Aram Squalls

World's fair use day: 1/12/10

Public Knowledge just announced the first annual World's Fair Use Day (WFUD):

A day-long celebration of creativity, innovation and remix culture to be held at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. on January 12th, 2010. Fair use is the legal right that allows creators to make limited uses of copyrighted materials for purposes like comment, criticism and education. At World's Fair Use Day, we'll demonstrate how fair uses of existing works, ranging from recontextualized audio mashups to documentary films, enrich our culture and contribute to the ongoing dialog on copyright. Speakers at the event will include Ben Huh (CEO of the Cheezburger Network, the publishing company behind ICanHasCheezburger and FailBlog), Dan Walsh (creator of the web comic "Garfield Minus Garfield"), Pennsylvania Congressman and mashup fan Mike Doyle, TechDirt founder Mike Masnick, mashup artist DJ Earworm and many more. The night before the main event, we'll kick things off with a "Movie Night," hosted by Mark Hosler of the pioneering audio collage band Negativland and featuring Brett Gaylor, director of RIP: A Remix Manifesto and Kembrew McLeod, director of Copyright Criminals. To view the full list of speakers and schedule and to RSVP, visit wfud.info.

I'll try my best to be there!

SF Police Seizing DJs' Laptops -- Why Am I Not Surprised?

The San Francisco Bay Guardian reports that the SFPD has begun routinely seizing DJs laptops at house parties. Like the ACTA treaty our federal government is currently pursuing, it's representative of a disturbing new trend in law enforcement -- one in which our digital civil liberties, or "e-speech," are not accorded the same protections that they would be in our physical lives or traditional communications media.

However, there's also something very familiar about this story. As I discuss in my forthcoming book, Mashed Up, musical practices and technologies have always been subjected to government regulation, often at gunpoint, from ancient times to the present. This is because music acts as a kind of social and psychological blueprint, and new musical ideas nearly always carry with them new social ideas, which threaten established institutions.

In the case of DJ- and laptop-based music, the new musical ideas are sufficiently threatening to destabilize all of today's modern institutions -- in the government, the marketplace, and even houses of worship. No small wonder, then, that the police would begin to confiscate and criminalize these devices. 

Of course, the flip side of regulation is resistance. Even history's most dispossessed peoples (e.g. slaves in the antebellum South) have responded to musical subjugation with innovative and canny countermeasures. I'm kind of looking forward to seeing how the SF DJ scene starts to hide its contraband...

Visions and Revisions of Cyberspace, revised

I'm almost done with the syllabus I blogged a few weeks back. But I still need some help from all you smart folks out there. Please take a look, and let me know what I'm missing. Feel free to borrow, as well. Remember, this is for Masters students in Media, Culture and Communication.

UPDATE: Here's the final revision going into the first class:

Topics in Digital Media:

Visions and Revisions of Cyberspace

 

Dr. Aram Sinnreich

Description

 

Today, for the first time in history, computer-mediated culture has become mainstream for a majority of individuals in technologically developed societies. From email to texting, from online gaming to online banking, from YouTube to Hulu, from DoS attacks to Second Life sit-ins, nearly every traditional aspect of our lives has found a new expression in its digital proxy.

 

In order to understand the cultural, social, political and economic consequences of this development, we must look to the origins of today’s cyberculture, in the futuristic visions (both dystopian and utopian) that shaped the development of today’s networked technologies. We will trace the genealogy of these visions, as they developed in tandem with the growing digital communications infrastructure over the past three quarters of a century, and evolved into new forms that even the most forward-thinking of visionaries could not have predicted. Ultimately, one can argue that the Internet has both exceeded and fallen short of the hype that surrounded its birth and development, and, by comparing the myth to the reality, we may better understand what aspects of the human condition are likely to persist regardless of technological development.

 

Class will be conducted as a seminar. Students will be responsible for leading discussions on the readings, and are encouraged to critically engage the readings and class conversations.

Schedule

9/9: Introduction

 

9/16: The Memex and the Mushroom Cloud

 

• Bush, V. (1945). As we may think. The Atlantic.
  
  AND 2 OF THE FOLLOWING:
  
  
• Borges, J. L. (1941). The library of Babel.
• Rifkin, J. (1995). A view of the future. Utne Reader.
• Slouka, M. (1996). Reality is death. (from War of the Worlds)
• Leiner, et al (2000). A Brief History of the Internet.

 

9/23: The Metaverse

 

• Nelson, T. (1974). Computer lib/dream machines. [excerpt]
• Baudrillard, J. (1988). Simulacra and Simulations [excerpt]
• Dibbell, J. (2008). Mutilated Furries, Flying Phalluses: Put the Blame on Griefers, the Sociopaths of the Virtual World
• Pendragon, H. (2008) Griefers: Why Dibbell’s Wired Article Was 1-Sided.

