Editorial Review
A simple observation lies at the heart of the Exposure book: that as different areas of culture start flowing in digital networks, it becomes self-defeating for artists, publishers, labels, and also regular people to insist for control over the distribution of their own creations. Although the fact is simple, its repercussions are only starting to be understood in their full complexity. At Aula, we have referred to these economic, social and legal repercussions as the "exposure" of art, ideas, and everyday life.
Introduction
The past year has been exciting in the domain of digital art and media: a computer manufacturer became a major player in the music industry overnight, weblogs have started a new wave of personal publishing, and camera phones have alerted us to the question of online privacy. To better understand what all of this means for the future of business and pleasure, Aula invited a group of infl uencers who are shaping the landscape of media and technology to Helsinki. The result was a symposium called the Aula Meeting of Minds, which took place on 15 June 2003 on the picturesque island of Sarkka. Collected in this volume are the discussions along with selected articles by the participants and other friends of Aula.
Marko Ahtisaari: The Exposure of Art and Ideas
This part of the book discusses the evolution of the economy of art and ideas, with particular attention paid to the music and gaming industries. In music we can see today what may be the case for other forms of cultural creation tomorrow. Likewise, in gaming we can already see a shift from products to service-based business models, and a turn from individual play to networked communities of players co-innovating with the official creators. While these are arguably early (if not special) cases, the issues raised apply more broadly to the overall digital creation and delivery of art.
John Perry Barlow: Selling Wine Without Bottles
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confi nement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. -Thomas Jefferson
Eric Wahlforss: Caching Music, Cashing In for Music
It's long since I bought my last record. Actually, buying music over the last years has been driven by social rather than musical interests - either I bought the record of some artist whose gig I just attended, or I bought a cd or an LP for somebody's birthday just to be able to hand over something tangible. Buying music for me, the poor student that I am, has become something special - something I do to gain social credibility in some context.
JC Herz: "The gaming industry caters to the players rather than treats them like criminals"
A lot of the problems the music industry is either experiencing or creating in regard of copyright don't exist in the gaming industry. There certainly is piracy in the game industry, and there's a trade group that hates how games are pirated, but these things don't impact the gaming industry as they do the music industry. Why is that?
Discussion: The Future of Copyrighted Media
AZEEM AZHAR: Very interesting to hear Eric Wahlforss speak, because he describes himself as a thief, steals other people’s music. We’re getting into now where there’s a lot of work that builds on intellectual property in the music space. In 2002 Belgians called Soulwax put out 2 Many DJs, one-hour album sampling 179 songs. Getting copyright clearance took them well over a year. That’s clearly not to our benefit. It’s also pretty clear that anyone listening to a remix of Dolly Parton’s Nine to 2 Many DJs is not going to be deterred from buying the rest of her back-catalogue. How do we go making those arguments to increase the supply new works?
Alex Nieminen: Riding the Wave of Personal Publishing
People have found new ways to express their thoughts, ideas and opinions to other people throughout history. Nonetheless, the essence of the need to communicate hasn't changed. What ancient people did with cave paintings and stone carvings isn't that different to what people are trying to do with the internet today. The key questions about power and media have also remained the same: who has access to the media creation tools; and who has access to the audience?
Tom Coates: The Mass Amateurisation of (Nearly) Everything
Before the world of the weblog was the time of the homepage. Back before we knew any better, it was the homepage that was going to transform the world. Everyone was going to have them. They were going to democratise publishing. Together we were going to change the world. But we didn't.
Kim Weckstrom: Conversational Media
Value added services in third generation cellular networks are perceived as new opportunities to deliver big media content to consumers. Sports results, news and celebrity gossip, and many other content categories are among the new candidates for mobile delivery. Handset manufacturers and carriers have started a race to join forces with marquee media brands. The Motorola-MTV deal announced in March 2003 is just one example. If we take a look at the historical development of mass media, the migratory movement of content might not be from traditional media to mobile networks, but rather the other way around: mobile devices might dramatically reshape content formats in traditional media. But focusing on mobile networks alone can be misleading. Mobile voice and data networks represent one part of a larger universe - the hypernet.
