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Thursday, 3 October 2013
Sunday, 4 March 2012
Another view on copyright
Published: Friday 10 February 2012 in Nation of Change
“We need to find a way to maximize the truly amazing potential of the Internet, while properly rewarding creators.”
The Ethics of Internet Piracy
Last year, I told a colleague that I would include Internet ethics in a course that I was teaching. She suggested that I read a recently published anthology on computer ethics – and attached the entire volume to the email.
Should I have refused to read a pirated book? Was I receiving stolen goods, as advocates of stricter laws against Internet piracy claim?
If I steal someone’s book the old-fashioned way, I have the book, and the original owner no longer does. I am better off, but she is worse off. When people use pirated books, the publisher and the author often are worse off – they lose earnings from selling the book.
But, if my colleague had not sent me the book, I would have borrowed the copy in my university’s library. I saved myself the time needed to do that, and it seems that no one was worse off. (Curiously, given the book’s subject matter, it is not for sale in digital form). In fact, others benefited from my choice as well: the book remained on the library shelf, available to other users.
On the other hand, if the book had not been on the shelf and those other users had asked library staff to recall or reserve it, the library might have noted the demand for the book and ordered a second copy. But there is only a small probability that my use of the book would have persuaded the library to buy another copy. And, in any case, we are now a long way from the standard cases of stealing.I asked the 300 students in my ethics class which of them had not downloaded something from the Internet, knowing or suspecting that they were violating copyright. Only five or six hands went up. Many of the rest thought that what they had done was wrong, but said that “everyone does it.” Others said that they would not have bought the music or book anyway, so they were not harming anyone. It did not seem that any of them were prepared to stop.
The case for enforcing copyright laws was strengthened by the details that emerged following the arrest in New Zealand last month of Kim Dotcom (born Kim Schmitz), founder of the Web site Megaupload (now closed down by the FBI). Megaupload allowed its 180 million registered users to upload and download movies, television shows, and music, and some of the money earned by Dotcom (from advertising and subscriptions) was on display at his mansion near Auckland, where he kept his Rolls-Royce and other exotic cars.
Dotcom’s lawyer claims that Megaupload was merely providing storage for its subscribers’ files, and had no control over what they were storing. But Megaupload offered cash rewards to users who uploaded files that proved popular with other users.
Last month, the United States considered legislation that aimed at stopping Internet piracy. The bills had been written at the urging of Hollywood studios and the publishing and recording industries, which claim that violations of copyright on the Internet cost the US 100,000 jobs. Opponents said the proposed law would reach far beyond sites like Megaupload, making Google and YouTube liable for copyright infringement – and allowing the government to block (without court authorization) access to Web sites that it deemed to be facilitating copyright infringement.
For the moment, Internet activists, together with Google, Facebook, and other major online players, have carried the day, persuading the US Congress to shelve its anti-piracy legislation. But the fight will continue: last month, the European Union and 22 member states signed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which establishes international standards and a new organization to enforce intellectual-property rights. The agreement has already been signed by Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, and the US. Now it must be ratified by, among others, the European Parliament.
I am an author, as well as a reader. One marvel of the Internet is that some of my older works, long out of print, are now far more widely available than they ever were before – in pirated versions. Of course, I am more fortunate than many authors or creative artists, because my academic salary means that I am not forced to rely on royalties to feed my family. Nevertheless, it isn’t hard to find better purposes for my royalty earnings than Kim Dotcom’s environmentally damaging lifestyle. We need to find a way to maximize the truly amazing potential of the Internet, while properly rewarding creators.
Australia, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and many European countries now have a public lending right, designed to compensate authors and publishers for the loss of sales caused by the presence of their books in public libraries. We need something similar for the Internet. A user fee could pay for it, and, if the fee were low enough, the incentive to use pirated copies would diminish. Couple that with law enforcement against the mega-abusing Web sites, and the problem might be soluble. Otherwise, most creative people will need to earn a living doing something else, and we will all be the losers.
ABOUT Peter Singer
Peter Singer is Professor of bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. His books include Practical Ethics, The Expanding Circle, and The Life You Can Save.
Tuesday, 20 December 2011
Thursday, 3 November 2011
Sunday, 23 October 2011
The Copyright Debate part 1
From Cory DOCTOROW/THE GREAT BIG BEAUTIFUL TOMORROW
This article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. See http://craphound.com/context for a more detailed explanation.
Creativity vs. Copyright
(Newly revised and condensed from his historic address to the 2010 World Science Fiction Convention in Melbourne, Australia)
THERE ARE THREE THINGS I want to cover in this talk. I tell you that because that way you’ll know how close I am to the end, as I will tell you each time I get to one of them.
Starting with the first: Anytime someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you and doesn’t give you a key, that lock is not there for your benefit. The lock I’m talking about here of course is digital rights management, or DRM—the so-called digital locks that are used to restrict copying and use of digital works. If you’ve ever bought a DVD from elsewhere that doesn’t play here in Australia, if someone’s ever given you a game that wouldn’t play in your game player, if you’ve ever gotten a movie and found that you couldn’t move it from one device to another, you’ve experienced DRM.
The biggest lie ever told to creative people is that DRM is there to help them and that it will contain their losses due to piracy. What DRM does primarily is stop authors and creators and publishers from authorizing audiences to follow them to new platforms.
Let me unpack that a little. Most countries—including Australia, since the U.S.-Australia Free Trade Agreement—have a law that prohibits breaking digital rights management technology, even if you’re not committing a copyright infringement. So, for example, if you bought a copy of your own work from Apple or Amazon or any other of the main DRM vendors, you yourself as the owner of that copyright can’t remove the DRM without their permission.
This obviously has no nexus with protecting copyright. We usually grant copyright to people who create things, not to corporations whose contribution to the enterprise is making electronics in Chinese sweatshops. But this is a way that copyright moves from creators to distributors. Practically what it amounts to is a way to lock creators into distribution platforms. Take the iPad or the Kindle or any of the other DRM platforms for distributing electronic books. If I were to sell a million dollars worth of eBooks through the iPad, all with DRM
on it, I couldn’t authorize you, my reader, to follow me to, say, the Kindle. It’s as if every time you bought a book at Borders, you were locked into only shelving it in an IKEA bookcase. If you wanted to sell your books through the local independent bookseller down the road, your readers would have to throw away all the books they had bought and buy new copies to shelve on their new bookcases. Or maintain separate parallel libraries where their books would be shelved either on one case or another depending on whose DRM was on it.
This is clearly not useful for creators. Rather, this is a way that the negotiating leverage between the creators and distributors can be tipped toward distributors. So it ends up being used as a club with which to beat creators and the publishers of creative works.
