Tag: World IP Day

One Movie Settled the “Debate” About Climate Change

When I saw the theme of this year’s World IP Day, Innovate for a Green Future, I will admit that it was hard not to be cynical. In light of the reinvigorated political assault on science—let alone to be thinking about climate change in the middle of a pandemic—it is tempting to believe that the debate about global warming still rages—or has even been lost. But that’s not quite true. The debate was settled a very long time ago. Or to be more precise, there is no such thing as a debate about scientific evidence, there is only understanding, misunderstanding, willful ignorance, or malignant deception. 

While it is stultifying to see that a truly vindictive brand of ignorance and deception are the cornerstones of the present administration, there remains one avenue of hope for at least mitigating—because it is almost certainly too late to reverse—the effects of global warming. Oddly enough, that avenue of hope has more to do with market dynamics than environmentalism per se, and I would assert that it was a single documentary film that opened the window to a market-based transformation, which, even now, represents a path forward. I am of course talking about An Inconvenient Truth.

An unlikely movie pitch, the centerpiece of the documentary is former Vice President Al Gore presenting his climate change “slide show,” which he had developed over several years after he was first introduced to the science in college in 1966. Not long after conceding the painfully-contested presidential election in late 2000, Gore devoted himself fully to the climate issue, taking his laptop and talking points on the road, offering free admission to anyone willing to listen to him discuss the fate of the planet.

“The slides were originally black and white,” says the film’s co-producer Lawrence Bender, whom I interviewed for this article. “They weren’t visually appealing, but they were almost scarier, like something you’d see in a science lab, when we first saw Al’s presentation in Los Angeles.” Bender and others who would eventually join the production team were invited by producer Laurie David (now Lennard), who had arranged for Gore to come to L.A. after she found herself captivated by his lecture in New York in May 2004.

“Gore’s show left us with a sense of urgency about the issue,” says Bender. “We knew we had to make what we had seen into a movie, but it was not easy to convince many people in the business that it was a movie. Try telling someone you’ve got former VP Al Gore, who lost the election, doing a slide show about science, and that you need a million dollars.” Enter Jeff Skoll, who founded Participant Media in 2004 with the fortune he had made as eBay’s first employee and first president. “Jeff financed the whole production without blinking an eye,” Bender tells me.

Less than a year after that initial presentation in Los Angeles, An Inconvenient Truth was ready for the screen. It became an international blockbuster (for a doc), earning two Academy awards, one for Best Documentary Feature, the other for Best Song, “I Need to Wake Up” by Melissa Etheridge. And for any cynics, who may be tempted to criticize the movie as a vanity project—Hollywood glamor with little substantive effect—I would direct your attention back to the 1990s and early 2000s.

Waking Up Tens of Millions

Hurricane Katrina. August 28, 2005. NASA

When the Kyoto Protocol was ratified in 1997, calling for a modest 5% reduction in greenhouse gasses by developed nations, global warming was not an especially bright blip on the public radar screen. General perception, such as it was, loosely divided along the left/right political lines that are usually drawn through environmental issues; but overall, the average citizen (and quite a few politicians in both parties) could be described as somewhere between ambivalent and unsure about the alleged causes or effects of a warming climate.*

It probably did not help that this was the same period when we all first logged onto the internet, which would prove to be a wonderful tool for obtaining information and disinformation at the same time. And to be sure, the extractive industries, and other vested interests bound to fossil fuels, were eager to provide erudite sounding counter-narratives to the mountain of evidence proving that human activity was in fact changing the climate in dangerous ways. Then, on January 24, 2006, An Inconvenient Truth debuted at the Sundance Film Festival.

Directed by Davis Gugenheim, the film’s most effective quality, in my view, was that it reintroduced the purportedly “wooden” politician Al Gore as a relatable, flesh-and blood human being, whose humor and humility rescues the didactic lecture from becoming either dry or a ninety-minute scold. Upgrading Gore’s visual aids to high-resolution slides using Apple Keynote certainly provided enough color and scope to fill the big screen, but the critical element was Gore’s humanity. 

