have been spending the last 2 days in Torino for a succession of workshops and conferences, and have used my spare time to revisit some of the places that here we had planned to install the expertbase during the big torino biennial back in 2002 (before we were kicked out of the exhibition). Seems that those parts of the city that we were working in have remained relatively unchanged by the construction madness caused by the 2008 winter games. However it appears that there has been a change among the migrant street hawkers selling all kinds of goods on the streets of the city. It appears that this trade has been taken over by Indian migrants that have replaced the Senegalese migrants that were all over the place back in 2002. However they still seem to operate in the same networked fashion that i observed back in 2002. On friday evening there was a brief (and relatively unannounced) thunderstorm, and all the street sellers were conveniently offering umbrellas:

I talked to one of them under the arcades of via Po and he confirmed that they do receive advance warnings that bad weather is coming from migrant street sellers in other cities. This enables them to anticipate on the type of merchandise they are offering (and provides a very convenient weather forecast).

Technorati Tags: africa, europe, india, migration, rain, senegal

Last Wednesday I attended the launch of ‘Adieu auteursrecht, vaarwel culturele conglomeraten‘ the new book by Joost Smiers. In this book he argues that (a) copyright is harmful, because it has led to large conglomerates dominating the production of culture and that (b) the world would be better off without copyright because it would be better of without these conglomerates and therefore (c) copyright needs to be abolished and the conglomerates must be broken apart. According to Smiers and his co-author Marike Schijndel this will lead to a level playing field for artists and other cultural producers and result in both a more diverse culture and better abilities for artists and cultural producers to live off their work.

Now I have not read his book yet, but I have listened to Smiers for a number of times, and he always looses me at the point where he assumes that the absence of copyright and conglomerates will quasi automatically lead to a more just distribution of attention and wealth among artists and cultural producers.

Regardless of his rather haphazard line of argumentation the public at the Balie seemed to like his ideas a lot (not really surprising since just about everybody can agree on the fact that the current copyright system is not working very well in ensuring that artists can live of their work, and the public that frequents these kind of events sure loves to see the blame laid on American cultural conglomerates) and there was no real discussion about the validity of his analysis or the nature of the ‘new business models’ that Smiers and Schijndel predict to emerge once we have gotten rid of copyright and the conglomerates (the last one being a bit of a shame).

During the non-debate (you were assumed to argue form a the perspective of a society without copyright and conglomerates) a number of people came up with arguments against copyright that were based on a variation of the argument that copyright restricts dialogue and is therefore a constraint on artists practices.

This argument is very much in line with a recent paper1 by the Canadian copyright scholar Abraham Drassinower. In ‘Authorship as Public Address: On the Specificity of Copyright vis-à-vis Patent and Trade-Mark‘ Drassinower makes the argument that “copyright is not about copying, pure and simple” [p.205] but rather about the right of an author to be associated with his work. Or to put it in Drassinowers own, more legalistic language:

Thus, copyright is less an exclusive right of reproduction than an exclusive right of public presentation. [p.221]

Drassinower arrives at this conclusion by examining the differences between copyright law, patent protection and trademarks. From these differences he tries to distill which particular kind of wrongdoing copyright law sanctions and tries to prevent. According to Drassinower this is not the simple unauthorized use of the a copyrighted work by persons other than the author or his agents, but a very specific form of use:

Put in terms of copyright doctrine, we need to understand (1) that originality is not about the absence of use, (2) that fair dealing is not about the absence of originality, and (3) that therefore originality and fair dealing are not opposing impulses or exceptions to each other, but rather radically continuous and integral aspects of copyright law as a whole. The fundamental problem is that of grasping the nature of the continuity. […] Thus, copyright is less about a prohibition on copying per se than about a distinction between permissible and impermissible copying—that is, between saying things in one’s own words and merely repeating the words of another. Authorship is less about the absence of copying than about the cultivation and exercise of modes of imitation that amount to more than mere repetition. Copyright law can no more prohibit copying per se, than it can prohibit authorship. [p.208-9]

According to Drassinower the fact that copyright law regulates cultural production which he (and many of the participants in the discussion following the book launch in the Balie) sees as a form of speech (or dialogue) means that copyright law can’t exclude others from using protected works as part of their own engagement in this dialogue: “… Persons are entitled to use the works of others provided such use is consistent with the equal authorship of those others” [p.213]. According to this conceptualization of copyright law no harm to the original author is done as long as I do not present someone else’s work as my own work, but rather use it in a way where it is instrumental to my own undertakings.

