The Freesound Project
The Freesound Project aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, … released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License.
Visit this page for interesting links
Remix Commons
Remix Commons is a network of free culture projects in the UK. Their aim is to get artists (working with music, video, images and text) to come together and share their work, be inspired by each others’ work, and ultimately to create “remixes”.
The more we can create and remix, the more enriching those communities become. When you can set-up a band with your mates, or run a music night in a local club, or make some video clips – be they funny or serious – you’re doing something profoundly social and human. This creative ability is far more important than the ability to simply access cultural items cheaply. If we just want to be a nation of consumers, a culture based around buying goods and becoming couch potatoes, then the ability to consume really matters a lot. But if we want to be vibrant, interesting people, sharing culture in communities, we need to think more about the ability to create, which implies access.
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/01/23/remix_reading_cclice.html
“U.S Path to Wealth and Power: Intellectual Piracy and the Making of America” – Doron Ben Attar
With the signing of the 1783 peace accord with England which officially ended the American revolution, the United States and Great Britain became political and economic adversaries. The founders believed that American political independence depended on economic self-sufficiency, which meant that the young nation needed to reduce its vast consumption of imported English manufactured goods. The new defiant American mood, heightened by war time demands for military industrial goods and by the post-war desire to prove the compatibility of republican government and a high standard of living, viewed technology piracy as the premier tool for industrial development. Perhaps I should do what historians do, and tell a story: In the second week of November, 1787, Finneaus Bond who was the British Consul in Philadelphia, received a visit from two English nationals. They knocked on his door frantically. One was Thomas Edimsor, a cotton merchant from Manchester, and the other was Henry Royal. Henry Royal was a calico printer from Cheshire County. Both men were greatly agitated. They feared they were going to be lynched by the American mob, lead by the leading citizens of the city. They looked to the envoy of his Brittianic Majesty, for shelter. And their story, went as follows: In 1783, concomitant with the signing of the Anglo-American peace accord, an English artisan by the name of Benjamin Phillips, decided he was going to make money in America. He purchased, and sent to America, four machines for the production of textile. One cotton machine, and three spinning machines. There were of course restrictions, he was not officially allowed to do so. But he sent them to America on a British ship called the 'Liberty', in the guise of them being Wedgewood china.
(Extracted from Doron Ben Attar's public lecture at the Contested Commons/
Trespassing Publics Confernce, organised by Sarai-CSDS and
Alternative Law Forum in Delhi. 6, 7 and 8 January 2005)
For the full text, go to the Sarai Reader-list Archives or click here
Levelling and 9/11
On September 11, 1648, the Levellers submitted the Large Petition with 40,000 signatures to Parliament. The deed was decisive because it set in motion the terrible events that culminated four months later in the execution of Charles Stuart, King of England, and because the Levellers, the first popular democratic political party in European, if not world, history, announced their opposition to the enclosures of the commons, or the privatization of the English land. Read more at http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=02/09/09/1225239
(from a Sarai Internal mailing list)
GNU/Linux
Milestone on the Way to the GPL Society
Stefan Merten
http://www.oekonux.org/texts/meilenstein/english.html
(from a Sarai Internal mailing list)
An interview with John Frow
A link to an interview with John Frow on his take on how the internet and digital technology have changed/impacted social and economic life.
http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/MotsPluriels/MP1801jf.html
(from a Sarai Internal mailing list)
Software Patenting Timeline
Here is a good link to material on Software Patenting, esp. in the European Union context. http://swpat.ffii.org/ For a quick timeline on Patents, see: http://swpat.ffii.org/swpat/log/history/index.en.html
(from a Sarai Internal mailing list)
Arts Project Moving Image Contest
Arts Project Moving Image Contest was organized in the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, Duke University School of Law (april, 2004)
The contest asked entrants to create short films demonstrating some of the tensions between art and intellectual property law, and the intellectual property issues artists face, focusing on either music or documentary film.
To watch the shortlisted films, go to
NINE-TENTHS OF THE LAW: THE ENGLISH COPYRIGHT DEBATES AND THE RHETORIC OF THE PUBLIC DOMAIN by Mark Rose: A Review by Avinash Kumar
While surveying the debates that took place over the copyright laws in England in the eighteenth century, this paper argues the following: as the debate around the copyright laws grew shriller and moved more in favour of the booksellers and the authors, the anti-monopoly position which included people like John Locke did not represent an affirmative defense of the public interest so much at it did a criticism of literary property. Rose’s central critique is that this debate did not also involve the formulation of the claims of the civil society. There was also no strong legal discourse of public rights as compared to the legal discourse of property rights. In the event, it merely confirmed the notions of property rights, the idea of the individual genius on a very weak ground of the notion of public utility.
To begin with, he cautions against the idea of a pre-copyright idyllic regime where everything was common property, ‘from literary stuff to the landed estate’. He argues on the basis of earlier works that while people like Shakespeare freely plagiarized works from other writers, booksellers and printers were guided by the existent rule under which books could be only printed under the orders of the crown or the Stationer’s Company which then would be authorized to assign specific guild member to go ahead with the printing.
Taking a cure from Habermas’ idea of the origin of the ‘public sphere’, Rose argues that with the onset of the eighteenth century, ‘copyright and the public domain were born together’. People like Samuel Johnson argued against the idea of perpetual copyright on the grounds that common people would be deprived of the works and also the work would suffer due to lack of ‘editing’ which an open printing regime would have brought forth. What he recommended was a reward plus a fixed years’ exclusive right to the author.
