POPCULT will be going on hiatus for a little while. We’re currently prepping for a full website facelift. I’m working with the my friend Simon Loffler to create an entirely unique and different design concept for the website. Once it’s up and running again, POPCULT will be inviting in a group of new writers to broaden the scope and the voices discussing the arts and ideas and politics. As they say, watch this space…

♺ Photo: Adaptation of  Untitled by SarahMcD ॐ (crop and resize). This version and the original available under a CC BY 2.0 Generic licence.

The article was written for The Ownership Issue of WQ published by the Queensland Writers’ Centre. If you republish it or reuse it please attribute me as the author and acknowledge that the article was first published in WQ, Iss 196. Thank you.

Photo: Zombie! by danhollisterduck

Kelly Link is worried about zombies.

The American short story author has been warning us of the coming zombie apocalypse for some time now. Back in 2008 she declared the zombie outbreak ‘will happen at any moment’ in an interview with The Nation. Her stories remind us of the need for zombie contingency plans. What will you do when the zombie epidemic starts while you’re at home? Work? The gym? The shopping centre?

But it is not only the flesh-rot-brain-eating zombie variety that has Link concerned. Like me, Link is also worried about copyright zombies. In pretty much every country around the world copyright grants creators rights to control copying and adaptation of their works without permission. But the ‘You can’t touch this’ approach of traditional copyright, coupled with aggressive expansion of corporate control of significant cultural products, has heralded a ‘permissions culture’, an environment where you need to ask for permission to do pretty much anything. And this restriction does not end in death. Cue the eerie music.

Content corpses

An author does not take copyright to their grave. Rather copyright subsists posthumously. (Rotting) flesh and blood zombies have a limited lifespan. Content corpses, the lingering carcasses of copyrighted works, stick around much longer. Under current Australian copyright law, these copyright zombies limp along for 70 years after the author is dead. During this time they attract the same level of protection they did during the creator’s life, which has significant implications for the accessibility and useability of content.

Take last year’s Orwell ebooks debacle for example. Remember that? When Amazon deleted hundreds of purchased copies of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm from customers’ Kindles? Although the potential for Orwellian-Big-Brotherish conspiracy theory diatribe is almost too much for me to stand, there is an equally important copyright issue that this saga highlights.

The problem for Amazon was that neither book was in the public domain — a designation given to content that is no longer subject to copyright protection, and is therefore available for anyone to use freely for any purpose. Nor had the ebook publisher secured a licence to create and distribute a digital copy of the books. Orwell published Animal Farm in 1945 and Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949, just one year before he died. In the United States the term of copyright subsists for the life of the author plus 70 years, meaning all of Orwell’s books remain protected by copyright until 2020 (although it is worth noting that, due to the complexities of the copyright term amendments over the last few years here in Australia Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four and all of Orwell’s other books fell into the public domain in 2000). When agents acting for Orwell’s estate informed Amazon of the infringement they remotely deleted the titles from customers’ devices. They stuffed them down the memory hole one might say (sorry, I had to get at least one Orwellian reference in their).

I am pretty sure that Orwell didn’t think about his digital distribution rights when he signed a publishing deal for Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four. Of course, maybe the crafty bugger knew ebooks were coming. Either way, the permissions needed to get his works, or any other author who is dead but whose works are not yet out of copyright, online is a legal minefield. And forget clearing the rights to remix them; that goes into the proverbial ‘too hard basket’.

Rest in Pieces

After copyright in a book is over you can do pretty much anything you like with it. Keeping in theme, a superstar example of the kinds of creative reinterpretations this may stimulate is the genre mash-up Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. The brainchild of Seth Grahame-Smith, it slips a few meandering undead (and cannibalism and ninjas!) between the pages of Jane Austen’s literary classic. Brilliant! But how do Austen’s relatives feel about the Bennets and Mr Darcy doing battle with reanimated corpses in ‘ultraviolent zombie mayhem’? Who cares? There’s no copyright here, so there’s no need for permission; which is why we have movie after movie after movie, a TV miniseries and a musical amongst the piles and piles of printed editions!

How is PPZ fairing? It was met with rave reviews from the mainstream media and the blogosphere alike. It sat at third place on the New York Times bestseller list and required a second printing before hitting shelves in the United Kingdom. There’s talk of a movie adaptation staring Natalie Portman. And its publisher, Quirk Books, have since released Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls. If Pride and Prejudice were still in copyright I doubt an ‘add zombies’ pitch would have gotten very far. Even if Austen’s estate supported the rewrite, you can bet they would have wanted to talk royalty payments before it got to market.

Not that I’m saying that Austen doesn’t deserve to reap the benefits of her creative outputs — just that I’m not sure her estate should for hundreds of years down the track. The absolute nature of control while copyright does still subsist can lead to some ridiculous outcomes, like James Joyce’s grandson refusing to allow public readings of his grandfather’s works as part of the Bloomsday celebrations in his honour.

