Leicht redigiert und mit anderem Titel versehen (Wo sind die Piraten?) veröffentlicht als Kommentar der Anderen, Der Standard, Print und Online, 28.04.2010

Die World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) hat den 26. April zum Welttag des Geistigen Eigentums ausgerufen. Das dem Urheberrecht verwandte Copyright erlebt zudem heuer den dreihundersten Jahrestag seiner Konstitution. Doch viel zu feiern gibt es nicht. Das Urheberrecht wird immer ambivalenter, da es sich heute weniger um ein Urheber- sondern mehr um ein Industrierecht handelt. Es dient weniger denn den Interessen der Kreativen, sondern denen der verwertenden Industrie, deren Lobbies immer stärker die Entwicklung der Gesetze bestimmen. Die dadurch ausgelöste Dynamik ist fatal. Abgesehen von wenigen Stars, verhilft das Urheberrecht KünstlerInnen kaum zu relevantem Einkommen. Die Musikerin Courtney Love fasste auf der Digital Hollywood Online Entertainment Conference das Problem folgendermaßen zusammen: „Heute möchte ich über Piraterie sprechen. Was ist Piraterie? Piraterie ist der Diebstahl künstlerischer Arbeit ohne dafür bezahlen zu wollen. Ich spreche hier nicht von napsterähnlicher Software. Ich spreche über die Verträge der Major Labels.“ Aber nicht nur bei der Vergütung der KünstlerInnen hapert es, auch in der kulturellen Produktion selbst, stellt das Urheberecht immer größere Hürden dar. Das reicht vom Dokumentarfilm wo Aufnahmen nicht nutzbar sind, weil die Hintergrundmusik aus dem Radio eruiert und lizenziert werden müsste, bis zur breiten Masse der InternetnutzerInnen, deren alltägliches Samplen und Remixen jederzeit zu Strafverfolgung führen kann.

Originally written for the nettime-l mailing list which lead to a follow-up discussion, here, and here.

In early 2007, Steve Jobs (of all people!) concluded in his 'Thoughts on Music' that "DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work."¹ Soon after, one label after the other started selling music in "unstricted"² formats, and there was much celebration about the death of DRM. And, there were lots of reasons see things this way: Digital Rights Management Systems were very unpopular with the public. People hated them. Plain and simple. And they were technically unstable, because the encryption, once released to the public, was regularly broken within a few days. And attempts to re-engineer the entire computer operating system to make DRM possible -- Windows Vista -- turned out be be equally unpopular and fraught with internal problems.

Fast-forward three years. Increasingly, our data is up in the clouds. The decentralized architectures for digital production of the 1990s are being phased-out. Google is pushing an operating system (Chrome) were all data is being stored online and virtually nothing remains on the computer. The device which individuals own is being reduced to a relatively dumb terminal. The apple IPad, it seems, is optimized for consumption (and thus hailed as the savior of the old, consumer oriented media industries).

This text, which tries to summarize and situate the concepts and practices of the digital commons, is my contribution to the "Dictionary of the Human Economy". The editors explain in the introduction:

We want to bring to the attention of English readers some currents of economic theory and practice that have flourished in non-Anglophone countries over the last two decades, particularly in France, Brazil, Hispanic America and Scandinavia. To these we have added significanst work by English-speaking authors that was sidelined during neoliberalism‟s heyday and deserves to find a wider audience now. We have brought these strands of new thinking together under the umbrella concept of “the human economy” which refers to an emphasis both on what people do for themselves and on the need to find ways forward that must involve all humanity somehow.

Definition

The digital commons comprises informational resources created and shared within voluntary communities of varying size and interests. These resources are typically held de facto as communal, rather than private or public (i.e. state) property. Management of the resource is characteristically oriented towards use within the community, rather than exchange in the market. As a result, separation between producers and consumers is minimal in the digital commons.

