Miasma

NYT.  The difficulties in moving the music business online isn't really about copyright theft.  It is mostly about business models:  who gets paid when you move from a pay-per-sip system of CDs (scarcity) to a pay-per-subscription system of online downloads (abundance).  The problem is that ownership of music is a convoluted mess, and everyone who has a stake wants to take the lion's share at the expense of all others.

"It's as if Franz Kafka designed this system and employed Rube Goldberg as his architect," said Rob Glaser, the chairman of MusicNet, which is part-owned by his company, RealNetworks, along with AOL Time Warner, Bertelsmann and the EMI Group. "It's full of tripwires."

[John Robb's Radio Weblog]

6:25:21 PM    

Jon Udell mixes Kurzweil's technological predictions and the current demands of the MPAA.  If by 2020 we can port our brain to hardware (or at least augment it), it's likely the MPAA will yell and screem about eyeballs and ears providing an "analog hole" that lets anyone who "sees" a movie or "listens" to a song record the experience (and potentially share it).  All jests aside, this is part of the reason I find hobbling of computers so offensive.  At this point, my computer is an extension of my thinking processes (it's just poorly connected). [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

I have this same difficulty with the IDEA of charging for ideas, ephemera. Performances, yes, I suppose, as an event. But what of the light that falls unmetered on your eyeballs? What of the sound that falls unheeded on your ears? Eye have lids to close, and I suppose copyright holders would have us close them if we choose not to pay the fee. Shall we also selectively stopper our ears to avoid a fee? But without listening, how would we know when to stop listening, and when to begin again?

I think of this as a photographer who has a right to shoot whatever I see when I stand in public spaces. If I have a clear view of a ticketed-admission sporting event, may I shoot from my vantage point, say, a building overlooking Wrigley Field? Legally, I have the same rights as anyone's eyeballs upon which the same light is falling.

Can I shoot through a chain link fence into a secret military installation? Some might stop me in this day and age, but light falling on eyeballs is light falling on my lens.

Satellite dishes puzzle me too. I understand the decoders, but I see dishes as extensions of the ear. How does one meter the ear, when it indiscriminately catches what sounds fall on it? Ears have no lids as eyes do.

The current debate about copyright takes me not just to the Sony court decision at the advent of VHS taping technology, but more so to the start of the graphical Web, with the small program Mosaic that shook the world just as Napster tried to do.

Technology open and lying on the road, hidden in plain sight. FTP communities had been trading GIFs and other things since the earliest networks and BBSs. Remember when it was illegal to EXPORT Mosaic? Dangerous tech.

Can the govt ban simple but dangerous tech?

Mosaic messed up photographers. Not just Mosaic, but CD-ROM technology as well. No one screamed back then, but I was uneasy. I kept my stock images, hoping for future resales. And even in the early 90s, ROYALTY FREE CD-ROMs were coming out, disks bragging of thousands of images.

To put out such a disk myself, with my lovingly created and sweat of my brow stock collection, I'd have thousands of hours and production material costs into it. With thousands of images on one CD, I'd be letting my best work go for less than two cents per image, with no hope of future royalties. Taking a fee so far under cost, survival would be impossible.

Who can work on such economies? I saw the end of it then, and resigned to it early on. I kept my images, did not release them royalty free, even though my years of work had suddenly become worse than valueless, like fast food that depends on volume selling and sells for nearly always less than cost. Only large vendors and huge ventures could absorb such economics, not freelance photographers. Hacks, surely, could fill royalty free CDs with shit. And some of it would be studio posed crap that actually LOOKS better than a good bit of my raw and journalistic-styled early work.

Only those at the very top could still play the royalty stock game, the Black Star shooters and the like. And art school shooters who could deal with the hyper-inflation of the gallery game, I suppose.

The Pathetic Thing is that I can take a $9.95 royalty-free CD of stock images--MESS with the stuff in Photoshop in ways that I suppose hacks could not (darkroom work was always my forte) and do some of my best work, make some really unique and original stuff. The gall sticks in my throat to even buy that $9.95 CD.

So I don't have any sympathy for Hollywood's fight against the force of interactive media. In order to enable graphical browsing, Mosaic copied graphical images to the machine with the browser, even if temporarily. That was a COPY. That was technically a violation of COPYRIGHT, just as much as Internet radio with its ephemeral playing of a song is a violation of copyright. Or digital movies, clips, and all other valuable properties that have the "entertainment industry" hyperventilating.

You mean they are just noticing NOW? They could have figured it out when VHS became dominant. When Mosaic did with images what Napster does with sound.

Opening the gates removes direct value from the scarcity model equation. You have to find other reasons to assess a value in something outside of the idea of creating value by hoarding and a metered gate.

The economics shift. In the early 1990s recession, they called that "structural unemployment." Information economy pushes out the industrial economy. It meant as a photographer my work suddenly became extremely cheap. What do you do when your work loses its value, becomes like poetry, the thing no one will pay for, ever?

When light and noise fall on eyeballs and ears. You discover the real reasons to value that work, outside of gates, gatekeepers, and scarcity models. You learn what value is.

Miasma
6:22:10 PM