It is not free unless I say so

An upcoming presentation/panel at TLTR here on campus is titled "Free Culture* (*while supplies last): Mashups, Remixes, and the Federal Sentencing Guidelines".

While I understand that the intent is to let people know about the state of copyright law, education and - that term again - Mashups - there are some things about the topic that I am sure won't be covered.

Of course, everyone (except perhaps Andrew Keen) is down with the idea of Free Culture (unless it pertains to my own work of course!). Higher education is at it's present philosophically believes in Free Culture, but the busines of Higher Education is diagrammatically opposed to Free Culture.

I will spend some time talking about why that is, but there is quite a bit of hypocrisy to go around. I struggle with this quite a bit when it comes to my own work, I am still not how this could work.

But, it appears that there is no one on the panel that actually makes stuff. We get a presentation about copyright law and education, and the problems here. This is quite the wrong discussion to have -- even the title is in the wrong place. It's to let people know what the deal is, what can be done -- but things are so beyond screwed up that it is almost like explaining the war in Iraq (support the troops, support Amurica!) in a way that is acceptable for a pacifist. It just can't be done. Copyright and intellectual property is beyond broken, it now points to deeper problems with how we approach knowledge and content in society -- not a particular country's laws -- but how we as a species consider it. So much is assumed.

I wish for Free Culture, I really want to believe -- but the data keeps saying otherwise. RadioHead's "pay what you want" album is widely pirated. But wait -- maybe that is not a bad thing -- the album is really on a small portion of a band's income -- it is touring where the money comes in -- so they may come out of it okay.

Film, video and text definitely have a problem here. Each performance of a recorded work is the same. There is no variation. You go once/read it and you have seen all there is to see. How can a filmmaker/writer make money in this environment? Let's face it: if a big name director/filmmaker puts a film out there with the same model as RadioHead, it is doubtful they will even begin to recoup costs. Free Culture be damned when we talk about new media.

Lev Manovich trys to dispel the belief that digital media is different from analog media because it doesn't degrade. I disagree -- he focuses on "lossy compression" in jpeg to illustrate is point that new media is capable of degrading like analog, but but but that is a pretty weak argument -- I just downloaded a jpeg of ronald reagan, and there it is -- in all it's digital glory. I made a copy and it is just like the original. Yes -- if I open and resave as a jpeg, it is damaged -- but this is just an exception, not the rule. It circumvents the bigger question with a technical argument, which is that we are a point in time where things can indeed be moved fluidly with little or no loss of quality, but perhaps with a large loss of context. That I think is much more worth considering.

Again, there is no one on this panel that actually *makes*. This is a problem. Let's not talk about all the different ways someone can go to jail for reusing content -- audio/visual quotes, outright re-visioning of work. Let's not talk about how we can "push back". Let's just do it. Run the red light because the traffic light is broken, and won't get fixed. There is no incentive to do that, but there is plenty incentive to keep things the same.