Zwei Interviews und eine Buchbesprechung
1

Wie das Web 2.0 «Öffentlichkeit» neu definiert
Mit Youtube, Facebook, Google und Co. verändert sich der Begriff der Öffentlichkeit rasant. Der angesehene Soziologe Manuel Castells hat mit seiner Studie «Communication Power» eine umfassende Analyse der Veränderung der Kommunikation und der medialen Öffentlichkeit durch das Web 2.0 vorgelegt. Der Medientheoretiker Felix Stalder, der selber zu den Netzpionieren gehört, kennt Castells Thesen - und diskutiert mit Barbara Basting darüber.
www.drs2.ch Reflexe vom Fr, 9.4.2010, 28. Min.

2

“Deep Search” Politik des Suchens jenseits von Google
Die digitale Explosion konfrontiert uns seit Jahren mit einem regelrechten Daten-Tsunami. Die Suchmaschinen sind es, die uns helfen, diesen Tsunami zu beherrschen. Das Verheerende: Was wir über die Welt wissen, erfahren wir fast immer durch Google. Anders gesagt: Was Google nicht findet, existiert für viele Menschen nicht. Mit dieser Situation und ihren Implikationen beschöftigen sich Medientheoretiker, Kulturwissenschaftler, Soziologen und Politologen im Sammelband “Deep Search – Politik des Suchens jenseits von Google”. Philipp Albers hat das Buch gelesen.
http://breitband.dradio.de 26. März 2010, 10 Min.

Wenn man diese Besprechung mit der Renzension der FAZ vergleicht, muss man sich fragen, wo heute wirklich die Qualitätsmedien liegen.

Seit bald 150 Jahren soll das moderne Urheberrecht (UHR) den Umgang mit „Werke[n] der Literatur, Wissenschaft und Kunst“ (§ 1, des aktuellen deutschen Urheberrechtsgesetz) regeln. Rund 100 Jahre zurück reichen die Anfänge der avantgardistischen Subversion bürgerlich-romantischer Konzeptionen von „KünstlerIn“ und „Werk“, die auch dem UHR zugrunde liegen. Durch die Einführung des Prinzips Zufall, die Verwendung bestehender kultureller Artefakte, die Betonung der Rolle des Unterbewussten, oder die direkte Intervention in soziale Prozesse wurde die Vorstellung des autonomen, aus sich selbst schöpfenden Subjekts von allen Seiten untergraben. Dessen ungeachtet propagierte der expandierende Kunstmarkt genau dieses KünstlerInnenbild. Vor diesem Hintergrund ist es fast erstaunlich, dass das Urheberrecht selbst erst sehr spät im Feld der Kunst direkt relevant wurde. Der erste große Gerichtsfall fand 1990-92 statt. Der Photograph Art Rogers verklagte den Künstler Jeff Koons, weil dieser nach Vorlage einer Postkarte von Rogers (Puppies, 1986) eine Skulptur (A String of Puppies, 1988) anfertigen ließ und in der Ausstellung Ushering in Banality präsentiert hatte. Im Kern ging es um die Frage, ob es sich hierbei um eine legitime künstlerische Strategie (die sich auf das US-amerikanische Recht des fair use berufen könne) oder um eine unautorisierte Werkbearbeitung handle. Koons verlor den Prozess sowohl in der ersten als auch in der zweiten Instanz und sah sich bald mit einer Fülle von Klagen konfrontiert, die konzeptuell vergleichbare Werke betrafen.

Why Wikipedia articles vary in quality.

Most of the existing research on Wikipedia is at the aggregate level, looking at total number of edits for an article, for example, or how many unique contributors participated in its creation," said Ram, who is a McClelland Professor of MIS in the Eller College.

"What was missing was an explanation for why some articles are of high quality and others are not," she said. "We investigated the relationship between collaboration and data quality."

Wikipedia has an internal quality rating system for entries, with featured articles at the top, followed by A, B, and C-level entries. Ram and Liu randomly collected 400 articles at each quality level and applied a data provenance model they developed in an earlier paper.

"We used data mining techniques and identified various patterns of collaboration based on the provenance or, more specifically, who does what to Wikipedia articles," Ram says. "These collaboration patterns either help increase quality or are detrimental to data quality."

Ram and Liu identified seven specific roles that Wikipedia contributors play.

Starters, for example, create sentences but seldom engage in other actions. Content justifiers create sentences and justify them with resources and links. Copy editors contribute primarily though modifying existing sentences. Some users – the all-round contributors – perform many different functions.

"We then clustered the articles based on these roles and examined the collaboration patterns within each cluster to see what kind of quality resulted," Ram said. "We found that all-round contributors dominated the best-quality entries. In the entries with the lowest quality, starters and casual contributors dominated."

I'm reading: The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism, by Jonathan Lethem, (Harper's Magazine, Feb.2007). Which is how influences flow freely in art and most artists have no problem admitting this (why should they?). Today's strong claims of copyright are based on what he calls "source hypocrisy" (denial of one's sources, refusal to allow one's work to become the source for someone else). In most cases, artists themselves are less hyporcritics than the corporations, trusts, foundations administring their work. Lethem also mentions that Bob Dylan never refused the permission for a sample.

A large, diverse society cannot survive without property; a large, diverse, and modern society cannot flourish without some form of intellectual property. But it takes little reflection to grasp that there is ample value that the term “property” doesn't capture. And works of art exist simultaneously in two economies, a market economy and a gift economy. The cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange is that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people, whereas the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection. (....) But a gift makes a connection. There are many examples, the candy or cigarette offered to a stranger who shares a seat on the plane, the few words that indicate goodwill between passengers on the late-night bus. These tokens establish the simplest bonds of social life, but the model they offer may be extended to the most complicated of unions—marriage, parenthood, mentorship. If a value is placed on these (often essentially unequal) exchanges, they degenerate into something else.
(....)

• X-axis: licensing permissiveness (freedom score)
• Y-axis: volume (number of CC-licensed items) per capita
• Bubble size: absolute volume
• Region colors: Orange -> Europe, Blue -> Asia, Green -> South Americ

more information: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Metrics

The US is missing.

Source: Andy Updegrove: A Big Victory for F/OSS: Jacobsen v. Katzer is Settled Friday, February 19 2010

A long running case of great significance to the legal underpinnings of free and open source/open source software (F/OSS) has just settled on terms favorable to the F/OSS developer.  The settlement follows a recent ruling by a U.S. Federal District Court judge that affirmed several key rights of F/OSS developers under existing law.
<..>
Significantly for the F/OSS cause,  the court found in favor of Jacobsen (the F/OSS developer) on three key points:

1.  The code in question was sufficiently original to be entitled to copyright protection.  While not unique to F/OSS code, this was a legal issue on which Jacobsen had to prevail in order to assert claims under copyright law.

2.  While the JMRI Project made its code available for free, there was "evidence in the record attributing a monetary value for the actual work performed by the contributors to the JMRI project," thus laying the basis for monetary damages.

3.  The removal of the copyright and authorship data contained in the pirated code was a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, thus providing a basis for suit for that action in violation of the JMRI license.

Point 2 is particularly important.

A range of applications, from predicting the spread of human and electronic viruses to city planning and resource management in mobile communications, depend on our ability to foresee the whereabouts and mobility of individuals, raising a fundamental question: To what degree is human behavior predictable? Here we explore the limits of predictability in human dynamics by studying the mobility patterns of anonymized mobile phone users. By measuring the entropy of each individual’s trajectory, we find a 93% potential predictability in user mobility across the whole user base. Despite the significant differences in the travel patterns, we find a remarkable lack of variability in predictability, which is largely independent of the distance users cover on a regular basis.

Source: Chaoming Song; Zehui Qu; Nicholas Blumm, Albert-László Barabási: Limits of Predictability in Human Mobility, Science 19 February 2010: Vol. 327. no. 5968, pp. 1018 - 1021