Matt Jones: Oblaat
Humans are storytelling creatures. Opposable thumbs and our propensity for tool-making also mark us out, but our love as a species for losing ourselves in stories is very special indeed. We have entered a time when our propensity for tool-making and storymaking have coincided to incredible effect. At one end of the scale we have render-farms weaving computer-generated unrealities of Wachowskian-wonder, and at another, the wave of personal publishing enabled by the web. Mind-boggling cgi-fests like The Matrix are a paradox. They are made possible by the technology of the network: hundreds of off-the-shelf pcs connected enable the computer graphics to be rendered at speeds and qualities comparable to supercomputers of only the recent past. Yet they are underpinned by industrial, broadcast economics: a centrally distributed franchise controlling how the tale is shown, told and traded. Personal publishing on the web in comparison has been said not to be bound to any of the broadcast era’s traditional economics, or forms – the clichés of “the infinite library” abound, but the promise of intellectual diversity and complete democracy of thought in this new medium has not by-and-large come to pass. Personal websites, and now weblogs, or blogs, have lowered barriers to participation but not necessarily increased the diversity of human discourse.
Abbas Raza: On Filter Blogs
A couple of years ago, my nephew Asad gave me the utilitarian birthday present of a very high-quality Global chef's knife. I had never before realised how much an excellent knife can improve the experience of preparing food, so I was disappointed when the knife started losing its razor-like edge after a few months. I learned that most good knives are made of relatively soft steel alloys, and must be sharpened every so often using a whetstone. I bought one from Chinatown, but once home, realised the instructions were in Chinese. Here's where the internet came in. A quick search on Google quickly turned up sites that not only explained how to use the whetstone to keep knives sharp, but also provided me with such a wealth of subtle detail (the difference between a press cut and a saw cut, how to optimise edge-angles for each, what honing really is, etc.) I was forced to acknowledge a body of knowledge that had previously eluded me: Knife Edge Theory!
Clay Shirky: Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality
People writing about the social aspects of weblogging persistently note - and usually lament - the rise of a small set of webloggers, an A-list, who account for a majority of traffic in the weblog world. This complaint follows a common pattern we've seen with muds, BBSes, and online communities like Echo and the WELL. A new social system starts, and seems delightfully free of the elitism and cliquishness of the existing systems. Then, as the new system grows, problems of scale set in. Not everyone can participate in every conversation. Not everyone gets to be heard. Some core group seems more connected than the rest of us, and so on.
Discussion: Riding the Wave of Personal Publishing
KIM WECKSTROM: Will amateur media ever take the leap into sustainable businesses; or will there be a grey area where you have barter economies; or will big media start leaking into the amateur space? What are your views on this?
Jyri Engestrom: The Exposure of Everyday Life
Every day more email messages, more digital photos and more video clips accumulate on our hard drives, and publishing the stuff online has become temptingly easy. But once it's out there, and someone else makes a copy, it's too late to press undo. This essay is about the consequences of an increasing exposure of our personal lives and the technologies that we should build to encourage considerate communication. The issues are: what information should be digitally captured, who should have access to it, and how should its exploitation be regulated.
Joichi Ito: "My paper has become a place where people hang out"
Representative democracy was designed for smaller, slower-moving systems. Systems where power wasn't as efficiently aggregated to corporations and governments. Journalism is one part of democracy, and a part of the journalists' job is to keep a level of transparency in power. The problem is that the media have become part of that same power - they've become corporations. Corporations and governments do not voluntarily give up control or become transparent by nature. So what we need to think about is how democracy can be made to work better using a fast network that can't be controlled by anyone - not even the big players.
