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]
DENVER
-- The manner in which copyright law is being applied to academe in the
digital age is destructive to the advancement of human knowledge and
culture, and higher education is doing nothing about it.
That is
what Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard University law professor and renowned
open-access advocate, told a theater of higher ed technologists
Thursday at the 2009 Educause Conference here. In his talk, Lessig
described how digital and Web technology has exploded the conditions
under which copyright law had been written.
“If copyright law, at its core, regulates something called ‘copies,’
then in the analog world… many uses of culture were copyright-free,” he
explained. “They didn’t trigger copyright law, because no copy was
made. But in the digital world, very few uses are copyright-free
because in the digital world … all uses produce a copy.”
The
paradigm for copyright law enforcement emerged out of this "analog
world" as a way of ensuring authors were remunerated for their
contributions to culture, thereby creating an incentive to make further
contributions and drive the progress on human art and discovery
forward, he said.
Times have since changed, said Lessig, but the letter of the law hasn’t.
Copyright
law was originally intended to protect those who create for profit
(Lessig used the example of recording artist Britney Spears). But
academics also create original works, he said, and they are — or should
be — motivated by a desire to advance human knowledge, not line their
pockets. Therefore, sealing their work behind copyright barriers does
no social good.
“If there’s a business model of science, or a
business model of education,” Lessig said, “that depends upon sharing,
depends upon sharing resources in common and that builds upon that
common set of resources — how does the paradigm case help that business
model?”
It does to an extent, Lessig allowed. Absolute open
access does weaken the incentive to create insofar as scholars crave
some tangible remuneration for their commercially published works. The
solution to the problem, he said, probably lies in hybrid systems such
as Creative Commons, of which he is a board member. Creative Commons
licenses allow authors to designate what portions of their work can be
copied and how it may be used, thereby avoiding the “thicket” of the
copyright system — where, Lessig said, things are never nearly that
simple.
Lessig cited several examples of how copyright law in academe has
hampered the pursuit of knowledge: neurologists who were unable to
aggregate data for a large-scale brain-mapping project due to copyright
restrictions; filmmakers who faced staggering costs re-clearing
copyrights on images they used in a civil-rights documentary series
when they wanted to release it on DVD. He even recounted a recent
incident in which he had been using a medical information Web site to
try to diagnose his ill daughter, when he noticed a note that said
portions of an article he was reading had been redacted under copyright
law.
“What we need to do is to act to avoid this thicket,” he
said, “at least where it’s clear this thicket doesn’t give us anything
good.”
Academics — presumably stakeholders in the effort to
advance knowledge — have been uncharacteristically and disturbingly
silent on the copyright “insanity” that has befallen the information
trade, Lessig said.
“We should see a resistance to imposing the
Britney Spears model of copyright upon the scientist or the educator,”
he said. “…But if you would expect that, you would be very disappointed
by what we see out there in the scientific and and education
communities.” Scholars, he said, have allowed the copyright
conversation to be steered by lawyers and businesses who are not first
and foremost to intellectual discovery.
To them, Lessig delivered a simple message: “Stop it.”
Unfortunately, not everyone has access to the scholarly literature,
despite advances in communications technology. The high cost of
academic journals restricts access to knowledge; in some fields, prices
can reach $20,000 for a single journal subscription1 or $30 for an individual article.2
Despite these high prices, authors of scholarly articles are not paid
for their work. The profits from these publications go solely to the
publishers of the journals. A vast amount of research is funded from
public sources – yet taxpayers are locked out by the cost of access.
Learning and inquiry are impeded when scholars lack access to
fellow researchers’ work, and when students lack access to the work of
scholars before them.
At the same time, digital technologies have opened new opportunities
for research. New tools facilitate faster discoveries, speed the
development of new technologies, and accelerate the progress of
science. Patients could have access to the latest medical research,
citizens could evaluate scientific information on environmental
impacts, and developing countries could apply the most recent
scholarship to public health and development efforts.3 But access barriers leave these opportunities under-explored.