The permissions culture keeps a lot of the good stuff out of our hands as it is, without the public domain there would be nothing to play with at all. Content which is in the public domain promotes the spread of information, ideas and scientific principles, fosters follow-on innovation in ways that intellectual property does not, and provides people with building blocks — text, images, film, music, sounds — on which to create new works. And it does this with low-or-no-cost and without the onerous rights clearances and royalty payment requirements of the copyright system. It is how Shakespeare sourced his storylines, how Walt Disney found his heroines, and how Homer heard The Iliad.

It’s alive… alive!

Everyone knows how to kill a zombie. You hit it. Really hard. In the head. Repeatedly. But how do you kill a copyright zombie? Better yet, can you stop them from happening? Is it possible to be like Frankenstein (or Frankenfurter?) and witness the marvel of giving (re)life to your creations in your own lifetime? This brings me back to Kelly Link.

Link didn’t want to see her copyright creations become content corpses. “Copyright is a good thing and artists deserve to be paid whatever society is willing to pay for their work,” Link wrote on the website of Small Beer Press, a fantasy and literary fiction publisher she runs with her husband, “But, do artists need to retain the rights to their work for 70 years after their death? Uh, no.”

But Link didn’t want to allow a complete free-for-all either. So to mark the release of her second short story collection, Magic for Beginners, Small Beer released a digital copy of her first collection, Stranger Things Happen, under a Creative Commons licence. The licence they chose — an Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence — allows anyone to remix and adapt the stories, so long as the reuse is noncommercial, they share derivative works on the same terms and they acknowledge Kelly Link as the original author. This prior-permission keeps Link’s content living; as she explains in the interview with The Nation, ‘[T]he stories, in terms of ideas or narrative, are up there and available to people who want to make other things out of them.’

Since its release under licence in July 2005, Stranger Things Happen has been downloaded more than 60,000 times. The book has been translated into more than six languages and converted into more than 15 different formats. One of the stories was even turned into an experimental music score for cello; others have been recorded as audio books. And all at no cost to Small Beer.

And while we’re talking money, sales of the collection, now in its sixth printing, have stayed strong. ‘There are many, many, many more downloads of the collection,’ Link concedes ‘but sales for the physical book have never gone down.’ In fact, she happily reported that sales went up during the first year of it being available online. This follows the experience of other authors who have experimented with CC-licensing their literary works, such as Cory Doctorow, whose fourth licensed novel, Little Brother, was also on the New York Times bestseller list. This seems to suggest a rich online life means a rich offline life.

In total, Small Beer has released five collections under Creative Commons. Now Magic for Beginners is under licence, as is Benjamin Rosenbaum’s The Ant King and Other Stories, John Kessel’s The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories and Maureen McHugh’s Mothers and Other Monsters.

Kelly Link may still be worried about flesh and blood zombies, but now she doesn’t have to worry about her stories becoming content corpses. Through flexible licensing and fan-motivation her works can continue live, breathe and grow long after she’s gone.

There are better ways to share knowledge than eating brains by Elliott Bledsoe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia License.
If for some reason you want permissions beyond this very broad licence ask me.

Bibliographical details: Bledsoe, E. (2010). “There are better ways to share knowledge than eating brains” in De Vantier, J (Ed), WQ, Iss 196, pp 8-9.

Here’s what I told him:

…short answer is yes, tweets are protected by copyright. they are a literary work for the purposes of the copyright act and thereby attract protection. a few ways that the age may have been able to republish tweets though:

1) twitter may have the right to give the age the herald sun permission. when you sign up to twitter as a user you agree to grant them a licence under their terms of service (www.twitter.com/tos) to do a whole bunch of stuff with your ‘content’ on the service including to sublicence (or give the rights you gave to twitter) on to third parties. as such they may have sublicensed their rights to the age the herald sun;

2) the age the herald sun may be relying on a fair dealing exception. under the copyright act there are exceptions that allow for the use of copyrighted works that would, but for the exception, otherwise be an infringement. one of the exceptions applies in relation to reporting the news. use can be made without permission but must be fair in the circumstance. unfortunately i guess this situation would be considered news (by some) and probably comes within the fair dealing exception.

hope this helps mate.

♺ Ping: itNews, Juha Saarinen, “Plans afoot for new Sydney-US Fibre Link”, 11 March 2010. Photo: Adaptation of  fibre by MikeBlogs (crop and resize). This version and the original available under a CC BY 2.0 Generic licence.

Congratulations are in order for Luis Acosta, winner of the NYC Condom wrapper design competition run by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Decided by popular vote, Acosta’s design, featuring a yellow power symbol (IEC 5009 – line partially within a broken circle), drew my attention to the many puns that can now be made when you turn on your computer.

Here’s what New York City Health Commissioner, Dr Thomas Farley, had to say about the design (from NPR):

“When I saw [the design], I said this is pure genius,” Farley told the crowd. “Everyone recognizes that symbol on their PC. People should use their own power to control their sexual health.” And once you see the power-on logo in a sexual context, it does have a dirty vibe to it. That’s the beautiful thing about designing a condom wrapper: It makes the most simple image seem erotic.

