[rogue_ronin]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

Oh, please.

Copyright has nothing to do with "control" of culture for anything other than commercial reasons. If you want to witness real cultural control for political reasons, keep your eye on places where it's actually happening -- e.g. China, Russia, Myanmar/Burma, Cuba, Iran etc

So commercial reasons are not political? (Because, of course, a la American Dream, all that wealth is just created by good ol' hard work, never any cheating or gaming the system!) And control is only the overt oppression of those out of governmental power? (No offering a preset set of options to folk, and claiming they have freedom to choose among them, no siree!)

Simplistic, and of course, not what I am talking about. Copyright is exactly what it says, a right to make copies, granted so that creators can profit from their creations. I have no objection to it, and in fact think it was, and is, a brilliant solution to a difficult problem.

But the limited monopoly of prior times is being transformed into a permanent monopoly, and specifically because of the fear of the internet and copying technologies, and the spread of knowledge. Licensing and control of distribution of content is what is being pursued (among many, many other things) by the business elites in the US, at least.

I live in Thailand. I know that there are worse places, with more overt oppression than most of the US. It is irrelevant that there is something worse, somewhere else. DRM, copyright extension, invasive control of digital systems; these are of a pattern with all the other abuses of power and money in the States. We discuss eBooks here, and DRM and copyright. Not insurgency, military repression and international relations.

Not to mention that it is much easier now to openly and freely distribute digital information than it ever was to distribute analog information. 20 years ago, a self-published author would be lucky to have access to any sort of distributor, let alone be able to afford the costs involved for a small print run; now, anyone with $15 and a domain name can distribute their cultural content to an international audience.

For the moment, sure. You don't think that there are people trying to put that back in the bottle? Heck, that Google search you're so proud of down below -- there are days here in Thailand, depending on what mood VIPs are in, when I can't run it at all. Ever wonder why the States has such crappy broadband, or monopolistic practices, or traffic-shaping, etc? It's not because the nice corporations are trying to help the plebes with their artistic remixin'.

I mean, try to mount a play that uses music from the 1950s without begging a corporation for permission. Maybe rewrite the dialogue to a showing of the Maltese Falcon. Or use the script from it as a source for a serious rewrite. Do anything at all with Zorro! Use commercials from the early twentieth century as material in your documentary -- try it!

You can't. The twentieth century is locked up, and so will be the twenty-first. The things that matter, that people want to talk about and use are imprisoned by the companies that "own" them.

If you try to create a new work from something sorta old, but not really old (and therefore of less relevance), you will be found. You will be punished.

The current relative ease of distribution is being overtaken by the ease of suppression. Now maybe it'll always stay ahead -- but not if folks keep thinking it's all gonna be just fine, keep trusting the guys in suits.

And I am not aware of any sort of "DRM Forces" that are trying to make everyone use DRM whether they like it or not. EMusic, Amazon, iTunes, and numerous public domain ebook distributors are DRM-free or moving in that direction. So where's the "control" that you fear so virulently?

"DRM Forces", glad you picked up on that telepathic message I was sending out. I'm hugely in fear of "DRM Forces".

The control I fear is that there are such things as EMusic, Amazon and iTunes. Too damn big, with too much power to shape choices. It will settle into a small group of corporations (pick an industry, any industry, it always does) that will protect each other from progress and outside insurgency using wealth and the concomitant political influence.

But really, beyond that, none of what you're discussing has anything to do with artists, or cultural appropriation -- the main thrust of my arguments so far.

DRM is not a political conspiracy to lock down content. It's an imposition and an annoyance, but that's really about it.

Conspiracies mostly look like conspiracies after the fact and from some distance. From up close, it's just a bunch of people who have similar goals and naturally do the sorts of things that allow them to achieve them. That those goals are reprehensible and contemptible are what makes it seem villainous -- and the fact that they have no awareness of the damage that they do daily to society is the dangerous part.

