Author: David Newhoff

David is an author, communications professional, and copyright advocate. After more than 20 years providing creative services and consulting in corporate communications, he shifted his attention to law and policy, beginning with advocacy of copyright and the value of creative professionals to America’s economy, core principles, and culture.

Bits & Pieces – Search, Speech, Privacy, Interdependence

The Illusion of Search

Casey Chan at Gizmodo.com suggests in this brief post that Google.com “barely shows real search results” on an initial results page, devoting a lot of screen real estate instead to Google services.  According to the linked study at Tutorspree, the problem is only exacerbated on smaller screens, and searching for products and services appears to put small business in direct competition with Google, which could well be the seeds of an anti-trust violation.

This does look a lot like an Illusion of More subject — the assumption that a universe of knowledge and resources is at our fingertips is betrayed by the reality of a circumscribed world designed to serve one corporate powerhouse.  It’s worth paying attention to with regard to consumer-based search, although research based search still seems to be relatively unchanged.  If I search something fairly esoteric like “Charles Giteau,” the delusional sap who shot President Garfield, I get links that are arguably valid results.

Free speech has its limits, even on Twitter

Speaking of presidential assassinations, it turns out that it’s a bad idea to threaten the President of the United States (or anyone else under Secret Service protection) even through social media.  The New York Times reports that Jarvis Britton (26) posted assassination threats against President Obama and that he is now serving a one-year term in federal prison.  After an initial round of threats, Mr. Britton was visited by Secret Service agents, who let him go after he apologized and said he’d been drunk; but it was Britton’s subsequent threatening tweets that led to prosecution.

Speaking for myself, if Secret Service agents showed up at my door and let me off with a warning, I might just find religion and join a monastery; but somehow there is a persistent yet absurd belief that social media is in some way private and personal.  We continue to see evidence that users of social media fail to recognize that it is a soapbox in the city square, and one that creates indelible impressions.   The free speech question in this case is settled law. If you say you wish the president would die, that’s protected speech; if you say you intend to kill the president, that’s grounds for being investigated and possibly prosecuted.  Why this would be any different on Twitter or other social media is a mystery to me, but I’m sure someone will offer a bizarre theory to the contrary.

Privacy Concerns

While many Americans continue to post gripes about their perception that the 4th Amendment no longer exists, I see far less wall-space being devoted to Google’s privacy policies landing it in hot water again.  Inviting censure from five EU countries, privacy watchdogs have expressed concerns as to how user data will be “shared” across the spectrum of Google products and how transparent Google is with regard to user understanding of the policies.

As I have stated repeatedly, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with keeping a weather eye on government intelligence services, but I continue to be surprised by the level of Orwell-invoking hysteria while simultaneously volunteering privacy away via private companies like Google.  If Snowden reveals anything (and I personally don’t think he reveals much), it’s that at the point when government agents do infringe civil rights their information is going to come from large telecom and internet companies.  Where else do we expect them to look?

A Declaration of Interdependence

In a rare moment of digital-age exuberance on this American Independence weekend, I leave you with this wonderful short film that reminds us that interdependence is a requisite constituent to human existence.  Directed by filmmaker Tiffany Shain, with animations by Stefan Nadelman, and music by Moby, the film is comprised of clips submitted from around the globe of individuals reading “The Declaration of Interdependence” in their native languages.

The reality of the internet, I believe, is that it does indeed connect us or, as this film reveals, reminds us that we have always been connected.  That is the power of these technologies, and the collaborative filmmaking being done at Let it Ripple is certainly inspiring and also humbling.  But this film also brings to mind the tension of the digital age.  With awareness of interdependence comes greater responsibility to live accordingly.   And as discussed in recent posts, the technology seems to foster the dichotomy of committing selfish acts under the cover of a generalized humanism.

What’s at the bottom of the Pandora box?

Once again, Pandora internet radio is attempting to use an act of Congress to lower the royalties it pays artists, and once again, musicians are speaking out against both the tactics and the two-faced approach being taken by CEO Tim Westergren to pay lip service to his respect for artists while sticking his already well-greased palm into their back pockets.  The members of Pink Floyd wrote an open letter to other musicians to beware Pandora’s recent “outreach” toward artists, and David Lowery famously got to the nuts and bolts of the matter by posting a royalty statement revealing that 1.1 million plays of one of his songs on Pandora earned him $16.89.  Opening up Pandora’s box, if you will, raises many issues, including the overarching question as to just how well digital-age models, at their best, are working for artists.  But while we’re still mid torrent issuing from Pandora, one question too often overlooked is where the songs come from in the first place. It’s been said before, but the generation raised on round-the-clock, free access to entertainment really may be as disconnected from the production of that entertainment as many of us through modern convenience became disconnected from the production of food. Perhaps, as we see a renaissance in understanding farming and other food production, a similar awareness might take place with regard to the creative works that feed the soul.

