Showing posts with label artists. Show all posts
Showing posts with label artists. Show all posts

24 July 2014

German Director Proposes 'One-Stop Shop' For Free, Instant, But Non-Exclusive Licenses To Offer Films Online

It's always heartening to come across new ideas for ways to make creations more widely available to the public while allowing artists to benefit. Here's one from the German film director Fred Breinersdorfer, probably best known for his film "Sophie Scholl". In an article that appeared recently on the newspaper site Süddeutsche.de (original in German), he complains about the fact that searching online for his film throws up plenty of unauthorized versions, but precious few authorized ones. 

On Techdirt.

15 July 2012

Are Books Printed With Disappearing Ink Really The Best Way To Make People Read Them?

As Techdirt has noted, the main threat to artists is not piracy, but obscurity -- the fact that few know they are creating interesting stuff. As passive consumers increasingly become creators themselves, and the competition increases, that's even more of an issue. For writers, there's a double problem: not only do people need to hear about a work, they also have to find the time to explore it once acquired, and that's often a challenge in our over-filled, stressed-out lives -- unless we're talking about haiku. Here's an unusual approach to encouraging people to find that time to read books

On Techdirt.

12 May 2012

After the German Pirate Party's String Of Successes, Here Comes The Backlash

Over the last few months, Techdirt has been reporting on the amazing rise of the German Pirate Party, with win after win after win. Politicians in the other parties have looked on aghast, powerless to halt the rise of something they clearly can't fathom. Inevitably, the fightback has finally begun, but packaged as an artists' revolt, not simply that of the copyright industries worried about their profit margins. 

On Techdirt.

07 March 2012

Isn't It Time Artists Lost Their 18th-Century Sense Of Entitlement?

One of the common assumptions in the copyright debate is that artists are special, and that they have a right to make money from their works repeatedly, in ways not granted to "ordinary" workers like plumbers or train drivers, thanks to copyright's reach through time and space. Of course, when modern copyright was devised in the early 18th century, artists were special in the sense they were scarce; offering them special monopoly privileges "for the encouragement of learning" as the 1710 Statute of Anne puts it, therefore made sense. 

On Techdirt.

02 December 2011

Why We Don't Need To 'Think Of The Artists': They're Doing Fine

Just as politicians routinely invite us to "think of the children" when they want to push through some new liberty-reducing law, so the copyright industries regularly invoke "the artists" when they want to justify longer copyright terms or harsher enforcement laws. 

On Techdirt.

07 November 2011

Free As In Freedom: But Whose Freedom?

It would be hard to overstate the contribution of Richard Stallman to the digital world. The founding of the GNU project and the creation of the GNU General Public License laid the foundations for a wide range of free software that permeates computing from smartphones to supercomputers. Free software has also directly inspired like-minded movements based around sharing, such as open access and open content (Wikipedia, notably). 

On Techdirt.

31 October 2011

Why Creative Commons Licenses Help Rather Than Hinder Struggling Artists

Creative Commons (CC) has been with us for nearly a decade, so you would have thought people might understand it by now. Apparently not, judging by the title of this blog post: "How Creative Commons Can Stifle Artistic Output." 

On Techdirt.

17 June 2011

The Arrogance of Artists (and Publishers)

You wouldn't expect much else from a meeting organised by WIPO, but this is pretty rich even for them:


Copyright is necessary to allow authors to live from their trade and to guarantee their independence, and exceptions should be decided by authors and publishers, according to panellists on a copyright dialogue held at the World Intellectual Property Organization this week.

Amusingly, this was a "copyright dialogue": but I bet there weren't many people from the *other* side of the equation - the readers. The readers, you see, don't really count in this - "exceptions should be decided by authors and publishers" as the above insists. The fact that copyright is supposed to be a balanced quid pro quo - a time-limited monopoly in return for works entering the public domain afterwards, and that such a balanced of necessity requires both parties to agree, seems not to have entered the heads of those authors and publishers.

The very idea that "exceptions should be decided by authors and publishers" betrays the deep-seated arrogance and contempt that both of these now have for their readers. And that's all part and parcel of the publishing industry's problems: it sees readers as the enemy, something that must be fought and vanquished in order for it to be forced to buy books on the terms of authors and publishers - forced, if necessary, by ever-more Draconian laws that criminalise willy-nilly.

