Wale: I Just Want To Make Music & Give It To Fans For Free… They'll Support Me

from the new-way dept

This is from a few weeks back, but I’m catching up on some older posts. We’ve been talking lately about how fans will support artists they like, and focusing on connecting with those fans by being open, human and awesome is a better strategy than freaking out about piracy.

There are lots of artists who recognize this basic formula. For example, hip hop star Wale was recently asked about things like SOPA, and he explained that he doesn’t get too involved in those things, but he just wants to make music and give it to his fans for free, knowing that they’ll support him when it comes time to buy:

I just know that I want to continue to make music and give it to the people for free and then if it’s good enough when it’s time for it to be sold they’ll go out and support it. I’m a fan of the mode that it is now…

Of course, he’s signed to Universal Music, which kinda limits his ability to give out his music for free. They don’t like that kind of thing. But it again raises questions about the claims of labels that they represent the best interests of artists. It seems like some artists have a better handle on what’s best for themselves…

Filed Under: culture, free, music, support, wale

Elsevier Backs Down, Removes Support For Research Works Act As Elsevier Boycott Grows

from the boycott's-work dept

While it never got as much attention as the GoDaddy boycott, it appears the growing boycott of academics, refusing to publish papers in any Reed Elsevier journal, has caused the company to back down. It has now announced that it no longer supports the Research Works Act. That’s the bill — for which Elsevier was a major backer — that would bar the government from requiring open and free access (after a period of time) to government-funded research:

While we continue to oppose government mandates in this area, Elsevier is withdrawing support for the Research Work Act itself. We hope this will address some of the concerns expressed and help create a less heated and more productive climate for our ongoing discussions with research funders.

Of course, then it immediately complains about the kinds of mandates that the Act would have disallowed:

Cooperation and collaboration are critical because different kinds of journals in different fields have different economics and models. Inflexible mandates that do not take those differences into account and do not involve the publisher in decision making can undermine the peer-reviewed journals that serve an essential purpose in the research community. Therefore, while withdrawing support for the Research Works Act, we will continue to join with those many other nonprofit and commercial publishers and scholarly societies that oppose repeated efforts to extend mandates through legislation.

That’s pretty ridiculous actually. None of these mandates “undermine” these journals in any way — unless you consider their insane set up (free writing, free editing, full copyright ownership, and subscriptions that cost tens of thousands of dollars) some sort of divine right. The mandates refer to federally funded research, which should be accessible by the public since they paid for the research in the first place. Elsevier doesn’t pay for the research. Hell, they don’t even pay the researcher for their paper. Or the peer reviewers for their work. So forgive me for not shedding any tears if Elsevier has to learn to adapt to only being able to have the exclusive rights to a paper for a year.

Still, with Elsevier dropping its support, hopefully it means that the original backers of the poorly thought out bill, Reps. Darrel Issa and Carolyn Maloney will drop the bill entirely. Instead, I’d very much like to see much greater support for Rep. Mike Doyle’s counter-proposal, which would mandate that federally funded research be made available to the public.

Update: And…. now Issa has said that he won’t move forward on the bill and (more importantly) that he now understands the importance of “open access” and how it’s “the wave of the future.”

Filed Under: academics, boycotts, darrell issa, journals, open access, peter suber, publishing, tim gowers
Companies: elsevier

Why Ebook Portal Library.nu Differed From Other Filesharing Sites

from the paying-the-price dept

A couple of weeks ago the popular ebook portal Library.nu was shut down, apparently voluntarily, after a coalition of book publishers obtained an injunction against it and a similar site. As an excellent post on the kNOw Future Inc. blog points out, Library.nu was significant in a number of ways:

the demand for the works offered there demonstrates that filesharing is not just about pop music, porn and cams of action movies, but also those forms and sources of knowledge whose acquisition are ritually celebrated within ‘enlightenment’ culture.

The stereotypical downloader — young, and looking for easy entertainment online — was in part a function of what was available initially. The Library.nu site showed that fans of “high culture” were just as keen to obtain digital versions of their stuff as those with more “low-brow” tastes.