I didn’t even know New York City had a branded condom (they are specifically branded Lifestyles condoms). Apparently the program has been running since Valentines Day 2007 with the cute tagline – Get Some!

♺ Ping: NPR, Robert Smith, “Official Condom Design: New York’s New Sex Symbol”, 9 March 2010. Also listen to the radio broadcast version. Photo: Adaptation of Roadside ads for condoms by Alaskan Dude (crop and resize). This version and the original available under a CC BY 2.0 Generic licence.

In a bid to be ‘returned result A’ in the list of suitors for Google’s announced 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home network experiment, the City of Topeka, capital city of Kansas in the United States, will be known as ‘Google, Kansas – The Capital City of Fibre Optics’ for all of March. By proclamation signed by Mayor William Bunten, the name change is to “recognize and support the continuing efforts to bring Google’s, “FIBRE FOR COMMUNITIES” experiment to our city…” Talk about a butt-kiss!

♺ Ping: Ars Technica, Nate Anderson, “Desperate cities beseech St. Google: bless us with thy fiber”, 25 February 2010. Photo: Adaptation of google was here? by gigaman (crop and resize). This version and the original available under a CC BY 2.0 Generic licence.

→ This too shall pass – RGM Version” on YouTube; “This too shall pass” official video on YouTube; bloopers on Shock TV.

The video, which had it’s ‘world premier‘ on YouTube on Monday, not only is a fun way to spend 3 minutes and 53 seconds, but apparently kept 60 engineers employed for three months (needing more than 30 people just to reset the machine after each run)! Awwww, OK Go simulate endorphins and the economy!! ^_^

♥ Kudos: Jessica Coates from Creative Commons Australia. ♺ Ping: Ok Go, ““This Too Shall Pass” World Premiere!”, 1 March 2010; Boing Boing, Mark Frauenfelder, “OK Go’s Rube Goldberg music video”, 2 March 2010.

The free monthly events carry no trace of the archetypal Christian rock concert, cringe-worthy in music and message. Each features a DJ, a live musical act, and an art installation staged in the cathedral’s labyrinth, plus the flask-toting, bespectacled crowd to match (unblessed alcohol is welcome).

So, this begs the question, would you rock out with the j-man?

♺ Ping: GOOD, Theo Schell-Lambert, “Sunday’s Church Is Saturday’s Night Club”, 25 February 2010. Photo: Adaptation of Love Jesus by Daquella manera (crop and resize). This version and the original available under a CC BY 2.0 Generic licence.

I’m sure many of you have heard about Eddie McGuire and Mick Molloy’s speculations on Channel 9’s coverage of the Vancouver Winter Games about the sexual orientation of male ice skaters. I certainly don’t agree with perpetuating ridiculous stereotypes on mainstream media, but this did leave me wondering, if the classification of gayness is how likely Eddie and Mick are to see you dick, what’s in and what’s out of the  Eddie/Mick closet?

We know that ice skaters are in, but who else? Well anyone wearing bike pants. That’s just obvious. And in that case wrestlers are definitely in, since they also wear spandex. What about jockeys? Those jodhpurs are pretty tight. So are footy shorts (either code). And American football pants for that matter. Are footballers fags? Swimmers? What else? Tights? Skinny leg jeans? Who can forget of course the horror of that photo of Tony Abbott’s budgie smugglers or the years of spandex wearing by Madonna that culminated in the visual atrocities of the “Hung Up” filmclip! If we are to follow Eddie and Mick’s rationale to it’s logical conclusion, then they are all raging fags!

Photo: Adaptation of BC Bike Race 2009 Coast Spandex by Jane Victoria King (crop and resize). This version and the original available under a CC BY 2.0 Generic licence.

Photo: Adaptation of Day 670 / 365 – After Skating by xJasonRogersx (crop and resize). This version and the original available under a CC BY 2.0 Generic licence.

Let’s honour Westwood’s pleas by either emailing her sales rep Kristina Golightly (sales information provided by London Fashion Week) or to place an order for nothing or cancelling an order on her online store mid-transaction.

The layers of irony in this kill me!

Note: ‘Former punk’ is not to be confused with post-punk :p

♺ Ping: The Australian, AFP, “Look but don’t buy: ex-punk queen”, 23 February 2010. Photo: Adaptation of u suck by Adrian Miles © (crop and resize). This version and the original available under a CC BY 2.0 Generic licence.

Let me welcome you all back with my take on employees and Twitter: mUmBRELLA has an article up on the recent launch of ABC’s new rant space, The Drum. In it, Tim Burrowes asks the question: ’should journalists using a Twitter account as part of their job relinquish control of the account if they change job?’ As he says, pushing the new portal out to the 8,000 odd followers between ex-Crikey editor Jonathan Green (@GreenJ) and the ex-Sydney Morning Herald journalist Annabel Crabb (@annabelcrabb) was bound to bring in a few readers from the popular micro-blogging platform. Burrowes asks the obvious, “[b]ut is it fair to their old employers that the ABC’s The Drum has enjoyed that immediate traffic leg-up based on their old roles?