What is so regrettable about this depressing vision is that at the very same conference where these extraordinarily insulting comments about readers were made, another publisher revealed the wonderful truth:

For Richard Charkin, executive director of Bloomsbury Publishing, publishing is also investing in the future. Copyright is a flexible system, he said, giving an example of Bloomsbury Academic’s business model. The publishing company publishes social sciences and humanities research publications. They are available online under a Creative Commons non-commercial licence, and for sale as printed books. The publications are thus widely available, Charkin said, but surprisingly, he said that sales of books seem to be higher when they offer free downloads than if they do not.

Go that? "Surprisingly", when people can freely share books, they *buy more* - exactly as many of us have been saying for years, and in diametric opposition to the dogma of the same authors and publishers who insist that they know best, and that readers must be brought to heel like recalcitrant curs rather than treated as equals in a pleasant colloquy.

How to make money in the age of digital abundance is there for all that have eyes to see; sadly, even the most basic optical equipment seems lacking in this singularly benighted profession. Looks like they will have to learn the hard way....

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

09 May 2011

Portugal to Make CC Licences Illegal?

I recently wrote about the suggestion that a "Great Firewall of Europe" should be created - a fine example of political cluelessness when it comes to technology. Here's another, this time from Portugal:

The Socialist Party will present this new proposal for approval in the next Government, no matter if they win the elections or not. In regards to Creative Commons, they support a vision where Creative Commons harm Culture, and in this law proposal they intend to turn them illegal. Here's how (quick translation, I'll soon post the whole proposal in Portuguese online, so others can make their own translation; this is only the part regarding written works, but there are similar items in "Article 3" for other works, except software):

Article 3, point 1 - The authors have the right to the perception of a compensation equitable for the reproduction of written works, in paper or similar support, for instance microfilm, photocopy, digitalization or other processes of similar nature.

[...]

Article 5 (Inalienability and non-renunciability) - The equitable compensation of authors, artists, interpreters or executives is inalienable and non-renunciable, being null any other contractual clause in contrary.

Here: in sum, every author (except software authors, so thankfully free software isn't affected) has the right of getting money out of private copy, and they can't renounce it, so every Creative Commons license, where saying "You are free to share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work" (or actually, in legalese, "licensor hereby grants you a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual license to reproduce the Work") is illegal.

Judging by the interesting discussion around the post quoted above, it's still not entirely clear whether this is really the intent of this new law. It's possible, for example, that this is just very badly drafted, and not actually an attack on the idea that creators should be able to share their work freely if they wish.

Unfortunately, a follow-up comment to the post is more pessimistic:
The SPA position (that the Ministry of Culture shares because they state they agree 100% in their positions) is that every creative commons author is harming artists, authors and the creative ecosystem.

The SPA is the "Sociedade Portuguesa de Autores", or Portuguese Authors Society:

Since its creation in May 22, 1925, the Portuguese Authors Society took on two important areas of activity: the mutualist and the cultural. The mutualist one has allowed thousands of authors to find support in old age and in sickness. As for the cultural one, it remains active, always with new proposals.

It seems here that those "new proposals" have nothing to do with helping authors distribute their creations as they wish, but is more about imposing a very one-sided and anachronistic view that only fools give away their creations. (Or as Bill Gates put it some years back: "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?")

This shows how prescient Rick Falkvinge was when he wrote recently:

Some people, and corporations in particular, claim that the purpose of the copyright monopoly is for a certain profession to make money. That was never the case, and frankly, the idea is revolting to any democracy and functioning market. Bricklayers don’t have laws guaranteeing they make money, marketers don’t, plumbers don’t, and nobody else does, either.

However, the means of achieving the maximization of the available culture has been to give some creators a monopoly on the opportunity — not the right, but the opportunity — to make money off of a creative work. This has been the means to maximize culture for the public at large, and never the end in itself.

This also means that the only legitimate stakeholder in copyright legislation is the public. The monopoly is indeed a balance, but not the “balance” between corporate profits and human rights that the copyright industry likes to paint and pretend. In fact, the copyright industry is not part of the balance at all.

Unfortunately, this is not some abstract battle between different points of view. For example, if CC licences become illegal in Portugal, this would presumably mean that contributing to Wikipedia would also become illegal. Maybe Wikipedia itself would become illegal - there seems no limit to the absurdity of the knock-on consequences when starting from such a ridiculous premise.

