Doctorow on Swartz

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing on Aaron Swartz.

Renting knowledge: Zizek

Zizek

The possibility of the privatisation of the general intellect was something Marx never envisaged in his writings about capitalism (largely because he overlooked its social dimension). Yet this is at the core of today’s struggles over intellectual property: as the role of the general intellect – based on collective knowledge and social co-operation – has increased in post-industrial capitalism, so wealth accumulates out of all proportion to the labour expended in its production. The result is not, as Marx seems to have expected, the self-dissolution of capitalism, but the gradual transformation of the profit generated by the exploitation of labour into rent appropriated through the privatisation of knowledge. more...

Indeed.

On Father’s Day three years ago, biologist Jonathan Eisen decided he’d like to republish all his father’s papers. His father, Howard Eisen, a biologist and a researcher at the National Institutes of Health, had published 40-some-odd papers by the time that he died by suicide at age 45. That had been in Febuary 1987, while Jonathan, a sophomore at college, was on the verge of discovering his own love of biology. At the time, virtually all scientific papers were just on paper. Now, of course, everything happens online, and Jonathan, who in addition to researching and teaching also serves as an editor for the open-access, online-only journal PLoS Biology, knows this well. So three years ago, Jonathan decided to reclaim his father’s papers from print limbo and make them freely available online. He wanted to make them part of the scientific record. He also wanted, he says, “to leave a more positive presence” — to ensure his father had a public legacy first and foremost as a scientist.

How hard could it be?

More -

See also Jonathan Eisen's blog.

h/t Alan Herrell.

Protection Rackets for Philistines

Link via wood s lot

in your country

Three elevantages of an elephant

Christian Fuchs characterizes three vantages offered by participants at the conference on The Internet as Playground and Factory :

In my opinion, three positions on these questions could be identified in
the presentations and discussions at the conference. These positions
partly overlap, are partly complementary, but to a certain extent also
stand in contradiction to each other.

Representatives of the first position hold that there is a symmetric
exchange between users and Internet companies so that the latter make
money profits and in exchange provide benefits in the form of free
access for users to technologies that allow information sharing,
communication, and community building. The Internet is conceived in this
position as being a participatory system because it allows users to
become information producers and to create and share user-generated
content.

Representatives of the second position tend to argue that the
Internet is not a truly democratic or participatory space, but has
deficiencies and is shaped by asymmetric power structures. However,
there would be democratic projects and potentials of the Internet that
allow envisioning the realization of an alternative, people-centred
Internet. The representatives of this position are thus rather
optimistic and argue that projects such as for example peer-to-peer
platforms, open access, open content, free software, open source,
alternative online media, digital art projects, cyberprotest, public
online media, public access projects, etc are likely to bring about
positive changes.

Representatives of the third position see the Internet
as being shaped by asymmetric power relations. They tend to argue that
there are positive potentials and projects for an alternative
participatory Internet, but that the contemporary Internet is largely
shaped by powerful actors, especially corporations, that derive material
benefits at the expense of Internet users, commodify the Internet,
exploit Internet users, and appropriate the Internet commons. Categories
employed in this context include exploitation, class, capitalism,
alienation, enclosure, appropriation, or expropriation. The political
implication of this position is that political movements and
organizations are needed that bring about wider transformations of
society so that a commons-based and participatory Internet becomes
possible.

These three positions on the one hand partly overlap or are
simultaneously present in approaches, and on the other hand are to a
certain degree opposites that result from different political and
theoretical positions. Opposites need not and cannot always be overcome,
it is possible that they stand side by side and create productive
tensions that advance the overall field. This requires to acknowledge
that there are certain commonalities and to agree that there are
disagreements.

All the other people's writing that's fit to print

This guy* might have a point --

"Is it appropriate for a national newspaper to reprint my personal tribute to Edward Woodward as if it were an article written for them?" tweeted Wright today. "They just lifted it from my blog without asking. And cut off the entire end section about my last meeting with him … I'm not talking about quotes. Am talking about the entire article. But with edits they made that make me look ill informed and unfeeling … Perhaps they would like to send the fee they would pay the commissioned writer of such an article to Edward's memorial... ." Media Monkey

Grosso modo: To what extent are news organizations like the Times trapped in a print publisher's economic model (and, btw, of news) that is already on its way towards being outmoded? And if that's the case, how can they be relied upon to provide us with news?

*via a Jarvis tweet

Tweet

The capitalist nightmare: search is both theft and the very ontology of the web.

about 6 hours ago from web

Binding the unicorn

nothing in this agreement precludes any other company or organization from pursuing their own similar effort. The agreement limits consumer choice in out-of-print books about as much as it limits consumer choice in unicorns. Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice — fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks. Brin

The best parody is the thing itself

David Weinberger detects a certain closeness between a 2004 parody of RIAA impropaganda and, hooha, a new piece of genuine RIAA bullshit.

Bray's specific formula for abject failure

Internet repels cheesy controls. Even controls without cheese. Don't take my word for it. Let me steal Tim Bray's:

copyright policy emphatically should not rely in any essential way on the use of technological anti-circumvention measures; such reliance is a recipe for failure.

One man's intellectual property is another man's nothing

17
These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they
are not original with me,
If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to
nothing,
If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are
nothing,
If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.