It is a symptom of a dangerous mindset, that leads to such things as creating devices that are not under the control of their tacit "owners." Devices that can report, that can be reprogrammed, that can be edited without your knowledge or permission.

It leads to the creation of laws to extend copyright to ludicrous lengths, that creates laws that make sacrosanct encryption schemes of corporations, but require citizens to relinquish theirs at the border.

Free ebooks? Let me Google that for you.

That looks like fun! Let me try: Mickey Mouse Copyright Laws

Or maybe: Corporate Apologist

B&N is under no obligation to educate people about public domain.

Sure enough. It's the bottom line after all. That's what really matters. We have to respect that because it's so noble.

Erk? Plenty of artists can access their predecessor's works. In some cases this can mean public domain works, e.g. numerous artists who are inspired by Moby Dick.

Okay, folks are making stuff from the public domain. Wow. Nice to see that you agree with me.

Moby Dick was written in 1851, before the Civil War. So, while the themes of the piece are being mined, I'm not so sure that the specifics of the piece have great relevance to people who didn't live through that century.

And of course:

Two actual events inspired Melville's tale. One was the sinking of the Nantucket whaleship Essex, which foundered in 1820 after it was rammed by a large sperm whale 2,000 miles (3,700 km) from the western coast of South America. First mate Owen Chase, one of eight survivors, recorded the events in his 1821 Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex. Already out-of-print, the book was rare even at the time.[2] Knowing that Melville was looking for it, his father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, managed to find a copy and buy it for him. When Melville received it, he fell to it almost immediately, heavily annotating it.[3]

If he had been writing under our current laws, how much you want to bet that the company that owned the rights to Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex would have sued his ass?

You have plenty of instances of movies and TV shows made 10 or 20 years ago that are re-made in the present.

Not by someone who doesn't have permission from the company that owns the rights. I mean come on, are you even trying here?

"Fan Fiction" flourishes, and is usually distributed via non-commercial methods.

I'm not talking about fan fiction. That's mostly "Mary Sue"s living out an adolescent fantasy. I'm talking about artists remixing their culture, for their profit. From stuff that should be available to them, but isn't because we keep giving more cultural assets and control to companies.

"Cover songs" are routine in pop music, not to mention that sampling existing recordings is a huge part (practically the backbone) of the musical component of hip-hop.

Are you talking about live covers, or recorded? Recorded, you're completely wrong -- they pay through the nose to make the recording, or split off a large piece of the profits. And they need permission to do it, of course. Live, you're just unlikely to be caught. And, generally, that's just mimicry, anyway, not creativity.

And hip-hop -- the whole hip-hop sampling thing is something you should read up on. Do you know how much they pay for as little as 5 seconds of another song? You're flashing back over 20 years here, to a time when it was in ascent. Read about after the lawyers got them. How what and how they sampled evolved, or disappeared. Do one of your famous Google searches on "sampling lawsuit". It's not like these guys are free to do what they like. Like, say, Beethoven.

Some artists do exert a fair amount of control over their works; i.e. only one movie company has the rights to make "Harry Potter" movies. But that's due to copyright laws, and has nothing to do with DRM.

Right, so why are you writing about it? I'm not writing about it. No one is writing about it. Artistic control over recent works of living artists is irrelevant to what we're talking about.

I'm talking about the use of DRM and the draconian laws that support it as they're being used by large corporations to carve up the cultural assets of our society between them, locking them away from the generation of creators and artists that would, in prior generations, feel no restriction about using them. Or suppressing innovation (re: printer cartridges, for instance.)

I'm talking about the extension of copyright, again by large corporations via political means, and the use of it as a bludgeon to extract control and wealth by rent-seeking.

And I'm talking about the lack of accountability of those corporations, the people who staff them and the mindset and ethics of both the companies and their people as they influence culture and law. And as a sideline, I'm commenting on how folks who don't pay much attention to what is going on, who take the mushy, middle path enable it all.

m a r