Re: Intellectual Property (was Re: the future of art)
Gorbon (raidon@EDEN.RUTGERS.EDU)
Fri, 12 Jul 1996 00:48:15 EDT
> Evan M. Kirchhoff rhetoricized and composed the following:
>
> > > Aesthetic merit is not
> > > a standard for awarding intellectual property rights. A
> > > Nobel-winning novelist has the same IP rights as a someone
> > > writing Penthouse Letters.
> >
> > Actually, no. [snipped: Evan's confession re: Penthouse
> Letters]
> > ...there's some kind of disclaimer in the Penthouse
> Letters section
> > saying that they obtain all IP rights to anything submitted, to
> re-use or
> > change as they wish (which may explain that infamous and
> > universal "Needless to say..." style).
>
> So what? Whenever something is published you cede certain rights
> to the publisher. Penthouse sets it up so that the actu of
> submitting indicates the ceding of "all rights" to the work
> submitted. It's just a form of contract. Harper's doesn't claim
> rights upon submissions, but if they accept your work they buy
> "First North American Serial Rights" which means they have the
> right to only publish it once in a magazine in North America.
> Once it's published, rights revert back to the author allowing
> you to sell Second North American Serial Rights (if, for example,
> _Utne Reader_ wants to reprint the article), foreign rights, book
> or anthology rights, etc. etc.
>
> > > I don't have any idea how creative work will be funded in the
> > > future, but my best bet is it will NOT be funded AT ALL. The
> act
> > > of giving financial reward to creative endeavor depends upon
> the
> > > necessity of being able to control the work. I.e. if you
> can't
> > > know who actually created the work how would you award
> someone
> > > for the creation?
> >
> > (Why would we have any sudden problem with verifying
> authorship?)
> >
> > > I think the idea of people making money off their creative
> work
> > > is history. Kaput. Outta here. (Except for live performers.)
> >
> > Actually, I predict that nothing much will change at all.
> First of all,
> > we're basically talking about writing, period.
>
> No, forms such as photgraphy, graphic design, video, and
> writing--all of which are easily reproduced and distributed by
> computer--will all be in danger.
>
> > I'll still be willing to
> > drive 5 hours to see Cornell boxes in Chicago, no matter what
> the Internet
> > does. Any art based around "artifacts", and that includes
> painting, won't
> > be affected by the Net any more than it was affected by
> photocopying. The
> > fact that you can now get GIFs of Monet's "Waterlilies" from a
> thousand
> > locations -- and if GIFs are too low-quality for you, there are
> $23
> > high-quality poster versions available at every campus on the
> planet
>
> There's a multi-million dollar industry in unauthorized art
> prints which will only burgeon with computer technology. You may
> be unaware of it, but it's illegal to make a photoreproduction of
> a painting without the owner's consent. Many of those $23 posters
> are bootlegs.
>
> > (Aside: the most
> > reprehensible part of IP laws is this idea of being able to own
> > "electronic reproduction rights" to paintings whose creators
> have been
> > dead for centures.)
>
> It's no different than current IP laws, *many* of which are
> stupid. For example: in the US if you make 10 copies or more of
> an audio CD it's a federal felony. It's not if you make 9, but it
> is if you make 10.
>
> > So back to writing. The supposedly new creator-verification
> problem
> > emerged a very long time ago, with the printing press. Once a
> document is
> > typeset, and no longer in someone's unique handwriting, how do
> you tell,
> > _simply by looking at the document_, who created it? The
> answer is that
> > of course you don't simply look at the typeset document.
>
> You're not looking at the whole picture, Ev. Yes, you can
> reproduce and distribute plagiarized copies of writing by either
> printing press or computer networks, but that's not what causes
> the problem. The crumbling of IP is caused by access,
> reproduction speed, reproduction quality, and distribution speed.
>
>
> Until digital technology, it was pretty unfeasible to make mass
> reproductions of plagiarized work. It was hard and expensive to
> get access to a printing press (or recording equipment or
> record-pressing machines) to make enough copies of high enough
> quality in a reasonable amount of time, and (biggest problem of
> all) it was damn hard to find a way to distribute them.
