Reading Shakespeare: the Next Act of Open Data

As readers of this blog will have noticed, much of the most innovative work in the field of openness is taking place in open data. One of the largest stores of data is held by government, and the argument for opening it up where possible is strong: after all, we, the public, paid for this data, so it is only right that we, the public, should have access to it. 

On Open Enterprise blog.

Why Microsoft Wants Us to Get All Mixed Up

“What's in a name?” some bloke in the sixteenth century once asked. As Microsoft knows, quite a lot. What you call something can have a major influence on how you think about it. So how Microsoft talks about free software is important – not least for the clues that it gives about its latest tactical move to defang the open source threat.

On Linux Journal.

Sounding Off Against Sound Copyright

Talking of petitions, here's one against extending the copyright in sound recordings, open to anyone. It includes the following excellent summary of what we're fighting for:

Copyright is a bargain. In exchange for their investment in creating and distributing sound recordings to the public, copyright holders are granted a limited monopoly during which are allowed to control the use of those recordings. This includes the right to pursue anyone who uses their recordings without permission. But when this time is up, these works join Goethe, Hugo and Shakespeare in the proper place for all human culture – the public domain. In practice, because of repeated term extensions and the relatively short time in which sound recording techniques have been available, there are no public domain sound recordings.

This situation is about to change, as tracks from the first golden age of recorded sound reach the end of their copyright term. The public domain is about to benefit from its half of this bargain. Seminal soul, reggae, and rock and roll recordings will soon be freed from legal restrictions, allowing anyone (including the performers themselves and their heirs) to preserve, reissue, and remix them.

Major record labels want to keep control of sound recordings well beyond the current 50 year term so that they can continue to make marginal profits from the few recordings that are still commercially viable half a century after they were laid down. Yet if the balance of copyright tips in their favour, it will damage the music industry as a whole, and also individual artists, libraries, academics, businesses and the public.

The labels lobby for change, but have yet to publicly present any compelling economic evidence to support their case. What evidence does exist shows clearly that extending term will discourage innovation, stunt the reissues market, and irrevocably damage future artists' and the general public's access to their cultural heritage.

As Europe looks to the creative industries for its economic future, it is faced with a choice. It can agree to extend the copyright term in sound recordings for the sake of a few major record labels. Or it can allow sound recordings to enter the public domain at the end of fifty years for the benefit of future innovation, future prosperity and the public good.

From Remix to Re-enactment

I wrote recently about the remix and it's relevance to an open content world. Here's an interesting exploration of remix's sibling, re-enactment:

Once you start thinking about the idea of re-enactment, you start seeing it everywhere. Maybe the argument could be made that we're in a cultural moment devoted to re-enactment. Much of what we write off as novelty can be put into this category. The Internet recently was excited about old people re-enacting iconic photos of the twentieth century; see also choirs of old people performing Sonic Youth's "Schizophrenia". Or choirs of small children doing much the same. But less ironic presentations abound: off the top of my head, Japancakes just released a note-for-note country-inflected cover of Loveless, My Bloody Valentine's seminal drone-rock record. Going further, German new music ensemble Zeitkratzer has played and recorded Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. Tom McCarthy's excellent recent novel Remainder concerns a wealthy man who maniacally reenacts scenes; McCarthy springs from the art world, which has been interested in re-enactment for a while. Examples spiral on ad infinitum. But there seems to be something in us that wants to see or hear what we've seen or heard before again.

These are quickly composed thoughts, and I'm ignoring a great deal; parsing the difference between re-enactment and adaptation could be fiendishly complicated, as might be the role of copyright in all of this, etc. I'll simply tie this back to the Communist Manifesto problem. I think it's become apparent that we're no longer reading texts in isolation: now when we read Hamlet, digital media has made it possible to read any number of possible versions at the same time. The archive presents us with an embarrassment of riches, though I suspect that we still lack the tools to let us make sense of the pile: both to make sense of the growing number of versions of texts and to usefully compare versions. The Wooster Group's Hamlet can be seen as a close reading of the 1964 Hamlet. But such a one-to-one reading might just be the tip of the iceberg.

What made this particularly apposite for me is that I've been watching Kenneth Branagh's film version of Hamlet, and the sense of hearing a hundred other uses of Shakespeare's famous lines is very strong, and makes the film feel, indeed, like a re-enactment rather than a performance, brilliant as it is.

Open Shakespeare Beta

Get your online honorificabilitudinitatibus.

My Bardolatry Out in the Open

I'm not really sure what this Open Shakespeare project is trying to achieve that hasn't already been done. No matter: if it's the Bard, put me down for half a dozen.

On second thoughts, scrub that. Since it's meant to be a triumphant demonstration of the virtues of openness as well as whatever else it is, you'd better put me down for a couple of dozen - just to be on the safe side: you just can't have too much of this stuff.