Right2Remix: A Campaign For European Copyright Reform

Back in February we reported on a welcome move by the Dutch government to modify its copyright law so that creative remixes are permitted. A new initiative called right2remix.org wants to make that a Europe-wide change: 

On Techdirt.

The Sad Intellectual Monopolist's Viewpoint

If you want to see how misguided the British publishing industry's attitudes are to copyright and its users, you could do worse than read what the outgoing president of the Publishers Association has to say on the subject....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Sounding Off Against Sound Copyright

Talking of petitions, here's one against extending the copyright in sound recordings, open to anyone. It includes the following excellent summary of what we're fighting for:

Copyright is a bargain. In exchange for their investment in creating and distributing sound recordings to the public, copyright holders are granted a limited monopoly during which are allowed to control the use of those recordings. This includes the right to pursue anyone who uses their recordings without permission. But when this time is up, these works join Goethe, Hugo and Shakespeare in the proper place for all human culture – the public domain. In practice, because of repeated term extensions and the relatively short time in which sound recording techniques have been available, there are no public domain sound recordings.

This situation is about to change, as tracks from the first golden age of recorded sound reach the end of their copyright term. The public domain is about to benefit from its half of this bargain. Seminal soul, reggae, and rock and roll recordings will soon be freed from legal restrictions, allowing anyone (including the performers themselves and their heirs) to preserve, reissue, and remix them.

Major record labels want to keep control of sound recordings well beyond the current 50 year term so that they can continue to make marginal profits from the few recordings that are still commercially viable half a century after they were laid down. Yet if the balance of copyright tips in their favour, it will damage the music industry as a whole, and also individual artists, libraries, academics, businesses and the public.

The labels lobby for change, but have yet to publicly present any compelling economic evidence to support their case. What evidence does exist shows clearly that extending term will discourage innovation, stunt the reissues market, and irrevocably damage future artists' and the general public's access to their cultural heritage.

As Europe looks to the creative industries for its economic future, it is faced with a choice. It can agree to extend the copyright term in sound recordings for the sake of a few major record labels. Or it can allow sound recordings to enter the public domain at the end of fifty years for the benefit of future innovation, future prosperity and the public good.

What is Open Archaeology?

It's becoming fashionable to stick the epithet "open" on just about anything days (I should know - I do it all the time.) But what does it mean to speak of "open archaeology", say?

Well, one important element of "classic" openness like open source is the freedom to take knowledge and re-use it in new ways. If you want to see what that might mean in the context of archaeology, here's a rather brilliant site (apart from the heavy use of Flash) that gives a hint of what's possible:

For more than a decade, archaeologists and scholars have gathered in central Turkey to explore the remains of the 9,000-year-old village of Çatalhöyük. First excavated in the 1960s, Çatalhöyük became world-famous for its dense architecture and spectacular wall decorations. Between 1997 and 2003, a team from the University of California Berkeley worked intensively on one building there, bringing to light the life history of a Neolithic home. Remixing Çatalhöyük features the investigations and discoveries of the BACH team, who invites you to participate in the interpretation of their work. Explore themed collections, create original projects, and contribute your own “remix” of Çatalhöyük.

Quite rightly, it's just won first prize in the Open Archaeology Prize at the Alexandria Archive Institute. (Via Open Access News.)

From Remix to Re-enactment

I wrote recently about the remix and it's relevance to an open content world. Here's an interesting exploration of remix's sibling, re-enactment:

Once you start thinking about the idea of re-enactment, you start seeing it everywhere. Maybe the argument could be made that we're in a cultural moment devoted to re-enactment. Much of what we write off as novelty can be put into this category. The Internet recently was excited about old people re-enacting iconic photos of the twentieth century; see also choirs of old people performing Sonic Youth's "Schizophrenia". Or choirs of small children doing much the same. But less ironic presentations abound: off the top of my head, Japancakes just released a note-for-note country-inflected cover of Loveless, My Bloody Valentine's seminal drone-rock record. Going further, German new music ensemble Zeitkratzer has played and recorded Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. Tom McCarthy's excellent recent novel Remainder concerns a wealthy man who maniacally reenacts scenes; McCarthy springs from the art world, which has been interested in re-enactment for a while. Examples spiral on ad infinitum. But there seems to be something in us that wants to see or hear what we've seen or heard before again.

These are quickly composed thoughts, and I'm ignoring a great deal; parsing the difference between re-enactment and adaptation could be fiendishly complicated, as might be the role of copyright in all of this, etc. I'll simply tie this back to the Communist Manifesto problem. I think it's become apparent that we're no longer reading texts in isolation: now when we read Hamlet, digital media has made it possible to read any number of possible versions at the same time. The archive presents us with an embarrassment of riches, though I suspect that we still lack the tools to let us make sense of the pile: both to make sense of the growing number of versions of texts and to usefully compare versions. The Wooster Group's Hamlet can be seen as a close reading of the 1964 Hamlet. But such a one-to-one reading might just be the tip of the iceberg.

What made this particularly apposite for me is that I've been watching Kenneth Branagh's film version of Hamlet, and the sense of hearing a hundred other uses of Shakespeare's famous lines is very strong, and makes the film feel, indeed, like a re-enactment rather than a performance, brilliant as it is.

The Art of the Remix

One of Larry Lessig's favourite concepts is that of the remix: taking pre-existing stuff and doing something new with it. Recently I came across one of the purest expressions of that remix idea in the shape of the Georg Baselitz exhibition at the Royal Academy.

After a series of rooms packed with often deeply disturbing images, the show culminated in one devoted entirely to the remix. More precisely, the pictures were remixes by Baselitz of his earlier works, which created a powerful double resonance. The ultimate remix, perhaps.

Pipe Dream: Re-wiring the Net

The online world is awash with XML feeds. The great thing about XML is that you can grab it and do stuff with it very easily, because it's basically a structured text file. For example, you can feed one XML stream into another, combine them, and keep on piping them around. A bit like Unix pipes.

Hey, now that's an idea:

Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.

What's particularly cool about this new service is the graphical approach, which looks a lot like programming flowcharts. The currently-available pipes are rather limited at the moment - this is still very new - but it's not hard to imagine some very rich stuff coming out of this. Bravo Yahoo. (Via GigaOM.)

The Meme is Spreading: Film at Eleven

Another milestone in the march of the distributed meme: a film financed by a Net-based group of 50,000 angel micro-investors: the Swarm. This takes it even beyond Elephant's Dream. Like it, the new film will be released under a CC licence that allows remixing (via Boing Boing).