talking
about how the audience might be leveled in terms of cultural
capital in cyberspace and then if/how that makes this space
more unappealing for the academic author....does it and should
it?


Convenience is another important factor in the future
compensation of creation. The reason video didn't kill
the movie star is that it's simply more convenient to
rent a video than to copy one. Software is easy to copy,
of course, but software piracy hasn't impoverished Bill
Gates. Why? Because in the long run it's more
convenient to enter into a relationship with Microsoft if
you hope to use its products in an ongoing way. It's
certainly easier to get technical support if you have a
real serial number when you call. And that serial
number is not a thing. It's a contract. It is the symbol of
a relationship.


I imagine actual storytelling making a comeback. Storytelling, unlike
the one-way, asymmetrical thing that goes by that name in
Hollywood, is highly participatory. Instead of "the viewer" sitting
there, mouth slack with one hand on a Bud while the TV blows
poisonous electronics at him, I imagine people actually engaged in
the process, and quite willing to pay for it.

This doesn't require much imagination, since it's what a good
public speaker encourages now. The best of them don't talk at the
audience, but with them, creating a sanctuary of permission where
something is actually happening. Right now this has to happen in
meatspace, but the immense popularity of chat rooms among the
young natives of cyberspace presages richer electronic zones
where all the senses are engaged. People will pay to be in those
places - and people who are good at making them exciting will be
paid a lot for their conversational skills.


Lawrence Lessig


Currently at Harvard:
Director of the Edmond S. Safra Center for Ethics
Roy L. Furman Professor of Law

Previously at Stanford Law School.

And previously-previously at Harvard, partly as the
founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and
Society.


Seth:
Playing the reluctant sophist, Lessig floats a few possible defenses
of “piracy” in the strong sense of illegally copying someone else’s
intellectual property for profit:
1. America used to allow the pirating of works that had been
copyrighted overseas.
2. It doesn’t harm the industry as much as they claim because
people (especially poorer foreigners) who illegally buy CDs or DVDs
in a copy shop would not have actually purchased a full-price legal
copy through Amazon or in a Barnes and Nobles’.
3. Piracy, in some cases, benefits the owner of the copyright by
giving the illegal purchaser a stake in purchasing legal copies in the
future. Individuals who pirate copies of Microsoft become, ipso
facto, Microsoft users, and this can only be a good thing for
Microsoft in the long run. (Not everything the pirater wants will be
available in a copy shop; she becomes used to using Microsoft;

Lessig rejects all of these justiﬁcations for IP
piracy because such piracy “doesn’t transform the
content it steals; it doesn’t transform the market it
competes in. It merely gives someone access to
something that the law says he should not
have” (66).


Who is a pirate?

Under what conditions
does piracy happen?


theft
distribution channels


artiﬁcial scarcity


What does this mean
for us?


Theresa:

Nonetheless, because of this personal question, I also
ﬁnd it useful how Lessig describes why creators might
want to give up total control of their work (p. 284)--for
instance, "to better spread their content" (offer a
sample), and to "express to others the importance of
balance in this debate" (285). But, again, I guess I am still
thinking about what this all means for me if I see myself
as an author, and how much control I am expecting to
exert over my work...why...and if/how do my reasons/
feelings resonate with both the promotion of a cultural
commons and exclusive ownership of "intellectual
property"....what reason maybe are in need of
more self-critique?

Neil Young:
“File sharing is the
new radio.”
“File sharing is the new - Neil Young

radio.”

Authorship: Copyleft Basics

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