Revolution ’13: a) on Capitalism and Piracy; and b) on a new kind of Communism

 capitalism, Communism, piracy, revolution, unclassifiable  4 Responses »
Mar 312013
 

Just had my mind blown.  If you watch only one video this year (and I generally don’t tend to watch any online videos), then please, please watch this one.  Amazing, amazing, truly amazing stuff.


http://youtu.be/ja_kOmHBPVA

I can’t begin to communicate to you exactly how much this five minutes of historical wordplay has suddenly made me see the world in a completely different way.  Earlier in the day, I was describing how we should establish a parallel BBC (after two previous posts on similar themes), because something quite fundamental about the one we’ve got really wasn’t as it should be.  Now I see more clearly.  Uncharted waters mean legitimate and illegitimate actions are often interchangeable; cannot be easily separated; exist in the same spaces.  And the biggest uncharted waters we’ve ever faced are around us at this very moment: cyberspace; our genetic make-up as a species; the patenting of cash crops.  It’s all waiting to be “pirated” – not just by those most of us would recognise as “pirates” but – just as significantly – by those who would claim to be quite otherwise.

I never realised the term was as rich and pregnant in meaning and expansion as I now understand it to be.

*

Today has, however, been a day of many felicitous discoveries.  This one, for example, which came my way a few minutes ago via Jeff:

In 2009, at the Economics for Ecology Conference, we’d made this point:

“The prevailing economics systems in the twentieth century were capitalism and communism.  Both systems were hypothetically aimed at creating a means of providing people with comfortable, safe and secure life.

Along the way, in the process of attempting different forms of economics from capitalism to communism, we have managed to pollute and contaminate our own environment to the extent of causing environmental change to the point of quite possible catastrophe for people around the world.  Neither the capitalist system nor the communist system – nor the various fascist systems attempted in such as Germany, Spain and Italy – lived up to their promises.  Communist and fascist systems became infamous for mass murder.  The Western capitalist was less murderous. Overall, capitalism was able to produce a much larger middle class of people between rich and poor, and has gained precedence due to making safe and secure life possible for more people.   But, it’s various methods over the past 100 years left millions of people to suffer and die more indirectly than outright murder.  Those people were dismissed as relatively unimportant, mostly left to die from deprivation rather than outright execution.  In all systems, some rationale was created to either dismiss people and leave them to die, or, kill people outright.  In the end, for the victims, the result was identical.”

To conclude thus:

This is a long-term permanently sustainable program, the basis for “people-centered” economic development. Core focus is always on people and their needs, with neediest people having first priority – as contrasted with the eternal chase for financial profit and numbers where people, social benefit, and human well-being are often and routinely overlooked or ignored altogether. This is in keeping with the fundamental objectives of Marshall Plan: policy aimed at hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. This is a bottom-up approach, starting with Ukraine’s poorest and most desperate citizens, rather than a “top-down” approach that might not ever benefit them. They cannot wait, particularly children. Impedance by anyone or any group of people constitutes precisely what the original Marshall Plan was dedicated to opposing. Those who suffer most, and those in greatest need, must be helped first — not secondarily, along the way or by the way.”

And what is applicable to the Ukraine is surely becoming applicable – now – to the UK:

In a joint report, the Baptist Union of Great Britain, the Methodist church, the United Reformed church and the Church of Scotland said that the “systematic misrepresentation of the poorest in society” was a matter of injustice that all Christians should challenge.

How capitalism so often comes full circle.  Occasionally entrancingly; usually tryingly; sometimes cruelly.

The last being, now it would seem, our circle.

Time for us all, perhaps, in this evermore uncharted century, to understand properly what it is to be a “pirate”.

____________________

Update to this post, 1st April 2013 (and no, it’s not an April Fools’ update either!): just a quick reference to something Jeff touches on, in his piece linked to above.  In it, and speaking of a latterday Marshall plan, he mentions:

[...] the ‘tools innovations and methodologies’ available today which hadn’t existed 60 years earlier [...].

Just so the dyed-in-the-wool capitalists don’t immediately turn off this meme, then, here’s something I wrote a while ago which describes how the iPhone is a perfect argument for a planned economy.  First this:

The iPhone, perhaps the apex of all latterday manufacturing and publishing industries, is just about as planned and structured to the last detail as anything in this life could possibly be.  It’s an astonishing paradox that Apple is held up to be the paradigm of effective free-market capitalism (even when we know it isn’t free market at all) – whilst being the most control-freaking company in history.