For example, take the iPad or the iPhone, where the likelihood of any one app author getting rich is very small. One of the things Apple likes to tout is the success of the platform. Yes, there are hundreds of thousands of apps for the iPad and the iPhone, and there are millions of apps sold. But when you divide the second number by the first, you come out with an average that tells you that most app authors are making very little money. While a few have gotten rich, the majority of people who create for that platform don’t make much at all. But they can’t afford to go somewhere else without risking alienating all their customers. Because when they switch to, say, selling their apps on Android (where you might get a larger percentage of the money that the audience spends) you have to be willing to risk that your own customers will abandon their investment in the iPad or iPhone app and buy it again from Android. You’re kind of locked into Apple.
As a result, Apple gets to set terms that authors tend not to like. For example, they take 30 percent (ouch!) and they have a very rigorous set of contractual terms that amount to censorship. They prohibited a dictionary because it contained dirty words. They prohibited the Pulitzer Prize–winning editorial cartoons of Mark Fiore because they disparaged public figures. They prohibited a comic book adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses because it had penises in it.
In each of these cases, Apple backed off after a lot of public ridicule. This is free speech—provided enough people are offended enough when you are censored that they’ll take up your cause and make the company that censored you feel stupid.
While no publisher is obliged to carry your works, usually there’s multiplicity of publishers you can shop your works to. But not if you are locked into one platform or store.
The reason that DRM is a really bad deal for artists and developers of art is not just that it locks us into these platforms, but that it locks us in without delivering what it’s supposed to deliver. What we’re supposed to get out of the DRM bargain is that if we allow our works to be locked up by distributors, in exchange they’ll make sure our works aren’t copied. As a technical matter, this has been a complete failure. It has never really worked. Every computer scientist and cryptographer who doesn’t work for a DRM vendor will tell you that it will never work. The only engineers who will tell you it’s possible to make computers worse at copying are those who have a direct financial stake in selling you technology to make computers worse at copying.
Fundamentally the entertainment industry put out an RFP (request for proposals) for magic beans. They wanted magic beans that would make computers worse at copying. Anytime you say we have an unlimited budget to spend on magic beans, you will find magic bean vendors. That doesn’t mean the magic beans will work, right? The War on Terror precipitated hundreds of RFPs for magic beans that would automatically detect terrorists or automatically prevent airplanes from being blown up. And lo and behold, there were hundreds of people showing up with magic beans to sell to the military-industrial complex. The entertainment complex has found itself with unlimited magic bean vendors as well. So that’s the reality. The nonideological, empirical, fact-based reality is that all DRM is broken as soon as anyone decides it’s worth breaking.
Every lock can be picked, especially if it’s sitting in the lock-picker’s living room, or computer. DRM designers know this, but what do they care? They’re selling magic beans.
Publishers and distributors know this too. They’re not stupid. They’re not actually interested in slowing or stopping copying, they’re interested in getting the legal protection that stops copyright holders from going to their competitors. For example, when Apple shipped the iPad they shipped it with a DRM that was supposed to stop the piracy of iPad apps. That DRM lasted all of twenty-four hours; they weren’t even trying. What they wanted to secure was not the app but their control over the app. The DRM gave them the right to call on the infinite might of the state to intervene on their behalf should anyone try to compete with them and offer a better deal to their authors.
So extending these legal locks ends up decreasing every artist’s individual negotiating power with distributors. Extending copyright does the same thing between creators and publishers. One example is the extension of copyright over sampling. Copyright didn’t use to cover sampling—only verbatim copying or certain kinds of derivative works. Samples were considered a legal gray area. Most legal scholars thought they would come under fair use in the United States. Then the courts explicitly extended copyright over sampling.
But sampling has always been a part of creation; there’s a reason they call Brahms’s First Symphony “Beethoven’s Tenth.” Artists have been quoting one another as long as they’ve been making music; listen to the great jazz solos of Charlie Parker. If they had to get a license every time they wanted to quote a snatch of music, then music as we know it wouldn’t exist. Sampling has always been integral to the production of music, all the way down to rock ’n’ roll. Sgt. Pepper, Pet Sounds, the great concept albums are all built around this kind of reference sampling, clipping out, remaking. It’s part of our music ecosystem.
Then, in the name of protecting artists, we created this exclusive right to license (i.e, control) samples. Artists who sign label deals generally sign over the copyrights to their works to the labels, which means that if you want to sample music you don’t go to the artist but you have to deal with the label. If you are signed to one of the big four, a phone call will usually do it. “Bob, this is Fred, remember that deal we did last week when you sampled one of my artists? Well now one of my artists is sampling one of yours. I’m just going to change the names in the contract and send it back to you.” So it’s trivial. But if you’re an indie artist, it’s either difficult or impossible. No one will even take your call. And when you add to this the recent expansion in the length of copyright, you end up with a situation where practically every sound that you may want to sample, virtually everything ever recorded, is owned by one of four companies. Which essentially means that you have to put yourself in harness to one of these labels in order to work in any one of the several genres of music that involves sampling. Or you have to break the law. So that’s part one.
Part two, the second point here, which I sometimes grandiosely call Doctorow’s Second Law, is that “it’s hard to monetize fame but it’s impossible to monetize obscurity.” As Tim O’Reilly very famously said, “The problem for most artists isn’t piracy, its obscurity.” It’s a great sound bite as things go, but merely being well- known doesn’t guarantee that you earn a living. The fact is, most artists have never earned a living. Never have and never will. There’s never been an economy that rewards every artist who wants to make art with enough money to go on and make it. This has never been a feature of any civilization. I’m not celebrating this. It’s just the fact. Yet people continue to make art anyway.
I think about science fiction when I think about this. Science fiction had its heyday as short stories in the 1930s and 1940s—the pulp days, when the magazines were paying one to two cents a word. If you sent a manuscript off on Monday, you might get it accepted on Wednesday. (This was when the American Post Office worked incredibly fast, almost at the speed of e- mail today.) The check you got on Friday that would pay your rent for the month. Today science fiction magazines pay two to six cents a word; in 1930-adjusted pennies, that’s a fraction of a fraction of a cent per word.
The last time I asked an editor of one of the major New York magazines how many stories she was getting a month, she said about a thousand. And she buys about two. So it’s clear that this is not a rational economic industry like, say, shoemaking. If your grandfather was a shoemaker and every time he fixed a pair of shoes he got enough money to pay the rent, and there was only one other shoemaker on his road, he was able to support his family. Flash forward two generations and you’re still in the family business, except there’s 999 other shoemakers on your road and every time you fix a pair of shoes you get enough money to buy a stick of gum. You’d probably find another job.