1709 Statue of Anne (the first of its kind) recognized authors as owners and also provided for term limits—twenty-one years for books already in print and fourteen years for new books, with the possibility of a second fourteen years if the author were still living at the end of the first term—But at this stage booksellers defying this statute and still treated Milton and Shakespeare as their perpetual properties. According to another major figure in this debate Peter Jaszi, Statute of Anne while invoking the idea of authorship was mainly meant to protect the interests of the publishers. With the rise of print and mass readership, the profits became too huge to be ignored by involved publishing houses, readers and the authors alike. What went as a call to protect writers’ interest in effect served the interest of the monopoly-seeking publishers. It was only through a pamphlet of 1704, that Daniel Defoe became the first to suggest that the right to prosecute book piracies ought to belong, in the first instance, to authors themselves.
The statute led to six decades of legal struggle over the question of literary property and two important cases:
In the King’s Bench case of Miller v. Taylor a divided court upheld the author’s common-law right and the perpetuity. It was followed by Donaldson v. Becket, where the House of Lords overturned Miller and declared that literary property was limited to the terms specified in the Statute. Following this for the first time, classic works became free for anyone to print and booksellers published redesigned volumes of ‘classics’ emphasizing the ‘national character’ of these publications e.g. a multi-volume Shakespeare, Bell’s British Theatre (21 vols.), Poets of Great Britain etc. It is interesting in this regard the way nationalism began to interpolate with the idea of mass printing in what was a growing commercial market.
Rose also stresses on the need to differentiate between what he calls ‘the fact of the public domain and the discourse of the public domain’—in the context what he argues is that the construction of a legal language to talk about public rights in writings could not even develop properly.
Though, according to him, there was a legacy of strong anti-monopoly sentiments which however excluded printing privileges from such legal discourse. This was critiqued by John Locke particularly in relation to Latin classics on the grounds of a possibility of better edited, corrected editions. It was premised upon the ideas of Enlightenment which believed in the circulation of knowledge. Locke at the same time did include the question of ‘saving the private property’ while ‘encouraging the learned men to compose and write useful books’.
Following Anne’s Statute, Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice treated the copyright question primarily as a matter of property rights—hence advocating ‘author’s natural and perpetual copyright’. Opposing him was Justice Joseph Yates who argued that while an author had a property in his manuscripts, the act of publication necessarily constituted a gift to the public. At the same time there was a threat that public would be deprived of a work in case of perpetual and absolute monopoly. But for Rose, Yates concentrated more from the point of view of nature of property rather that talking about ‘literary commons’. Hence the debate was only indirectly a struggle over knowledge and public domain and essentially an argument over the theory of property. Another perspective came from Lord Camden who while briefly touching upon the anti-monopoly and Enlightenment themes did not emphasize upon the destructive nature of a perpetual monopoly and instead focused on the meanness of writing for money. He was clearly against the idea of professional authorship in this regard. Robert Southey, one of the more popular Romantic poets of his age, argued against this on the grounds that many books achieved celebrity status slowly and even after the author’s death, hence his/her family needed to benefit. Wordsworth, on the other hand, justified copyrights as ‘just reward for a national treasure’. It is interesting to note in the context that element of nationalism is used both for and against the copyright as mentioned earlier.
In fact in Germany, where the copyright debate started much after England, one of the major figures participating in the debate was Fichte who gave a theoretical underpinning to the idea of the copyright by dividing a work/book in to two aspects: material and form. While the former constituted the content of the book, which according to Fichte became the property of the reader once the work was sold, it was the latter which could be uniquely author’s own, in terms of arrangement of words, phrases and ideas. For him, once it was changed it would become somebody else’s. And it is here that the issue of copyright could be invoked in favour of the author. Fichte, as we know, was also one of the pioneer romantic thinkers who laid the foundations of German nationalism. Actually, in this context, it would be perhaps a worthwhile exercise to locate the issue of copyright from the ideological as well legal perspective. The ideological part then would include not only the notions of individualism, but also the coming of a notion of new public as well the new collectivities like ‘national communities’.
Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi have actually located some of these debates by historicizing the notion of the ‘author’ as it emerged out of eighteenth century. According to them, till the beginning of the eighteenth century, there were two conceptions of the writer in circulation: one, as a craftsman, where he was a skilled manipulator of predefined strategies for achieving goals dictated by his audience especially in courts; second, an author understood as inspired, where he was seen as ‘inspired’ perhaps even by God. Yet both these conceptions externalized the genesis of a work where an author could equally be ‘the subject of independent forces, for the inspired moments of his work—not the writer’s sole doing, but instead attributable to a higher, external agency’.
It was with the commencement of the eighteenth century that the new theorists departed in two ways: ‘minimizing the element of craftsmanship in favour of the elements of inspiration and they internalized the source of inspiration, that is, not coming from outside but from within the writer himself. Inspiration came to be seen as ‘original genius’…with the consequence that the inspired work was made peculiarly and distinctively the product—and the property—of the writer’.
The print also intervened in another manner where the printed word replaced the ‘written one’ in terms of assertion of a certain kind of authority which then could be utilized for the assertion of author’s copyright.
It was with this idea that somebody like Wordsworth fully articulated the ‘birth of the original’ and demanded for perpetual copyright on these grounds. It is rather ironical as has been shown in some other works like the one by Jack Stillinger where Wrodsworth’s packaging as an original genius had a lot to do with collaborative exercise undertaken by the likes of Coleridge and Dorothy Wordsworth.
The debate detailed by Mark Rose over various litigations concerned with copyright issue brings forth one important aspect in this larger context..
(posted on a Sarai internal mailing list)
From T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’
“One of the facts that might come to light in this process is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity.[…]
“The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: for my meaning is, that the poet has, not a “personality” to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality.”
For the full text, click here
REMIXANA 