A Search for Comity in the Intellectual Property Wars: symposium at The New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, April 28-30, 2006 [slides, audio, transcripts]
Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld
has always answered his detractors by claiming that history will one
day judge him kindly. But as he waits for that day, a new group of
critics—his administration peers—are suddenly speaking out for the
first time. What they’re saying? It isn’t pretty
EDITOR's NOTE: Apparently, GQ saw fit to WATERMARK these images...ha ha! which adds a priceless layer of irony, however inappropriate that may be.
Does GQ think that they own the copyright? These are declassified US military documents, which means they are in the Public Domain.... GQ scooped everyone and has the exclusive slide show -- cool -- they should be bent on disseminating them far and wide.
via NYTimes, Op-Ed, May 16, 2009, by Frank Rich: {excerpts}
TO paraphrase Al Pacino in “Godfather III,” just when we thought we
were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing
so. No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the
previous administration, he can’t. Until there is true transparency and
true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year
nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new
administration’s high ambitions. [...]
There are many dots yet to be connected, and not just on torture. This Sunday, GQ magazine is posting on its Web site
an article adding new details to the ample dossier on how Donald
Rumsfeld’s corrupt and incompetent Defense Department cost American
lives and compromised national security. The piece is not the work of a
partisan but the Texan journalist Robert Draper, author of “Dead
Certain,” the 2007 Bush biography that had the blessing
(and cooperation) of the former president and his top brass. It draws
on interviews with more than a dozen high-level Bush loyalists.
Draper reports that Rumsfeld’s monomaniacal determination
to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America’s
most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to
undermine his own soldiers. But Draper’s biggest find is a collection
of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of
Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest
prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often
delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself.
These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of
the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and
they are seriously creepy.
Take the one dated April 3, 2003, two weeks into the invasion, just
as Shock and Awe hit its first potholes. Two days earlier, on April 1,
a panicky Pentagon had begun spreading its hyped, fictional account
of the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch to distract from troubling news of
setbacks. On April 2, Gen. Joseph Hoar, the commander in chief of the
United States Central Command from 1991-94, had declared on the Times Op-Ed page
that Rumsfeld had sent too few troops to Iraq. And so the Worldwide
Intelligence Update for April 3 bullied Bush with Joshua 1:9: “Have I
not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do
not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you
go.” (Including, as it happened, into a quagmire.)
What’s up with that? [...]
Important links/more info on Psyops and its history:
Dorothy Arnold Fatima Allotey Dietmar Busse Luca Buvoli Amanda Church Rico Gatson Carlo Ferraris Fay Ku Joy Garnett Angelo Filomeno Noritoshi Hirakawa Julian Jackson Mark Kostabi Wolf Khan Samm Kunce Christa Maiwald Tracey Moffatt Maria Morganti Walter Robinson Jack Sal Rebecca Smith Duston Spear Nancy Spero Jeanne Susplugas Linda Van Boven
About Transfiguration School:
Founded
in 1832 Transfiguration School is one of the oldest elementary schools
in New York City and is located on Mott Street, in the heart of
Chinatown. Dedication to education in a value centered family
environment continues to be the hallmark of Transfiguration's
reputation. The students are nurtured to excel to the best of their
abilities in their academic achievement, their development of
character, and their service to the community. Students come
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in grades one through eight post enviable test scores ranking the
school among New York City's best.
Proceeds from the
benefit will go to further the services and mission of the school.
Please go to the gallery's website to place a bid.
From the gallery
and the school (students, parents, faculty and staff), our deepest
gratitude to all the artists who so generously donated works to this
most worthy cause.
Thank you for
your support and for placing your bid.
I was lucky enough to catch Larry Lessig's talk "Copyright Wars," at the Sophiensaele on my last night in Berlin. It was sponsored by the Heinrich Boll Foundation.
I finally got a chance to watch this great documentary on my flight home from Berlin yesterday -- perfectly fitting after participating in the ECLA State of the World Week conference on the Politics of Cultural Ownership, and then catching the surprise talk by Lessig at the Sophiensaele along with some of "my" students on my last night in town.