This gets more interesting once Drassinower expands this argument and applies it to other types of activities regulated by copyright law. In the 2nd part of his paper he applies his concept to copying in the digital context and comes to the conclusion that the mere making of digital should not trigger copyright law, since it rarely happens in order to communicate the copied works as a work:

The distinction between the reproduction of a work in the physical sense and its reproduction as a work in the normatively relevant sense is also at play in the ongoing encounter between copyright law and digital technology. It is generally accepted, for example, that Internet browsing— which requires the making of temporary copies—is legal on the grounds that by posting the work online, the poster is granting an implied license to others to reproduce that work in order to view it. […] Whereas the implied license and public interest approaches more or less successfully cloak the rupture between copyright law and digital technology, the authorship as public address approach interprets the legal significance of technology from the viewpoint of a renewed understanding of the law - that is, of the nature of the right and wrong at issue. Because it dislocates the centrality of reproduction as the organizing principle of copyright law, the authorship as public address approach can find that the reproductions involved in browsing and caching do not amount to uses of the work as such. Instead, since browsing and caching2 are neither implied licensing nor public interest exceptions, they constitute user rights precisely because they amount to non-authorial use. [p.227]

While Drassinower’s paper is somewhat complicated and lengthy3 I do think that his approach is well suited to bring copyright law back into line with reality: In a time where copying is one of the most basic cultural technologies it is more and more absurd (and inefficient) that copyright law even attempts to regulate the mere making of copies. The beauty of Drassinowers argument is that he does not depart from this observation but rather arrives at the conclusion that copyright law cannot be about the regulation of copies by looking at the balance between user and author rights. By framing the subject matter of copyright as ‘dialogue’ between author/users and user/authors he saves copyright law from falling prey to the explosion of everyday copying.

1. Drassinower, Abraham, Authorship as Public Address: On the Specificity of Copyright vis-à-vis Patent and Trade-Mark. Michigan State Law Review, No. 1, 2008. Available at SSRN
2. Of course the same argument can be made for private copying [a.k.a. unauthorized downloading] which Drassinower considers to be a user right as well.
3. On the other hand he references Jorge Luis Borge’s 1956 shot story ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote‘ which, as far as i am concerned, is the most insightful essay on copyright ever.

Technorati Tags: amsterdam, copyright, ipr, piracy, technology

last friday’s edition (’three baby camels‘) of the NPR planet money podcast contains a wonderful nugget about the economical aspects of how to determine the amount of ransom money that is to be paid to somalian pirates in order to get a hijacked ship back.

The story is based on the negotiations a Danish shipping executive (Per Gullestrup) conducted with someone representing a gang of Somalian pirates (Mr. Ali). The problem both parties are facing is that there are no other buyers or sellers for the merchandise (the hijacked ship) who would provide them with clues about the market price in markets with more sellers or buyers (in economics this situation is called a monopolist monopsonist bargaining problem).

In this situation exchanging information (with fellow pirates or fellow ship-owners) about prices paid for the release of other ships is one of the very few ways of speeding up the often time-consuming process of finding a price that is acceptable to both the seller and the buyer. According to Per Gullestrup the pirates are fairly good at that while the ship-owners are not (emphasis mine):

The owners are escalating the ransom payments because they are not really coordinating how they deal with pirates. The pirates on the other hand are extremely good at sharing information. And we know for a fact […] that they so have piracy workshops, that the pirates are actually meetings ashore and exchanging information.

Technorati Tags: africa, knowledge, piracy

spend the last two evenings at the print/pixel international conference on the current shifts in print and online media production (warning: most dysfunctional conference website ever) organized by the research project Communication in a Digital Age at the PZI in Rotterdam. Most of the discussions were (not surprisingly) on business models for print publications and the role of print journalism in the current technological and economic climate. Unfortunately the whole thing has not really resulted in much new insights (& all the speakers i really wanted to hear did not show up).

At times the discussion reminded me very much of the discussions around file sharing of music from a couple of years ago. At that time the music industry was claiming that they needed to be in control of distribution (and thus eliminate file sharing) because they had a god-given task to do the (expensive) discovery of new artists and transforming some of them into stars, which could only be done as long as they were able to extract enough surplus from distributing recorded music.

Now the print people are structurally repeating the same argument: self distribution via the internet must be limited because (small) publishing houses use parts of their revenue in order to filter the quality texts from the much bigger reservoir of general text production. The argument goes that in order for this quality filter to survive, authors must continue to publish through publishers instead of relying on internet distribution.

Of course this line of reasoning is not only stupid but also incredibly arrogant. If i was a publisher i would rather invest my energies into figuring what i have to offer to authors and readers once the perfect shitstorm of cheap generic electronic paper reading devices1 and wide available of e-books on the file-sharing platforms breaks loose. judging from the discussions at print/pixel it appears that very few people are seriously preparing for this inevitable scenario.

The entire event reminded me of a passage in the first half of David Foster Wallace’s ‘Infinite Jest‘ (which i have almost finished reading by now). It describes a fictional future scenario in which the digital revolution re-structured the economics of entertainment (=news) in a completely different way from the situation as it was discussed at print/pixel2. When it was published in 1996 Infinite Jest was situated in a near future that roughly corresponds with the current present (predictably wikipedia has an entire section of the ‘infinite jest’ article devoted to the question which year in the book corresponds to which year in the Gregorian calendar).

In the scenario described in Infinite Jest, television has been replaced by the a entertainment mechanism for entertainment products (called cartridges) called InterLace. InterLace is also the name of the company that has complete control (i.e a monopoly) over the distribution of entertainment cartridges. People pay for the on demand consumption of cartridges (and those who can’t afford it re-watch old cartridges all the time). In the book the emergence of InterLace is described in a term paper written by the main character Hal Incandenza, a marihuana addicted junior tennis player (pages 410-418 in the back bay 10th aniversary paperback edition).

According to Hal’s paper the shift from Network television to cable television and then to InterLace as the dominant entertainment medium started when advertisements on network television got so repulsive that people viewers abandoned network television in favor of cable television which offered more choice and less advertisement. While the cable TV stations rested in their new found popularity, a video rental chain owner called Noreen Lace Forché bought up the production facilities of the bankrupt TV networks and used them to produce content for InterLace which offers pre-produced on-demand entertainment. From the consumer perspective the appeal of InterLace over cable television is that one has complete control over the choice of programming (i.e one can select from a huge library) without any advertisement. In the scenario described in infinite Jest this is a business proposition that people are happy to pay, which not only puts broadcast and cable television out of business but also eliminates most of the advertising industry.

Now the obvious difference with the the current reality is today there is no monopoly provider of entertainment (or news) products that can afford to set a price for access. Instead we have the open internet offering free access to almost all entertainment (or news) and one of the very few business models that offers some relief to producers is online advertisement. Makes me wonder if we would not be better of in the infinite jest scenario, paying for our entertainment and news and being spared of the advertising onslaught…

1. in the short term this probably means jail-broken kindle’s that display standard .pdf and .epub files.
2. the free availability of news in real time all over the internets undermines the very structures involved in producing these news and in the long run will affect the quality and diversity of the news available