Let's hope that enough Portuguese artists protest and the politicians come to their senses before Portugal becomes the laughing-stock of the civilised world.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

21 November 2010

No Art Please, You're Not British

I thought we had got beyond this daftness:

A Cellist was held at Heathrow Airport and questioned for 8 hours this week. A terrorist suspect? False passport? Drug smuggling? If only it was so dramatic and spectacular. Her crime was coming to the UK with her cello, to participate in musicology conference organised by the School of Music at the University of Leeds and it was for this reason that Kristin Ostling was deported back to Chicago. What was UK Borders Agency (UKBA) thinking? That she would sell her cello to earn some cash, or do a spot of moonlighting at some secretive classical music gig, while she was here?

The Conference organiser, Professor Derek Scott informed the Manifesto Club that “She was not being paid a penny for this, but these zealous officers decided that playing a cello is work and, paid or unpaid, she could not be allowed in.”

Lovely logic here: if you are a professional cellist it follows that putting bow to string is work, and therefore not permitted according to the terms of your visa. And as the article explains, it's the same for painters and photographers: if you dare to create a masterpiece here in the UK, you might end up being deported, and blacklisted.

Now, call me old fashioned, but it seems to me that we should actually be *begging* artists to come here and create: it not only enriches the cultural ecosystem based on the UK and all it contains, it makes it more likely that other artists and non-artists will want to come to the country to see where these works were spawned, bringing with them all that valuable touristic dosh that everyone seems to be scrabbling after these days.

But the problem is really deeper than this simple loss of these earnings. What is really disturbing is the crass way the UK Borders Agency equates artistic creation with work: if you act as an artist - even if you are not paid - you are theoretically doing something that should have a price on it. This is really part and parcel of the thinking that everything should be copyrighted and patented - that you can't do stuff for free, or simply give away your intellectual creations.

It's a sick viewpoint that leads to kind of shaming situations described above. And of course, in the usual way, the people imposing these absurd practices haven't though things through. After all, if musicians can't play, or artists paint, when they come to the UK, surely that must mean by the same token that visiting foreign mathematicians can't manipulate formulae, and philosophers are forbidden to think here...?

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

22 October 2009

Artists to Fans to Artists: Positive Feedback

One of the sad things about the current mess in the music industry is that artists are too often pitted against fans, when in fact both want the same thing: good music in a convenient format at a fair price. Here's a welcome initiative that's trying to bridge that gulf of misunderstanding:

Artists need to be paid, and fans want to pay them.

Our goals at a2f2a are:

* Help each community better understand the other;

* Help find a practical and workable system which offers artists fair remuneration in exchange for access to material by fans; and

* Help set the agenda for discussions about the role P2P can play within the emergent digital record industry.

Together, we can do it – artist to fan to artist.

What I particularly like about this - aside from the dialogue - is that it starts from the premise that people *do* want to pay for stuff. I think that's absolutely central: most people realise that artists need to be supported, and that if everyone pays, the overall price will be lower. But the music industry likes to portray the public as split in two: those who don't want to pay anything, ever, and those who will meekly pay whatever exorbitant price the labels demand. It ain't that Manichean, and if a2f2a can help to dispel that myth, that's got to be good news.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

09 October 2009

Why Creativity Needs Shorter Copyright Terms

In response to a tweet of mine about shortening copyright to stimulate creativity, someone questioned the logic. It's an important point, so it seems useful to do some thinking out loud on the subject.

First, I should probably address the question of whether *longer* copyright stimulates creativity. The basic argument seems to be that longer copyright terms mean greater incentives, which means greater creativity. But does anyone seriously think about the fact that their creations will still be in copyright 69 years after their death? It won't do them any good, and probably won't do their descendants much good either, since the income at this point is generally close to zero.

Indeed, speaking as an author, I know that practically all my income from writing comes within the first couple of years; after that, it's dribs and drabs. If my copyright were cut down to even five years, it would make only a marginal difference to my total remuneration.

Now, clearly I'm not JK Rowling, but the point is, neither are 99.99999% of authors: I know from talking to other run-of-the mill writers that the same holds for them, too. So in practical terms, reducing the copyright term would have little effect on the money that most creators earned as result.

But let's look at the main part of my claim: that reducing copyright's term would encourage creativity. This is based on the rough syllogism that all artists draw on their predecessors in some way; making more prior creativity available would allow more artists to draw on it in more ways; and so this would increase overall creativity.