Open Access is an alternative to the traditional closed, subscription-access system of scholarly communication. Open
Access makes the results of scholarly research available online for
free, immediately upon publication, and removes barriers for scholarly
and educational re-use.4 Entire journals can be open-access,
or an author can provide Open Access to an individual article by
posting a copy on an openly accessible Web site. All forms of
open-access publication depend on rigorous methods of quality control,
including peer review.
Open Access has achieved remarkable success to date: more than 4,000 open-access journals are published today;5 millions of articles are made available via open-access repositories;6 and dozens of policies from universities and research funders support Open Access;7 but still more needs to be done.
We, the undersigned student organizations, hereby endorse Open
Access as the preferred model for scholarly communication, because:
(a) Open Access improves the educational experience.
All students, regardless of their institution’s ability to afford
subscriptions, should have access to the full scholarly record, whether
for assigned reading, research for a term paper, or literature review
for a dissertation.
(b) Open Access democratizes access to research. Students
from around the world should have full access to the scholarly
literature, along with patients looking for medical information and
citizens seeking to learn about the environment or other scientific
topics.
(c) Open Access advances research. Open Access
helps researchers be more productive by facilitating access to the
latest studies. Open Access also enables new techniques for
computer-assisted research, paving the way for scientific advancements.
(d) Open Access improves the visibility and impact of scholarship. Today’s
student is tomorrow’s scholar. Recent studies suggest that Open Access
articles are downloaded and cited more frequently than articles that
are accessible only through subscription.8 Open Access fulfills researchers’ professional responsibility to maximize the impact of their research.
We hereby:
Call upon UNIVERSITIES to support Open Access
We believe universities should adopt policies that ensure Open
Access to their faculty’s research, such as the policies adopted at
Harvard University9 and Stanford University.10
Call upon GOVERNMENTS AND RESEARCH FUNDERS to support Open Access
We believe research agencies should adopt policies that ensure Open
Access to publicly funded research, such as that of the National
Institutes of Health11 and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.12
We believe charitable funders likewise should adopt policies that
ensure Open Access to their funded research, such as that of Autism
Speaks13 and the Canadian Cancer Society.14
Call upon RESEARCHERS to support Open Access
We believe researchers should publish in Open Access journals,
and/or deposit their peer-reviewed manuscripts in Open Access
repositories.15
Commit to support Open Access in our activities
We will undertake activities, in our membership and on our
campuses, to educate students about Open Access and to engage them in
efforts supporting Open Access.
American Medical Student Association (June 10, 2009) Student PIRGs (June 10, 2009) Students for Free Culture (June 10, 2009) Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (June 10, 2009) California Institute of Technology Graduate Student Council (June 10, 2009) Trinity University Association of Student Representatives (June 10, 2009)
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.
Legal
scholar and copyright reform advocate Lawrence Lessig was unhappy to
discover that one of his presentations on YouTube was hit with a bogus
DMCA takedown notice from Warner Music. Lessig intends to fight back
and give Warner some schooling on fair use.
By
Ryan Paul
| Last updated April 29, 2009 9:05 AM CT
Lawrence Lessig, the well-known legal scholar and copyright reform advocate who founded Creative Commons, was surprised to discover that Warner Music issued a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice against one of his presentations on YouTube.
Lessig, who is a leading expert on the legal principle of fair use and an outspoken critic of DMCA abuse, intends to fight the takedown notice.
Warner Music just flunked out of common sense 101 and is about to get
some unpleasant remedial schooling from the irate professor.
The growing volume of infringing content on YouTube has made it a
major target for DMCA takedown notices. Unfortunately, the content
producers that are flooding the site with takedowns are rarely taking
adequate steps to ensure the validity of their claims and are
indiscriminately targeting videos that fall within the boundaries of
fair use.
In some cases, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and other organizations have stepped in
and filed lawsuits against takedown abusers in an effort to protect
fair use. Such efforts are time-consuming and often fraught with
difficulty. It's pretty clear that the content companies aren't really
getting the message, as their claims continue to descend into increasingly ludicrous territory.
Big content believes
that it should be permissible to issue takedowns whenever it wants,
regardless of whether the content is fair use, and that there should be
no consequences or liability for doing so, even when the basis for the
takedown is clearly bogus.