Technorati Tags: books, conference, future, news, entertainment, technology

the always entertaining big picture has an edition with pictures from the non-event of the century: ‘the 2009 swine flue outbreak‘. i particularly like this picture depicting ‘a woman, wearing a face mask as a precaution against swine flu who holds a skeletal figure representing the folk saint Santa Muerte during a ceremony in Mexico City:

Bonus: check out this picture with a woman wearing a face-mask & a megadeath t-shirt at the same time. i would doubt that she is aware of the irony…

Technorati Tags: dead people, fashion, popularculture, religion, senseless

one of the biggest idiots of our times, ryan air’s Michael O’Leary who has an opinion on just about everything is quoted by the german news website Spiegel online to have claimed that the swine flue ‘only affects people living in slums in mexico and asia’ and that ‘people flying short haul in Europe this summer will fortunately not die of the Swine flue’. Funny thing is that Ryanair flights can best be characterized as flying slums, which would make O’Leary a slum lord in addition to be a general nuisance and an idiot.

Technorati Tags: airtravel, dead people, stupid, tourism

for some reason this photo had escaped my attention when i first viewed it back in march on the big picture’s edition covering the drug war in mexico. fortunately it’s animal-like beauty did catch Bryan Finoki’s eye over at subtopia, who calls it the sand dragon:

what looks like some creature from a science fiction movie is actually part of the border fence that is being erected by the US along the border with Mexico. This particular stretch covering 7 miles of in Imperial [sic!] County in California is called the floating fence. The fence is constructed to float on top of the sand dunes that cover the south eastern part of Imperial County:

[US Border Patrol] Agent Michael Espinoza said unlike other border fences, this one moves. “It’s just amazing, the concept of a floating fence here in the sand dunes that can just be picked up and settled back down,” Espinoza said. […] The concept is simple. As sand builds up along its edges, sections of fence can be lifted by a machine and placed back on top of the sand, so the fence never loses its height. “I personally have never seen a fence like this before,” Espinoza said. [KYMA Local News ]

What is probably intreagues me most about this shape shifting monster of steel is the fact that by the very nature of its design it will later the contours of the border between mexico and the US. being build on top of moving sand dunes means that the fence will move away from the border sooner or later. In this aspect it does not demarcate territory (as traditional border fortifications tend to do but it rather establishes an inside and an outside: the border itself becomes flexible in order to be able to enable exclusion. Bryan Finoki links the floating fence to his concept of the nomadic fortress, a permanently reconfiguring regime of access control that divides the functioning capitalist core of the global economy from the global south:

This space has no regard for borders any more as we traditionally understand them, no respect for national territory; it hovers over and slips between those definitions, goes around and under them when it needs to, ultimately passing through border fixity as it sees fit. It is in some way the final border, a border that is never at rest but is always modifying itself for greater tactical vantage; a kind of flexible mock-hydrological regime that deploys and aligns other sub-border levers and valves below it to secure the conduits of neoliberal capitalism and the flows of people who are captives of them in one way or another. A structure that utilizes an entire atlas of border fences with a range of satellite technologies, web-based border vigilantes and extra-territorial floating prisons, to feed the border as a kind of geopolitical gutter space that siphons the subjects of migration off into a swollen infrastructure of detention where billions of dollars and are spent on their bounty.

It is a fully transitional geography of unsettled coordinates, excessive legality and perpetual legal suspension. This border doesn’t take the defensive posture that borders traditionally have in the past, but instead is on the move and on the hunt for a new class of would-be border crossers who’ve been bound together in a dangerously wide-cast surveillance net that is incapable of distinguishing the refugee from the enemy combatant, the migrant from the smuggler, laborer from insurgent. It is the border as the worst kind of political blur space. It is as immovable as it is fluid, like a sea of transparent blast walls crashing on the shores of geopolitical exile. [exceprted from: ‘Towards a Nomadic Fortress [Refuge/Refugee]‘]