This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,
This the common air that bathes the globe. #

words to run important things by

However, it is his intellectual generosity that I value above all. Cage didn't have any "students" in the strict sense, just people who worked with him. It is a measure of his greatness that those who are now composers never end up sounding like him. He gave you permission to be yourself. Anything goes, provided - as he would always say - that you take "nothing" as the base. #

nuages and soupe

je contemplais les mouvantes architectures que Dieu fait avec les vapeurs, les merveilleuses constructions de l'impalpable

"All hail, great master! grave sir, hail! I come

To answer thy best pleasure; be't to fly,

To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride

On the curl'd clouds; to thy strong bidding task Ariel and all his quality."

~~~

Phil at Gifthub - Philanthropy at the Crossroads:

To level society, NCRP, we need a bigger bulldozer. Let's abolish, for example, intellectual property. link

~~~

Gladwell, dismantling Chris Anderson and Kevin Kelly:

he’s forgotten about the plants and the power lines. link

~~~

	No more dams I'll make for fish, Nor fetch in firing
	At requiring,
	Nor scrape trencher, nor wash dish.

Et tout à coup je reçus un violent coup de poing dans le dos, et j'entendis une voix rauque et charmante, une voix hystérique et comme enrouée par l'eau-de-vie, la voix de ma chère petite bien-aimée, qui disait: "- Allez-vous bientôt manger votre soupe, s...b... de marchand de nuages?"

Ach, du Lieberman

FRPAA, public access mandate, re-introduced in U.S. Senate

Senator John Cornyn, Sens. Cornyn & Lieberman Team Up To Increase Public Access To Taxpayer Funded Research, press release, June 25, 2009.

See also: http://www.openoasis.org/

re-esemplastic rethread

Afterthought with regard to the thread in the preceding post, much of which focuses on the Berkman Center's mode of presenting talks. For me, the Berkman Center was just cited as an example of how current practice tends to put valuable intellectual property out there and then leave it to its own devices. David Weinberger explains that the Berkman's support of an author like Lewis Hyde has other facets, and that putting his lunchtime talk out there is better than not doing so, even if follow up responses to it do not get tracked.

I want to move off of Berkman to try to make a point that otherwise might be lost. Conversations don't often neatly begin and end. Some have been going on for a few thousand years. Ten years ago, it was suggested that "markets are conversations," but the definition of "conversation" remained somewhat open-ended, like the thing itself (it extended into a deep and mostly tacit theory of voice, among other things).

We in the US and elsewhere have had the habit, for perhaps too long, of assuming that conversation can be bottled up inside a piece of thingliness - a vessel like a book, a CD, DVD, digital file, painting, etc. -- and presented as a self-sufficient, closed object which can then be sold. I don't think that's what "markets are conversations" was intended to mean, but the closing of the conversation, like the enclosure of the commons, leads to improper notions of something as "a property," and then, "intellectual property."

What if intellect cannot be localized because much of what we think and say is already in a dialogic (or, allegoric) relation to other words that have been thought and said? If intellect doesn't lend itself to a local habitation and a name, then "intellectual property" is an oxymoron, or worse, a senseless grouping of phonemes.

Yet in our daily practice, as we're used to slicing up the stream of time into end-stopped segments, we share and sell moments in larger conversations, themselves moments in even larger conversations.

My point vis a vis Hyde was that even as he spoke of a commons and its loss through stages of enclosure, there was both a fidelity and a betrayal of his thinking in how it was situated. It is freely shared - qua segment, qua object, qua Berkman moment; but by bracketing it off from any further precedent or subsequent context, its necessary relation to its origin and its destiny, its power to bear witness to further repercussions of its own impact, is denied.

This is not merely a Berkman phenomenon; it's a representational phenomenon deriving from a scheme that believes intellectual objects have an integrity which in fact they do not possess.

Twitter might be a helpful gloss: no one on Twitter is the source of any given conversation, nor is it the case that a conversation takes place between the same interlocutors. Conversations are witnessed, piled in on, diverted, commented upon, rejoined, attitudinalized, left for dead, by a series of folks who may never directly speak to one another. On Twitter, conversation might be said the be the soul of indiscretion.

So, where the roots of ideas of intellect and property are being seriously examined, the representation of moments in their conversations would do well to explore how they can bring forward the links among themselves and their exfoliations.

Desideratum: A reverse wordcloud - where the words in a post that are cited, linked to, retweeted, etc., grow and (somehow) contain links to posts that link to them. Sort of like Eliot's Tradition and the Individual Talent, where later texts within the tradition contain and esemplastically transform earlier ones.

Hyde and seek

Interesting talk by Lewis Hyde on the commons - thanks to Jon "Wirearchy" Husband for the pointer. David Weinberger live-blogged it here.

What is proper to Hyde's talk - just the talk? It seems the Berkman Center thinks so. The Berkman offers a ton of interesting talks on its site. What's not here is any follow-up discussion, exploration. Where does responsibility toward ideas and their dissemination begin and end?

Means and ends of immaterial production

"I don't feel a loss of control over my own productive activity when I contribute to a Wikipedia entry that may benefit others. On the other hand, I might be more likely to feel this loss of control when I discover, say, that details of my online activity have been collected, sorted, and packaged as a commodity for sale to people who may use it to deny me access to a job or to manipulate me based on perceived vulnerabilities, fears, and other personal details about my mental or physical well being." ~ Mark Andrejevic on the IDC list.

This line of inquiry could help clarify intellectual property confusion as well as the thinking of "exploitation."

this and not that

"It is equal measure document and conversation.”

and platform.

IntelProp thems contentz, boyz.

unlike Bing, it conceives of communication before consumption.

Ach Ja, Die Stoffe ist der Geist

Sigh

"Intellectual property has to be just as protected as material property. All creativity will be destroyed if you have a mentality that everything should be free."

The Good German Parliamentarian ist soooo richtig. The elan vital of lobbyists, middlemen, advertising yeggs, their bartenders and valets could seriously be impaired by the dissolution of their host.

Towering Germanic intellects such as these might benefit from a talk with Steve Albini.

Update: The problem with music - dead link on textism.