Category: Digital Culture

Choice Words & The Right to Choose

Photo by David Crockett
Photo by David Crockett

Announcement of the Copyright Alert System just over a week ago brought some new readers to this blog, and among these was one who was offended by this post, which is coincidentally the most-read to date.  My use of the word slavery in context to BitTorrent sites exploiting labor inspired the reader to call me a racist. You can decide for yourself whether the accusation is fair, but the subsequent exchange of comments did leave me thinking about the word slave, which made me think of Prince, who performed in 1993 on Late Show with David Letterman with that very word inscribed on his face. [Date and show name corrected from original post thanks to comment from a regular reader.]

Prince is an unqualified musical genius, and in the tradition of geniuses, he has been as provocative in managing his career as he is with the production of music itself.  It occurs to me, though, that this particular artist also unwittingly personifies so many of the emotional and functional complexities in the business of making and selling music in the digital age.

Presently, the 1984 hit song “Let’s Go Crazy” is at the heart of an ongoing case, Lenz v UMG, brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2010. The case involves a DMCA takedown of a home video from YouTube depicting a baby dancing in a kitchen while Prince’s song plays on the radio in the background.  The short story is that the video was taken down in error and then restored, which is pretty much how DMCA is meant to work, but of course the video and Mrs. Lenz’s temporary inconvenience aren’t really the point. See Terry Hart’s analysis from August of 2010.

Interestingly, the CAS bump in readership here also brought a new reader/commenter with whom I had discussion about the altruism (or not) of organizations like EFF; and Lenz makes a pretty good example of what looks to me like a group of lawyers making much ado about nothing while hiding a rather large axe to grind.  The general public gets the easily digestible image “Prince sues mother and baby,” even though the suit was brought by Lenz and the EFF.  But the aura of Prince provides good cover for the real motive in this case, which is that the EFF is seeking a ruling that UMG willfully issued takedowns to non-infringing material (because honest mistakes are not grounds for a suit) in order to establish a precedent that would place a higher burden on creators seeking to protect their works online.  Writes attorney Luke Platzer in this guest post at Copyright Alliance:

“…the expansion of the 512(f) standard to challenge the reliability of copyright owners’ takedown processes — thereby forcing copyright owners to use more precise, but potentially much slower processes — appears to have been at least in part EFF’s goal in bringing the Lenz case.”

If you read the recent article in the Wall Street Journal about NBCUniversal’s counter-piracy efforts which can hardly keep up with its notice and takedown process, you might understand why many independent content owners have given up hope of protecting their work online; but by bringing the case in Lenz, the EFF would like to make that process even harder. In fact, cases like this aren’t about the work, they aren’t about the artist, they aren’t about free speech, and they aren’t even about fair use.  They’re about ivory-tower academics making a career out of fighting a problem that doesn’t exist. To paraphrase Hart, DMCA was 12 years old when the case began, and this relatively benign and temporary video takedown was the best example they had to reflect a supposedly comprehensive threat to free speech and democracy.  In fact, the recent misuse of DMCA by NASCAR to remove footage of a crash from YouTube makes a much better example than Lenz, but  Lenz  is already underway.  Still, the fact that Prince is the face of this story is somewhat paradoxical, although not necessarily incongruous, if we understand the mind of the artist.

Where this stuff gets a little complicated for the casual observer is that Prince is in fact an ardent — some might even say obsessive — protector of his rights on the Internet. He has gone to great length and expense to control where and how his work is used but has never, to my knowledge, filed suit against an individual user or fan for infringement. For anyone who thinks copyright is just about money, consider the likelihood, that it costs Prince more to pursue these actions than it is probably worth on the balance sheet. So why does he do it?  I don’t know the man, but I’m going to guess that it’s the same passion that drove him to the performance he gave in 1993 on Letterman.  It is one of the few live TV acts I’ll never forget because it was so strange — this virtuoso guitarist playing as though wrapped in a straight jacket, and scrawled on the side of his face in what looked like black marker, letters organized vaguely into a guitar shape akin to the glyph that would become his temporary moniker, the word — SLAVE.

I do find it fascinating that the same musician who has been unfairly tarred in the Lenz case is the one who can reasonably be described as our generation’s poster child of the artist bucking against his corporate “gatekeepers,” for those who would use that term. In fact, Prince’s frustration with Warner Music back then had nothing to do with money per se, but with the label’s reluctance to release his new album Gold over concerns of “saturating the market.”  Restraining an artist is a difficult thing, and I can only imagine doing so with Prince would be like trying to lasso a stallion with a length of yarn.  Yet even in the years subsequent to these events, even with all the resources at his disposal, Prince has not thoroughly embraced the so-called “permissionless culture” promoted by legal scholars, who perhaps don’t actually understand artists.  Some will assume the motive here is greed, although I would argue that this assumption is likely a misunderstanding of Prince in particular and many artists in general.  What those who don’t create art fail to grasp is that controlling distribution is often a component of the work itself.  This is why an artist as passionate, as obsessive, as prolific, and as influential as Prince will naturally rebel against both a Warner Music holding him back and a Google exploiting his work. And, yes, either form of restraint on his choices can make the artist feel like a slave.

