Tiffany Lee Brown on 15 Feb 2001 22:37:39 -0000 |
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[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> Usenet archives sold? |
"geert lovink" <geert@xs4all.nl> wrote: >The Usenet archives thread is raising interesting questions and I think we >should further list these questions rather than getting into a big >capitalism debate. from the various posts i've read, it seems that general issues about copyright and ownership of intellectual property are kinda big in this argument. just to throw in my POV: regardless of whether or not capitalism sucks ass, it is what we happen to have right now in the US. given this reality, some of us attempt to make our way within "the system" by selling our skills, talent, time, and hard labor. in return we are given magic green tickets that we can trade to other people for rent, mortgage payments, food, and little devices composed of plastic, silicon, and soldered stuff. t byfield <tbyfield@panix.com> wrote: >a critique from the standpoint of the commodity, which fetishizes >the author and his (yeah, his) rights. some of us earn all of our magic green tickets by creating things whose only monetary value lies in their distribution. in and of themselves, they are abstract, ephemeral things. we get the magic green tickets to pay our rent because people will pay to read our words in magazines, books, webzines, databases, and business plans. but give the fetishized author a frickin' break: did he ask to be born into a capitalist world, or one dominated by terrifying powerful multinational entities? probably not. still, he writes. he's good at it. he gets paid. he wants to own his writing and have the right to sell it, just like the farmer can sell his cabbages and the cobbler can sell his shoes. as an author fetishized by my own commodity (and i just love that mental picture, which comes complete with latex and restraints), it's important to me that copyright exists. "information wants to be free" -- true, perhaps, but i want to pay the rent, as long as i live in a world where paying rent is part of the deal if you want to avoid death by exposure. i happen to write a lot for free, because i cherish participating in things i care about. this does not mean that some CEO should be making an extra half-mil $US just cuz he and his clever cohorts figured out a way to steal a thousand writers' words. yep, STEAL. that's what it's called when you take something that isn't yours: STEALING. if i wrote those words for free, it just makes me *more* furious that some random entity has stolen them. >"geert lovink" <geert@xs4all.nl> wrote: > >Instead of looking back, we may as well raise the *future* issue of the >nettime archive. Who owns it? What will happen if someone suddenly starts >selling it to a museum or library, or as a commodity, selling it as a DVD? >Could anyone of us, who have put so much time and effort into nettime, >prevent this from happening? I don't think so. And how about other lists? >Nettime and other lists such as syndicate, do not have a clear ownership, so >that's asking for trouble. But how about Rhizome? Are all the artists who >are posting on Rhizome aware that their words and net.artworks are already >owned by the Rhizome corporation? What is going to happen to that archive? all artists, writers, musicians, hackers -- anyone who creates intellectual property -- should be aware of copyright protection and think about intellectual property. IT IS ALL WE HAVE. maybe it's screwy, maybe it isn't implemented properly, and maybe capitalism is yucky altogether, but within the constraints of where we are *right now* it's all we've got. and no one should be able to waltz in with their corporate power and phalanxes of attorneys and just plain steal our stuff -- not startups like Google and Deja, not cool arty things like Rhizome, not the New York Times, which my union has been fighting for the last few years due to their various attempts to gobble up all redistribution rights from writers. >Could anyone of us, who have put so much time and effort into nettime, >prevent this from happening? I don't think so. i think it would be helpful to abandon the position that poor little us, the regular old people, are useless in the face of these corporate sharks and phalanxes of attorneys... are they not human? do they not bleed? well, no, i guess not. but perhaps we should all be vigilant, *just in case* maybe we can make a little bit of a difference. make some noise. sign some petitions, call some senators, spam the media 'til they cover our precious issues. tell others. there just might be hope out there, even in such naive-sounding, grassrootsy approaches. (and, failing that, there's always digital terrorism to consider.) the National Writers Union, for example, has seen some success with intellectual property and electronic rights, because a lot of people have made a lot of noise. they've organized. they've educated each other -- a necessary step, since many writers are astonishingly naive about these things. it involves all kinds of boring, old-fashioned political organizing: petitions, speeches, lawsuits, and refusing to back down. but it's working, in some cases. there's info at http://www.nwu.org/. i like the idea of applying a public license. in the case of Google/Deja/net news, it's too late. you can't retroactively apply any kind of license, not unless you can find each and every person who's every posted to Usenet and get their permission. "the public" does NOT own those posts into eternity, however grumpy it may make them feel because they're used to having instant, free access to other people's thoughts frozen in time. going forward, though, geert is definitely on to something: take steps now to avoid future problems. apply a very specific license agreement to lists like nettime and to their archives. -tiffany Tiffany Lee Brown * Editrix, SIGNUM * http://www.slm-net.com/signum after March 1: http://www.signumpress.com * magdalen@magdalen.com _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold