Die Vorstellung, dass Kulturen, sowohl als ganzes wie auch ihre einzelnen Manifestationen, aus Mischungen, Wandlungen, Verschiebungen, Bearbeitungen und Neuformierungen unterschiedlichster Elemente bestehen, bereitet uns Unbehagen. Das Aufkommen einer „Remix Kultur“, in der das Neue nie einfach nur neu ist, sondern immer unter explizitem Einbezug unterschiedlichster Elemente des Alten artikuliert wird, wird von vielen als Niedergang der (abendländischen) Kultur empfunden. Besonders sichtbar wird dies in der Auseinandersetzungen um das Urheberrecht, die deutlich an Schärfe zugenommen haben. In der ZEIT vom 10. Mai, 2012 sahen Autoren eine der „zentralen Errungenschaften der bürgerlichen Freiheit“ bedroht, kurz darauf bezeichnen Musikschaffende die Schweiz als „Urheberrechts-Guantánamo in Europa“, weil die relativ liberale Gesetzgebung sie ihrer fundamentalen Rechte beraube.

Was steckt hinter diesen schrillen Tönen? Nicht zuletzt eine zunehmend problematische Konzeption von Autorschaft als Urheberschaft. Diese soll im folgenden beleuchtet und mit einer zeitgemässeren Konzeption von Autorschaft kontrastiert werden.

Der Postcast des Gesprächs mit Peter Purgatofer ist online. Es ist die 10. Folge seiner lohnenswerten, ausführlichen Gespräche zu "gesellschaftlichen Spannungsfeldern der Informatik".

Das Gespräch war eines von denen, die für mich direkten Einfluss auf die Lehrveranstaltung haben werden; einige der angesprochenen Zusammenhänge waren mir in dieser Form noch nicht bewusst, und die Phrase "standing on the heads of many many dwarfs" (statt "standing on the shoulders of giants") wird mein argumentatives Handwerkszeug bereichern.

Eigentlich wollte ich mit Felix Stalder ja über Privacy, Google, Facebook und Überwachung reden, weil ich da einen wirklich interessanten und durchaus provokativen Artikel von ihm gelesen haben, aber dazu sind wir nicht gekommen, wir sind beim Copyright hängen geblieben. Ausgehend von der unglücklichen »Kunst hat Recht«-Initiative haben wir Geschichte, Funktionsweise, Veränderung und das notwendige Ende von Copyright in der heutigen Form diskutiert. Vielleicht findet sich in der zweiten Staffel (LOL) ja Zeit für noch ein Gespräch mit Felix Stalder.

Download mp3 (86 MB, 93 Min)

There is very little information about the back-end of Youtube (provided by a company called audible magic), which watermarks content to screen for copyright violation. But there's an interesting snippet by Viacom's general counsel.

Fricklas points to the recent MTV music awards, where Kanye West rushed the stage, grabbed the mic, and delivered his Internet-meme-producing-line, "I'mma let you finish, but…" Viacom quickly uploaded the evening's footage into the content recognition engines of sites like YouTube, which can then block exact uploads of the same footage or allow rightsholders to monetize it with ads. Viacom used the tool to block copies of the clip, but not without offering a solution of its own: the clip was hosted on Viacom websites and was embeddable and linkable.

It also points to a more flexible strategie: Block exact copies, earn money from other people's mash-ups (who themselves don't earn money).

Source: Ars Technica,Viacom's top lawyer: suing P2P users "felt like terrorism" November 16, 2009

From PDF to MP3: Motivations for creating derivative works
by John Hilton III.
First Monday, Volume 14, Number 9 - 7 September 2009
http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewAr...

From the conclusion:

This study indicates that individuals are willing to create derivatives because they want to help others access a given work and they want to make it more convenient to access it personally. Some derivatives, such as changing file formats, can take little time to create. Other derivatives, such as language translations, can be extremely time–consuming. However, individuals are willing to voluntarily create both types of derivatives. Nearly all those surveyed indicated they were glad that they had created derivative works, feeling like they were part of a community effort to share a given work with others. These creators of derivatives believe that as the awareness of open licenses increases others will be encouraged to create derivative works.

The study is fairly limited -- only 17 people were interviewed, and the original works were all books on the subject area -- but it's interesting nevertheless since it focusses on the motivations of people who do relatively uncreative mundane work, but still enjoy doing it because a sense of identity this creates.

NEW YORK (AP, 04.02.2009) — On buttons, posters and Web sites, the image was everywhere during last year's presidential campaign: a pensive Barack Obama looking upward, as if to the future, splashed in a Warholesque red, white and blue and underlined with the caption HOPE.

Designed by Shepard Fairey, a Los-Angeles based street artist, the image has led to sales of hundreds of thousands of posters and stickers, and has become so much in demand that copies signed by Fairey have been purchased for thousands of dollars on eBay.

The image, Fairey has acknowledged, is based on an Associated Press photograph, taken in April 2006 by Mannie Garcia on assignment for the AP at the National Press Club in Washington.

The AP says it owns the copyright, and wants credit and compensation. Fairey disagrees.

The article quotes competing opinions about whether this is fair use or not, with all the usual hair splitting.

There's an interview with Fairey where talks about all the different influences that guided his transformation of the image and how other people worked on his stuff. Which makes the fair use discussion even more absurd.

The NYT has an interesting article on people who make money with the regular video shows (apparently all comedy). Through YouTube's partner program (where people can register to have adds shown next to their video -- so that youtube can be sure not to show adds on pirated content). According the a company spokesperson, there are "hundreds of YouTube partners are making thousands of dollars a month." One of the shows as an average of about 200'000 viewers with popular episodes up to three million.

Mr. Williams, who counts about 180,000 subscribers to his videos, said he was earning $17,000 to $20,000 a month via YouTube. Half of the profits come from YouTube’s advertisements, and the other half come from sponsorships and product placements within his videos, a model that he has borrowed from traditional media.

On YouTube, it is evident that established media entities and the up-and-coming users are learning from each other. The amateur users are creating narrative arcs and once-a-week videos, enticing viewers to visit regularly. Some, like Mr. Williams, are also adding product-placement spots to their videos. Meanwhile, brand-name companies are embedding their videos on other sites, taking cues from users about online promotion. Mr. Walk calls it a subtle “cross-pollination” of ideas.

I'm doing research on the early practices of remixing and came across this gem from the late 19th century, by Eugène Bataille a member of an art group called "les incoherènts" which I had never heard of, quite frankly. Yet they did many of the things that later the dadaist and surealists would do, a full generation earlier.

Giorgos Cheliotis, assistant professor of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore done one of the, if not the, first network analysis and network visualization of a remix community, based on the ccMixter.

He writes:

One of the visualizations, consisting of all uploaded audio tracks that have been remixed and all remixes thereof, is shown below. I was very surprised by the structure, density and connectedness of the resulting network. I was expecting to see a more weakly connected set of “islands of common interest”, as defined by genre, friendships or location. Instead, before we even go into deeper analysis, the figure suggests that the creative reuse of cultural content (such as enabled by licenses like Creative Commons) leads to a very high degree of cross-pollination across authors and across works, forming a dense network of greatly enhanced collaboration and creativity through open sharing and reuse. We have posted a working paper and more cool hi-res visuals on the Participatory Media Lab wiki.

This seems to suggest that cultural -- or at least musical -- styles are becoming ever more fluid as the range of source is becoming ever more wide.

At the turn of the last century, photographic post-cards became hugely popular, among them so called "photographic phantasies" which created surreal motives, based on all kinds of visual trickery (montage, close-ups, distortions) that the public had not yet been accustomed to. Some of them were purely for entertainment, others for advertisements, or even for political purposes.

Spiegel Online has a selection of them, based on an exhibition called "stamped fantasies" at the Folkwang Museum in Essen on the subject.

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Note: Kaiser Wilhelm II. as an armed insect. French Postcard, ca. 1900.

http://www.kreidler-net.de/productplacements-e.html

music piece / performance ("music theater")

70,200 samples in 33 seconds: nightmare for GERMAN RIAA

If you want to register a song at GEMA (RIAA, ASCAP of Germany) you have to fill in a form for each sample you use, even the tiniest bit. On 12 Sept 08, German Avantgarde musician Johannes Kreidler will —as a live performance event—register a short musical work that contains 70,200 quotations with GEMA using 70,200 forms.

The Piece:

Essay by the artist Johannes Kreidler, Telepolis Article about the performance (both in German)