- An eBook ‘digital rights management’ provider suddenly decides to ‘manage’ all the books it has ever sold through a popular eBook site into deep freeze, consigning all that distributed literature to the digital dustbin in a single blow.
- A developer attempts (and fails) a 100-day protest just to get permission to release a game he has been designing for years, on the Nintendo Wii.
- A physical crafts artist begins firing up a lynch mob to take down and destroy the widely sourced collage art of digital remixers.
- Apple escalates its media censorship from the niche realms of comic books and competing podcast aggregators, into the mainstream world of mature fiction, actually banning a book from its App Store for ordinary, unremarkable adult content.
- Emboldened by the Baye-Dole Act, universities go from claiming ownership of 250 of their students’ inventions a year, to 3,000 a year, poaching $45 billion in licence fees, in 2006 alone, from those who pay hefty tuitions for the loss of free access to the output of their own minds.
[Submitted by The Laroquod Experiment.]
4 Comments
Ah the joys of DRM and outdated ownership.
I can’t help but think that if the artist instead embraced the collage works instead of throwing around the ‘theft’ charge, everyone would be better off.
That being said, nobody better EVAR use any part of rgbFilter for such mash-ups. Our crack team of legal experts will, uhm… ineffectively pursue legal action as long as we pay the lawyer fees.
True, true, on the highly ill-advised approach and misplaced moral outrage.
I think you’re being facetious about the lawyers and all, but to obtusely take you seriously to make a point, I think rgbFilter should be used in mash-ups and that we shouldn’t have any say in it. It’s easy to look at the fact that this seems to be currently illegal and say, ‘That’s just some crazy dude’s opinion.’ But it’s also the opinion of almost every human being ever born before, say … 1750. And *certainly* before the printing press was invented. With every technological advance we are losing more and more communicative freedom, and it didn’t just start with the computer revolution.
As digital communication becomes less and less like ‘official publication’ and more and more like an oral culture (IM much?), sooner or later we are going to *have* to stop criminalising the contemporary art of the remix, or else our culture really *will* enter an ice age, the likes of which our forebears would find quite remarkable, since to them the idea that you couldn’t remix descriptions or quotations of what you had seen or heard without asking permission or waiting for 100 years for it to enter the ‘public domain’, would seem very odd indeed.
This is why I have chosen to include the peculiarly modern phenomenon of ‘remix outrage’ among the collected evidence of the Big Digital Freeze.
Lawrence Lessig made a similar argument only with a lot more authority this week on The Colbert Report…
And as Colbert requested, here’s the dance beat remix. 87
That was a brilliant episode too. That interview was actually on my mind when I posted the rgbFilter lawyers line.
Here’s more on the dude who tried to stage a 100-day protest to release his game on the Nintendo Wii. Their refusal drove him a little bit nuts, I must say. It is really a human tragedy when somebody pours all of their heart and soul into a creative endeavour whose release to the public is actively prevented and blocked; it really can affect one’s mental health. I feel for Bob…
http://www.gamecyte.com/bobs-game-over
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