Many of those whose works were offered derive income not from royalties, but from related activities such as teaching and research. Such people were themselves an important component library.nu’ user base.

The first part means that the authors of those books wrote not for money, principally, but for other reasons — for example, prestige or influence. It was actually in their interests for their works to be circulated as widely as possible in order to enhance their reputation, and Library.nu made that possible. It’s not clear what evidence there is for the second sentence quoted above, but assuming it’s true, it would indicate that for some, at least, the Library.nu ethos was “share and share alike”.

The post concludes:

Some [of those downloading from Library.nu] have other means to access the same materials, others, especially those in countries with weaker education infrastructures and more emaciated library budgets, do not. Outside of formal education, the millions of online autodidacts may be denied access to material, seriously impinging on their lives and possibilities. When one considers the cost of text books and more especially scholarly articles, that is no hyperbole, and applies not only to the global south but the post-industrial north as well, awash in its dreams of knowledge economies and human capital.

That suggests two things. First, that publishers are missing out on a huge audience that is hungry for knowledge, but simply can’t afford text books, say, at current pricing. Once again, piracy is driven partly by a failure to serve the market properly.

The other point is that although publishers may rejoice that Library.nu has been taken down, readers around the world will suffer in terms of losing access to these works that they can’t afford. Some may say that’s just tough, or that these people should work harder or make greater sacrifices elsewhere in order to be able to afford such books. But in many locations, those books are not available legally at any price.

As a result, when sites like Library.nu disappear, there is a cost to society as a whole because of the knock-on effects of reduced information flow, and of practical knowledge that is unavailable for application as a result. In this respect, sites with large collections of digitized textbooks are quite different from those that are principally offering music or video downloads for entertainment.

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Filed Under: culture, ebooks, file sharing, library

La La La La La: The Internet Routes Around Copyright Censorship To Restore Daria

from the infringement-as-restoration dept

One of the things I’ve never liked about copyright is its potential to be the functional equivalent of censorship. Sometimes this censorship comes about because an author didn’t get permission to create his work in the first place (see: Richard Prince, JD California). While this unfortunately turns judges into cultural gatekeepers, it’s been deemed a necessary balance between copyright law and the First Amendment, and harm to the public is arguably lessened by the fact that we don’t know what we’re missing; because the censored work is never able to reach and impact us, we’ve only lost the potential of its cultural contribution.

However, other times a work is created with the initial blessing of copyright, makes its mark on the public, then becomes effectively censored down the line due to licensing restrictions (see: The Wonder Years, Werewolf). This is much more culturally pernicious because it deprives the public of a work already in its lexicon, and the sense of loss is far more palpable as a result. Often, the only way to get the work back in the public’s hands is to perform triage, excise the no-longer-licensed content, and try to be happy with a bastardized version of the work (see: WKRP in Cincinnati, The State).

What’s interesting, however, is how we’ve seen the Internet step up to effectuate cultural preservation, when copyright law stands in the way. I recently picked up a DVD collection of Daria, one of the last good things MTV ever produced. The show had an immense impact on my childhood, in no small part because of how it helped frame pop culture for me with its liberal use of MTV-placed contemporary music, and I was incredibly excited to relive that experience. When I opened up the DVD case, however, I was greeted with the following message:

For those who can’t see the note, it says in the pertinent part:

“So let’s answer the big question right away: 99 percent of the music has been changed, because the cost of licensing the many music bites we used would have made it impossible to release the collection (and for many years did). So no, these aren’t the shows as aired, but more like one of those astronauts in a TWILIGHT ZONE episode who returns from space and his wife can’t figure out what’s changed about him, until it slowly dawns on her that instead of a cool song from 1997 playing when he walks into the room, it’s some tune she’s never heard. Yeah, it’s just like that.”

Needless to say, I was disappointed. As I Googled around for more information, I could see many other fans of the series felt the same, opining that, “when I watch the show without proper music it feels as though one of the main characters is missing,” and “even to those who say they didn’t pay much attention to the music, I think you’ll still sense an absence.” Then I stumbled across something else entirely. Something called “The Daria Restoration Project.”