“Davis was adamant that the film had to work emotionally,” says Bender. “It’s a deceptively simple movie, but we spent a lot of energy in post-production trying to find the right balance between this man’s personal journey and the science.” By interweaving Gore’s presentation with glimpses into his life story—anecdotes in which he admits his own frailties and errors—the overall result of the film was that it turned carbon dioxide into a kitchen-table issue. And that was the significance of An Inconvenient Truth.

Seemingly overnight, as a direct result of the movie’s success, concepts like “carbon footprint” entered mainstream conversation and classroom curricula across the U.S. and abroad. While the opposition was by no means silenced, the film awakened enough public consciousness that multiple business segments suddenly needed to respond to a new consumer demand to “go green.” 

Consumer Change Leads to Corporate Change

To be sure, not all business initiatives were substantive, but by and large, the mandate to promote green led to tangible and lasting changes in corporate culture and governance. Sustainability went from a crunchy, esoteric notion to a board-room best practice, and this, in turn, spawned new investment in the development of alternative and more efficient energy solutions. “Practically every Fortune 500 company has a sustainability officer or sustainability program today, and that was not true fifteen years ago,” says my longtime friend Jeff Turrentine, a writer and editor for On Earth, the publication of the Natural Resources Defense Council. 

An Inconvenient Truth was not the first conversation about the economics of sustainability, and Gore was hardly alone in asserting that carbon reduction, aside from being existentially mandatory, is compatible with economic growth. Many environmental experts, technology innovators, and political leaders (even bipartisan ones) had a solid grasp on the two uncontroversial facts about carbon mitigation: 1) that burning less fuel saves money and is, therefore, profitable; and 2) that green innovation represented a whole new sector of untapped economic opportunity.

That conversation was already taking place in various pockets in the both the public and private sectors for at least a decade or more before An Inconvenient Truth was released. But the film gets credit for igniting those latent sensibilities in the minds of the general public and for spawning the aforementioned consumer demand for change. The movie was catalytic in fostering market conditions in which multiple industries and municipalities discovered what many environmentalists had tried to explain for years—that working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions happens to be good for business. 

So, while the Trump administration has arrogantly stumbled backwards on environmental policy—evangelizing climate science denialism out of sheer spite—the green investments made by both the private and public sectors over the last decade and a half are unlikely to be reversed—especially when those investments are yielding positive returns. It is still not enough, but it is most likely where the best hope still remains. And perhaps there is no better example of this paradigm than the city of Georgetown, Texas, featured in An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power (2016). 

Mayor Dale Ross proudly tells Gore, on camera, that his city is powered by 90% renewable energy (at the time of filming), despite being “the reddest city in the reddest county in Texas.” Why? Because, to paraphrase Ross, it saves his constituents money, and because you don’t need to be a scientist to understand that less pollution in the air is a good thing. This is why I will argue that An Inconvenient Truth went beyond merely “raising awareness.” It directly created a public mandate that led to the kind of common sense approach taken by Ross, who reminds us that there is nothing “conservative” about waste or higher prices.

The countless market effects that can be attributed to a single film—in which the information was neither new nor hard to grasp—remind us that creative expression is essential. In a time when IP deniers argue that copyright functions solely as a barrier to information, the story of An Inconvenient Truth belies the naïve, tech-utopian assumption that access to information alone is sufficient—least of all when utter nonsense gallops across digital platforms like a fifth horse of the apocalypse. Facts alone do not speak meaningfully to people. Invariably, it takes creativity to inspire us, even when it comes to saving our own lives. 

*It must be acknowledged that the climate issue had Republican champions in those days, and there is an extent to which Gore, as the most prominent messenger, became a more attractive political target after the 2008 election, when the GOP became more dependent on the fossil fuel industries.

Photos: “Al Gore” Lisbon, 2017. By G Holland.

“Earthrise” Apollo 8, December 24, 1968. NASA.

Skin in the Game: World IP Day 2019

The theme of year’s World IP Day celebration is sports.  And although I’ve never been what you might call a major sports fan, it does occur to me that the business of athletics is about as IP-rich and environment as one might imagine.  Covering all the bases, as it were, the world of professional sports is steeped in every kind of intellectual property you can name—from broadcast rights under copyright that enable the majority of fans to watch games and events, to trademarks and patents for all that equipment, to publicity rights that popular athletes negotiate for their endorsements of goods and services.  And that doesn’t even include all the IP-related activity spawned by sports like photography, journalism, biography, gaming, etc.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) summarizes this year’s attention on athletics as follows:

The global sports ecosystem is made up of a complex web of players and commercial relationships underpinned by IP rights. The strategic use of these rights has, to a large extent, enabled the rapid growth of the global sports industry, and will continue to play a central role in the future evolution of sports in a rapidly evolving and evermore technology-driven landscape. A focus on IP and sports also offers significant opportunities to foster the social, economic and cultural development of all nations.