I say screw the media owners. Such a view of ownership of social media profiles undermines the whole concept of social networking. It’s about people. I follow Green and Crabb and I follow Crikey (@crikey_news) (and I’d follow SMH too if they’d sort their shit and get on Twitter!). I follow both Green and Crabb because I am interested in what they as people have to say. And I follow Crikey because, as a general rule, I am interested in the content published by that media org. Two very different reasons for following.

I didn’t stop following Green or Crabb when they left their respective former-employers, nor did I stop following Crikey for that matter. Why? Because I follow Green and Crabb because of who they are. That is in part influenced by the status and creditability of where they came from of course, but it’s more about who they are as personalities. They post interesting, engaging (and sometimes down right hilarious and bizarre) posts. Did that stop when they changes jobs? No. Did Green and Crabb suddenly become automatons because they were no longer affiliated with Crikey and SMH? No. And did I suddenly loose interest in them as 140-character charmers because they’d moved on? No.

If media organisations want to ride the fan stream even after an employee has moved on, then the accounts being used should be established by the media organisation itself. So, using Crabb as an example, the handle should either be generic (something like @ABCTheDrum) or it should identify the person as being part of the media organisation (like @annabelcrabbABC), kind of like being given a work email address which you relinquish control of when you leave. To require general, personal accounts to be handed over at the cessation of employment is like requiring an employee to give you the username and password of their personal Gmail account).

To take a comment by Margaret Simons further, media creators (or any profession for that matter) should not just be cautious of employment terms that limit their capacity to use social networks, they should avoid such an agreement altogether. And this includes where the employer tries to claim the network that builds up around that person. Let’s keep social media social.

The article was written for the Changing Climates in Arts Publishing issue of Artlink. If you republish it or reuse it please attribute me as the author and acknowledge that the article was first published in Artlink, Vol 29, No 4. Thank you.

Photo: Haier Share Your Ideas by nan palmero.

I just read Lisa Dempster’s Neon Pilgrim. I’m generally not into backpack-lit, but Lisa’s conversational confessional approach spins out a hilarious and (sometimes too) honest recount of her 1200 kilometre trek along Japan’s famed 88-temple pilgrimage, the henro michi. It’s a good read. I enjoyed it so much in fact, that I lent it to my sister. No harm in that right? People lend books all the time. But I wonder if your reaction would be the same if I told you I also emailed a PDF copy to my friend living in London.

Connecting ourselves to cyberspace creates relationships to and with ‘stuff’. But sharing stuff online is very different to sharing it offline. On the internet, you’re not just talking about sharing, what you’re technically and legally talking about is copying. And traditional copyright says you can’t copy without permission. But is the reason I am making the copy—to share a book I like with my friend—substantially different to lending the copy to my sister?

In the publishing world, there are lots of questions around ownership, who controls the rights and what you can do with things. Traditional copyright’s ‘You can’t touch this’ approach, coupled with aggressive expansion of corporate control of key products of culture, has heralded a ‘permissions culture’; an environment where you need to ask for permission to do pretty much anything. But this mindset doesn’t play well with the technological and sociological realities of the internet and other distributive digital technologies.

In my eyes, the reason so many copyright owners are up in arms about the internet is not (solely) because people can exchange and engage more than ever before, but rather that it is much harder for them to enforce traditional business strategies in this space. Before the internet large content owners controlled the medium, not just the content. Across book publishing, recorded music, radio and television broadcasting and pretty much all forms of creative expression, copyright was strictly enforced and the means of production jealously guarded. But digital technologies and the internet have flooded the market with cheap production and distribution opportunities available to anyone and everyone. As user-led distribution and innovation continues traditional business models, and their beneficiaries, flounder. Their distribution domains, once easily patrolled, are not so any more.

Literature is by no means immune from this shift. Reading will always exist, but for authors, it is important to realise that what’s changed is who is reading, what they are reading, how they are reading, and where they are reading. The idea of reading, the concept of reading, has diversified. And so has the idea of writing. The internet provides a remarkable capability to produce, consume and disseminate text in a number of different formats and a number of different platforms; and this is moving us away from the read/write dichotomy we’ve had for centuries.

Historically we think about the experience of writing and the experience of reading as discrete activities. Reading was something that was done by the end user and writing is something done by the cultural producer and never the twain shall meet. Not so anymore. Online reading and writing become similar experiences. They are both an act of engaging with content. ‘Copy’, ‘paste’, ‘insert hyperlink’, cutting bits up, rewriting and reworking text is a technological reality, but at odds with traditional copyright. A significant void continues to widen between what the law wants to do and the actual use of content by users.

So what’s the answer for authors and publishers? Stay offline? Get everything online and grin and bear that it’s going to be passed around? Or embrace the new opportunities and make the internet work for you?

This is where Creative Commons (CC) comes in. CC is a copyright licensing scheme designed to foster a more flexible approach to rights management that is responsive, not resistant, to digital technologies and the internet. If traditional copyright is an “all rights reserved” approach, Creative Commons is a “some rights reserved” approach. It provides a legal mechanism to let you encourage people to disseminate your content to communities that are interested in it. You retain the rights that you need for other purposes, but grant enough rights to the user to enable them to move your work around, share it with others and even remix or sell it if you permit.

At the core of the Creative Commons project is a suite of standardised licences that are made freely available to authors and artists and which provide a range of protections and freedoms for their material. For CC it’s about options. Want to be recognised as the author of your blog? Then require Attribution. Don’t want others making money from your animation? Easy. Put the work under a Noncommercial term. Just want people to pass your novella around but don’t want them changing it? A No Derivative Works licence will do that. And what if you want to see what people will do mashing up your work, but think they should share too? No problems, Share Alike compels them to let others remix anything they’ve made from your work. By mixing and matching these elements you can create a range of licences that provide the level of flexibility you want.

So, back to me being a dirty pirate… Thankfully for me Neon Pilgrim is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial licence. Thank you Lisa! This means that I am actually legally allowed to share her book (as long as I acknowledge her as the author and don’t reuse the book for commercial gain, of course). So emailing my ex-pat friend in London a copy is legally ok. Which brings me to a case study of how Creative Commons might be used in the literature world.

This is not the first dabble into flexible rights management that Lisa’s publisher, Aduki Independent Press, has undertaken. An earlier book on their catalogue, Stick This In Your Memory Hole by Tristan Clark, released in 2007, also applied an Attribution-Noncommercial licence. ‘We really liked the idea of giving people easy access and the right to use the work without seeking our permission,’ Aduki’s publisher, Emily Clark, said, talking about why they took the gamble of giving the book away, ‘The book has an important message that needs to be shared.’ Did the licence undermine sales? At the end of September this year Stick This In Your Memory Hole had been downloaded 8,872 times from the Aduki website and had sold 611 copies, a very good result for Aduki. And as for Neon Pilgrim? Since it was release on 1 October this year more than 300 copies have been sold, even though it is available online for free. Make up your own mind if the use of the licence has been successful.

Creative Commons: Fair to share? by Elliott Bledsoe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia License. If for some reason you want permissions beyond this very broad licence ask me.

To see the original article as it was published in the print edition of Artlink, see the Scribd frame below (or the document on Scribd). It is best viewed in ‘Fullscreen’ mode. Please be aware I have removed all third-party copyrighted material from the scan.

Bibliographical details: Bledsoe, E. 2009. “Creative Commons: Fair to share?” in Britton, S and Maughan, J (Eds), Artlink, Vol 29, No 4, pp 36-37.

Photo: The Good Life by slavin fpo

He’s one of the early internet information architects and is currently the head of design direction for user interface and services at Nokia. To paraphrase his own introduction, his work sits somewhere at the interface of sophisticated technical systems and the people who use them. Given Greenfield literally wrote the book (well, a book) on ubiquitous computing, I figured much of his lecture was going to be around the potential of seamlessly integrated computation into everyday life. I was right.

Essentially, he began with the premise that we are going to see a lot more integration of computer into objects we engage with in our everyday lives (agreed); what he calls “networked urbanism”. But more importantly, that some (if not most) of this will occur without us even being aware of it (agreed). He asked, “Why are we collecting data? Is the likelihood of its utility in the future worth the investment?” A fair point. One to which my reply kept coming back to a resounding “Umm… maybe…” Perhaps the question should be “Should we be collecting data? Is the likelihood of its utility in the future enough to justify the collection?” From this situation a number of (societal, moral, legal) question (will) emerge; around the collection, management and preservation of data, around what objects are collecting and computing data and how, the extent to which individuals will be identifiable through data collection and other privacy concerns, the extent of disclosure and opt out options individuals have around the collection of this data, to name but a few.

He went on to extrapolate beyond mere policy questions; exploring some of the potential ramifications that this kind of techno-emersion might have on urban life. In particular, the talked through a number of ’shifts’ in how we exist in the world that is resulting (and will continue more rapidly) from new consumer technologies. didn’t catch all of his x to y list during the lecture, but thankfully he has them all listed on his blog Speedbird. So here’s my crack at talking through all some of them:

Latent to explicit

There is seriously so much more data in the world then ever before. And it’s ”saving us mega-lifetimes of effort”. But what else is it doing?

In urban areas a number of social ‘truths’ form. To use Brisbane as an example, isn’t it ‘true’ that Bardon is more expensive than Mt Gravatt or that you’re more likely to be mugged in Kingston than you are in Paddington? Sure, we all ‘know’ these statements to be true, but what’s backing these assertions up? There might be some data that proves it, but the average Brisbane resident can’t pull it up at a moment’s notice. What happens when this information goes from inherent to explicit?

Greenfield offers Oakland Crimespotting as an example. It is an online, interactive tool that plots Oakland Police Department’s CrimeWatch data onto a map creating a visualised spread of crime in the Oakland area. On the one hand this can be viewed as a really useful and good tool. It allows residents to make informed decisions about what suburbs they live in, work in and play in. Now asides from the usual criticism about the comprehensiveness of the data (that the datasets are too generic, that not all crimes are reported, etc), which Greenfield touched on, it also does also significantly change how information about crimes in cities is represented. The city ‘truths’ as to which suburbs are safest go from being commonly held beliefs to (allegedly) concrete facts.

