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Topic: Who owns ideas? (Read 1015 times) |
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rhinoceros
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My point is ...
  
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Who owns ideas?
« on: 2005-06-06 10:30:06 » |
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Two parallel articles on intellectual property in MIT Tech Review:
The People Own Ideas!, by Lawrence Lessig
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/06/issue/feature_people.asp?p=0
The Creators Own Ideas, by Richard A. Epstein J
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/06/issue/feature_creators.asp?p=0
A short comment: If you don't keep your ideas to yourself, you need a paid enforcement mechanism such as a government to enforce your "ownership" for you. It is not a "natural" right (assuming there is such a thing). It is a social construct.
This, of course, is also true for land property to some lesser extent -- but if you are a home-owner your neigbors might feel a moral obligation to help you with keeping your property, perhaps because of some empathy mechanism. This is more unlikely to happen currently if you are an "idea-owner".
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Blunderov
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"We think in generalities, we live in details"
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RE: virus: Who owns ideas?
« Reply #1 on: 2005-07-11 16:09:23 » |
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[Blunderov] The information wants to be free. I hope nobody, especially
William Gibson, minds if I post the entire piece.
Best Regards.
God's Little Toys
Confessions of a cut & paste artist.
By William Gibson
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.07/gibson_pr.html
When I was 13, in 1961, I surreptitiously purchased an anthology of Beat
writing - sensing, correctly, that my mother wouldn't approve.
Immediately, and to my very great excitement, I discovered Allen
Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and one William S. Burroughs - author of
something called Naked Lunch, excerpted there in all its coruscating
brilliance.
Burroughs was then as radical a literary man as the world had to offer,
and in my opinion, he still holds the title. Nothing, in all my
experience of literature since, has ever been quite as remarkable for
me, and nothing has ever had as strong an effect on my sense of the
sheer possibilities of writing.
Later, attempting to understand this impact, I discovered that Burroughs
had incorporated snippets of other writers' texts into his work, an
action I knew my teachers would have called plagiarism. Some of these
borrowings had been lifted from American science fiction of the '40s and
'50s, adding a secondary shock of recognition for me.
By then I knew that this "cut-up method," as Burroughs called it, was
central to whatever it was he thought he was doing, and that he quite
literally believed it to be akin to magic. When he wrote about his
process, the hairs on my neck stood up, so palpable was the excitement.
Experiments with audiotape inspired him in a similar vein: "God's little
toy," his friend Brion Gysin called their reel-to-reel machine.
Sampling. Burroughs was interrogating the universe with scissors and a
paste pot, and the least imitative of authors was no plagiarist at all.
Some 20 years later, when our paths finally crossed, I asked Burroughs
whether he was writing on a computer yet. "What would I want a computer
for?" he asked, with evident distaste. "I have a typewriter."
But I already knew that word processing was another of God's little
toys, and that the scissors and paste pot were always there for me, on
the desktop of my Apple IIc. Burroughs' methods, which had also worked
for Picasso, Duchamp, and Godard, were built into the technology through
which I now composed my own narratives. Everything I wrote, I believed
instinctively, was to some extent collage. Meaning, ultimately, seemed a
matter of adjacent data.
Thereafter, exploring possibilities of (so-called) cyberspace, I
littered my narratives with references to one sort or another of
collage: the AI in Count Zero that emulates Joseph Cornell, the
assemblage environment constructed on the Bay Bridge in Virtual Light.
Meanwhile, in the early '70s in Jamaica, King Tubby and Lee "Scratch"
Perry, great visionaries, were deconstructing recorded music. Using
astonishingly primitive predigital hardware, they created what they
called versions. The recombinant nature of their means of production
quickly spread to DJs in New York and London.
Our culture no longer bothers to use words like appropriation or
borrowing to describe those very activities. Today's audience isn't
listening at all - it's participating. Indeed, audience is as antique a
term as record, the one archaically passive, the other archaically
physical. The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is
the very nature of the digital.
Today, an endless, recombinant, and fundamentally social process
generates countless hours of creative product (another antique term?).
To say that this poses a threat to the record industry is simply comic.
The record industry, though it may not know it yet, has gone the way of
the record. Instead, the recombinant (the bootleg, the remix, the
mash-up) has become the characteristic pivot at the turn of our two
centuries.