Lessig is strongly committed to educating the public, lawmakers, and
the content industry about the importance of protecting fair use from
DMCA abuses, so it seems likely that he will take advantage of Warner's
mistake to raise awareness of the issue. The fact that the notice was
issued at all serves as yet another reminder of how easily the barrage
of poorly considered DMCA takedowns can hit innocent bystanders.
Hat tip to TechDirt for first noticing the tweets.
On Tuesday, April 7, the National Federation of the Blind will protest in front of the Authors Guild headquarters, at 31 East 32nd Street, New York City. The protest criticizes the Authors Guild's bullying
of Amazon to get them to shut of the Text-to-Speech functionality on
the Kindle 2. The Authors Guild demands that blind people wanting this
added and enabling technology must either submit to a burdensome
special registration system and prove their disabilities or pay extra
for the text-to-speech version.
Great statement from Shepard Fairey on art, appropriation and fair use that speaks truth to power. I hope the haters who shout "plagiarism" will read it and think twice. The comments are fun too!
I'm sure a lot of people are wondering about my case with the AP
over the Obama HOPE poster. I can't talk about every aspect of the
case, but there are a few things I want to discuss and points I'd like
to make.
Most importantly, I am fighting the AP to protect the rights of all
artists, especially those with a desire to make art with social
commentary. This is about artistic freedom and basic rights of free
expression, which need to be available to all, whether they have money
and lawyers or not. I created the Obama image as a grassroots tool
solely to help Obama get elected president. The image worked due to
many complex variables. If I could do it all over again, I would not
change anything about the process, because that could change the
outcome. I am glad to endure legal headaches if that is the trade-off
for Obama being president.
No disrespect was intended to photographer Mannie Garcia, but I did
not think (and do not think) I needed permission to make an art piece
using a reference photo. From the beginning, I openly acknowledged
that my illustration of Obama was based on a reference photograph. But
the photograph is just a starting point. The illustration transforms
it aesthetically in its stylization and idealization, and the poster
has an altogether different purpose than the photograph does. The AP
photo I used as a reference, which I found out much later was taken by
Mannie Garcia, (which was actually this one,
not the one being circulated in the press) was a news photo that showed
George Clooney and Barack Obama attending a 2006 panel on the genocide
in Darfur. My Obama poster variations of "HOPE" and "PROGRESS" were
obviously not intended to report the news. I created them to generate
support for Obama; the point was to capture and synthesize the
qualities that made him a leader. The point of the poster is to
convince and inspire. It's a political statement. My Obama poster does
not compete with the intent of, or the market for the reference photo.
In fact, the argument has been made that the reference photo would have
faded into obscurity if it were not for my poster which became so
culturally pervasive. The Garcia photo is now more famous and valuable
than it ever would have been prior to the creation of my poster. With
this factor in mind, it is not surprising, that a gallery in NYC is now
selling the Garcia photo for $1,200 each. As I understand it, Garcia
himself did not even realize the poster was created referencing his
photo until it was pointed out to him a full year after the poster came
into existence. Mannie Garcia has stated in the press that he is an
Obama supporter pleased with the poster result.
I did not create the Obama poster for financial gain. The poster was
created to promote Obama for president, and the revenue from poster
sales was re-invested in more posters, flyers, stickers, etc.., and
donated to charity, including the Obama campaign. A free download of
the Obama image was available on my website, which should provide
further evidence of the desire to disseminate the image, not to benefit
financially.
Lastly, I m very saddened to see many people try to demean my Obama
poster as being "stolen" or that because I used a photo I "cheated".
As far as the idea of the image being "stolen", I would love to have
the clout to command portrait sittings from world leaders, but for me
and most artists out there, that is not an option. For lots of artists,
even licensing an image is out of the question financially. Should
artistic commentary featuring world leaders be stifled because of
copyright of the reference images even when the final artistic product
has new intent and meaning? Reference is critical to communication, and
in my opinion, reference as a part of social commentary should not be
stifled.
A writer asked me why I "didn't just draw Obama from my
imagination". My response was that I needed to make my image look like
Obama, who is not an imaginary character. I know few people who could
capture a convincing likeness of close friends or even their own family
members from their imagination or memory. I use my own family members
as models, taking my own photos of them to illustrate from - VIVI LA REVOLUCION and COMMANDA. Were Obama a member of my family I would have employed this technique.