Essentially, certain Daria fans had taken to combining the high-quality video and spoken audio of the official DVDs with the music that accompanied the original broadcasts, either sourced from old television recordings or by manually inserting the pertinent songs. They’re doing their best to preserve the fidelity of a major piece of culture that is currently only legally available to the public in crippled form.

And of course, their curating efforts are 100% illegal, punishable by hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars in fines.

To be sure, copyright owners are supposed to be able to control how their works are used to create new works outside the bounds of ideas and fair use (though we don’t always get that right). However, allowing copyright licensing to prevent the public from accessing the proper versions of culturally-significant media, after their creation and initial publication has already been sanctioned, almost smacks of a marketplace parallel to the European “right of withdrawal.” It not only presents a huge hurdle to the preservation of certain works, but robs the public of the value they placed in that media while it was available to them.

While the Internet is not nearly as “lawless” as many would like us to believe, there are certainly pockets of it where the traditional rule of law is less readily applied. And though this poses a challenge to society in some aspects, there is also undoubted utility in having these pockets able to function in the interest of the public, the proper beneficiaries of copyright law, when the legal state of play so radically conflicts with that interest. As a law student, I’m not happy when I see pirates doing a better job than copyright owners at preserving and spreading culture; after all, the Supreme Court recently noted in its Golan decision that copyright law can serve its core purpose not only by incentivizing the creation of works, but the dissemination of them as well. Yet here we see copyright hurdles completely inhibiting the proper dissemination of legally-created works through economic censorship.

Well, as John Gilmore once said, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” So until copyright law manages to untangle itself and properly serve its own fundamental purpose, I’m glad we can rely on pirates to do its job for it.

Filed Under: censorship, copyright, culture, daria, music, piracy, restoration

How To Turn A Legitimate Buyer Into A Pirate In Five Easy Steps

from the ip-in-the-oatmeal dept

As we’ve mentioned before, it’s interesting to watch copyright issues break into the mainstream and get attention from bigger and bigger sources. This time, Matthew Inman used his famous (and widely read) webcomic The Oatmeal to recount the moral quandary he was placed in when trying to watch Game of Thrones. It’s hard to get the full effect without the whole comic, so you should really go read it—but here’s a preview:

Of course, plenty of people have been saying this for years: the biggest driver of piracy is a lack of legitimate offerings. Unfortunately, the legacy players think (or at least claim) that they are being innovative with their offerings, even as their customers tell them otherwise. Hopefully, as people like Inman continue putting all-too-common stories like this into the spotlight, they will begin to get the message.

Filed Under: copyright, game of thrones, ip, piracy, purchases, the oatmeal

When We Copy, We Justify It; When Others Copy, We Vilify Them

from the everything-is-a-remix dept

We’ve written multiple times about Kirby Ferguson’s excellent Everything is a Remix project that has produced three videos highlighting the problems and history of intellectual property and how copying and derivative works are a core element of culture and invention. He’s now released the fourth and final installment in the series, and it’s a great summary look at the general problems with intellectual property law today.

The key theme is that the theory (treating ideas, inventions, content, etc. as a form of “property” — in the minds of many copyright and patent system supporters) simply doesn’t match up with reality (where almost everything is a derivative work of some sort). What the video does nicely is highlight the hypocrisy of it all. As he notes brilliantly, when we copy (and everyone does copy), we justify it. When others copy, however, suddenly we attack them and vilify them. A perfect recent example of this, by the way, was former NYT executive editor Bill Keller’s bizarre defense of the NYT copying and posting a work covered by someone else’s copyright, just days after his own column came out in support of greater legal enforcement of copyrights.

As he notes, this is psychologically understandable. It’s all about “loss aversion.” People feel a sense that they “own” something which they really do not — and that’s often boosted by the concepts of intellectual property that really spread the idea that you can, in fact, own an idea (and, yes, technically neither copyright nor patents apply directly to “ideas,” but that’s a nuance that most people fail to grasp when they see how content and inventions are considered “owned” under the laws of today).