Another Must Read

Thanks to a regular reader for linking to this article in Scientific American.  Were I to stop writing this blog today, this would not be a bad final note to leave because it very succinctly describes how the pursuit of targeted advertising (i.e. the brass ring of Web 2.0) has fostered a design that creates an illusion of choice.  While the Web industry promotes messages of populism, individual opportunity, and innovation, the truth is the money is all predicated on organizing the market (that’s us) into a limited number of paths based on data mining our profiles. Anyone who buys into the notion that the Web is all about elevating the rights of the many over the power of the privileged few should consider what this article implies and perhaps question why it is the Web seems to foster at least temporary monopolies in any given category.

Probable Causes

iStock_000008641273XSmallIn his book At Home, Bill Bryson describes how the English clergy system, through the 18th and 19th centuries produced a local renaissance in the sciences and arts.  By that time period, the English were not an especially pious bunch, and as such the clergy system fostered a generation of well-educated and financially comfortable young men who ended up with a great deal of time on their hands. According to Bryson, most of these sons of the gentry studied classics rather than divinity and many of them were not expected to do much more for their rural parishioners other than recite an unoriginal sermon on Sunday mornings.  As a result, many of these otherwise idle hands produced a flowering of discovery, ideas, inventions, and creative works.  Or as Bryson describes, “Never in history have a group of people engaged in a broader range of creditable activities for which they were not in any sense actually employed.”  This period yielded, among other things, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy; the power loom; the Jack Russell terrier; numerous first works on botany, paleontology, and other natural sciences; the economic principles of Thomas Malthus; the first aerial photography; the invention of the submarine; and the theorem of Mr. Thomas Bayes.  All the result of time, financial security, and curious minds.

There is a lot of discussion lately, including comments on this blog, about open access, which was of course central to the activism of Aaron Swartz; and the subject got me thinking about this particular revelation in Bryson’s book.  In a sense, we could think of the English clergy system as an incubator much in the same way we’re meant to think of digital technology today as a catalyst for innovation.  There is even a parallel in the democratic aura in which these rectors and vicars became the amateur, DIY scientists, authors, and inventors of their time.  In simple, idealistic terms, recreating this phenomenon on a global scale appears to be a foundation upon which the principle of open access is based — that the next life-altering idea might come from anywhere and, therefore, keeping a running spigot of data is of paramount importance.  To quote the start of Swartz’s manifesto, Information is power…

But is it?

What, for example, would the aforementioned Bayes’ Theorem tell us about the probability of achieving some of the more utopian aims of open access?  (Let’s be clear, I’m personally on the side of allowing especially publicly funded data to flow to the public; but this is a different question.)  Bayes provides a means to predict probabilities based on limited data, and as Bryson points out, the theorem was intriguingly of little use at its conception given that there were no computers to perform the calculations.  Today, Bayes is applied to work like climate change models and financial markets, but could it predict the probability that is the underlying question of this entire blog — i.e. will more access to more data produce more social benefit?

Naturally, we’d have to agree on what social benefit looks like, but assuming we’re using western notions of freedom, social justice, well-being, and enlightenment, does it stand to reason that adding more content into the pipeline must inevitably serve as a catalyst to improve or increase these humanistic goals?  It seems clear that there are far too many variables to accurately make such a prediction.  Even in a broad sense, consider how polarized the U.S. is, then spend about five minutes on the Web searching any number of topics. It becomes self-evident that data aren’t even data — that one man’s fact is another’s government conspiracy and vice-versa.  Or as Big Think posts here, even one man’s exercise can be another’s road to perdition.

Aside from the fact that data interpretation on a macro scale is a total crap shoot — we still have school boards fighting evolution for crying out loud — we might keep in mind the three conditions that were necessary to produce the innovations described by Bill Bryson:  they were education, financial stability, and time to indulge. There are ways in which digital-age tools provide more time, as in the Kurzweilian sense of adding additional brain power; but I’m sure I’m not the only one to feel that sometimes the constant flow of disparate information and social media ephemera can also become an obstacle to focused contemplation.  Additionally, there are aspects of the open access idea that are disruptive to existing economic models, particularly affecting the financial well being of some of the leading producers of quality information and cultural content.

I think the principles of open access are fundamentally good, and often principle alone is reason enough to demand support for a social agenda.  But the principle should not necessarily be confused with the reality that application in this case does not guarantee a renaissance. (The new era could look like 4Chan, too, which is the Web equivalent of the Dark Ages.) History is full of unintended consequences; and while the next big idea can indeed come from anywhere, this includes the possibility that it will originate in the mind of an individual as removed from our digital wellspring as an 18th century English clergyman.