And then this:

What iPhone really shows us, then, is the massively impact planning our whys and wherefores can have on how they turn out.  If we want to use Apple – and its huge cash mountain and its immense ability to deliver products and services people want – as an example to follow, we have to argue it has far more to do with planned economies than the supposedly libertarian, slapdash and light-touch approaches conventional neoliberalism would have us ascribing to.

Provokes trains of interesting thoughts, if nothing else.  Ones we really should have the intellectual honesty to follow.

No?

The Pirate Party case for copyright reform?

 copyright, on a high, piracy, Pirate Party  No Responses »
May 012012
 

Yes indeed.  Whilst they tell us that “Sharing is caring” – something which I believe, as a natural and primary instinct and impulse of all human beings from birth, it most certainly must be considered – they also understand the need to maintain copyright for commercial purposes: to maintain it in such a way as to allow existing business models to continue on their constructively productive and creative ways.  So here we have a summary of the Pirate Party’s thoughts on the case for copyright reform, reproduced freely from this downloadable book:

Our proposal can be summarized in six points:

• Moral Rights Unchanged
We propose no changes at all to the moral right of the author to be recognized as the author.

Nobody should be allowed to claim that they are ABBA, or have written all of Paul McCartney’s songs, unless they actually are or have. To the extent that this is a real world problem, it should still be illegal to do so. ”Give credit where credit is due” is a good maxim that everybody agrees with.

• Free Non-Commercial Sharing
Until twenty years ago, copyright hardly concerned ordinary people. The rules about exclusivity of the production of copies were aimed at commercial actors, who had the means to, for example, print books or press records.

Private citizens who wanted to copy a poem and send to their loved one, or copy a record to cassette and give it to a friend, did not have to worry about being in breach of copyright. In practice, anything you had the technical means to do as a normal person, you could do without risk of any punishment.

But today, copyright has evolved to a position where it imposes serious restrictions on what ordinary citizens can do in their every-day lives. As technological progress has made it easier for ordinary people to enjoy and share culture, copyright legislation has moved in the opposite direction.

We want to restore copyright to its origins, and make absolutely clear that it only regulates copying for commercial purposes. To share copies, or otherwise spread or make use of use somebody else’s copyrighted work, should never be prohibited if it is done by private individuals without a profit motive. Peer-to-peer file sharing is an example of such an activity that should be legal.

• 20 Years Of Commercial Monopoly
Much of today’s entertainment industry is built on the commercial exclusivity of copyrighted works. This, we want to preserve. But today’s protection times – life plus 70 years – are absurd. No investor would even look at a business case where the time to pay-back was that long.

We want to shorten the protection time to something that is reasonable from both society’s and an investor’s point of view, and propose 20 years from publication.

• Registration After 5 Years
Today, works that are still in copyright, but where it is impossible or difficult to locate the rights owner, are a major problem. The majority of these works have little or no commercial value, but since they are still covered by copyright, they cannot be reused or distributed because there is nobody to ask for permission.

Copyright protection should be given automatically like it is today to newly published works, but rights owners who want to continue to exercise their commercial exclusivity of a work beyond the first 5 years after publication should be required to register the right, in such a way that it can be found by a diligent search of public rights databases. This will solve the orphan works problem.

• Free Sampling
Today’s ever more restrictive copyright legislation and practice is a major obstacle to musicians, film makers, and other artists who want to create new works by reusing parts of existing works. We want to change this by introducing clear exceptions and limitations to allow remixes and parodies, as well as quotation rights for sound and audiovisual material modeled after the quotation rights that already exist for text.

• A Ban on DRM
DRM is an acronym for “Digital Rights Management”, or “Digital Restrictions Management”. The term is used to denote a number of different technologies that all aim to restrict consumers’ and citizens’ ability use and copy works, even when they have a legal right to do so.

It must always be legal to circumvent DRM restrictions, and we should consider introducing a ban in the consumer rights legislation on DRM technologies that restrict legal uses of a work. There is no point in having our parliaments introduce a balanced and reasonable copyright legislation, if at the same time we allow the big multinational corporations to write their own laws, and enforce them through technical means.

Some interesting initial thoughts there, in what – in .odt format – is a 64-page booklet I still have yet to read in full.

I suggest, at the very least, that you might take it onboard and try and incorporate some of its common sense into your world view of what needs to be done next.

(Via PXDigitalGov’s Twitter feed this morning.)