The video then talks about the continued expansion of copyright laws, and the more nefarious effort to continue to ratchet things up through trade agreements like ACTA and TPP. But he also points out that this is somewhat ironic, since in its early years, the US refused to sign similar trade agreements, and was a “pirate nation” that ignored copyrights from around the globe.

The video doesn’t just cover copyrights, but digs into patents as well — with specific attention paid to broad software patents that do little to contribute any knowledge to the world, but instead take broad concepts and seek to lock them up for the purpose of suing and trying to extract settlements from those actually creating and innovating.

From there he breaks out the original purpose of both copyrights and patents under the US system. In both cases, they were about benefiting the public: to encourage learning or to promote the progress of “useful” arts (inventions). But when the laws fail to do that, then we should see the system as broken and seek to remedy it.

All in all, Ferguson’s series is a great introduction to many of the issues we cover around here. I don’t fully agree with everything in all of the videos — and the latest one has a slight undertone suggesting that capitalism and markets in and of themselves are bad (which I think is conflating a few different issues). But overall the videos are fantastic — and in terms of production quality, it seems like each one in the series is better than the previous one. He keeps maturing as a video maker, which is cool to see. Ferguson is now moving on to a new project, called This is Not a Conspiracy Theory, for which he’s raising funds on Kickstarter, so check it out.

Filed Under: copying, copyright, everything is a remix, intellectual property, kirby ferguson, loss avoidance, patents, property, remix

Rep. Doyle Introduces Bill To Provide Public Access To Publicly Funded Research

from the good-for-him dept

We were quite disappointed last month to see that Rep. Darrell Issa — who has done lots of excellent work to encourage more open access to government information — was sponsoring a bill that would close off open access to government funded research. This is an important issue that we’ve been following for years. Government funded research means that taxpayer money funded that research… and yet because of ridiculous policies by gatekeeper journals, the public has almost no access to that information. The whole situation is ridiculous. The journals get free labor: they never pay for articles (and, in some fields, academics actually have to pay the journal to get published), they never pay for the peer review. So they get free content and free editing. Then, as part of getting published, they require the researchers to give the journal their copyrights and usually bar them from using that same research elsewhere. Finally, they then sell these journal subscriptions at insane rates: often tens of thousands of dollars a year for a subscription. Only large university libraries and research institutions will pay those fees. It’s a huge scam and it’s why a ton of academics are boycotting publishing giant Elsevier, (infamous for its fake journal division).

The issue in these bills is that there has been a movement to require any research that is federally funded (taxpayer funded) to be placed in an open access repository one year after it was published. The National Institute of Health (NIH) who funds billions in research every year, has had this policy going for a few years (though journals have even tried nasty tricks, like requiring academics to pay them to “deposit” their own papers into these open repositories). This kind of rule makes plenty of sense: we’re talking about publicly funded research after all. It should be open to the public. Giving the journals a one-year headstart on publishing the papers seems like more than enough for them to make money (again, from the “free” content they get).

Except… the journals hate this because they want their lifetime-plus monopoly on this information (which, I’ll emphasize once again that they do not pay for). So they’ve been pushing various bills that would outlaw such open access requirements. And, somehow, they got Darrell Issa to back the latest version of this bill.

Thankfully, however, Rep. Mike Doyle — who has a long history of being really good on copyright issues — has introduced a counter bill to Issa’s bill (pdf) called the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2012. It really is the mirror image of the Issa bill.

the Federal Government funds basic and applied research with the expectation that new ideas and discoveries that result from the research, if shared and effectively disseminated, will advance science and improve the lives and welfare of people of the United States and around the world; and the Internet makes it possible for this information to be promptly available to every scientist, physician, educator, and citizen at home, in school, or in a library.

The bill would require that all federal agencies establish policies that encourage open and free access to federally funded research. One hopes that Rep. Issa will rethink his position on his bill, and recognize that Doyle’s bill is much more aligned with Issa’s stated goal (and long-shown commitment) to more open access to government information.