Technorati Tags: border, desert, fence, migration

in march we spend a week in bangalore with jamie and the darkfibre crew. we had flown there to take pictures of them while they were shooting for dark fibre (more pictures will become available later).

dark fibre crew at work on the rooftop terrace of a IT office building in south bangalore

it was fun and extremely interesting to watch the production from behind the scenes and i am really looking forward to the film (jamie has promised that there will be a trailer on the 13th of may). in the meanwhile there is an interview with jamie and his co-director peter mann on the website of the center for internet and society in bangalore:

‘Dark Fibre’ is set amongst the cablewallahs of Bangalore, and uses the device of cabling to traverse different aspects of informational life in the city. It follows the lives of real cablewallahs and examines the political status of their activities.The fictional elements arrive in the form of a young apprentice cablewallah who attempts to unite the disparate home-brew networks in the city into a grassroots, horizontal ‘people’s network’. Some support the activity and some vehemently oppose it — but what no one expects is the emergence of a seditious, unlicensed and anonymous new channel which begins to transform people’s imaginations in the city. Our young cable apprentice is tasked with tracking down the channel, as powerful political forces array themselves against it. Not only the ’security’ of the city, but his own wellbeing depend on whether he finds it, and whether it proves possible to stop its distribution. Meanwhile, mysterious elements from outside India — possibly emissaries of a still-greater power — are appearing on the scene. This quest for the unknown channel is reminiscent of a modern-day ‘Moby Dick’, with the city of Bangalore as the high seas and our cable apprentice a reluctant Ahab. The action is a combination of verite, improvisation and scripted action.

Technorati Tags: bangalore, copyright, film, india, media, photos, piracy, technology

over the last couple of days there has been a disproportionate amount of attention for a albino migrant named Moszy who, back in march, arrived together with 60 other a
African migrants on the Spanish island of Tenerife. Moszy, who is said to have fled his native Benin where he was frequently abducted and used in magic rituals, has requested asylum in Spain, and it appears that the spanish government is willing to grant him refugee status. Now i am all against abducting people and using them in magic rituals (and possibly killing them in ‘grisly ritualistic killings’), but it appears to me that the media coverage is bordering a little bit on the absurd:

the price for the most absurd headline (so far) goes to the Croatian news agency ‘Javno’ claiming ‘Spain Saves Albino African from Sure Death‘ (which for some reason is buried in World > World Report > Bizarre [sic!]). Of course spain did no such thing, to the contrary: Spain (together with the rest of the EU countries) did everything it could to get Moszy (and the other 60 passengers of the boat that took him to Tenerife) killed. In its ongoing attempt to keep (black) africans in Africa Spain has forced migrants attempting to get into europe to take longer and more dangarous routes (from Nouakchott to Tenerife it is more than 1000km across the open Atlantic Ocean). This has resulted in many deaths that generally receive much less media attention than one albino arriving in Tenerife.

According to the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelblad, Moszy’s asylum request has been backed by a spokesperson of the Spanish Commission for Refugee Aid, arguing that sending him back to Africa (as it is foreseen for the other 60 passengers) ‘would put his life at rist’. Makes me wonder if sending back the other 60 passengers who barely made it onto Spanish soil does not put their life at risk? Chances are that they will make another attempt to get to Europe and if past experience is any indicator some of them will pay for this with their lives. But you do not hear the CEAR spoksperson or the media talk about their lives being in danger. But then they did not have the privilege of being born with white skin either, so why should they care?

Technorati Tags: africa, border, dead people, europe, migration, racism

a while ago i got a flickr request by someone from a polish cycling magazine called bikeboard.pl if they could use my Ōmiya Keirin keirin photo set to illustrate an article about keirin in their upcoming issue. i said yes and they promised to send me a copy. today i received two copies of the mag which contains a 7 page article about weird cycling cultures (at least that is what i assume since i do not read polish at all). the three pages dealing with keirin are entirely illustrated by pictures taken from my set:

Technorati Tags: bicyle, keirin, photos