On the follies of Copyright expectations
29 Jan 2006I’ve been occupied the last few days trying to get an effective fileserving/sharing/roaming profile (domains) environment working with Samba, and was thinking this evening about the implications of a network-wide media share. At present, it’s illegal, though not particularly morally reprehensible in view of the fact that all content on it would be ‘licensed’ (just not for duplication in a digital form, under present copyright law — scheduled to be overturned).
It is a truth universally acknowledged… that the absence of a fair-use provision in Australian copyright law is simply an oversight on the part of legislators. (Apologies to Austen fans :P)
What if it’s not?
There is, now, what Paul Sheehan termed “little squares of light“, signifying connectivity in an “advanced, ironic, post-ethnic polyglot societ[y]“. Before that? The “Dark Age” (also Sheehan). It did exist. There was a time before computers and multimedia were intrinsically connected (depending on your definition of multimedia–multimodal media is perhaps more apt). There was, indeed, a time before multimedia existed — though we can, perhaps, trace its origins to Wagner’s 1849 essay, “The Artwork of the Future” and the notion of Gesamtkunstwerk — which, in turn, traces back to Greek drama, but no matter!
Yet irrespective of when this arose, legislators are meant to have acknowledged the imminent rise of the copyright-violating, citizen-empowering, content-producer-collaboration-dictat at the hands of the web. We’re expecting the wrong thing. Media has progressed, the law hasn’t. Yet.
But what if it doesn’t? Does this matter? Speaking to an influential podcast-media personality yesterday afternoon, it became clear that there had emerged between citizen media and conventional mechanisms a fissure that certain people were very reluctant to bridge. Suspicion exists between the two ‘industries’ (though it was suggested that an ‘industry’ cannot exist until someone is making money: perhaps not the case with citizen media, overblown acquisitions aside) where ‘citizen media’ is concerned that any partnerships with ‘conventional media’ will stifle innovation. Clearly, this is wrong, and ignores the ‘citizen’ part of ‘citizen media’: any partnership cannot exist without the ‘citizen’ remaining, thus changing conventional media. And if the ‘citizen’ component is dissolved, it becomes a meaningless acquisition as ‘media’ already exists, and ‘citizen media’ without the ‘citizen’ has no impetus whatsoever.
However, that aside, this (perhaps mutual) hostility raises interesting notions.
If we consider the two to exist in entirely distinct and disparate spheres, then new possibilities arise. We accept that citing and re-using ‘mass media’ material in new creations is, for a time, impossible. We accept that a ‘normalisation’ is taking place, to cite the much-lauded ‘village square’ concept of communal media: that we are returning to a ‘normal’ state, and that broadcast top-down media was a temporary hiccup in the state of human being. The difference, then, is that we now exist in a globalised state where those with whom we communicate (or, share media/experience) is not limited by geography… but remains limited in scope (sensual experience, for example, is rather inhibited by the tyranny of distance).
In two hundred years, assuming mass media assimilated back into ‘normality’ today, all copyright would have expired and all work could be cited, quoted, re-used and abused as people willed it. There is clearly no great possibility of this happening: acknowledged even by the mass-media-hostile personality interviewed. Should we care? Maybe. If there is material worth reproducing, that is.
The web is a temporal media, still. Never before have such vast volumes of information been so volatile, in part because such vast volumes of information have never been so accessible (in an entirely un-web-standards-related sense). Hence, it is possible that the alleviation of this access will hurt more than it would had we not known what was possible. The nature of this detachment from the web isn’t something to be discussed here — suffice to say, global energy crisis, war, censorship (because the web remains relatively dependent on a small number of servers — DNS root servers particularly) and a variety of other factors could all play a part. But what would this mean?
Earlier, I alluded to the ‘globalised village’ concept, and how that, in some senses (no pun intended), fails. What we are now seeing is a series of online ‘communities’ existing in parallel, with very occasional (but also very complex) perpendicular relationships. There is no global village. There are a series of global communities, with which people can choose to participate and engage to whatever extent they deem desirable. A series of factors aside from the web and MSM have also led to the decline of the physical ‘village’ environment — urban sprawl, globalisation in a physical sense (highly mobile populations, etcetera) and the like are examples of such — but there is something wrong with an entirely directed, specific, no-overlap environment. Ben remarked a day or two ago that it’s intriguing his three best friends all have an affinity for English (and two of those teaching it), whilst he is indifferent about the language, as about teaching (though remarked it is ‘fun’ where maths is concerned!).
Rarely, in Internet-based communities, have I seen someone engage with people outside of their own area of principle interest. Web sites work like that. They are sites with a purpose: and, if they do not have a purpose, the traffic they attract is often sporadic and undirected. Even this blog has a purpose — it must, to have attracted (and retained) the attention of an American with an interest in web publishing. Once attention is engaged on one front, it is possible to explore others — it’s possible that people with an interest in web publishing and accessibility will read this post simply because it popped up in their feed reader and looked vaguely interesting (though length is doubtless a deterrent!). Back to the term ‘site’ — clearly, this word’s etymology ensures it cannot be divorced from its real-world meaning.
People do not simply enter a building for no reason. This parallel fails to some extent as the power of search-engines come into the equation — but, remember, search engines must also discover a ‘site’ at some point (impossible without incoming links). Which brings us back to the parallel-with-occasional-perpendicular-bridges image (note, parallel cannot mean linear because of the nature of hyperlinks. Perhaps I speak of parallel Möbius strips?)
Irrespective of the mechanisms for web-based exploration, web media and mainstream media both fail to serve an encompassing purpose of human interaction. Copyright makes no difference to this. Observe how distracted this post is. Observe how I return to the topic of copyright harshly, how it does not link to the important defining qualities of human interaction (which, it must be said, the web in part facilitates). This was both intentional and unavoidable: there is no better link. Copyright doesn’t matter, and previously created content under copyright does not matter. Eventually, copyright will dissolve, and a harmonisation between formally detached publishing mechanisms (I have decided that is all the difference is) will come about. People will continue to express themselves, drawing on the content of their time — ideas are aside from copyright — whilst, perhaps, drifting apart from this new media and back into the village…