Filed Under: darrell issa, mike doyle, nih, open access, public funding, research
Companies: elsevier

Beware Of Those Who Claim They're 'Saving The Culture Business' When They're Really Protecting Those Who Strip Artists Of Rights

from the 'culture-business'-ain't-culture dept

We’ve talked a few times about the ridiculously unsupported and unsupportable claim by Robert Levine that the “tech industry” (by which he means “Google”) is somehow destroying culture by “free riding” on content. There are so many things wrong with this argument that it would take an entire book to debunk them one by one. But, as we’ve recently shown, the culture business isn’t dying at all — instead, it’s been growing quite nicely over the past decade. So what’s going on? Lateef Mtima, from the Institute for Intellectual Property and Social Justice at Howard University does a nice job dismantling Levine’s argument by showing that what Levine is arguing isn’t about “saving the cultural busness,” it’s about saving a few giant media conglomerates who used to be the gatekeepers to culture (often at the expense of artists — especially minority artists), and pretending that without those companies, there wouldn’t be much culture. As Mtima notes, this is, ultimately, an incredibly elitist position:

Culture is not something reserved to an elite. No particular business or set of businesses and no particular business model should be protected from the winds of innovation and change in the name of preserving culture. A people’s culture is just that — the people’s culture….

And this is really a key point. The few companies that Levine is looking to save are not the deciders and arbiters of culture, no matter how much Levine wants them to be. In fact, they’re often the companies who are really cheapening culture themselves and stripping the rights from the artists themselves, signing them to ridiculously one-sided contracts that are almost criminal in how they strip artists of their own rights and toss them out on the street for the profit of a few business fat cats.

Initially Levine presents his book on the pending doom of American culture as an appeal really done on behalf of the financial interests of artists, writers, and musicians. (One might be forgiven for skepticism and for asking where was/is Levine on the issue of IP corporate establishment exploitation of African American and other marginalized artists who have been pillaged by those entities for more than a century.)

Of course “protecting struggling artists” is only the cover story. Levine actually knows what many other Americans realize–that most artists are trapped in contractual peonage with their corporate distributers and that they often retain no property interests capable of being ravaged by third-party pirates.

It really is quite a disgusting, paternalistic, almost antebellum argument: that these poor artists need some big conglomerate to come “rescue them,” take control of their rights, in order to produce “the culture business.” The reality is quite different of course. What’s happening every day out here, in the real world, is that new companies — often from the “tech industry” that Levine insists is killing off his heroes at the major labels and studios — are providing the tools for amazing new cultural works to be produced, distributed, promoted, shared and monetized. Witness the great success of companies like Kickstarter, and the fact that they’re doing it without typical Hollywood smarminess.

But the real cultural elitism from Levine shows through in his disdain for the kinds of amazing culture produced all the time outside of the circles of the gatekeepers.

Levine utterly ignores creative and impactful and socially desirable user-generated material such as the insertion into a picture of Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” a still from the video of a policeman nonchalantly pepper spraying demonstrators engaging in the Occupy movement. Such works make statements and connect people culturally in ways Levine apparently does not value and would stop….

…. The constitutional grant of power to Congress to regulate copyrights and patents explicitly states that the purpose of such laws is to benefit the public. Innovation is to insure progress for everyone, not merely wealth for a few. The Internet may indeed be destroying the culture business, or at least some of it in its entrenched form, but it is not destroying culture. Intellectual property law is not designed to be, never has been intended to be, and must not be allowed to become the footservant of moneyed erstwhile overlords.

Levine’s argument, in the end, comes down to a somewhat sickening assertion that without the Universal Musics of the world, artists wouldn’t be able to produce their cultural works. It’s that poor artists need big corporations to mold and shape their cultural creations, or such culture won’t exist. To both the public and many artists, that argument isn’t just laughable, it’s insulting.

Filed Under: amateurs, culture, elites, free ride

The Rise Of The 'Professional Amateur' And The Fall Of Gated, Exclusionary 'Clubs'

from the the-internet-is-the-ultimate-siege-engine dept

As the gatekeepers continue to see their carefully constructed walls crumbling, they have rushed to shore up the walls using any means at their disposal, whether it’s legislation, lawsuits or simple exclusion. But those within the gates aren’t much happier, despite the limitations imposed by the gatekeepers, and many are just as resistant to change as the legacy industries they work in.