And that’s all well and good from the thirty-thousand-foot perspective, but perhaps one of the most significant narratives in regard to athletics is not so much that we could unpack all the IP related to the career of Serena Williams or Lionel Messi, but that we might instead recognize the significance of IP for the kid who just signed up for little league or junior hockey or Tae Kwon Do.  Because the likelihood that her parents are going to buy equipment online is quite high, and unfortunately the growth of global e-commerce has also fueled a companion growth in e-counterfeiting.  And right now, the safeguards for that new athlete are inconsistent at best.

A counterfeit jersey is bad for business, but it isn’t going to get anyone killed.  That may not be the case with counterfeit ski boots or a face-mask or padding.  While that comment may seem alarmist, the present condition is that online counterfeiting is already outpacing enforcement—especially for any business that is not yet a mega-brand.  I don’t mean to suggest that the mom buying sporting goods on Amazon for will automatically be presented with counterfeits more often than the real thing, but the probability is increasing that she will see counterfeits alongside the real thing and will not be able to tell the difference.

How often have you shopped for a product online and found what you were looking for at a price that seemed unrealistically low?  That’s because the counterfeiter, most likely operating in China, has infringed the brand’s trademarked logo, infringed the copyrighted photograph of the real product to feature online, and will ship you an inferior-grade knock-off made by some company you’ve never heard of and never will.  Again, if it’s earbuds that don’t work well, lesson learned.  If it’s protective gear, different story.

Unfortunately, neither the current legal frameworks nor prevailing cultural attitudes about online infringement have kept pace with the counterfeiters’ ability to move very fast and break many things.  The narrative that began more than twenty years ago as the alleged “victimless crime” of music piracy today frustrates the urgency to address online counterfeiting of physical goods where the clearly-identifiable victims may be consumers buying inferior products and/or small businesses that can been wiped out by rampant counterfeiting.  (See 2018 article in the Atlantic.)

While Amazon states that it devotes considerable resources to weeding out bogus suppliers—and no doubt they do—the fulfillment giant (along with many other e-commerce sites) remains shielded by 90s-era “safe harbors” that indemnify web platforms for third-party copyright infringement under the DMCA and for third-party harm in nearly all other forms under Section 230 of the CDA.  So, inasmuch as Amazon may indeed be working to mitigate counterfeits, the fact remains that, to-date, the company has no skin in the game.  It’s buyer beware.  Except you will not actually see that warning at the top of their webpages.  

And that point raises one of the most blatant hypocrisies when it comes to intellectual property in the digital age.  As a trademarked brand itself, Amazon et al are a beneficiaries of the underlying value of trademark law, which is to foster consumer confidence.  But the brand identities protected by those marks are anathema to the aforementioned lack of liability when it comes to protecting consumers or the trademarks of the legitimate suppliers that sell their products on their platforms.  

To be clear, I’m not dinging Amazon because they’re so terrible but rather because they are the largest and almost certainly the best in the business.  Removing infringing material from Amazon can be costly and time-consuming, but it’s a cakewalk compared to, say, Alibaba whose obfuscating takedown process is like following assembly instructions written in badly-translated Chinese to English.  But foreign-based sites and trade negotiations notwithstanding, it is time to get our own house in order when it comes to the presumed “neutrality” of web platforms, and WIPO’s attention to sports this year makes a good a case as any for doing so.

E-commerce sites like Amazon, EBay, Wal-Mart, et al are not strictly “neutral highways on which goods travel.”  They are toll roads that collect fees for every transaction, and they have brand names protected by law for the benefit of the consuming public.  While it seems neither fair nor tenable to hold these platforms responsible for every bad actor who slips through the cracks, it is likewise unacceptable to resign ourselves to a lazy policy of saying “cracks happen.”  