Browse to search, held to shared

Expanding on this idea, Greenfield went on to talk about the shift from ”browse urbanism” to “search urbanism”. Tools such as local searching (News Limited’s TrueLocal, local listings on Google Maps), user-recommendations and microblogging, are encouraging people to search out specific things in specific suburbs rather than exploring or browsing them.

Likewise, these tools moves knowledge of those little gems in a city from the the ‘knowing few’ to the collective consciousness. Social media tools are encouraging people to share their lived knowledge of their city with each other. We will continue to see new websites and applications emerge to aggregate and collate this information across multiple sources.

Wayfinding to wayshowing

In a (sort of) extension to the ‘browse to search’ shift mentioned above, new technologies are changing how people navigate cities. Navmans on the dashboard, GPS navigation in the iPhone Google Maps app, mobile device applications such as Exit Strategy NYC tell commuters which carriage to be in depending on which station exit they want to use (even possible Google Latitude), stifle the serendipity of discovery through exploration. Similarly, to paraphrase Greenfield, when the way is shown to you, rather than discovered you don’t develop a mental map for yourself.

Of course, all four of these ideas merge run the risk of “lubricating commerce and sociality”. I’m not against commerce in these spaces, but it does add a number of other issues into the mix.

Passive to interactive

In the future, much more of our urban landscape will be interactive. Using the Galleria West Shopping Centre in Seoul to illustrate his point about the increasing interactivity of urban space. The external surfaces of the Galleria building are covered with the biggest pixels in the world that behave “like a giant video screen”; with a constantly changing surface. Although not as snazzy, recently revamped Stefan’s tower might be considered in a similar vein.

Greenfield when on to propose highly interactive elements of the urban landscape, saying that “everything has the possibility of being interactive displays”. Not so much along the to-one-advertising in Minority Report (2002), but rather multi-user, multi-displays in public places. But this raises a whole range of access questions as to who gets to drive these displays.

Object to service, ownership to use

Greenfield also examined the shift away from ownership of things. In particular, Greenfield uses the changes in car ownership in metro areas to expand his claim. Historically people bought a car, and the ownership of that car would persist with them over its lifespan (or at least for a prolonged period of time). For some at least car ownership was a strong identity factor in their life, but to Greenfield, “this is a luxury we will be able to have in the future”.

Enter the rise of shared network services. Sticking with the car analogy, car-sharing services have emerged in different parts around the world including here in Australia. Services such as GoGet CarShare in Sydney and Melbourne mean private car ownership is not necessary. Imagine cities where almost everyone car shares? The same mobility, less vehicles. Maybe that’s not a bad thing?

Greefield’s full list of the elements of networked urbanism are:

1. From latent to explicit;
2. From browse to search;
3. From held to shared;
4. From expiring to persistent;
5. From deferred to real-time;
6. From passive to interactive;
7. From component to resource;
8. From constant to variable;
9. From wayfinding to wayshowing;
10. From object to service;
11. From vehicle to mobility;
12. From community to social network;
13. From ownership to use;
14. From consumer to constituent.

Gimme more

Tasty snack: If this blog entry is too much for you to digest, why not start with an hors d’oeuvre of tweets about the lecture?

Things worth exploring: The issues posed by Greenfield dovetail across so many other interesting areas. The idea of everything having an IP address, something Sir Tim Berners-Lee talks about also, ties into the IPv6 protocol . The collection (known and unknown) of data and people’s right to be informed that data is being collected has also been addressed by Berners-Lee (see here and here). It also ties into arguments for net(work) neutrality and open standards.

Follow: You should also follow Adam Greenfield on Twitter, @adamgreenfield.

Tag, you’re it: Search for the hashtag for what others were saying, #AdamGreenfieldLecture.

Lecture notes and thoughts | Speaker: Adam Greenfield | Lecture title: “The City The City Is Here For You To Use” | Venue: Roundhouse Theatre, La Boite, Level 5, The Works (Z2), Creative Industries Precinct, Queensland University of Technology, 6 – 8 Musk Avenue, Kelvin Grove (map) | Sponsors: NICTA Queensland Research Laboratory, Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation (iCi), ARC Network in Human Communication Science (HCSNet) | Tuesday, 14 July 2009, 4.30 – 5.30 pm

The Commission “… concluded that the current restrictions create material upward pressure on book prices in Australia” and that, “By removing the restrictions, local booksellers would have the option of accessing better value books from overseas. Local publishers would have a strong incentive to make their prices more competitive and to look for greater efficiencies in their operations, the report said.”

I am hoping to read the report over the next few days and post some thoughts. In the mean time, you can read the Commission’s report here. Also worth looking at is the Commission’s media release and Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Competition Policy and Consumer Affairs, Chris Bowen’s media release.