(I'll be remixing some screen grabs from this film for my powerpoint keynote at Iona College's inaugural Conference on Intellectual Property in June -- more on that soon!)
When it comes to remix culture, copyfight and crowd-sourcing, Brett
Gaylor walks the walk. The director of “open source documentary” RiP: A Remix Manifesto
released his feature-length film under a Creative Commons license and
even adopted Radiohead’s name-your-own-price business model when he
made the movie available online.
“We’ve gone to really great lengths to make this film as accessible
as possible,” Gaylor explained in an e-mail interview conducted after
announcing the download Monday. “It’s already on the Pirate Bay, and
that’s great — it’s another delivery format. We didn’t put it there
ourselves, though; we didn’t need to. Had we gone that route, it’s
fairly likely, given the realities of the film-distribution universe,
that we wouldn’t have these other opportunities to get the film to
people who still watch TV, rent DVDs or go to movies, which is, in
fact, most people. We wanted those people to watch this movie.”
Featuring mashup artist Girl Talk and luminaries like Lawrence Lessig, Gilberto Gil and Cory Doctorow, RiP: A Remix Manifesto debuted in Amsterdam and Canada last year and in North America last month. It opens theatrically Friday in New York.
The movie’s compelling analysis of sampling, sharing and
copyfighting was pieced together over six years, during which Gaylor
shared his raw footage with other filmmakers, some of whose remixes he
spliced into the film. Given the realities of remix culture, where
there is no such thing as a final cut, Gaylor subsequently offered the
movie online as a remix experiment at Open Source Cinema, which he founded and beta-launched in 2004.
Since then, the little doc that could has nabbed awards, screened at
panels and walked the tightrope between theatrical and internet
distribution, original art and open-sourced amalgam, without falling
off.
Gaylor talks about copyfight crusaders, the trials and tribulations
of the distribution war, and the joys of messing with the media.
RiP: A Remix Manifesto director Brett Gaylor asks fans to pay what they will for his downloadable doc. Photo: Mila Aung-Thwin
Wired.com: The pay-what-you-want initiative makes
perfect sense for this film, but I’m betting it wasn’t easy to pull off
from a business perspective.
Brett Gaylor: It’s been a peculiar road to get to
the point where we could release the film as a download, because
obviously this is something we wanted to do right from the get go. But
since we have so many partners that helped us make the film, including
theatrical and television distributors, it was a delicate balancing act
to make sure the good faith they showed in making the film would be
rewarded, that we wouldn’t undercut their efforts to promote and recoup
on the film by giving it away. So we waited a while before launching
the various online permutations. The National Film Board [of Canada]
put up a chaptered version during our U.S. premiere at South by
Southwest in March, and we embedded calls to action into each chapter.
Around SXSW, we partnered with two American partners —
Disinformation for our DVD release, and BSide for the theatrical side
of things. And at the first meeting I had with them, it became clear
that we needed to go down this road. We knew the film would appear on
file-sharing networks immediately and we knew the audience for the film
wanted and expected it to be online. So knowing that, we wanted there
to be a method for those who wanted to pay to do so.
Wired.com: Are you satisfied with the arrangement so far?
Gaylor: It’s still not moving as fast as I’d
ultimately like. The pay-what-you-can is at the moment just available
for those in the U.S., while some of the other world territories do
their thing theatrically or on DVD. And we, being the National Film
Board of Canada, and our production company EyeSteelFilm, want those
territories to be able to have a chance to define their own business
model, so it’s fair. Its been a lot of tricky e-mails.
Wired.com: How has the theatrical run gone, and how are you feeling about the New York City opening?
Gaylor: The theatrical run so far has been amazing.
In Canada, it played literally coast to coast, and there is something
immensely satisfying as a filmmaker to see your film’s title on a
marquee and have people watch it together on a big screen. We went to a
lot of lengths for it to work well in that format; it’s got big sound,
beautiful graphics and animation, and the cinematographer Mark Ellam did an amazing job.
It’s also really challenging to engage the public in theaters,
because you’re playing your film to this broad demographic. We had
people in the lineups at the AMC trying to decide if they’d go see Benjamin Button
or this crazy copyright remix movie, so that was a surreal pleasure. It
also generated a ton of press for the film, mostly great, but the film
enraged the right-wing papers in the country who took a lot of umbrage
with its central themes.