But the artist or the writer doesn’t. Approximately speaking, anyone who can write and sell a short story to Asimov’s magazine could be writing ad copy for a salary with benefits and a retirement plan. So if the reason you’re in the arts is for money, you’re really in the wrong business. And the dismal rate for short fiction and poetry and novels (and handmade jewelry and oil paintings done by street vendors) has almost nothing to do with copyright.
I heard a poet speak at a European Union copyright event a couple years ago bemoaning the terrible state of poets’ lives, talking about how hard it was to make a living writing poetry. I completely sympathized until she concluded: “That’s why we need to defend copyright!” And that’s where I broke with her, because even if she had her own special copyright cutlass that allowed her to disembowel people who used her poetry without paying for it, it wouldn’t make her an extra penny.
If you really want to make life better for artists, improve their leverage with their publishers. I speak of publishers in the broadest sense here, including record labels and film distributors. Publishing is the job of making the work public: that is to say, identifying a work, identifying an audience for that work, and taking whatever steps necessary to introduce the audience to the work. Sometimes money changes hands and sometimes it doesn’t. But that’s really what publishing comes down to.
Now some of that artists can do for themselves. But there’s an enormous amount of it that’s beyond the grasp of an artist, that requires an institution. Even if you’re the most organized person in the world (and not all artists are), you don’t have a sales force, you can’t coordinate printers, you can’t do all kinds of stuff that publishers can do. Plus, if you’re on tour with your book, you’re not at home writing another, and you’re also not at the Frankfurt Book Fair selling your book to foreign editors. All that is stuff publishers perform for us. So this is why it’s a good partnership when it works.
But there’s another version of combining knowledge with special abilities that has a reverse effect; it actually reduces the author’s bottom line. For example, your publisher might sew up all the distribution so that if you want to get a book into a bookstore you have to do a deal with him. That’s happened periodically in the history of bookselling. And that’s happened regularly in the history of music and film distribution. And when all commerce is controlled by a small cartel, people who produce into that supply chain end up suffering.
The music industry is a textbook example of what happens when all the copyrights accrue to a small number of companies, which as a result end up with control over the whole distribution and retail chain.
Say you are signed to a label (and you have to be signed to a label if you want to do things like sampling and not get sued into a wet spot on the pavement) that sells through the iTunes store, and that looks like a good deal for the artist.
For the consumer, not so good. When iTunes, Apple, sells you something as a listener, they actually don’t sell it to you—they license it to you. That’s what that twenty-six thousand words of boilerplate you have to click through is all about. It’s not like lawyers write twenty-six thousand-word license agreements to let you know you have more rights than you thought you had. It’s to let you know that they have the right to come over to your house and eat all your food and punch your grandmother and make long distance calls.
The upshot is that it’s a license. You as the listener haven’t bought it the way you bought a CD or a record. You can’t sell it, you can’t loan it, you can’t give it away, and you sure as hell can’t copy it.
This is the business model for digital music: nobody gets to own anything ever again. For the artist, it looks great, because the standard record deal states that if it’s a license you get 50 percent of the take, and if its a sale you get a 7 percent royalty. But in reality you end up getting 7 percent because the record company classes this transaction as a “sale” on your royalty statement. The buyer gets treated as a licensor, but for you, the musician, it’s a sale, and thus the label pays about six- sevenths less than you’re owed. All four of the majors have the same accounting peccadillo, so if you don’t like it you can go pound sand. Because who else are you going to license your catalog to? And to add insult to injury, a line item on the standard royalties sheet deducts a certain percentage for “breakage,” which apparently accounts for all the bits that are broken on the way to the iTunes store.
This kind of thing gets repeated throughout the other industries where you have strong copyright and a lot of strong copyright lawyers. So, for example, anyone who wants to make a movie that’s distributed through the studio system has to go to the insurers that the movie industry has grown up in tandem with, and they insure you against lawsuits for copyright infringement. Before they insure your film, they go through it to make sure you haven’t done anything that might arise in a lawsuit (not anything that would arise in a lawsuit) that they would lose just anything they might get sued for at all. Practically speaking, what that means is if there’s someone wearing a t-shirt with a logo on it hanging around in the background of your film, you have to get a license for it.
When I taught at the University of California, I had a student whose summer job was to open checks for the Men in Black franchise. Anyone who shot a movie with a Men in Black comic lying around had to send them a check, not because copyright law said so but because the insurers who work for the studios said so. So when you create obstacles, you create people whose job it is to keep the obstacles in place so they can create problems only they know how to solve. When you use copyright to turn creativity into an obstacle course, you end up giving power to institutions whose job it is to remove obstacles.
It is really only by using policy to remove obstacles to creativity that you end up giving power to creators. This is where we get back to the idea that it’s hard to monetize fame but impossible to monetize obscurity. Creative Commons licenses and other tools make it possible for artists to build audiences. YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc., allow artists to forge contract with readers or listeners that runs person to person, not person to corporation. (It can be quite exhausting, very asymmetrical: you’ve got a million readers and there’s only one of you, and they all want to send you a tweet, and you have to figure out how to reply to them all! But it sure beats the alternative, which is that you’ve got no readers and no one gives a tweet.)
This amounts to a social contract, and it’s different from an economic contract, in which you only get what you pay for and you only deliver what you gat paid for. The consumer gets the commodity, say, the CD that you get to bring home, and the producer gets the money that you spent on it. You have no responsibility to the producer and the producer has no responsibility to you; you’ve engaged in an act of commerce, like buying a candy bar, not entering into a relationship.
The artistic business has always had this element of social contract; it’s never been merely an economic contract. The artist asks the audience to integrate her art into their lives, to listen to her arguments, to adopt her aesthetic, to hum her tunes to their children, to ruminate on her stories and tell them to themselves— to make her art part of their lives. In return, audiences don’t just acquire art, they purchase a part in an artist’s career. They feel a stake in it; they promote the art that they love; they do things that run contrary to their theoretical economic interest but that are in favor of their social interest and the interest of the artist that they love. They buy premium items, they buy spare copies, they buy copies just to keep on their shelves; they come out to see authors at festivals. They treat the artist’s material as though it were infused with the artist herself or himself.
This isn’t the kind of contract that corporations are very good at, which isn’t to say don’t try. That’s why any sentence that contains the word “brand” is almost certainly bullshit. Because “brand” as it’s used in corporate board rooms is a way of fooling the customer into feeling as if she’s entered into a social contract, while carefully ensuring that there is no reciprocal contract on the part of the corporation. The customer is meant to tirelessly promote and support the brand, but the brand has no duties to the customer; it can even sue the customer for promoting the brand in a way that runs contrary to the brand identity endorsed by the brand’s owner.