Discussion: Creating Celebrity, Protecting Privacy
JYRI ENGESTROM: Here's a comment from the Wall Street Journal, just to go back to the idea of immediate capture content, and the way it ends up via blogs or other similar forms of publishing into a space, where it can be linked to and where it can travel and be distributed. This was published in the Wall Street Journal about a week ago, and the headline is Will Camera Phones Be Used To Humiliate Us Ordinary People. It goes on to tell the story of a professional photographer. He was walking on a street in New York, and happened to see Naomi Campbell in a clothing store. While he was setting up his equipment for a paparazzi-shot, he was overtaken by a lady who had a camera phone ready. She bumped him out, and started taking her own pictures. All of a sudden we have these paparazzi-capable people walking around - mass amateurisation taken to the extreme. What sort of mechanisms need to be in place for this type of content to end up in a space where other people can link to it; is someone going to make money by establishing media that allow for ratings or other ways of filtering it; and will people actually pay to see it?
Cory Doctorow: Is iTunes Good Enough?
Since late April 2003, Apple customers have been enjoying an unaccustomed pleasure: readily available, high-quality digital music at the click of a mouse. The Apple iTunes Music store has made over 200,000 such files available for $0.99 each (discounts are offered for whole albums), and the success of the service (over 2,000,000 sales in the first 16 days) has even led people to suggest that the iTunes Store is the long-sought answer to the "problem" of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing. While the iTunes store has a lot to recommend it, if you think it's the "answer" to P2P, then you're not asking the right questions. iTunes store or no iTunes store, P2P file sharing is here to stay. So we've got two questions to answer. First, how do we get artists paid for the unauthorised file-sharing. Second, how do we halt the collateral damage on civil liberties, privacy and innovation that is piling up as a result of the legal assaults on file-sharing. The Apple iTunes Store, whatever its other features, fails to address either question.
Jim Griffin: All You Can Eat
Actuarial copyright is a simple concept: replace pay-as-you-go or pay-by-the-piece pricing models with flat fees, one price for roughly all you can eat. Essentially the route travelled by theme parks that once charged by the ride and now sell one entry fee at the door. Simple, yes, but it can sound complicated: actuarial accounting replaces actual counting. Relative revenue splits replace per unit margins. Percentages rule where boxes were King.
Closing Discussion
JOICHI ITO: I'm working with Japanese hardware companies, and I think the trick is to get them to turn against Hollywood. Hollywood is dumber than you think. If you raise your voice and attack them publicly or if you show up on their radar some other way, or if the media writes about them, or if bloggers get excited about it, they come after you. The trick is - and this is difficult for bloggers - to kind of keep quiet, and be subversive. Because they don't understand code, and this is the other thing, one of the keys is that on one hand you need to make it a political thing, and make people aware, but at the coding level you want to build into the DNA all kinds of things that allow you to move away, like you said Napster rebuilt itself, and I think once these technologies are out there, you can't stop. End of rant, but the key thing is that the heads of these companies that are currently evil, hate the fact they're evil, and you can play to that if you do it well.
The Aula Meeting of Minds '03 brought together an exceptional group of artists, pundits, and entrepreneurs to discuss the future of media, copyright, and creativity in Helsinki. More »
Contents
Part I: The Future of Copyrighted Media
» Marko Ahtisaari: The Exposure of Art and Ideas
» John Perry Barlow: Selling Wine Without Bottles
» Eric Wahlforss: Caching Music, Cashing In for Music
» JC Herz: "The gaming industry caters to the players rather than treats them like criminals"
» Discussion: The Future of Copyrighted Media
Part II: Riding the Wave of Personal Publishing
» Alex Nieminen: Riding the Wave of Personal Publishing
» Tom Coates: The Mass Amateurisation of (Nearly) Everything
» Kim Weckström: Conversational Media
» Matt Jones: Oblaat
» Abbas Raza: On Filter Blogs
» Clay Shirky: Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality
» Discussion: Riding the Wave of Personal Publishing
Part III: Creating Celebrity, Protecting Privacy
» Jyri Engeström: The Exposure of Everyday Life
» Joichi Ito: "My paper has become a place where people hang out"
» Discussion: Creating Celebrity, Protecting Privacy
Closing Remarks
» Cory Doctorow: Is iTunes Good Enough?
» Jim Griffin: All You Can Eat
» Closing Discussion