 

OR

 

• Neil Stephenson, Snow Crash (Bantam, 1992)

 

9/30: Rules and Regulation

 

• Internet Society, DNS Root Name Servers Explained for Non-Experts
• Mueller, M. (2002). Dancing the Quango: ICANN as International Regulatory Regime.
• Sinnreich & Zager (2008). E-Speech: The (Uncertain) Future of Free Expression
• Wu, T. (2005). Network neutrality, broadband discrimination.

 

OR

 

• Lawrence Lessig, Code v2 (Basic Books, 2006)

 

10/7: Freedom to Hack

GUEST: Karl Fogel, founder, questioncopyright.org

 

• Christopher Kelty (2005), Geeks, Social Imaginaries, and Recursive Publics
• NY Times (1995), A Most Wanted Cyberthief is caught in his own web.
• 2600, Interview with Kevin Mitnick (video)
• Stallman, R. GNU manifesto

 

OR

 

• Doug Thomas, Hacker Culture (U. Minn Press, 2002)
  
  

10/14: dot-com Fantasies

GUEST: Gene DeRose, CEO, HouseParty, former CEO, Jupiter Research

 

• Dyson, E. (1995). Intellectual value. Wired.
• Sinnreich, A. (2001). Remixing the Distribution Chain for Digital Music. Jupiter Research.
• Meeker, M. (1995). The Internet Report. Morgan Stanley. [Read part 1. The rest is skimmable].
• CNET, Top 10 dot-com flops

 

OR

 

• Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (Vintage Books, 1996)

 

10/21: Web 2.0

 

• Anderson, C. (2004). The Long Tail. Wired.
• O’Reilly, T. (2005). What is Web 2.0?
• Schiff, S. (2006). Know it all. The New Yorker.
• boyd, d. (2007). Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace.

 

10/28: Remix/Configurable Culture

• Aram Sinnreich, Mashed Up (U. Mass Press, 2010)

 

OR

 

• Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture (NYU Press, 2006)

 

OR

 

• Lawrence Lessig, Remix (Penguin, 2008)

 

11/4: The Cloud

 

• Downes, S. The Cloud and Collaboration
• Zittrain, J. Lost in the Cloud
• Golden, B. Clueless on the Charles: How Zittrain’s Cloud Missive Got it Wrong
• Doctorow, C. Not Every Cloud Has A Silver Lining
  
  

OPTIONAL:

 

• Google Blog, Introducing the Chrome OS
• Chappell, Windows Azure Whitepaper

 

11/11: Surveillance, Sensors and Semantics

 

• Brin, D. (1998). The transparent society.
• Berners-Lee, et al. (2001). The Semantic Web.
• Dodson, S. (2008). The Net Shapes Up to Get Physical.
• EFF, Surveillance Self-Defense Project

 

11/18: Adventures in MeatSpace

GUEST: Dennis Crowley, founder, Dodgeball.com

 

• Doctorow, C. (2004) Anda’s Game
• NY Times (2004). Quick, After Him, Pacman Went Thataway
• Laura Forlano (2010). WiFi Geographies: When Code Meets Place
• Area/Code, Big Games Manifesto (1 page)
• Patti Maes, The Sixth Sense (Video)

 

 

11/25: MOVIE/FIELD TRIP

 

12/2: Presentations

 

12/9: Presentations

 

FINAL PAPER DUE: 12/16

Feeling lucky? Download the "$675,000 mixtape."

The legendary Pirate Bay's about to close it's doors. We'll finally see the last of those copyright criminals, and order and harmony can be restored to the free peoples of Culver City and Rockefeller Center.

In the meantime, though, if you feel like owning a piece of an unholy relic, you can take your chances and download the "$675,000 mixtape," a torrent linking to all 30 songs student Joel Tenenbaum ended up paying so dearly for.

And, if you're feeling really naughty, you can download, and mirror, the big Kahuna: a 21GB file containing every single torrent tracked on the Pirate Bay to date.

But get it all while the gettin' is good; Arrrrrrmageddon is a-comin'.

Nirvana gets Rick Rolled

Yes, yes, I know, Rick Rolling was soooooo 2008. But this new video mash-up by DJ Morgoth was just too good not to post. The video mix isn't much to look at, but the musical juxtaposition really works.

Previously:
Obama + Rick Astley = lulz
Memetic hybridization -- or, Hitler gets Rick Rolled

France crushes online innovation and dissent with a silicon fist

Well, it appears that Free France has finally given in to the forces of totalitarianism.

Today, the country passed the dreaded "HADOPI" bill, which many American news outlets are calling a "three strikes" law. Here's how it works: if you're accused of copyright infringement by a rights holder, you receive an email with your IP address in it. If you are still suspected of infringement, you receive a certified letter telling you you're in big trouble. If you make the mistake of being suspected of infringement a third time, you'll lose your Internet connection for up to a year.

And there's no right to judicial appeal.

Clearly, there are a thousand problems with this: IP addresses can be spoofed or piggybacked, allegations don't prove guilt, many online uses of copyrighted content fall into exempt categories such as fair use, new business models are built on the innovative (re)use of copyrighted material, political dissent is built on the innovative (re)use of copyrighted material, ... oh, and whatever happened to privacy?