In this New York Times article, author/musician Wesley Stace describes his experience collaborating with poet Paul Muldoon to teach a class in songwriting to students at Princeton.  Stace poses the question as to whether or not songs (and by implication other art) can be produced on demand like any other homework assignment, leaving open the more whimsical question of being struck by one’s muse. While reading, I could not help but think of the famous Brill Building, that songwriting factory of the 1950s whence came many of rock-n-roll’s most famous hits.   Stace concludes that, yes, songwriting is a craft like any other, and that it has a process that can be taught and learned and accomplished, even by students with little background in creative writing or music.  By leading their students to delve into emotion in this otherwise intellectual setting, Stace and Muldoon found the results both prolific and astounding.  “I wish I’d written, or could write, some of the songs I heard on these Tuesday afternoons; sometimes it felt like my sole qualification to teach the course was that I was old and experienced,” writes Stace.

One might conclude from the article that “anyone can write a song,” and Stace would probably agree up to a point.  The 24/7 coffeehouse known as YouTube has certainly helped  feed this notion that “we are all authors” now, which in turn spawns the illusion that songs and other works are of lesser value today than they were 15-20 years ago. But to quote Stace, “Songwriting is a skill — best practiced, easily improved. If you exercise regularly, keeping fit becomes easier and less unpleasant, until it becomes a habit.”  In other words, it’s work.  And what makes the songs you and I want to hear over and over again is a combination of, yes, luck in the form of possessing raw, unique talents, and then a ceaseless investment of work, often by many people.

My Pandora stations include both a Camper Van Beethoven and a Pink Floyd, and if you ever heard me play “Comfortably Numb” on the six string, you would need no further proof that we are not all musicians.  But when we consider the combination of both effort and circumstance that yields just this one song about an experience most of us will never have, yet so many of us can understand, we should recognize that it is rare and therefore valuable.  In fact, not unlike the story of Pandora’s Box, the album The Wall itself concludes with destruction and then the sound of an accordion playing like a solitary flower growing though the gray rubble, and the voice of Roger Waters reciting a eulogy with just a tinge of hope.  I know for sure that I need Pink Floyd in my life and that I don’t need Pandora to get it. So, that’s what’s at the bottom of the box.

TEDPrattles “Piracy” by Jean-Philippe Vergne

In this TEDTalk, Jean-Philippe Vergne spends sixteen minutes proving one thing:  that piracy is the wrong word for mass, digital copyright infringement.  Those who operate torrent and similar sites should never have been called pirates, a word charged with romance and all too easily embraced as a badge of honor and charming rebelliousness. Never mind the fact that even this romantic image of the traditional pirate is entirely based in fiction, there is nothing nearly so intriguing or sympathetic about the digital “pirate,” and the word allows people like Vergne to distract audiences with charming half-truths about high-seas buccaneers and privateers of the colonial 18th century.  Not that I care in this context, but he even gets his naval history wrong in the “documentary” he shows midway through his presentation.  I know a marketing video when I see one.

In fact, if we want to play the “compare to real piracy” game, let’s do it honestly and more thoroughly.  I say a Somali pirate, as dangerous a criminal as he may be, is arguably more deserving of our sympathy than a torrent site owner.  The former is most likely a displaced fisherman who has turned to piracy in an act of economic desperation; the latter is a spoiled, middle-class punk who could get a job with his programming skills but chooses instead to turn the labor and investments of honest workers into his personal cash machine. As a moral comparison, this is a no-brainer.

Those we call pirates in the digital-age sense should instead be called exploiters, which is less catchy and more accurately descriptive of what these enterprises do, which is to exploit the work of others for profit and without permission.  Had this been the kind of language used from the beginning, I doubt for instance, we would see the rise of the European Exploiter Party, and jokers like Vergne wouldn’t have the opportunity to saunter on stage wearing cute eye patches (the props that go with the concept of exploitation are far less dashing).  So, let’s stop behaving like children, shall we?  Because after the purely semantic, and utterly pointless, comparison between digital theft and high-seas piracy, there is still the matter of a massive, criminal enterprise savaging honest, middle-class labor — and it’s not cute no matter what we choose to call it.