In this regard, I am reminded of former Senator Franken’s pointed question to Facebook in November 2017 as to why the company could not connect two dots linking American political ads being paid for in rubles and conclude that there might have been a problem.  By the same principle, we should expect a robust data company like Amazon to identify various yellow flags that would indicate the Rawlings product being offered is not the real deal.  So, while it is certainly true that the world of professional sports is complexly intertwined with every type of IP, sometimes it is the most basic stories that make the best policy arguments.  And what can be more basic than buying your kid a batting helmet?

Remembering Helen Levitt: “New York’s Visual Poet Laureate”

When I saw that this year’s World IP Day/Week celebrates the contributions of women, the first thought that came to mind was a memory of a chance meeting in the Spring of 1986 with a legendary photographer named Helen Levitt. My friend Josh and I were in New York City down from college and were supposed to stop by a gallery owned by a friend of his family. When we arrived, the owner, along with another woman who looked about seventy, was reviewing stacks of Levitt’s photographs. So, when Josh announced, “I love Helen Levitt,” he did not notice—but I did—that the older woman sitting at the end of the table, very quietly, almost to herself, said, “Thank you.”

Then, with proper introductions made, we were invited to join Ms. Levitt and the owner in poring over some of most widely-regarded images ever made in the genre of street photography. “They kept offering us more photographs like a pair of Jewish grandmothers serving chicken soup,” as Josh remembers it. At the age of eighteen, I had never heard of Helen Levitt or her work, but then neither had a lot of people due to the fact that she was an intensely shy and private person, shunning publicity for most of her more than sixty-year career capturing some of New York’s most poignant, charming, humorous, and painful little moments.

Had I thought of anything smart to ask, Levitt wouldn’t have wanted to answer it anyway, as NPR’s Melissa Block would later discover in a rare interview conducted in 2002. In response to Block asking about one photo depicting a group of girls on the sidewalk watching floating soap bubbles that seem to be following them, Levitt replied, “If it were easy to talk about, I’d be a writer. Since I’m inarticulate, I can express myself with images.”

In an era when the techno-pundits have preached to all the artists that they must abandon the concept of value in their works and instead “cultivate their personal brands” on the free platforms of abundance, this memory of a chance meeting with a woman and artist who rejected notoriety seems well suited to observing World IP Day 2018. Because without question, Levitt’s work speaks for itself, even if she was reluctant to speak for her work. As her friend, fan, and collaborator James Agee wrote in the introduction to her first book in 1965, “…the photographs as a whole body seem to me to combine in a unified view of the world, an uninsistent but irrefutable manifesto of a way a of seeing, and in a gentle and wholly unpretentious way, a major poetic work.”

Born in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn in 1913, Levitt dropped out of high school in her senior year and first learned basic photographic skills working for a commercial portrait photographer starting in 1931. By the mid-1930s, there was a growing emphasis on documentary photography, when artists like Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, and Dorothea Lange were hired by FDR’s Resettlement Administration to portray the effects of the depression and the famine of the “dust bowl.” Levitt, who would become a colleague of Evans and Shahn, was initially inspired to take pictures with a social agenda, but in that same 2002 interview, she said …

“I decided I should take pictures of working-class people and contribute to the movements. Whatever movements there were—Socialist, Communist, whatever was happening. And then, at one point, I saw the photographs of Cartier-Bresson, and I realized photography could be an art. That made me ambitious. I wanted to try to do something like that. Instead of pictures were being use for a purpose. Trying to approach making a picture that would stand up by itself.”

After Levitt met Bresson in 1935, accompanying him while he photographed the Brooklyn waterfront, she bought a used Leica the following year and taught herself composition by looking at art in museums. Then, when she began taking pictures in the city’s poorer neighborhoods, like Spanish Harlem and the Lower East Side, it was not as a documentarian but as an artist. Unlike the very specific empathy inspired by Lange’s beautifully heartbreaking “Migrant Mother,” Levitt abandoned that kind social commentary for something more subtle, or as Agee and many other critics would say, for photographs that are “lyrical.”

In the days before air conditioning and television, the streets of the neighborhoods Levitt visited were the living rooms and commons of the adults and—most of all—the playgrounds and “battlegrounds” of the the children. Here she found visual poetry.