Another suggestion someone made was "why not splice two or three
photos together and illustrate from that?" Well, though a direct match
would have been harder to find, with an image as popular as the HOPE
poster, internet sleuths would probably have found the references and
maybe I'd be facing two or three lawsuits. This leads to the next
question: is illustrating from a photograph "cheating"? I studied art,
illustration specifically, at one of the most prestigious art schools,
The Rhode Island School of Design. At RISD I was taught to draw from
life, to draw from photo references, and to appropriate and
re-contextualize imagery. All of these techniques had historical
precedents which I learned about. Here are some great examples of famous painters working from photo references, and not always their own photos.
I have respect for, and have frequently collaborated with,
photographers, but I do not think permission, or a collaboration is
warranted in every case where an artist works from a photo reference. I
collaborate with photographers because I WANT to, not because I believe
I HAVE to. Usually, when I work directly with a photographer as a
collaboration, I do so because I am building upon, rather than
transforming their original intent. Of course, as with everything, the
definition of transformation and fair use is somewhat subjective. I'm
an artist, not a lawyer, so I'd prefer to see more latitude for
creativity even though I do respect intellectual property.
This case has raised many issues, including the use of references in
art. Some of my earlier works have been attacked by some as
"plagiarism". I think reference is an important part of communication
and it has been common practice in the art world. When I flipped
through the Christie's auction house catalog from November 2008 I found
many pieces that are based on reference or appropriation. Most are
selling for over $100,000. Some are more clever than others, but these
are all works that are at auction being taken very seriously. Take a look.
If the AP wins their case, every Obama art (or any other politician)
that was based on a photo reference that was not licensed would be
rendered illegal. Here are just a few that were an important part of
the political discourse during this election cycle. I also think art
that is critical of leaders that neither the subject or the
photographer approve of need to be a legal form of expression. I think this Bush image is a perfect example.
This is a blog post that speaks more to the legal issues in the case. Thanks for reading.
Lawrence Lessig and I have been writing about the link between publisher contributions to members of the House Judiciary Committee and their support for H.R. 801 -- a bill that would end the newly implemented NIH public access policy
that makes all works published as part of NIH-funded research freely
available online. On Friday, House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers
(D-MI) -- lead sponsor of the bill -- responded in a letter on Huffington Post.
The first several paragraphs of Conyers' letter contain an outline
of his record as a progressive politician. But no record, no matter how
distinguished, is an excuse for introducing an atrocious piece of
legislation that sacrifices the public interest to those of a select
group of publishing companies.
Conyers would have us believe that it is just a coincidence that his
bill would erase a government policy vehemently opposed by publishers
who have contributed to his campaigns. But his response to our letter
-- like the bill itself -- is taken straight from the publishers'
playbook.
Conyers trots out the publishers' two favorite lines of attack
against the policy: 1) that the NIH policy is taking a right (in this
case a copyright) away from publishers, and 2) that making
taxpayer-funded research available to taxpayers will bankrupt
publishers and thereby destroy science.
Both arguments are specious and reflect fundamental ignorance about
how science and scientific publishing work. The accusation that the
policy is bad for science because it will drive publishers out of
existence is the more serious one, so I will deal with it first. Here
is what Conyers wrote:
... on the narrow merits of the issue, Professor Lessig and
proponents of "open access" make a credible argument that requiring
open publishing of government-funded research information furthers
scientific inquiry. They speak out for important values and I respect
their position.
While this approach appears to further and enhance access to
scientific works, opponents argue that, in reality, it reverses a
long-standing and highly successful copyright policy for
federally-funded work and sets a precedent that will have significant
negative consequences for scientific research.
These opponents argue that scientific journals expend their own,
non-federal resources to manage the peer review process, where experts
review academic publications. This process is critical because it
provides the quality check against incorrect, reckless, and fraudulent
science and furthers the overall quality and vigor of modern scientific
debate. Journal publishers organize and pay for peer review with the
proceeds they receive from the sale of subscriptions to their journals,
thereby adding considerable value to the original manuscripts of
research scientists.