Tadhg Kelly at GamesBrief has delivered an excellent post explaining why it’s so hard for the creators still working within the confines of these industries to embrace the future:

Creative industries tend to be like clubs. You can get into the club in many ways, but all of them are equally difficult. You’ve put the time in, done the training, had the lucky breaks, struggled and finally made it. Once you are actually in the club then life is easier. You have a name, you are a part of a network and you work with a lot of the same people year in year out. Members rarely fall out of the club entirely…

We are pros. We are “in”. And we are aware that there are so many more people who are not “in” that would like to be.

Perhaps they have an overly-romantic notion of what it’s like but that’s just how it is. All creative fields, from modern art through to advertising have that lustre because people like the idea of making things for a living.

That last sentence is key. Even as the limitations and drawbacks of yoking your creative output to a major label or a large publishing house become more apparent, the lure remains nearly as strong, simply because for a long period of time, these legacy industries were the best option. But now they’re not, and this threatens those still working within the system.

[P]art of being “in” is the sense that the club can’t get too big, and for many the internet is actually pushing to make the club smaller. Book publishers, for example, no longer offer much in the way of advances. Long-tail services like Netflix and Spotify have such huge libraries that every new artist is competing not just with their peers, but their antecedents also. Distribution may rise but prices fall.

They feel squeezed by piracy. Though they dislike it, many who are “in” quietly believe that they have to keep many more people “out” in order to hold on to what remains. I don’t mean executives etc. I mean established writers, musicians, game makers and so on. We live in a curious age where the freest of thinkers (artists of various stripes) are the ones that want to curtail freedom the most.

The pressure to control the internet isn’t simply studio execs and big content lobbyists. The pressure is also exerted by those on the inside, who aren’t happy to see huge shifts in the gameplan or new blood being introduced. But even worse, they can’t tell whether the gates are protecting them or trapping them.

Those who are “in” also feel squeezed by something else: Democratisation of tools. It’s bad enough that they have to deal with a loss of revenue, but a reduction of difficulty in getting into the club threatens to increase its size many times over. The future is a world awash with low-rent ebooks, GarageBand music and GameMaker-developed games. Quality will collapse, and there will be no future for the professional any more.

This opinion is expressed quite often during discussions about legacy industries, that if the barriers are low enough, everyone’s going to jump the fence and water down the creative field. To those in the club, it looks hopeless: set adrift in a sea of low-talent amateurs whose willingness to undercut the competition with massive amounts of cheap/free goods.

But they fail to see the upside to the removal of barriers:

In the startup world, the reduction of barriers is a great boon. You can, for example, assemble a small team and go create a tool that will change the world. As an individual you can create a blog that causes conversations and change. You can develop a game, make music, start a design agency, and all you need is a laptop.

With the barriers to entry removed, the stage is set for a new breed of creators: the professional amateur.

It’s not amateur in the sense of a lack of diligence, nor is it professional in the sense of those who are “in”. The forces of technology distribution and cheap or free tools creates a space for talent to do what talent wants to do. It creates a class of pro-amateur makers.

A pro-amateur perhaps works on a project as a side-line to her day-job but she treats it seriously. Like any struggling writer, there is the work and the need to pay the rent. The difference is that the pro-amateur then takes her work and distributes it directly. She creates a book, an album, a TV series and just puts it out there. It only really costs her time to do it, and if it works it works. If not, she does something else.

As has always been the case, making money in the creative world is hard. Most people cannot afford to do it as their only source of income. This isn’t a new problem, although many of those on the inside of the “club” tend to portray it as such. But this new hybrid form of creator will be able to do things they can’t, thanks to platforms and tools they embrace, rather than distrust.

The magic of the internet is therefore this: It substitutes time spent getting into the club with time spent finding fans. Expertise with experience. Legitimacy with audience. Jargon with generosity. And for those with the talent to do it well come the rewards because niche audiences that blossom into tribes exist for almost anything you can think of.

To coin a phrase (ha!), Connect with Fans and give them a Reason to Buy.

Filed Under: amateurs, clubs, culture, gatekeepers, professionals