>
> Digital technology removes all those barriers. For a small
> initial investment (i.e. easy access) you can buy the technology
> that will allow you to make perfect digital copies, reproduce
> them infinitely and nearly instananeously and distribute them
> WORLDWIDE over computer networks for only the cost of a monthly
> ISP fee. And as the tech develops, it only gets easier and
> easier.
>
> So what we're talking about is not a matter of ability, but a
> matter of *degree*. It has always been *possible* to violate IP
> rights, but never simple or economically feasible. As digital
> technology develops it becomes consistently more simple and more
> economical to reproduce perfect copies infinitely--thus taking
> the power of reproduction and distribution out of the hands of
> the few and giving it to the masses.
>
> Since enforcement of IP depends upon the difficulty of
> reproduction and distribution, as reproduction and distribution
> become available to the masses it becomes harder to enforce IP
> (and much harder to profit from reproduction and distribution,
> too).
>
> > The situation
> > you're worrying about is, I think, analogous to me pulling
> _Angels &
> > Insects_ from the shelf in front of me and arguing that the
> publishers are
> > dupes or fools for continuing to send Byatt those royalty
> cheques, because
> > "for all we know" anyone could have written it, since it's just
> > a bunch of anonymous typing on paper.
> > But there is no such problem for 99.99% of the books on the
> market;
>
> Of course not, because the effort to reproduce and distribute
> fakes non-digitally deters people from doing so. It's just not
> profitable. The value of IP is directly related to the difficulty
> of reproduction and distribution and the profitability that
> accompanies a process which is only open to a few. If we could
> all manufacture our own drugs in minutes, why would we pay
> pharmaceutical companies big bucks to do so?
>
> > "Aha!" I hear you (or some people) saying: "On the Internet,
> There Will Be
> > No Centralized Publishers!" Bollocks. Of course there will
> be, for the
> > same reason we have paper publishers.
>
> Centralized publishers have nothing to do with it. I'm sure there
> will be centralized publishers on the Net. Who the hell wants to
> self-publish and promote their own work? It's a hell of a lot of
> labor.
>
> > Contrary to popular belief, it is
> > not prohibitively expensive for any random person to bind dead
> trees and
> > ship them out in boxes; it's not the cost of production that's
> keeping
> > everyone from being printed on paper. In fact, I'll bet it
> costs
> > significantly *less* to run a small publishing house than it
> does to run a
> > decent web site
>
> You're fucking nuts.
>
> A friend of mine just self-published his book of poems. He did
> all the design and layout himself: 50 pages, 8 1/2" x 5 1/2",
> staple-bound, standard weight paper, cardstock cover, one-color
> printing (i.e. not a very slick print production--still has the
> 'zine look to it). Cost for a thousand copies: $580. And that was
> with a MAJOR discount because the printer was a friend of his
> father-in-law. Nor does that price include distribution or
> advertising.
>
> Another example: I used be an editor at a local monthly magazine
> here in Richmond. 8 1/2" x 11", newsprint, two-color printing,
> staple bound. Also not very slick print production. Five thousand
> copies cost about $1300 to print, around $.25 a copy. It would
> cost twice that much now because of the rising costs of
> newsprint.
>
> After the initial investment for the computer equipment (which
> would be necessary for either a print publication or web
> publication--and arguably less for web publication, since you
> wouldn't need to buy DTP software), there's almost no production
> cost for a web publication. Yeah, you pay your designers and
> editors, maybe, but you do that in print to. In print you also
> pay the printer & the distributor *major* money. If web
> publishing you pay the ISP squat, if you're smart, a couple
> hundred if you're not so smart.
>
> > Big publishers exist as
> > a quality-control mechanism
> > [snip] So the present symbiotic
> > consumer/publisher/author relationship will probably remain
> basically
> > unchanged.
>
> And that's why web-publishing will still flourish. We want
> someone to weed out the crap for us so we don't have to spend
> time doing it. Here's what will change: since the reproduction
> and distribution power is less valuable, people won't be getting
> paid as much (if at all) for the creative work they produce for
> publication. The value of publication (like everything in the
> information age) will shift from the product (the book) to the
> service (editing, weeding out the crap).