The policy Professor Lessig supports, they argue, would limit
publishers' ability to charge for subscriptions since the same articles
will soon be publicly available for free. If journals begin closing
their doors or curtailing peer review, or foist peer review costs on
academic authors (who are already pay from their limited budgets
printing costs in some cases), the ultimate harm will be to open
inquiry and scientific progress may be severe. And the journals most
likely to be affected may be non-profit, scientific society based
journals. Once again, a policy change slipped through the
appropriations process in the dark of night may enhance open access to
information, but it may have unintended consequences that are severe.
Far from being the reckless act Conyers portrays, the NIH policy is
actually fairly conservative. It requires that papers that arise from
NIH funded research be made freely available, through a website run by
the National Library of Medicine, within 12 months of publication --
not immediately. This delay between publication and free public access
was put in precisely because it will allow publishers to recoup, and
profit from, their investment in publishing by charging for access to
the freshest material.
Science moves far too fast for active researchers to afford a year's
delay before reading papers in their field. Thus universities and other
research institutions have to maintain subscriptions to journals even
if their year-old content is freely available. Many journals, realizing
that their revenue comes primarily from new material, already make
their complete contents freely available online after a year or less.
And these journals have not reported a wave of canceled subscriptions
-- or any appreciable loss of revenue. So both empirical data and
publisher actions refute Conyers' central argument against the NIH
public access policy.
Conyers' argument is also clouded by several misconceptions about
scientific publishing. He correctly identifies peer review as the most
important role of scientific journals. But he is incorrect in his
assertion that publishers make a tremendous investment of "their own,
non-federal resources" in the process of peer review. While publishers
supervise peer review, the process itself is carried out voluntarily by
members of the research community. Scientists receive no remuneration
whatsoever when they review a paper -- they do it instead because they
recognize that peer review is central to the scientific process.
Since the salaries of most American scientists are paid, directly or
indirectly, by the US government, the peer review process is actually a
massive federal subsidy to publishers, whose very existence is based on
the tens of billions of annual taxpayer dollars invested in scientific
research. That even after they have had a year to profit from this
taxpayer largesse some publishers are still unwilling to grant the
public access to copies of papers they paid to produce and review is
unconscionable.
And while Representative Conyers' publishing friends may have
convinced him that there are severe unintended consequences that will
arise from the NIH public access policy, the scientific community --
who has been debating this issue for over a decade -- strongly
disagrees. [read on...]
Mr. Conyers says
I "cross the line." He says I label his motivations for introducing
this bill as "corrupt," that I accuse him of "shilling," and that I
"dismiss" his bill as nothing more than a "money for influence scheme."
On the basis of this "one piece of legislation," he says I have waved
away "forty years of fighting against special interests." He insists
that he has "earned a bit more of the benefit of the doubt" and "that
there is far more to the 'open access' story than [my] muckracking tale
lets on." (Mike Eisen and my original posts are here and here. My blog post is here.)
First, as to substance: As others have shown without doubt, there is
absolutely no "more to the 'open access' story" than my and Mike
Eisen's criticism let on. (See the rebuttals especially here and here.)
This bill is nothing more than a "publishers' protection act." It is an
awful step backwards for science -- as 33 Nobel Prize winners, the
current and former head of the NIH, the American Library Association,
and the Alliance for Taxpayer Access have all said. And Mr. Conyers
knows this. Practically the identical bill was introduced in the last
Congress. Mr. Conyers' committee held hearings on that bill. The "open
access" community rallied to demonstrate that this publishers' bill was
bad for science. Even some of the cosponsors of the bill admitted the
bill was flawed. Yet after that full and fair hearing on this flawed
bill, like Jason in Friday the 13th, the bill returned -- unchanged, as
if nothing in the hundreds of reasons for why this bill was flawed mattered to the sponsors.
Of course, no one will believe this, but this event was actually
scheduled before the AP threatened Shepard Fairey. It is the last of my
REMIX events, which was the last of my copyright/cyber books. Tickets here.