Piracy and Charles Dickens: the start of all our woes?

 a con, copyright, copyright madness, Dickens, Fernando Savater, piracy  No Responses »
Feb 142012
 

Fernando Savater defends Charles Dickens, the apparently swashbuckling protector of copyright, in this fascinating piece of literary history (in the original Spanish here, in Google’s robot-English here).  He describes how Dickens visited the USA and took on the US literary establishment on his own terms: instead of delivering the easy tales about English aristocratic privilege they were expecting to hear, he criticised the Americans for their own copyright laws which – at the time – allowed them to “pirate” (according to Savater, the usage was actually Dickens’s) foreign literary works by English writers like Dickens himself.

Savater then goes on to conclude (this is my loose translation):

In this way, he confronted public opinion, which isn’t always right but has the advantage of being in the majority.  And the fact of the matter is that cultural creators are always in the minority when compared to those who consume and enoy, whether this be in that century or ours.  Carry out the following test: condemn the corruption of politicians and bankers and the masses will agree satisfied; condemn the corruption of the unscrupulous Internet users and one will be booed. [...]

With this sort of argument, he decides very clearly that we must respect and admire Dickens for precisely his honourable and sustained defence – despite the dangers of a very real public disapprobation – of what was morally right in copyright law over what was easier, at least at the time, to popularly maintain.

Where I’m really not sure if I agree or not is in the conclusions we seem to be drawing in this piece.  Are we really saying that Dickens’s brave battle against zero rights in the lifetime of a real person and creator is comparable to the battle being raged by corporate figures whose ultimate intention is to ensure that modern content industries will never have to contribute to the public domain they have – even where productively – clearly pillaged for their own benefit?

The other day, for example, I read that just Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” had been filmed in over fifty different film and TV versions – which is, of course, as it should be for a work by a man long dead.  I have, however, yet to see any moves to release into a similarly enriching and shared commons other characters and tales from the very 20th century arts that currently occupy those of us worried about the Internet and freedom of speech.

And until I do, I’m afraid appeals like Savater’s will be falling on my relatively deaf ears.

Not because I’m taking the easy way out, though.  After all, the easy way out is for mugs.

As well as for businesspeople unwilling to effectively re-engineer their traditional and other-century business models.

"Who are the pirates now?"

 a con, El País, piracy, SGAE, Spain  No Responses »
Jul 012011
 

One of the Facebook comments at the foot of this story (in Spanish) – as it came my way via the Facebook feed of the Spanish paper El País – asks the possibly rhetorical question: “Who are the pirates now?”  For the Spanish Association of Authors and Publishers (SGAE) has spent most of the day under the unforgiving eyes of Spain’s Civil Guard, as a result of investigations which began in 2007.  It’s apparently taken four years for anything to come of that original tip-off.  In the meantime, as Wikipedia points out, the main function of the Association has been:

[...] the collection of a blank media tax called “canon”. This fee is aimed to compensate authors for private copies of their work and was incorporated into Spanish law by Law 22/1987 of November 11, Intellectual Property. This law recognized the right of users to make private copies. The fee was intended to levy countervailing audio and video devices such as tapes, stereos or televisions. Its latest version, called “digital canon”, placed the SGAE in the middle of a controversy when trying to extrapolate this charge to digital devices such as CD, DVD, external hard drives and cell phones capable of playing music. The amount payable ranges from 0.17 euros on the price of a CD-R up to 227 euros to be paid to purchase a copier.

Whilst as El País points out today:

El escrito del ministerio público que investigaba a la SGAE fue presentado hace unas semanas ante la Audiencia Nacional y responde a unas diligencias previas abiertas por este departamento a raíz de una denuncia que presentaron en noviembre de 2007 la Asociación de Internautas, la Asociación de Usuarios de Internet, la Asociación Española de Pequeñas y Medianas Empresas de Informática y Nuevas Tecnologías (APEMIT) y la Asociación Española de Hosteleros Víctimas del Canon (VACHE). La denuncia se basaba en la aparición en varios medios de comunicación de “supuestas ilicitudes cometidas en la gestión económica de los recursos de la SGAE”. Los internautas denunciaban que los directivos de la entidad habían formado una trama societaria de empresas filiales en torno a la SDAE en las que las cantidades recaudadas en concepto de gestión de derechos de autor se invertían en actividades lucrativas para las mismas. Una denuncia que converge con la intervención policial de hoy.

Essentially, the Spanish Association of Internet Users and other organisations drew the corresponding government department’s attention to evidence which had apparently appeared in the media in 2007 – and which seemed to indicate that there existed parallel companies into which monies received as a result of copyright were being diverted.