>
> > And heck, if anything, technology will make it *easier* to
> verify original
> > authorship in very uncontentious ways: digital signatures,
> time-coded
> > server-logs, etc. Sure beats having to pore over handwriting
> samples or
> > brushstrokes, or doing chemical analysis on paper and paint.
>
> Nope, makes it easier to conceal original authorship. Anything
> that can be displayed on a screen can be stolen, digital
> signatures blah blah blah aside. Take a screen shot, run it
> through Photoshop or OCR, badda bing badda boom. You don't have
> to get the date from the pipeline; just snag it off the screen.
> Time-coded server logs? Get real. It's sooo easy to fake time
> stamps. Someone with system privileges just resets the computer
> clock for a minute or two, changes the files' timestamps, sets
> the clock back to real time. Pow. Easy to fake.
>
> > > The creative areas that are going to be hardest hit are
> writing,
> > > music, photography, video, graphic design--those easy to
> > > reproduce by computer.
> >
> > Note that all these things are currently easy to reproduce
> _without_
> > computers.
>
> And FAR, FAR *easier* to reproduce WITH computers. Like I said,
> it's not ability, it's degree.
>
> > > Images of things like painting, sculpture,
> > > crafts, theater, and dance are easily reproducible by
> computer,
> >
> > And by television.
>
> Um. Do you have your own broadcast television station, Ev? Maybe
> a little cable company on the side?
>
> Yet if you wanted (and you had a powerful enough computer), you
> could video tape _Friends_ and distribute it WORLDWIDE over the
> Net today.
>
> > So what?
>
> It's not ability, it's degree.
>
> > At worst, it'll all look like the
> > recorded-music industry: if you make your own copy, nobody
> cares, but if
> > you make a million copies and sell them, they arrest you.
> There's no
> > need to make things impossible to pirate; all you have to do is
> protect a
> > sufficiently large market in "official" paid-for copies that
> the creators
> > and their publishers can make decent money.
>
> Easy to say when only a few people have the resources to pirate a
> million CD copies. How do you enforce the law when EVERYONE has
> the resources to pirate a million CD copies, Evan?
>
> > And the fact that there is a "software industry", and a hugely
> successful
> > one, demonstrates that even in cases where *exact* copies can
> be made
> > almost instantaneously (not true of most of the arts above),
> there are still
> > ways to make lots of money selling product.
>
> Let me guess--you bought stock in Netscape, right?
>
> Sucker.
>
> Oh, I'm sure it will be decades and decades before we see the
> total erosion of IP. As long as people still want to read books
> in bed instead of laying in bed with their hand-held, flat LCD,
> infrared-interfaced Net Access Device there'll be a market for
> printing, and as long as there's a market for printing people
> will try to protect that market. It will take a couple of
> generations before the nostalgia of the book is worked out of our
> system--well past my lifetime, anyway, which is why I continue in
> my silly pipe dream of making a living as a writer.
>
> Audio & video will probably fall by the wayside long before the
> book. Actually the book will never fall by the wayside. Like
> photography made painting quaint (and paved the way for
> Impressionism, Abstract Expressionism, etc.), the net will make
> books quaint and pave the way for a resurgence of book art
> (which, if you pay attention to what's going on in galleries and
> art schools, you will see has already begun).
>
> --
> Greg Ritter
> gritter@saturn.vcu.edu <--NEW E-MAIL ADDRESS!
> ritter@urvax.urich.edu
> http://www.urich.edu/~ritter
> --
> CompLink
> (a comprehensive resources for
> Rhetoric & Composition teachers)
> http://www.urich.edu/~ritter/CompLink.html
>
Plain and simple...people want money. Don't you think that people will
create NEW technelogies to get a buck out others. For instance, even though
the net is making everything accessible, people are also finding new ways to
use the net for their own profitable advantage. The TV didn't kill the
newspaper, the disk didn't kill paper, and the net won't kill profits
either...only lead to new ways to make a profit...