False dichotomies: music/fashion, creator/fan

Interestingly, the panel’s position orientated mainly around the interrelations (or not) between music and fashion as experienced by creators of such content. Naturally, I guess since they are all cultural producers in their own right. Fair call. There are plenty of music types who you naturally think of their look and their style. Names were thrown about: David Bowie, Boy George. For these people, their clothes, their persona, becomes intrinsically tied to their music. After all, it is all expression of themselves.

But this is no different for the fanbase either. In fact, it is likely more so for them. Here’s a little exercise: I want you to think generally about emo bands, punk rock and indie rock. What did you think of?

Exhibit A - Emo

Exhibit B - Punk

Exhibit C - Indie Rock.

Was I right? Something like this? I think there is an equally interesting conversation to be had around the relationship between fans of music and fashion. Many musical genres have an natural association to fashion. Punks with mohawks, indie rockers in too-tight-jeans, r&b with a bit of bling and the goths in eyeliner and black jackets. Kiley Gaffney talked about the concept of style as the arbiter between art and commerce. Too true. When I started considering the topic, I was focused on the user (or consumer) of these cultural products. From this position, there is a natural and fairly obvious link between music and fashion because things we choose to purchase are identity markers. And who is it that is consuming the cultural products of music and fashion? The fans.

‘Ya sell out’

The panel’s creator-focused position would of course eventually lead to “sell out” being mentioned as well. What a surprise? Not.

But to be honest I hoped for more. I thought this would be the kind of group who would have already seen past the ‘downloading is stealing and it hurts my CD sales’ syndrome but alas not the case. To some extent I can see Patience’s point when she threw (basically) the entire Hip-hop genre into the ring. Sure, they are among the most likely musicians to have clothing lines, video games (and contollers!) and fragrances; go on, think Eminem’s Shady Ltd clothing company and Wu-tang Clan’s Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style and the Def Jam triology (Def Jam Vendetta, Def Jam Fight For NY, and Def Jam Icon) video games and Wu-wear clothing company? And then there’s 50 Cent’s entire catalogue of products that would rival Krista Now’s (from Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales) including his 50 Cent: Bulletproof and 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand video games, 50 Cent: The Money and The Power reality television program, Pure 50 RGX body spray, his G-Unit clothing company, two film companies, a book imprint, Glacéau Formula 50 vitamin drink, the G-Unity charity foundation, and (if the list wasn’t already ridiculous) Magic Stick condom range. But what about the pop-princesses—Britney’s swag of scents or Kylie’s bod and bed threads (even a stint with The Wiggles)?! If this is the marker of ’sell out’ I suspect these two are stamped. Kiley Gaffney mentioned Chicks on Speed as an interesting merge of music, fashion and visual arts. Chicks on Speed have collaborated with serveral fashionistas to create fashion lines (like Insight51, Garcia Marques, Lee Cooper), exhibited as visual artists widely and operate a record label oozing with indie-cred. Now don’t get me wrong, I like anyone else who doesn’t play guitar, but where is this proverbial line in the sand drawn? What makes Ice-T and Hilary Duff sell-outs and Chicks on Speed not?

A final remark: I was very interested in Suzi Vaughan’s comment about the fashion industry having to deal with ripping-off and piracy since (she says) they don’t get copyright. (This is of course not entirely true, but fashion and copyright is a complicated area, as I have said before). She made the argument that the reason that fashion seems so fickle and orientates itself around seasons is because you are so likely to be ripped-off that the only thing to do is keep creating, to stay ahead of the crowd.

After the talk session, Megan Shneck and John Dunlop did an awesome live performance using looped pre-records and a violin.

On a side note, normally if feel like the youngest person in the room at things like this, not the case for this session. It turns out that the event intentionally coincided withsome events being run for the school children taking part in Education Queensland’s Creative Generation Excellence Awards in Instrumental Music.

Gimme more

What are they saying? Hannah Suarez at Brisbane Creative Industries has thoughts on the panel, as does Mem Rynne on her Tumblr.

Thanks x

Photos: Indie Rock(?) by Billy Wuot; Untitled image by Jeff Keen and DSCF0780 by Tom Purves (in order of inclusion). All photos are 

The proposed treaty

On the EFA website, Nic Suzor provides a good summary of the key provisions of the proposed treaty:

• an exception to copyright infringement for non-profit supply of accessible versions of works to which a person with a print disability already has access in a non-accessible form;
• a statutory licence for reasonable for-profit supply;
• an exception to anti-circumvention law to allow blind persons to break technological locks that make the work inaccessible; and
• most importantly, an exception that allows importing and exporting of accessible versions of copyright works, enabling them to be distributed to blind people in other countries.