A world of open networks and social systems is one in which artists get more leverage; in which they can take on some of those very difficult tasks of publishing and building an audience, face fewer bottlenecks, pay less to do more, and get better deals from their publishers. This isn’t any guarantee that an artist will earn a living —I’ll say it again: most artists will never earn a living— but rather this is a way that ensures when art is bought and sold more of the money that results from those transactions goes to the artist.
And now we’re on to the final piece of the puzzle, which is that information doesn’t want to be free, people do. In 1985 at the first Hackers’ Conference in Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand uttered his famous aphorism, “Information wants to be free; information [also] wants to be expensive.” And this was a lovely Zen summation of what was about to happen in the next fifteen years, when information technology would make it easier to copy stuff, but also raised the value of
the stuff that was getting easier to copy. And these two trends were to rub up against each other in very interesting and at times catastrophic ways.
This was a very prescient thing for him to have said, but not a moral statement about whether copying is good or bad, and certainly not the ideological basis for people who support copyright reform it has become. “Information wants to be free” has about the same relationship to the copyright fight that “Kill Whitey” has to the civil rights movement or bra burning has to feminism—which is to say that it’s a kind of intellectually dishonest cartoon that allow you to duck the real questions and just address the straw man.
And “information wants to be expensive” means that artists and creators often end up taking the stance that either government or corporations have a duty to figure out how to make computers worse at copying. This is a fool’s errand that will have no measurable effect on “piracy,” because copying is as hard now as it is ever going to get, which is not very hard. It’s not like next year hard drives are going to become more expensive, or fewer folks will know how to sit down at a computer and type in “Batman Returns bittorrent.” From here on in, copying just gets easier.
It’s also a fool’s errand because it has very negative external effects on society as a whole. In addition to increasing the power of intermediaries over artists (as we see with DRM), it also rewrites the operating system of the information age to build in censorship, surveillance, and control. So, for example, we are creating these national firewalls—as here in Australia, with the aim of ending child pornography, even though the people who make the firewalls say that they won’t work for that!
You all know Chekhov’s first law of narrative, which is that if you put a gun onstage in act one, someone is going to use it by act three. So once you build a national firewall, everyone who knows of something on the Internet they’d prefer their fellow citizens not see, starts showing up in the halls of government saying we should add this and that to the firewall. In the UK there is a proposal to add trademark and copyright infringement to the national firewall. The same proposal has been floated in the United States and in Ireland and Scandinavia as well.
The problem is, the sites that contain “infringing” material also contain an astounding amount of noninfringing material placed there by artists as part of their legitimate distribution schemes. Take a site like YouTube, with something like a billion files (and about 5 percent of them infringe copyright), which assembles and makes public a body of creative work that is larger than ever dreamt of before. Shut it down? It’s as if we’ve discovered a town that houses the largest library ever built, surrounded by a shantytown of pirated DVDs, and so we propose to bulldoze the whole city.
Everybody gets in on this act, even people who are theoretically progressive and involved in social-justice causes. Last year, Bono from U2 wrote an op-ed in the New York Times saying we must end copyright infringement on the Internet. Build a Great Firewall like the one in China, he says. First of all, he’s wrong. China, which has the power to arrest you and harvest your organs for high-ranking party members, hasn’t managed to build an effective firewall. But even if they could, the idea that Bono is aligning himself with the Chinese government and their tactics in order to control information flow is astounding. I mean, we know you love freedom, we just wish you’d share, Bono!
What happens when you start to control how these networks work is that you need to preemptively examine all the work that goes there. What you end up doing is raising the cost of hosting material altogether. When I spoke at Google Zurich in last year, I said there’s about ten hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. (I’d gotten that stat about a month before.) A person who worked at YouTube put her hand up and said, “No, it’s twenty-nine hours.” That was then: now, it’s probably like a quintillion hours uploaded every minute.
So if you say to Google, you have an affirmative duty to ensure that none of this stuff infringes copyright before the public is allowed to see it, you fundamentally say to them we expect you to hire an army of copyright lawyers booking more lawyer hours than exist between now and the heat death of the universe. Which is to say, it’s impossible.
If you expect Google to watch everything that goes on YouTube before it goes live, something has to give. My guess is, they would solve that problem by restructuring YouTube so that it looks like cable TV. Nothing goes on cable TV until a lawyer and an insurer have signed off on it. In some very lucky places, there are a whopping five hundred cable channels. Imagine if the Internet only had five hundred websites! And of course if the principle of a duty to review for infringement applies to YouTube, there’s no reason it shouldn’t apply to a blogger or to Twitter or any other place people are making information available.
This is not just bad for indie artists. You end up blocking efforts to organize political movements or form little league teams or bind together far-flung families, as well as to build free and open serve software and to create encyclopedias and do all manner of amazing things. Once you impose the duty to police what gets posted on user-generated content cites, you have to retain ever-larger amounts of information in case someone is found retrospectively to infringe copyright.
It gets worse. YouTube allows users to set some videos as visible only to family and friends, but Viacom in a recent lawsuit argued that you and I and everyone else should be shut off from that privacy option just in case we were using it not to share pictures of our toddlers but old Mork & Mindy episodes. And some digital rights management technology includes spyware that records your Internet doings and secretly smuggles them up to some mother ship that’s trying to do behavioral marketing. And worst of all, there’s the “three-strikes” law being proposed as part of ACTA, an international treaty that Australia participates in. If you are found guilty of three acts of copyright infringement (with a very lightweight standard of proof before something like a traffic court), they cut off your Internet access; and since most of us share a household, it’s collective punishment.
If you swipe a DVD from a shop you get a small fine, or if you’ve done it hundreds of times maybe you get some community service—but we don’t come to your house and say, OK, we’re going to cut you off from all the services that deliver freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, access to tools, communities, and ideas, access to education, and civic engagement.
This not a principle we think of as belonging in the justice systems of enlightened countries. People like me fight for copyright reform not because we’re cheap and we want DVDs for free but because, in the name of preventing piracy, corporations and governments are attacking fundamentals like the right to assemble, the right to free speech, the right to operate a free press and the right to organize and work together. Information doesn’t want to be free, people do! Artists need to transcend the self-serving, terrorized, crappy narrative that’s been fed to us by the copyright industries and recognize that the collateral damage from this doomed effort to reduce copying includes the free society that we all cherish.
And there are organizations that will help us. In Australia there’s Electronic Frontiers Australia; worldwide there’s Electronic Frontiers Foundation, Creative Commons, and many other organizations that work for a balanced copyright regime that respects all the civil liberties that are part of a free society and also tries to insure that artists can go on earning their livings as well.