For the first assertion, look at history. Painters once began by mixing paints in another artist's studio, then drawing unimportant bits in his (usually his) works, learning how to emulate his style. Then they gradually painted more important bits in the style of that artist, often doing the low-cost jobs or rush jobs that he didn't have time or inclination to execute. Then, one day, that apprentice would set up on his (usually his) own, building on all the tricks and techniques he had learned from his master, but gradually evolving his own style.

Today, would-be artists tend not to become apprentices in the same way. Instead, they typically go to art school, where they learn to *copy* the masters in order to learn their techniques. Often you see them doing this in art galleries, as they strive to reproduce the exact same effect in their own copy. It teaches them the basics of painting that they can then build on in their own work.

In music, something very similar happens: journeyman composers write pieces in the style of the acknowledged masters, often copying their themes and structure very closely. This is true even for extreme geniuses. For example, in order to learn how to write in the new early classical style, the eight-year-old Mozart arranged three piano sonatas from J C Bach's Op. 5 as keyboard concertos.

Mozart also "borrowed" entire themes - most famously in the overture to The Magic Flute, where he takes a simple tune from a piano sonata by Clementi, and transforms it. Some composers did this on a regular basis. Handel, in particular, was quite unscrupulous in taking themes from fellow composers, and turning them into other, rather better, works. Moreover, the widely-used form of musical variations is based generally on taking a well-known theme and subjecting it to various transformations.

That was in the past, when art was an analogue artefact. Copying took place through trying to reproduce an artistic effect, or by borrowing musical themes etc. Today, in the digital age, copying is not such an incidental act, but central to how we use computers. When we access something online, we copy it to our computers (even audio streaming has to be assembled into copies of small chunks of sound before we can hear it).

Digital plasticity - the ability to compute with any content - makes the clumsy copying and learning processes of the past trivially easy. A child can take a digital image of a work of art and cut and paste elements of it into his or her own work; anyone can sample music, distort it and mix it with their own; texts can be excerpted and juxtaposed with others drawn from very diverse backgrounds to create mosaics of meaning.

All these amazingly rich and innovative things are now very easy to do practically, but the possibilities of doing so are stymied by laws that were drawn up for an analogue age. Those laws were not designed to forbid artists from learning from existing creations, but to stop booksellers producing unauthorised copies - a totally different issue. The idea of using just part of a work was not really a concern. But it is today, when the cut and paste metaphor is central to the digital world. That is why we need to reduce copyright to the bare minimum, so that the legal obstacles to creating in this new, inherently digital way, are removed.

If we don't, one of two things will happen. Either we will fail to realise the full creative potential of computing, or else the younger generation of artists will simply ignore the law. Either is clearly unsatisfactory. What is needed is a copyright regime that is balanced. That is far from being the case today. As the media industry (sic) ratchets up copyright terms again and again, creation has become subservient to the corporation, and the creators are cut off from their past - and hence future.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

01 May 2009

The Sad Intellectual Monopolist's Viewpoint

If you want to see how misguided the British publishing industry's attitudes are to copyright and its users, you could do worse than read what the outgoing president of the Publishers Association has to say on the subject....

On Open Enterprise blog.

27 March 2007

BuyaBand, SellaBand

At last - someone is trying a new business model for digital music:

For the first time fans and Artists can be in business together. Therefore each Artist issues 5,000 so called Parts. Parts cost $10 (plus transaction costs) each. Together Believers have to raise $50,000 to get their Artist of choice in the studio. At any point before your Artist has reached the Goal of $50,000, you can withdraw your Parts and pick a different Artist. You can even get your money back. It's your music. It's your choice.

Once your Artist has raised $50,000 SellaBand will assign an experienced A&R-person to this project. Together with a top Producer, your Artist will record a CD in a state-of-the-art Studio. During the process you will get an exclusive sneak preview of this exciting process.

...

The music on the CD will be given away as free downloads on our download portal. All advertising revenues generated on SellaBand will be shared equally between you, the other Believers, the Artist and SellaBand. The amount of money you and the band will get paid depends on the advertising revenues and the market-share your band gains on our download portal.

In some ways this is like vanity publishing: people pay to be published. The differences are that fans pay for publication - micro-patronage - published items are given away (because content has zero marginal cost), and money is made from advertising (the Web 2.0 way). I can see this working, provided the main company Sellaband isn't taking such a big cut from the ad revenue that it is perceived as a free rider on the work and money of others.

At least it's founders seem to have the right background, as well as an interesting idea. Here's hoping. (Via OpenBusiness.)