In one of my favorite photos, a group of boys plays with a broken mirror on the sidewalk. Two of them pick through the jagged shards on the curb while another pair holds the empty, wooden mirror-frame upright so that what first grabs our attention is the small boy seated on a tricycle, positioned behind and, therefore, within the upheld frame. We instinctively see what looks like a reflection of a child who isn’t there until a moment of study corrects this perception. Particularly because of this frame-within-a-frame element, this image feels almost collage-like, composed of fragments, much like the broken bits of mirror being contemplated by the boys.

Like much of Levitt’s work, this photograph is full of kinetic energy, not so much telling a definitive story as inspiring the viewer to concoct any number of stories to describe the moments just before and just after the scene she has chosen to memorialize. Although the children in this image are demonstrably poor, neither that nor their multi-ethnicity is what Levitt presents or asks us to think about. To the contrary, the mood of the photo is more like a Rockwell idyll–just boys being boys. In this regard, it’s easy to wonder if Levitt’s profound shyness did not lend itself to a proclivity for the kind of detachment needed to make art from a keyhole view of real people. I asked my friend Marco North about Levitt’s influence on his own street photography, and he replied …

“She looked at the world really carefully, and recognized the most subtle gestures, the most fleeting laughter and elevated them to something fairly epic. I feel wisdom in her images, about life’s complexity – pain and triumph, joy and tears it is all there, with a gentle gaze, set inside a landscape (her pictures always carry context, a lot of environment with them.) I think Levitt taught me that there is a way to take the ugly, grotesque moments we witness in the street and just witness them, adding nothing overt to them, not commenting or romanticizing or demonizing – just putting a moment on a plate and serving it for lunch, no fancy parsley sprigs on it, just food for thought.”

Possibly inspired by Ben Shahn, Levitt often used a right-angle lens that allowed her to point the camera perpendicular to what she was really framing, thus preventing her subjects from altering their natural behavior for the camera. In that same NPR story, photography scholar and curator Maria Morris Hambourg describes Levitt as “like a cat, very quiet, very slight.” This jibes with the the resulting images suggesting that Levitt deftly maneuvered between the obvious icons of poverty—the broken, peeling, and threadbare neighborhoods—to capture intimate, human moments that her subjects sloughed off without the slightest awareness of their latent artistic value. As Joel Smith writes for The New York Review of Books, “Any human gesture in a street photograph—a swinging arm seen from this angle, a planted foot from that one—results from the posture and movements not of the subject alone but of two people, photographer and photographed.”

Levitt’s first solo exhibit was mounted at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1943. A year later she began collaborating with James Agee and artist Janice Loeb on a 14-minute film called In the Street. Essentially Levitt photographs in motion, segments from this film serve as the prologue to Episode Seven (2001) of Ric Burns’s New York documentary series. She received Guggenheim fellowships in 1959 and 1960 to resume her photography, this time in color. Although considered a pioneer in color work, many of her prints were unfortunately stolen out of the modest Greenwich Village walk-up apartment where Levitt lived alone for more than thirty years.

The first national retrospective of Levitt’s work was launched in 1991 by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and in 1997, she received the International Center for Photography’s Master of Photography Infinity Award. Most of her books were published after 1987, when she was 74, suggesting Levitt might have been as reticent to market her work as she was to market herself—at least in contrast to many notable photographers. On March 29, 2009, she passed away in her sleep at the age of 95, and I wonder if there was still a box in the corner marked “Here and There,” the title of a book published in 2004.

Particularly because Helen Levitt never did “cultivate her brand,” her work, and its influence on countless subsequent photographers, says something about the meaning of “originality” in photography. The copyright skeptic often doubts the premise of “authorship,” particularly in works that are at least co-written by forces external to the author. As a mechanical (and now digital) medium of creation, photography has always been vulnerable to this criticism; and street photography might seem particularly “unoriginal” to some.

By contrast, numerous articles refer to Levitt as “New York’s visual poet laureate,” and although I cannot find the source of this accolade, it seems highly appropriate. In much the same way that Walt Whitman poeticized the precision of a blacksmith’s hammer or the dangling shawl of the prostitute in Leaves of Grass, Levitt’s street photographs are among the essential phrases in the city’s ever-expanding vernacular.