So thank you and good night.
This article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. See http://craphound.com/context for a more detailed explanation.
Creativity vs. Copyright
(Newly revised and condensed from his historic address to the 2010 World Science Fiction Convention in Melbourne, Australia)
THERE ARE THREE THINGS I want to cover in this talk. I tell you that because that way you’ll know how close I am to the end, as I will tell you each time I get to one of them.
Starting with the first: Anytime someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you and doesn’t give you a key, that lock is not there for your benefit. The lock I’m talking about here of course is digital rights management, or DRM—the so-called digital locks that are used to restrict copying and use of digital works. If you’ve ever bought a DVD from elsewhere that doesn’t play here in Australia, if someone’s ever given you a game that wouldn’t play in your game player, if you’ve ever gotten a movie and found that you couldn’t move it from one device to another, you’ve experienced DRM.
The biggest lie ever told to creative people is that DRM is there to help them and that it will contain their losses due to piracy. What DRM does primarily is stop authors and creators and publishers from authorizing audiences to follow them to new platforms.
Let me unpack that a little. Most countries—including Australia, since the U.S.-Australia Free Trade Agreement—have a law that prohibits breaking digital rights management technology, even if you’re not committing a copyright infringement. So, for example, if you bought a copy of your own work from Apple or Amazon or any other of the main DRM vendors, you yourself as the owner of that copyright can’t remove the DRM without their permission.
This obviously has no nexus with protecting copyright. We usually grant copyright to people who create things, not to corporations whose contribution to the enterprise is making electronics in Chinese sweatshops. But this is a way that copyright moves from creators to distributors. Practically what it amounts to is a way to lock creators into distribution platforms. Take the iPad or the Kindle or any of the other DRM platforms for distributing electronic books. If I were to sell a million dollars worth of eBooks through the iPad, all with DRM
on it, I couldn’t authorize you, my reader, to follow me to, say, the Kindle. It’s as if every time you bought a book at Borders, you were locked into only shelving it in an IKEA bookcase. If you wanted to sell your books through the local independent bookseller down the road, your readers would have to throw away all the books they had bought and buy new copies to shelve on their new bookcases. Or maintain separate parallel libraries where their books would be shelved either on one case or another depending on whose DRM was on it.
This is clearly not useful for creators. Rather, this is a way that the negotiating leverage between the creators and distributors can be tipped toward distributors. So it ends up being used as a club with which to beat creators and the publishers of creative works.
For example, take the iPad or the iPhone, where the likelihood of any one app author getting rich is very small. One of the things Apple likes to tout is the success of the platform. Yes, there are hundreds of thousands of apps for the iPad and the iPhone, and there are millions of apps sold. But when you divide the second number by the first, you come out with an average that tells you that most app authors are making very little money. While a few have gotten rich, the majority of people who create for that platform don’t make much at all. But they can’t afford to go somewhere else without risking alienating all their customers. Because when they switch to, say, selling their apps on Android (where you might get a larger percentage of the money that the audience spends) you have to be willing to risk that your own customers will abandon their investment in the iPad or iPhone app and buy it again from Android. You’re kind of locked into Apple.
As a result, Apple gets to set terms that authors tend not to like. For example, they take 30 percent (ouch!) and they have a very rigorous set of contractual terms that amount to censorship. They prohibited a dictionary because it contained dirty words. They prohibited the Pulitzer Prize–winning editorial cartoons of Mark Fiore because they disparaged public figures. They prohibited a comic book adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses because it had penises in it.
In each of these cases, Apple backed off after a lot of public ridicule. This is free speech—provided enough people are offended enough when you are censored that they’ll take up your cause and make the company that censored you feel stupid.
While no publisher is obliged to carry your works, usually there’s multiplicity of publishers you can shop your works to. But not if you are locked into one platform or store.
The reason that DRM is a really bad deal for artists and developers of art is not just that it locks us into these platforms, but that it locks us in without delivering what it’s supposed to deliver. What we’re supposed to get out of the DRM bargain is that if we allow our works to be locked up by distributors, in exchange they’ll make sure our works aren’t copied. As a technical matter, this has been a complete failure. It has never really worked. Every computer scientist and cryptographer who doesn’t work for a DRM vendor will tell you that it will never work. The only engineers who will tell you it’s possible to make computers worse at copying are those who have a direct financial stake in selling you technology to make computers worse at copying.
Fundamentally the entertainment industry put out an RFP (request for proposals) for magic beans. They wanted magic beans that would make computers worse at copying. Anytime you say we have an unlimited budget to spend on magic beans, you will find magic bean vendors. That doesn’t mean the magic beans will work, right? The War on Terror precipitated hundreds of RFPs for magic beans that would automatically detect terrorists or automatically prevent airplanes from being blown up. And lo and behold, there were hundreds of people showing up with magic beans to sell to the military-industrial complex. The entertainment complex has found itself with unlimited magic bean vendors as well. So that’s the reality. The nonideological, empirical, fact-based reality is that all DRM is broken as soon as anyone decides it’s worth breaking.
Every lock can be picked, especially if it’s sitting in the lock-picker’s living room, or computer. DRM designers know this, but what do they care? They’re selling magic beans.
Publishers and distributors know this too. They’re not stupid. They’re not actually interested in slowing or stopping copying, they’re interested in getting the legal protection that stops copyright holders from going to their competitors. For example, when Apple shipped the iPad they shipped it with a DRM that was supposed to stop the piracy of iPad apps. That DRM lasted all of twenty-four hours; they weren’t even trying. What they wanted to secure was not the app but their control over the app. The DRM gave them the right to call on the infinite might of the state to intervene on their behalf should anyone try to compete with them and offer a better deal to their authors.
So extending these legal locks ends up decreasing every artist’s individual negotiating power with distributors. Extending copyright does the same thing between creators and publishers. One example is the extension of copyright over sampling. Copyright didn’t use to cover sampling—only verbatim copying or certain kinds of derivative works. Samples were considered a legal gray area. Most legal scholars thought they would come under fair use in the United States. Then the courts explicitly extended copyright over sampling.
But sampling has always been a part of creation; there’s a reason they call Brahms’s First Symphony “Beethoven’s Tenth.” Artists have been quoting one another as long as they’ve been making music; listen to the great jazz solos of Charlie Parker. If they had to get a license every time they wanted to quote a snatch of music, then music as we know it wouldn’t exist. Sampling has always been integral to the production of music, all the way down to rock ’n’ roll. Sgt. Pepper, Pet Sounds, the great concept albums are all built around this kind of reference sampling, clipping out, remaking. It’s part of our music ecosystem.