Battle lines over free culture are drawn in this RiP collage, entitled Copyright vs. Copyleft.
Wired.com: Tell us about the New York screening, which coincides with a panel from the Open Video Alliance about standards and practices.
Gaylor: We’re doing a sneak preview on Friday and
then following up with the launch at the Open Video Conference, which
I’m extremely excited to participate in. I was part of the initial
planning sessions for this group back in the fall, and it really feels
like a culmination of all this disparate work that has been going on in
the free culture world for years. Filmmakers, free software geeks,
remixers, lawyers, academics — all these different people who have been
working on these parallel tracks are starting to feed their work into
one another, and I find it incredibly inspiring. So it will be an honor
to show the film there. It’s a tough crowd, too!
Wired.com: What are your thoughts on the future of open video?
Gaylor: I’m generally optimistic about it. There
are a lot of challenges, for sure: Lack of universal standards,
third-party rights, bandwidth, access for the developing world, and a
lack of basic media literacy among users. On the flip side, I think the
internet will very quickly overtake TV as the content-delivery medium
of choice, and with that comes the opportunity for a genuine
participatory experience. I think the time is now for developing the
tools, standards and practices to make sure we don’t just see TV 2.0.
Party music remix champ Greg Gillis, aka Girl Talk, fights the good copyfight in RiP: A Remix Manifesto. Photo: Andrew Strasser
Wired.com: Talk about working with Girl Talk’s
Gregg Gillis and Negativland’s Mark Hosler on this film and its various
openings. What role have both played in the evolution of remix culture?
Gaylor: Working with Gregg was a lot of fun. One of
the reasons I wanted to include him in the film is because he doesn’t
see himself as a copyright crusader. He’s a serious musician whose work
points out a lot of flaws, contradictions and challenges in current
copyright law. The fact that he’s been able to reach such a level of
success without a lawsuit has created a lot of elbow room for musicians.
When you think about Negativland,
which had a fairly major lawsuit filed against them over a decade ago,
it’s obvious that things are changing. Negativland had a huge influence
on my life. Watching it take such an intelligent, activist stance was
very inspiring, and you could tell they were taking such joy in fucking
with the media. It was something I looked at and said, “Yeah, I could
do that! I want to do that!”
Wired.com: How about Lessig and Doctorow?
Gaylor: Their writing put some meat on the bones,
and framed the debate for a whole generation of copyright activists.
For a lot of people, it was like suddenly realizing: “That’s what kind
of activist I am.”
Wired.com: You’ve said in your blog that
“theatrical distribution is a war.” Can you elaborate? And what does
internet distribution, legal and otherwise, offer in terms of an olive
branch?
Gaylor: It’s a war in that you have to do so much
to get the proverbial butts in the seats. It’s extremely costly and the
stakes are high, whereas I think the internet gives some opportunities
to speak directly to an audience. With RiP, we tried to have
the best of both worlds. It was important that folks who weren’t
exposed to these issues were able to see it, but we also wanted to try
and lower the friction as much as possible to those who were active
online and who would really see themselves in the film.
Wired.com: Now that you’ve made a film on these
issues, has your mind changed about intellectual property or ownership?
What’s the tightrope there?
Gaylor: The classic copyright ones: Providing an
incentive, while at the same time ensuring the public’s access to the
work. Ultimately, that’s what I, and most people in this movement, are
pushing for — a balance. So the film release was a lot more “free as in
speech” than it was “free as in beer,” because it was important for me
that average folks could see the film on TV or in theaters. And
eventually, after a limited term (measured in months!), the film will
fall into the public/pirate domain and be copied freely.
Wired.com: Do you envision a day when theatrical distribution is a dinosaur, and we’re all paying to stream films online?
Gaylor: We’ll see how I feel about that in a year.
The remixing is just starting to take off, and I envision a time when
these sorts of interactions will create an environment where a
theatrical screening is to filmmakers what live performances are to
musicians. The ability to create something unique for a particular
screening or event allows you to offer an added value to that audience
member, as well as have something unique that’s different from what you
can get on a DVD or online.
