Use=Sue: Art in the Age of Intellectual Property

nettime: There is a good description of art appropriation from the Detournement movement in 1950s to intellectual property being the “Oil of the 21st century”:

In a post-industrial society production is no
longer confined to material goods (such as steel
and coal) but increasingly extends to immaterial
goods. However, a significant difference exists
between the two: immaterial goods like knowledge
and information can be reproduced without
impairment, which is not the case with material
goods. But in order to be able to function within
a value chain, the distribution of these
immaterial goods must be restricted - namely with
the aid of patent, copyright and trademark law.

Helping the almost journalists be journalists

Dan Gilmour, author of We The Media, has an article on the Center for Citizen Media about the future of journalism lying in the helping of what he terms as “almost-journalists” doing actual journalism. He points to organizations such as the ACLU or Human Rights Watch, uncovering gross instances of abuse as examples of very successful “almost-journalism”.

He writes:”They are absolutely in the media field now, because they are using the tools of media creation to learn and tell stories, and to make those stories available to a wide audience. These organizations and countless others like them — small and large, local and international — are part of the media ecosystem. With just a little extra effort, they could be part of the journalistic ecosystem too, in ways that go far beyond their traditional roles.”

Gilmour believes that helping these kinds of organizations remove the almost from their names will lead to a boon in credible news sources for the public.

via boingboing

Project make McCain Exciting

About a month ago Colbert offered up a challenge to viewers to make McCain exciting by photoshoping green-screened footage of a mind-numbingly dull speech that was uploaded to colbert nation. He has been showing them on The Report ever since and there has been a ton of these videos created, here are some of the most popular and my personal (nerdy favourite)

Throttling web traffic is a good thing: Bell Canada

wired blog: “Bell Canada, the largest telecom provider in Canada, argues that throttling — the practice of slowing down web speeds for “bandwidth hogs” — ultimately improves the user experience and stokes innovation.”

Of course this comes after Bell was lambasted for throttling, do you think Bell would be so forthcoming about all the benefits of throttling if no one knew about it?

Create a video describing Bill C61 in 61 seconds

You can do it! More information can be found here.

From Michael Geist:
“Tens of thousands of Canadians have spoken out against Bill C-61 over the past month. In addition to the letters, MP meetings, and town halls, many have created mashups, videos, comics, posters, photos, and other creative art to express their disappointment and concern with Industry Minister Jim Prentice’s plan for copyright in Canada. To build on this creativity, the Fair Copyright for Canada group is launching a new YouTube video competition. C-61 in 61 Seconds invites everyone to post a video – whether rant, mashup, or something new – on the copyright bill.”

Via Boing

Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video

online video
The Center for Social Media has recently released a suggested code of best practice in fair use for online video.

More and more, video creation and sharing depend on the ability to use and circulate existing copyrighted work. Until now, that fact has been almost irrelevant in business and law, because broad distribution of nonprofessional video was relatively rare. Often people circulated their work within a small group of family and friends. But digital platforms make work far more public than it has ever been, and cultural habits and business models are developing. As practices spread and financial stakes are raised, the legal status of inserting copyrighted work into new work will become important for everyone.

It is important for video makers, online service providers, and content providers to understand the legal rights of makers of new culture, as policies and practices evolve. Only then will efforts to fight copyright “piracy” in the online environment be able to make necessary space for lawful, value-added uses.

Mashups, remixes, subs, and online parodies are new and refreshing online phenomena, but they partake of an ancient tradition: the recycling of old culture to make new. In spite of our romantic cliches about the anguished lone creator, the entire history of cultural production from Aeschylus through Shakespeare to Clueless has shown that all creators stand, as Isaac Newton (and so many others) put it, “on the shoulders of giants.”

Paranoia or real reason to panic: the death of “free” internet

According to an article on American Free Press, Canadian ISPs (Bell & Telus) are paving the way for a new pay-as-you-go cable inspired system that will be in place by 2010 and will serve as a model for the implementation of this system world-wide: “By 2012 ISPs all over the globe will reduce Internet access to a TV-like subscription model, only offering access to a small standard amount of commercial sites and require extra fees for every other site you visit. These ‘other’ sites would then lose all their exposure and eventually shut down, resulting in what could be seen as the end of the Internet.”

Whether true or conjecture, articles like this point to the very real fact that ISPs are going to be implementing some major changes in how we can access the internet that are above and beyond typical “traffic shaping”.

Media ownership in the USA

Neatorama has put together some graphics that illustrate what large corporations control in the television media. It’s rather scary seeing how only a few companies control how much of what we see and hear. I’m sure that it becomes a nightmare when radio, newspapers, and the internet are included.

Here’s the graphic that shows what General Electric owns:

GE TV ownership

To see more check it out who owns what on television at Neatorama.

Does anybody know if this has been done for Canada? I’d love to see it!

New York Times Makes History Again With New Media

 

Syndication, Widgets, Aggregation, Social Overlay and Personalization are the new buzzwords being put into play at the Times online. Monetizing these new-media techniques is a low priority as it is for most Silicon Valley start-ups in these early years of development. 

Far beyond other old-media newspapers the Times has enough of a foothold online to give other social news aggregator sites like Readburner and Techmeme real competition.