Then, in the name of protecting artists, we created this exclusive right to license (i.e, control) samples. Artists who sign label deals generally sign over the copyrights to their works to the labels, which means that if you want to sample music you don’t go to the artist but you have to deal with the label. If you are signed to one of the big four, a phone call will usually do it. “Bob, this is Fred, remember that deal we did last week when you sampled one of my artists? Well now one of my artists is sampling one of yours. I’m just going to change the names in the contract and send it back to you.” So it’s trivial. But if you’re an indie artist, it’s either difficult or impossible. No one will even take your call. And when you add to this the recent expansion in the length of copyright, you end up with a situation where practically every sound that you may want to sample, virtually everything ever recorded, is owned by one of four companies. Which essentially means that you have to put yourself in harness to one of these labels in order to work in any one of the several genres of music that involves sampling. Or you have to break the law. So that’s part one.
Part two, the second point here, which I sometimes grandiosely call Doctorow’s Second Law, is that “it’s hard to monetize fame but it’s impossible to monetize obscurity.” As Tim O’Reilly very famously said, “The problem for most artists isn’t piracy, its obscurity.” It’s a great sound bite as things go, but merely being well- known doesn’t guarantee that you earn a living. The fact is, most artists have never earned a living. Never have and never will. There’s never been an economy that rewards every artist who wants to make art with enough money to go on and make it. This has never been a feature of any civilization. I’m not celebrating this. It’s just the fact. Yet people continue to make art anyway.
I think about science fiction when I think about this. Science fiction had its heyday as short stories in the 1930s and 1940s—the pulp days, when the magazines were paying one to two cents a word. If you sent a manuscript off on Monday, you might get it accepted on Wednesday. (This was when the American Post Office worked incredibly fast, almost at the speed of e- mail today.) The check you got on Friday that would pay your rent for the month. Today science fiction magazines pay two to six cents a word; in 1930-adjusted pennies, that’s a fraction of a fraction of a cent per word.
The last time I asked an editor of one of the major New York magazines how many stories she was getting a month, she said about a thousand. And she buys about two. So it’s clear that this is not a rational economic industry like, say, shoemaking. If your grandfather was a shoemaker and every time he fixed a pair of shoes he got enough money to pay the rent, and there was only one other shoemaker on his road, he was able to support his family. Flash forward two generations and you’re still in the family business, except there’s 999 other shoemakers on your road and every time you fix a pair of shoes you get enough money to buy a stick of gum. You’d probably find another job.
But the artist or the writer doesn’t. Approximately speaking, anyone who can write and sell a short story to Asimov’s magazine could be writing ad copy for a salary with benefits and a retirement plan. So if the reason you’re in the arts is for money, you’re really in the wrong business. And the dismal rate for short fiction and poetry and novels (and handmade jewelry and oil paintings done by street vendors) has almost nothing to do with copyright.
I heard a poet speak at a European Union copyright event a couple years ago bemoaning the terrible state of poets’ lives, talking about how hard it was to make a living writing poetry. I completely sympathized until she concluded: “That’s why we need to defend copyright!” And that’s where I broke with her, because even if she had her own special copyright cutlass that allowed her to disembowel people who used her poetry without paying for it, it wouldn’t make her an extra penny.
If you really want to make life better for artists, improve their leverage with their publishers. I speak of publishers in the broadest sense here, including record labels and film distributors. Publishing is the job of making the work public: that is to say, identifying a work, identifying an audience for that work, and taking whatever steps necessary to introduce the audience to the work. Sometimes money changes hands and sometimes it doesn’t. But that’s really what publishing comes down to.
Now some of that artists can do for themselves. But there’s an enormous amount of it that’s beyond the grasp of an artist, that requires an institution. Even if you’re the most organized person in the world (and not all artists are), you don’t have a sales force, you can’t coordinate printers, you can’t do all kinds of stuff that publishers can do. Plus, if you’re on tour with your book, you’re not at home writing another, and you’re also not at the Frankfurt Book Fair selling your book to foreign editors. All that is stuff publishers perform for us. So this is why it’s a good partnership when it works.
But there’s another version of combining knowledge with special abilities that has a reverse effect; it actually reduces the author’s bottom line. For example, your publisher might sew up all the distribution so that if you want to get a book into a bookstore you have to do a deal with him. That’s happened periodically in the history of bookselling. And that’s happened regularly in the history of music and film distribution. And when all commerce is controlled by a small cartel, people who produce into that supply chain end up suffering.
The music industry is a textbook example of what happens when all the copyrights accrue to a small number of companies, which as a result end up with control over the whole distribution and retail chain.
Say you are signed to a label (and you have to be signed to a label if you want to do things like sampling and not get sued into a wet spot on the pavement) that sells through the iTunes store, and that looks like a good deal for the artist.
For the consumer, not so good. When iTunes, Apple, sells you something as a listener, they actually don’t sell it to you—they license it to you. That’s what that twenty-six thousand words of boilerplate you have to click through is all about. It’s not like lawyers write twenty-six thousand-word license agreements to let you know you have more rights than you thought you had. It’s to let you know that they have the right to come over to your house and eat all your food and punch your grandmother and make long distance calls.
The upshot is that it’s a license. You as the listener haven’t bought it the way you bought a CD or a record. You can’t sell it, you can’t loan it, you can’t give it away, and you sure as hell can’t copy it.
This is the business model for digital music: nobody gets to own anything ever again. For the artist, it looks great, because the standard record deal states that if it’s a license you get 50 percent of the take, and if its a sale you get a 7 percent royalty. But in reality you end up getting 7 percent because the record company classes this transaction as a “sale” on your royalty statement. The buyer gets treated as a licensor, but for you, the musician, it’s a sale, and thus the label pays about six- sevenths less than you’re owed. All four of the majors have the same accounting peccadillo, so if you don’t like it you can go pound sand. Because who else are you going to license your catalog to? And to add insult to injury, a line item on the standard royalties sheet deducts a certain percentage for “breakage,” which apparently accounts for all the bits that are broken on the way to the iTunes store.
This kind of thing gets repeated throughout the other industries where you have strong copyright and a lot of strong copyright lawyers. So, for example, anyone who wants to make a movie that’s distributed through the studio system has to go to the insurers that the movie industry has grown up in tandem with, and they insure you against lawsuits for copyright infringement. Before they insure your film, they go through it to make sure you haven’t done anything that might arise in a lawsuit (not anything that would arise in a lawsuit) that they would lose just anything they might get sued for at all. Practically speaking, what that means is if there’s someone wearing a t-shirt with a logo on it hanging around in the background of your film, you have to get a license for it.