Maria Gilbert of the Getty Museum started an interesting (and, I’m
sure, evolving) conversation this morning about institutional “brands”
on Twitter. The discussion was sparked, in part, by a recent post from Ari Herzog assessing the Museum of Modern Art’s
own online presence. Twitter, and specifically how to use it in an
institutional capacity, has of late been a hot topic at the Met
as well, and the time seems right to lay out some of my own thoughts on
the subject. Welcome to my New Year’s resolution to write more here at
kovenjsmith dot com. Woot.
I think that the process of trying to figure out how to use
so-called “social media” platforms like Twitter and Facebook has
essentially accelerated the disintegration of what we used to call “the
institutional voice”; that single, monolithic, thoroughly-vetted voice
that spoke to you, the visitor, from a given museum’s publications,
press releases, and Web site. As more and more low- or no-cost
publishing platforms have become available over the last decade, we’ve
seen an erosion of this single voice, as individuals from institutions
are able to publish more quickly without going through a traditional
vetting process. The question for museums is then: when that voice is
gone, what replaces it?
I find, on Twitter, that institutional or company feeds are always
less interesting than personal feeds. They’re informative, to be sure,
and often highlight things about a given institution (a work of art, an
upcoming program) that I might not have otherwise known, but they lack
that certain personal angle that makes for a really good feed.
The problem is that a feed that speaks for an entire museum must, by
its very nature, often remove the personal and/or provocative from its
tweets in order to appeal to the broadest possible constituency.
Therefore, the problem is less “what should we write about?” and more “from what perspective should we write?”
I agree with Tyler Green
that the primary focus of a museum feed should be Art, but an
institution can’t be as free with its opinions as an individual can be.
If an art museum were to say something like “this portrait looks like
Billy Dee Williams” in its Twitter feed (and let’s hope that happens),
I’d have to wonder, as a follower, whose perspective that is. Does
someone in the marketing department think that? Does the curator? An
educator? The Web site director? As an institution, then, we’re reduced
to posting somewhat bland tweets–daily highlights of works from the
collection (something better suited to an “Artwork of the Day” desktop
widget), or advertisements about half-price admission days (which
probably belong in a marketing newsletter).
However, this problem of perspective goes away if you replace that single feed with a diversity of feeds from your staff.
Think about it. Friendships in the virtual space are not much
different from friendships in real space. I’ll never be “friends” with
MoMA, no matter how much I may love it as a museum, but I could easily
imagine being friends with MoMA’s technology people, its curators, its
educators, or its conservators. MoMA The Institution might not feel
free to say that a particular work in its collection is sub-par, but a
curator on MoMA’s staff might be willing to tweet at length about why
that work is sub-par. I may not agree with that perspective, but it’s
still an interesting one to read (and potentially joust with as well,
via @ replies). As a follower, I’m not engaging with the institution
per se, I’m engaging with one of many possible viewpoints
from within that institution. This would have the end result of
actually connecting me to the institution in a much more powerful (and
one would hope, lasting) way.
This doesn’t mean that a single institutional feed has no value. In fact, as Tim O’Reilly points out in a recent post, he finds that his own Twitter feed often works as a kind of switchboard, connecting his followers to individual feeds within O’Reilly Media.
One could certainly imagine an institutional feed taking this role,
functioning almost as a party host introducing various guests to one
another.
Although it seems likely that Twitter is about to break into the mainstream,
we’re all still really trying to figure out how best to use it. It’s
not a blog, it’s not e-mail, it’s not a Web site–it’s something
entirely different that, I believe, has the potential to fundamentally
change the way museums interact with their public. In “Remix,” Lawrence Lessig
states that “…despite the rhetoric of the content industry, the most
valuable contribution to our economy comes from connectivity, not
content. Content is the ginger in gingerbread–important, no doubt, but
nothing like the most valuable component in the mix…” It will be
interesting to see if this will become true for museums as a result of
engagement with platforms like Twitter.
h/t to Joy Garnett (from the Goldwater Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art) for the Lessig quote.
Koven J. Smith
is the Musical Director of cornfield dance, as well as a producer of
interactive technologies at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and an
adjunct professor of Information Technology for the Visual Arts at New
York University. With a background in electroacoustic music, formal
composition, and new media design, Koven's work explores the
intersection of multiple art forms and technology.