Copyright for the first world

What I find really interesting about this controversy is how it illustrates the agenda of the first world nations at WIPO. The first world uses international treaties to pressure developing nations to enforce the rights of their patriots’ copyright abroad. For example, to be a member of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) countries must comply with the substantive law provisions of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (the Berne Convention) (pursuant to the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS)). The first worlds have pushed to enforce the copyrights of their citizens internationally through presuring developing nations to ratify Berne-style copyright into domestic law and the ‘negotiation’ and signing of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). Copyright has slowly expanded its reach into the uncertain ‘markets’ of the third world. Consumer International’s report Copyright and Access to Knowledge summarises this issue very well:

… a powerful lobby of copyright owners have prevailed upon governments of developed countries, notably those in the European Union, the United States (US) and Japan, to ratchet up the scope and duration of copyright protection further. The numerous bilateral FTAs have been the vehicle to achieve this.
National lawmakers therefore not only do not have complete liberty to formulate their own copyright laws but are also being subject to continual pressure to ratchet upward the protection granted to rights holders. Even the legislative advice they are being provided by multi-lateral agencies such as WIPO is wanting. The advice they are being given is tailored to ensure that they do not take full advantage of all the flexibilities available to them under the various international instruments. The foregoing is the political reality confronting lawmakers in the developing world.

Can we now add rolling international copyright policy development to that list? What a combo? TRIPS, Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and WIPO factionalism.

Disability and copyright exceptions

World-wide there are some moves to address this short-falling in copyright law. Here in Australia individuals can rely on the fair dealing for research and study in order to reproduce works in an accessible format. Of course all the use must fall within the scope of ‘research and study’; no general, personal uses. If a person with a print disability wants to reproduce works for any other purpose they should contact an educational institution licensed by the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) because the Copyright Act 1968 provides a statutory licence scheme (Part VB licence) to allow education institutions to provide people with a print disability with material in accessible formats. Of course limitations to these exemptions. For example, where the copyright owner has an accessible format version is commercially available the exemptions don’t apply.

Want more?
The sections of the Copyright Act 1968 that apply are ss 47A, 135ZN, 135ZP, 135ZQ, 135ZR, 135ZS and 135ZT. For more general information about copyright exceptions for disabled persons see section 3 of the frequently asked questions on the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s website.

I also recommend reading “Digital copyright and disability discrimination: From braille to bookshare,” Nic Suzor’s co-authored paper with Paul Harpur and Dilan Thampapillai on the issue of access to copyright materials for blind users in Australia. Also have a look at the EFA’s submission (PDF) to the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy’s Digital Economy Future Directions consultation.

♺ “USA, Canada and the EU attempt to kill treaty to protect blind people’s access to written material” by Cory Doctorow @ BoingBoing; “Australia opposes treaty to enhance access of blind people to copyright material” by Nic Suzor @ Electronic Frontiers Australia; “Final conclusions of SCCR 18″ by James Love @ Knowledge Ecology Notes.

Want even more?: Follow the ‘#sccr18′ tag at hashtags.org or Twitter search.

Anne went on to talk about Dr Terry Culter’s discussion point about information stock and information flows in an innovation system. In the context of Crown copyright, she talked about the vast amounts of content (information stock)  generated by governments and how the vesting of copyright in that information acts as a barrier to that content’s resue.

Neale Hooper went on to discuss how we might create information flows for this kind of information. He outlined why mechanisms such as open content licences are useful for governments for enabling Public Sector Information . The Government Information Licensing Framework (GILF) was established by the Queensland Government to look at a whole-of-government licensing system for the State. The GILF project found that the vast majority of PSI can be made available under Creative Commons. Since its establishment, GILF has become recognised as an international leader in this area and helped influence the devision of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) ABS to release statistical information generated by the ABS under Creative Commons licences. Geosciences Australia are currently trialing the GILF model.

QUT also hosts a number of associated projects. It hosts the Creative Commons Australia project which administers the Australian Creative Commons licences. It also hosts the Open Access to Knowledge (OAK) Law Project and it’s spin-off project the OAK List, a web-enabled database containing information about publishing agreements and publishers’ open access policies. Recently QUT also established Access to and use of Public Sector Information (auPSI), a project to develop information policy about delivering access to and encouraging the use of public sector information and an office of the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information (CRCSI). QUT also hosted the now concluded Legal Framework for e-Research project.

She argued that the idea that the process of creating is an internalised, uncertain and undefinable activity is problematic. Rather, artists see and engage with cultural products around them all the time. This is of course the ‘standing on the shoulders of giants‘/’everything has been said before’ argument. So naturally at this point we want to throw around works like ‘appropriation’, ‘reuse’, ‘remix’ which… as it has been said… has been said before…

Anyway, Cohen examplified her point with a number of examples including Sheppard Feirey’s Obama HOPE poster. Feirey created the poster in support of Barack Obama’s 2008 US Presidential Election campaign.

Obama Hope © Sheppard Feirey 2009.

The artist (allegedly) appropriated a photograph taken by Mannie Garcia for Associated Press. As Cohen said, Feirey didn’t know Obama personally, nor did he have the opportunity to take a photograph of the candidate himself. He had to use something.

Mannie Garcia’s photograph for Associated Press.

Possibly his decision to use an AP image rather than one taken by another copyright owner who he could have secured permission from or who was less likely to sue for infringement. Perhaps he wouldn’t need to front up to court now.

Cohen also put under the microscope the assumption that copyright stimulates incentives to creative by affording the creator exclusive rights to control the use of their creations.