When I taught at the University of California, I had a student whose summer job was to open checks for the Men in Black franchise. Anyone who shot a movie with a Men in Black comic lying around had to send them a check, not because copyright law said so but because the insurers who work for the studios said so. So when you create obstacles, you create people whose job it is to keep the obstacles in place so they can create problems only they know how to solve. When you use copyright to turn creativity into an obstacle course, you end up giving power to institutions whose job it is to remove obstacles.
It is really only by using policy to remove obstacles to creativity that you end up giving power to creators. This is where we get back to the idea that it’s hard to monetize fame but impossible to monetize obscurity. Creative Commons licenses and other tools make it possible for artists to build audiences. YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc., allow artists to forge contract with readers or listeners that runs person to person, not person to corporation. (It can be quite exhausting, very asymmetrical: you’ve got a million readers and there’s only one of you, and they all want to send you a tweet, and you have to figure out how to reply to them all! But it sure beats the alternative, which is that you’ve got no readers and no one gives a tweet.)
This amounts to a social contract, and it’s different from an economic contract, in which you only get what you pay for and you only deliver what you gat paid for. The consumer gets the commodity, say, the CD that you get to bring home, and the producer gets the money that you spent on it. You have no responsibility to the producer and the producer has no responsibility to you; you’ve engaged in an act of commerce, like buying a candy bar, not entering into a relationship.
The artistic business has always had this element of social contract; it’s never been merely an economic contract. The artist asks the audience to integrate her art into their lives, to listen to her arguments, to adopt her aesthetic, to hum her tunes to their children, to ruminate on her stories and tell them to themselves— to make her art part of their lives. In return, audiences don’t just acquire art, they purchase a part in an artist’s career. They feel a stake in it; they promote the art that they love; they do things that run contrary to their theoretical economic interest but that are in favor of their social interest and the interest of the artist that they love. They buy premium items, they buy spare copies, they buy copies just to keep on their shelves; they come out to see authors at festivals. They treat the artist’s material as though it were infused with the artist herself or himself.
This isn’t the kind of contract that corporations are very good at, which isn’t to say don’t try. That’s why any sentence that contains the word “brand” is almost certainly bullshit. Because “brand” as it’s used in corporate board rooms is a way of fooling the customer into feeling as if she’s entered into a social contract, while carefully ensuring that there is no reciprocal contract on the part of the corporation. The customer is meant to tirelessly promote and support the brand, but the brand has no duties to the customer; it can even sue the customer for promoting the brand in a way that runs contrary to the brand identity endorsed by the brand’s owner.
A world of open networks and social systems is one in which artists get more leverage; in which they can take on some of those very difficult tasks of publishing and building an audience, face fewer bottlenecks, pay less to do more, and get better deals from their publishers. This isn’t any guarantee that an artist will earn a living —I’ll say it again: most artists will never earn a living— but rather this is a way that ensures when art is bought and sold more of the money that results from those transactions goes to the artist.
And now we’re on to the final piece of the puzzle, which is that information doesn’t want to be free, people do. In 1985 at the first Hackers’ Conference in Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand uttered his famous aphorism, “Information wants to be free; information [also] wants to be expensive.” And this was a lovely Zen summation of what was about to happen in the next fifteen years, when information technology would make it easier to copy stuff, but also raised the value of
the stuff that was getting easier to copy. And these two trends were to rub up against each other in very interesting and at times catastrophic ways.
This was a very prescient thing for him to have said, but not a moral statement about whether copying is good or bad, and certainly not the ideological basis for people who support copyright reform it has become. “Information wants to be free” has about the same relationship to the copyright fight that “Kill Whitey” has to the civil rights movement or bra burning has to feminism—which is to say that it’s a kind of intellectually dishonest cartoon that allow you to duck the real questions and just address the straw man.
And “information wants to be expensive” means that artists and creators often end up taking the stance that either government or corporations have a duty to figure out how to make computers worse at copying. This is a fool’s errand that will have no measurable effect on “piracy,” because copying is as hard now as it is ever going to get, which is not very hard. It’s not like next year hard drives are going to become more expensive, or fewer folks will know how to sit down at a computer and type in “Batman Returns bittorrent.” From here on in, copying just gets easier.
It’s also a fool’s errand because it has very negative external effects on society as a whole. In addition to increasing the power of intermediaries over artists (as we see with DRM), it also rewrites the operating system of the information age to build in censorship, surveillance, and control. So, for example, we are creating these national firewalls—as here in Australia, with the aim of ending child pornography, even though the people who make the firewalls say that they won’t work for that!
You all know Chekhov’s first law of narrative, which is that if you put a gun onstage in act one, someone is going to use it by act three. So once you build a national firewall, everyone who knows of something on the Internet they’d prefer their fellow citizens not see, starts showing up in the halls of government saying we should add this and that to the firewall. In the UK there is a proposal to add trademark and copyright infringement to the national firewall. The same proposal has been floated in the United States and in Ireland and Scandinavia as well.
The problem is, the sites that contain “infringing” material also contain an astounding amount of noninfringing material placed there by artists as part of their legitimate distribution schemes. Take a site like YouTube, with something like a billion files (and about 5 percent of them infringe copyright), which assembles and makes public a body of creative work that is larger than ever dreamt of before. Shut it down? It’s as if we’ve discovered a town that houses the largest library ever built, surrounded by a shantytown of pirated DVDs, and so we propose to bulldoze the whole city.
Everybody gets in on this act, even people who are theoretically progressive and involved in social-justice causes. Last year, Bono from U2 wrote an op-ed in the New York Times saying we must end copyright infringement on the Internet. Build a Great Firewall like the one in China, he says. First of all, he’s wrong. China, which has the power to arrest you and harvest your organs for high-ranking party members, hasn’t managed to build an effective firewall. But even if they could, the idea that Bono is aligning himself with the Chinese government and their tactics in order to control information flow is astounding. I mean, we know you love freedom, we just wish you’d share, Bono!
What happens when you start to control how these networks work is that you need to preemptively examine all the work that goes there. What you end up doing is raising the cost of hosting material altogether. When I spoke at Google Zurich in last year, I said there’s about ten hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. (I’d gotten that stat about a month before.) A person who worked at YouTube put her hand up and said, “No, it’s twenty-nine hours.” That was then: now, it’s probably like a quintillion hours uploaded every minute.
So if you say to Google, you have an affirmative duty to ensure that none of this stuff infringes copyright before the public is allowed to see it, you fundamentally say to them we expect you to hire an army of copyright lawyers booking more lawyer hours than exist between now and the heat death of the universe. Which is to say, it’s impossible.