Away, that is, from their rightful beneficiaries.

As the Facebook commenter says indeed: “Who are the pirates now?”

Not a good day for supporters of copyright in Spain.  Or, perhaps, anywhere.
____________________

Update to this post: this article on the subject of filesharing as symptom rather than cause has just come my way via Tim O’Reilly’s Twitter feed – and is an absolutely positive exposition of the issues that underline modern virtual behaviours and their relationship to digital rights.  As the article concludes:

Indeed, Ericsson is calling for an end to extensive lobbying for harsher and more restrictive copyright legislation. Instead, the entertainment industry should take it upon themselves to meet the demands of consumers. No more DRM, no more artificial delays, and global availability in all formats possible. In other words, offer products that can compete with piracy instead of attempting to make piracy go away through repressive legislation.

Rene Summer’s words may sound familiar to many TorrentFreak readers, but we don’t often hear them being voiced by a director of a billion dollar company. Let’s hope the right people are listening to pick them up.

www.DontMakeMeSteal.com

 filesharing, manifesto, on a high, piracy, sorted  No Responses »
Feb 052011
 

This is brilliant.  Don’t Make Me Steal is a website with both a mission and a sense of integrity.  You can find its manifesto here:

I PROMISE never to illegally download a movie if there was a legal alternative following the criteria on this page.

THE CRITERIA

1. Pricing
In general I want the pricing model to be simple and transparent. I don’t mind a slight difference in pricing between movies with regard to the age of the movie.

  • Rentals should not exceed 1/3 of the cinema price.
  • Purchases should not exceed the cinema price.
  • Monthly flat rate prices should not exceed 3 visits to the cinema.
  • Pricing of TV shows is about 1/3 of movies.
  • Payments are for the content, not bandwidth.

2. Languages

  • I can obtain the audio in every language produced for the content.
  • After purchasing a movie, all the languages are available.
  • Fans are legally allowed to create and share subtitles for any content.

3. Convenience

  • The content I paid for is instantly available.
  • Content is delivered without ads, or disrupting infringement warnings.
  • I can find movies or TV shows by year, director, language, country, genre, IMDB ID, etc.

4. Choice And Release Dates

  • The release date is global. There are no limits regarding the country you live in.
  • I can download nearly every movie ever made.

5. Rights

  • I can watch the movie on any device, without any differences in how the movie is presented.
  • Movies are not bound to the service provider, and must be DRM-free in the case of purchases.
  • I can easily understand my rights regarding movies that I rent, buy, or stream at a flat rate.

All via Paul Baldovin’s Twitter feed this afternoon. 

All in all, an excellent starting-point for bringing sense and sensibility back to the marketplace. And just as applicable to other kinds of content currently struggling to make a living out there on the open Internet.

Alongside all of this, and though going off on a slight tangent, I suppose we do have to admire Rupert Murdoch’s pricing strategy for his new iPad newspaper.  Whether you like the product or not, 99¢ a week is nothing for the free content enthusiasts amongst us to get particularly worked up about.  As long, that is, as it isn’t designed as a loss-leader to whet people’s appetite and gain a captive market before he then proceeds to jack up the prices abusively.  Something I’d assume unlikely in the presence of so much alternative free content.

If, then, he can get the economics of the publishing industry to work on the basis of such end-user charges (though early adopters should think twice), so much the better for everyone else who wants to be able to earn a living from content development.  Once done once, it’ll be much easier to do again.

For I would certainly like to think that some areas of the content business are looking to learn the lessons of sensible pricing.

Meanwhile, to go back to the original manifesto at the top of this post, it would be so nice if consumers and producers could sit down around a mogul’s table and learn how to be a little more agreeable in their discourses.  As the Wired article Baldovin links to points out, though:

While not every filesharer is likely to agree with it, it’s a nice place to start with a conciliatory tone. Unfortunately, most of the demands it requires can’t be addressed by download services — only by rights holders, who are a step removed from the process. In most cases, the likes of Hulu, Spotify, and iTunes want to make their content more accessible, but are unable to due to contracts written and signed decades ago.

So, although developments such as the manifesto above coupled with initiatives from the business itself to charge realistic digital prices all seem like jolly good ways of breaking the conceptual logjam, cash-cow generating rights holders who are used to living off the laurels of the past are unlikely to join in the lovefest too soon.

The trends may be clear.  But men and women across the globe still prefer to believe they can buck the lessons of history.  In the meantime, we can only be patient and continue to argue our case.