Kicking someone off the Internet is not the same as telling the kids "no TV for a week." We are shifting an ever greater number of essential social functions online, from access to government bureacracy to vital business and personal communications to consumer research to banking to emergency and disaster warnings. The net disenfranchisement (so to speak) amounts to something more like losing your voting rights or your passport.

Fortunately, we don't have any laws like this currently on the docket in the U.S; unfortunately, the "market" is preempting the need for such anger-provoking action on the part of our elected representatives. Already, two of the four major ISPs have agreed to "voluntarily" adopt a 3-strikes rule against their own customers. They brokered the deal with the RIAA back in December 2008 -- a bitter pill dipped in the carob candy shell of a pledge by the RIAA to stop suing file sharers. Too bad they have already broken that part of the bargain.

At least Jacques Attali, France's greatest philosopher of music, technology and culture, has come out against HADOPI:

Jacques Attali tacle Hadopi
by iPolTV

Previously:

• French Parliament nixes awful IP law
• e-Speech: My Truthdig article about free expression in the digital age

RIP: A Remix Manifesto -- tonight at UnionDocs

Whatever you think you're doing tonight, cancel those plans. Because Brett Gaylor's massively acclaimed documentary, RIP: A Remix Manifesto will be screening at UnionDocs in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. And if that weren't incentive enough, you can hear me and Fred Benenson from Creative Commons talk about the social significance of remix at a panel immediately following. Serious fun. Begins at 7:30pm.

Feel the fear and do it anyway

One of my former students, a copyright scholar and photographer named Daniela, just sent me a link to this on Twitter:

Apparently blogger Leo Babauta, who used the hoary old chestnut "feel the fear and do it anyway" as a post title, was shortly thereafter contacted by legal thugs representing Susan Jeffers, PhD., who apparently wrote a book by the same title.

Jeffers' thugs want Babauta to acknowledge on his blog that this well-known idiomatic phrase is now the exclusive trademark of Dr. Jeffers. Babauta isn't capitulating. In support of Babauta's cause, I am using the phrase as the title of this post, and encourage you all to do the same. The only solution to the absurd proprietization of language and culture is to stand up for our rights to free expression, even if it means using a stupid phrase that's practically meaningless as a blog post title.

If you're interested in some legal backstory, or feel like being galled by some ridiculous corporate overreaching in the privatization of public culture, check out David Bollier's excellent book, Brand Name Bullies.

Auto-tuning the news

If you've ever found the robotic, pat intonations of TV commentators and their limited list of talking points and phrases cloying or off-putting, you'll probably get a kick out of this video. The Gregory Brothers have "autotuned" and mashed up TV news footage with their own song lyrics, turning the unidirectional drone of punditry and commentary into a funky Q-and-A.

Previously:

• It's like Milli Vanilli all over again...
• Palin's musical cadences, set to piano

(Thanks for the link, David!)

4 Swedes sentenced to jail for pointing at stuff

This just in: four founders of Swedish BitTorrent tracker Pirate Bay have each been sentenced to a year in jail, and have been assessed an additional fine of $3.6 million.

The PirateBay never copied, hosted, or distributed any copyrighted material. All the site did was provide a search engine indexing and linking to text files known as "torrents" that provided instructions to users about how to share specific pieces of content (some copyrighted, others legally free to distribute). In other words, it didn't do anything different than Google, Yahoo, or a million other indexes of Internet content.

Not only does this ruling pose a tremendous potential chilling effect to free speech, it also marks a problematic incursion of U.S. industry and legal institutions into foreign markets and sovereignties.

And here's the icing on the cake: although people certainly used the Pirate Bay to download tons of unpermissioned copyrighted material, the jailing of its founders won't even mark a blip in the inevitable transformation of the media industry from a retail to a service model. In plainer English, the record labels and movie studios won't save a single, solitary dime as a result of this verdict.

Everyone with a brain in the media industry (a surprisingly large subset) knows that the traditional models of remuneration are over, and there's no turning back. Information goods are transforming into something more akin to a utility -- a fact the labels and studios are acknowledging by attempting to license at the ISP level, and supporting ever more on-demand services, from Netflix to Hulu to Spotify. Furthermore, recorded music is increasingly seen even within the industry as a marketing tool for the really profitable touring and merchandising industries. Warner Music Group has tacitly acknowledged this by announcing last year that all new artist contracts will be "360 deals," in which the label participates in the full gamut of a recording artist's revenues, far beyond simply keeping the wholesale on record retail.

So if the labels and studios are resigned to the structural changes of their industries, and the closure of a BitTorrent tracker will have zero effect on revenues, what's the reason for this trial, and for the amazingly punitive sentence? Pure and simple: the Pirate Bay founders are being hanged as an effigy for all of us. This is a pure act of spectacle, calculated to make us, the world citizens of digital culture, frightened and guilty for our sin of independence.

The only question is: will it work, or will the backlash catalyze an even greater revolt against the dominance of the gatekeepers?