If you expect Google to watch everything that goes on YouTube before it goes live, something has to give. My guess is, they would solve that problem by restructuring YouTube so that it looks like cable TV. Nothing goes on cable TV until a lawyer and an insurer have signed off on it. In some very lucky places, there are a whopping five hundred cable channels. Imagine if the Internet only had five hundred websites! And of course if the principle of a duty to review for infringement applies to YouTube, there’s no reason it shouldn’t apply to a blogger or to Twitter or any other place people are making information available.
This is not just bad for indie artists. You end up blocking efforts to organize political movements or form little league teams or bind together far-flung families, as well as to build free and open serve software and to create encyclopedias and do all manner of amazing things. Once you impose the duty to police what gets posted on user-generated content cites, you have to retain ever-larger amounts of information in case someone is found retrospectively to infringe copyright.
It gets worse. YouTube allows users to set some videos as visible only to family and friends, but Viacom in a recent lawsuit argued that you and I and everyone else should be shut off from that privacy option just in case we were using it not to share pictures of our toddlers but old Mork & Mindy episodes. And some digital rights management technology includes spyware that records your Internet doings and secretly smuggles them up to some mother ship that’s trying to do behavioral marketing. And worst of all, there’s the “three-strikes” law being proposed as part of ACTA, an international treaty that Australia participates in. If you are found guilty of three acts of copyright infringement (with a very lightweight standard of proof before something like a traffic court), they cut off your Internet access; and since most of us share a household, it’s collective punishment.
If you swipe a DVD from a shop you get a small fine, or if you’ve done it hundreds of times maybe you get some community service—but we don’t come to your house and say, OK, we’re going to cut you off from all the services that deliver freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, access to tools, communities, and ideas, access to education, and civic engagement.
This not a principle we think of as belonging in the justice systems of enlightened countries. People like me fight for copyright reform not because we’re cheap and we want DVDs for free but because, in the name of preventing piracy, corporations and governments are attacking fundamentals like the right to assemble, the right to free speech, the right to operate a free press and the right to organize and work together. Information doesn’t want to be free, people do! Artists need to transcend the self-serving, terrorized, crappy narrative that’s been fed to us by the copyright industries and recognize that the collateral damage from this doomed effort to reduce copying includes the free society that we all cherish.
And there are organizations that will help us. In Australia there’s Electronic Frontiers Australia; worldwide there’s Electronic Frontiers Foundation, Creative Commons, and many other organizations that work for a balanced copyright regime that respects all the civil liberties that are part of a free society and also tries to insure that artists can go on earning their livings as well.
So thank you and good night.
Wednesday, 5 October 2011
Occupying Wall St
Wall Street itself is at the same time quintessentially American and the most untypical of New York's streets. It's narrow and crooked, completely unrepresentative of the US city grid plan, and almost unnavigable at the moment with crowd barriers and guards everywhere - a bit like being at the zoo. The reason is that some latter day Dr Who has transposed the political activism of the 60s into modern day Manhattan. Thousands of protestors rallied and then marched on Wall St today, people from every walk of life, class and race prepared their placards and demanded that the bankers, hedge funds managers, the 1% who own more than a third of the wealth in the US, be called to account. Singing, making speeches and chanting, the demonstration united the original alternative protestors who had been inspired by Adbusters to occupy Wall St, and trades union members from all over New York. I saw nurses, taxi drivers, actors, freelance workers, sex workers, doctors, teachers and municipal workers all demanding that Wall St be regulated, convicted and controlled while working people should be bailed out and given a chance.
The occupiers are using all the techniques of Tahrir Square and more - they have live streaming video monitoring every move the NYPD makes. The cops on the other hand have lots of plastic ties - wrist sized - designed to do I don't know what, one of the live streaming tv crews was arrested and continues to broadcast from the inside of a paddy wagon.
Some of the chanting sounds slightly religious - the statement and response of the catechism springs to mind. Lets keep religion out of this. We can think for ourselves and attack capitalism at the same time without deviating too far from an agreed plan of action.
Perhaps the opportunity to debate the issues of the day and find new solutions to age old problems will be as dramatic as the events in the Middle East.
One banner read "Arab Spring, European Summer, American Fall" , not too much to hope for.
The occupiers are using all the techniques of Tahrir Square and more - they have live streaming video monitoring every move the NYPD makes. The cops on the other hand have lots of plastic ties - wrist sized - designed to do I don't know what, one of the live streaming tv crews was arrested and continues to broadcast from the inside of a paddy wagon.
Some of the chanting sounds slightly religious - the statement and response of the catechism springs to mind. Lets keep religion out of this. We can think for ourselves and attack capitalism at the same time without deviating too far from an agreed plan of action.
Perhaps the opportunity to debate the issues of the day and find new solutions to age old problems will be as dramatic as the events in the Middle East.
One banner read "Arab Spring, European Summer, American Fall" , not too much to hope for.
Friday, 19 August 2011
Time is of the essence
Film, I think about at least a dozen times a day, from new films, to classics to my favourites and technical stuff, lets just say I think about everything film related very often. One thing that is a common thought concerns runtime. As a regular goer, I want to be entertained for a sufficiently decent length of time, so when a film finishes after 80 odd minutes I can’t help but fell a little cheated. If I’m honest it’s mostly kids films that have these low runtimes and as we know kids don’t have fantastic concentration, something to do with either Sunny Delight or a 20 Silk Cut a day habit just makes them a bit hyper. But I can’t help but feel that regular films keep scaling back towards the sub 100 minute mark and beyond. The value of a cinema ticket is actually going to skyrocket in terms of £/min.
Now I realise that pacing is an important factor in editing a feature film and that an audience should never be left to get bored but film as an art form allows you to tell stories at whatever pace they need to be told, by the film maker not by an impatient audience.
There is a solution, sort of, which is to split a film into two separate parts. On one hand this is great as the story can be told in all it’s detail, on the other hand I’ve got to pay for two separate tickets as well as wait for the second part to come out.
But what do you think about the length of films these days? What was the last film you saw that went on for too long? What was the last film you saw that finished very quickly? Should a cinema ticket entitle you to a set amount of time of entertainment?
Now I realise that pacing is an important factor in editing a feature film and that an audience should never be left to get bored but film as an art form allows you to tell stories at whatever pace they need to be told, by the film maker not by an impatient audience.
There is a solution, sort of, which is to split a film into two separate parts. On one hand this is great as the story can be told in all it’s detail, on the other hand I’ve got to pay for two separate tickets as well as wait for the second part to come out.
But what do you think about the length of films these days? What was the last film you saw that went on for too long? What was the last film you saw that finished very quickly? Should a cinema ticket entitle you to a set amount of time of entertainment?
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