We live at a peculiar juncture, one in which the record (an object) and
the recombinant (a process) still, however briefly, coexist. But there
seems little doubt as to the direction things are going. The recombinant
is manifest in forms as diverse as Alan Moore's graphic novel The League
of Extraordinary Gentlemen, machinima generated with game engines
(Quake, Doom, Halo), the whole metastasized library of Dean Scream
remixes, genre-warping fan fiction from the universes of Star Trek or
Buffy or (more satisfying by far) both at once, the JarJar-less Phantom
Edit (sound of an audience voting with its fingers), brand-hybrid
athletic shoes, gleefully transgressive logo jumping, and products like
Kubrick figures, those Japanese collectibles that slyly masquerade as
soulless corporate units yet are rescued from anonymity by the
application of a thoughtfully aggressive "custom" paint job.
We seldom legislate new technologies into being. They emerge, and we
plunge with them into whatever vortices of change they generate. We
legislate after the fact, in a perpetual game of catch-up, as best we
can, while our new technologies redefine us - as surely and perhaps as
terribly as we've been redefined by broadcast television.
"Who owns the words?" asked a disembodied but very persistent voice
throughout much of Burroughs' work. Who does own them now? Who owns the
music and the rest of our culture? We do. All of us.
Though not all of us know it - yet.
William Gibson's latest novel is Pattern Recognition.
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simul
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I am a lama.
 
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RE: virus: Who owns ideas?
« Reply #2 on: 2005-07-14 06:28:35 » |
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Years ago, a good friend of mine scanned and lovingly corrected the entirety
of the Cryptonomicon (excellent book, I highly recommend). He was the first
to publish it via Gnutella/Kazaa (where his copy has survived ever since).
Do you think Gibson would mind that?
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-virus@lucifer.com [mailto:owner-virus@lucifer.com] On
> Behalf Of Blunderov
> Sent: Monday, July 11, 2005 4:09 PM
> To: virus@lucifer.com
> Subject: RE: virus: Who owns ideas?
>
> [Blunderov] The information wants to be free. I hope nobody,
> especially William Gibson, minds if I post the entire piece.
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First, read Bruce Sterling's "Distraction", and then read http://electionmethods.org.
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Blunderov
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"We think in generalities, we live in details"
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RE: virus: Who owns ideas?
« Reply #3 on: 2005-07-14 09:04:26 » |
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[Blunderov] Hi there Erik. I shouldn't think Gibson would mind at all
but really we would have to ask him I suppose.
Apparently though, even those that 'own' the information sometimes
actually want it to be free, partially anyway. I recall that Bruce
Springsteen once gave a concert that was broadcast live on radio. He
opened his set by instructing his audience to 'roll them tapes'. You
will gather that this was quite some time ago. More recently Michael
Moore expressed his complete equanimity with the fact that people were
downloading Fahrenheit 9/11 for free.
I would certainly disagree with the ethics of anyone who subsequently
profited financially from such generosity by selling the materials on
though.
Best Regards
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/13/236203&from=rss
Doctorow and Stross Release Latest Novels for Free
<snip>
FleaPlus writes "Two prominent science fiction authors have recently
released their newest novels as free downloads to coincide with their
in-store releases. The first is Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves
Town, by Cory Doctorow. This is an unconventional story about an
entrepreneur (who happens to be the child of a mountain and a washing
machine) who gets involved in a scheme to blanket Toronto with free
wireless mesh network, among other things. The second is Accelerando, by
Charles Stross, which tells the tale of three generations of the Macx
family (beginning with perptually-slashdotted venture altruist Manfred
Macx) in the years leading up to and beyond a technological
singularity." </snip>
Erik Aronesty
Sent: 14 July 2005 12:29
Years ago, a good friend of mine scanned and lovingly corrected the
entirety
of the Cryptonomicon (excellent book, I highly recommend). He was the
first
to publish it via Gnutella/Kazaa (where his copy has survived ever
since).
Do you think Gibson would mind that?
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David Lucifer
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Enlighten me.
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RE: virus: Who owns ideas?
« Reply #4 on: 2005-07-14 12:59:42 » |
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Quote from: simul on 2005-07-14 06:28:35
Years ago, a good friend of mine scanned and lovingly corrected the entirety
of the Cryptonomicon (excellent book, I highly recommend). He was the first
to publish it via Gnutella/Kazaa (where his copy has survived ever since).
Do you think Gibson would mind that?
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Gibson may not mind, but we should really ask the author, Neal Stephenson.
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simul
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I am a lama.
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Re: virus: Who owns ideas?
« Reply #5 on: 2005-07-14 16:08:02 » |
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> Gibson may not mind, but we should
> really ask the author, Neal
> Stephenson.
Ack! I always get them mixed up. Well, if I knew Neal's address, I'd ask, and include a link to the original article by Ginson.
- Erik
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First, read Bruce Sterling's "Distraction", and then read http://electionmethods.org.
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