Course:Legal Constraints on Digital Creativity/Course Notes/01. Community
CREATIVE MODELS & COMMUNITY CONSTRAINTS (extra-legal)
A. FROM DOCUMENTS TO DATA: What happened?
- Application (metaphorically) of the 2nd law of thermodynamics re entropy – universe increasingly going from orderly to disorderly. Why would this basic law of the universe not apply in some way to everything including media?
- Wired for Culture (Mark Pagel)/Everything is a Remix – culture developed on a trajectory of “cumulative cultural evolution”, a bustling of ideas successively building and improving on others. Sounds like the evolution of new digital media. So those ideas become the raw materials of growth, which of necessity would almost have to be through being further remixed.
- The 3 “C’s” of media evolution from a user standpoint:
- Consume (watch-c); TV, film, radio, music, books, magazines, newspapers.
- Connect; telephone, email, text, Skype.
- Create; multiplayer gaming, blog, vlog, Twitter…..
- There is a fourth “Silent C” which though not strictly connected to an ethical framework, is quite determinative of all creative success however defined. That is – “Craft” – the effort that goes into the journey from Inspiration, to Idea, to Incarnation; and now to Interactivity (the 4 “I’s”?).
- Most current evolution is that from rich media to rich interactivity….
- Consequence: Digital redefines everything (all knowledge) into digital terms. If you don’t exist in & embrace the digital world, you will not exist in it – publish or perish;
- Note other descriptions/metaphors: Atoms/Bits.
B. FROM DOCUMENTS TO DATA: What does it mean?
Documents Data
Analog Digital
Reaction-based (newspaper, tv, film) Proactive (Twitter, games)
Scarcity-based (limited availability-film, spectrum) Abundant (Google, Facebook)
Restricted Expressive
Copy Create
Consumer the key User
Counterfeiting Piracy
C. FROM DOCUMENTS TO DATA: What are the problems?
- The Internet scales everything: Trust, Distrust, Privacy, Piracy, Concern, Action. It scales. Period. “Bruce Schneier: How The Internet Allows Us To Scale Trust [TCTV] tcrn.ch/yEBDWt
- The contradictions between everyone wanting to be a celebrity/creator and the technology allowing for this in unprecedented ways, while at the same time also wanting privacy and not to be defamed. As Spock would say: “Fascinating”.
- Techdirt: Too Much Copyright: This Generation’s Prohibition
“………..the key point really comes at the end from Ben Huh, and it’s a point that we’ve been raising for years:
‘This disconnect between the public’s view of copyright and fair use and what should and should not be prosecuted vs. the copyright maximist’s view of the law is our generation’s prohibition. The law no longer reflects what the society believes to be true. And I think that if they continue to go down that route, they’re going to see even bigger backlash.’
This is such a key point, and one we’ve raised over and over again. The disrespect for copyright law today is not because people are uneducated or immoral. It’s because copyright law just doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s so disconnected from reality and societal norms, that people can’t respect it. The fact that the industry’s response to this is to push to make the laws even more ridiculous and push them further away from people’s natural tendencies, is only going to serve the opposite purpose of the maximalists’ intentions.”
D. VIDEO-GAME MODS: A Prism Through Which To See
- Background Story: For the longest time my favorite videogame was Grand Prix Legends, or GPL as it was affectionately called. GPL was a real creation of the 1967 Formula One racing season and was made by Papyrus. Upon release it sadly was both a financial and a critical failure. Subsequently and over time however, GPL grew into the standard for hard-core automotive racing sims. The game was released to less than stellar acclaim in 1997 and was still going strong because of the community and supported it, modded it and built on it a decade later. No aspect of the initial game was left unchanged and unmodified by the community. Over time unfinished or never included features such as online play, AI sliders, extraordinarily accurate and detailed cars and tracks, improved physics, new and beautiful menu art, additional classes of cars and racing series all came into the game. Being part of the GPL community was almost like being a collector. What would the forums say is being released today or was coming tomorrow? An unbelievably dedicated and talented group of coders and modders emerged to lead our community and to satisfy our unending thirst for everything to do with the vintage Formula One simracing. They were heroes to us in the community, it’s these modders – every effort magically setting a higher standard than what went before.
- One evening while browsing the GPL forums as I always did a striking and out of place post appeared. It was from a woman in New Zealand who was looking for some help. She wondered whether there was anyone on the forums who could assist. Her father it seemed was aging and ill. He had driven the Tasman racing series “down under”, which was essentially a cousin to the Formula One World Championship, and one in which many Formula One drivers participated. She had heard about Grand Prix Legends and our community, and wondered if there might be a way to modify the game so as to create a simulation of the car her father raced in, the tracks he raced on and the drivers he raced against. Though not easy, any member of the community of any long-standing knew this was indeed possible with considerable effort. As I remember it, it took mere minutes for some of the truly extraordinarily talented artists and monitors to reply to the daughter, and proceed to take the discussion to a more dignified place off-line. There was no further follow-up or discussion online. In my imagination I am committed to believing it all happened just as it should, with a fully reengineered version of GPL true in every detail to the season the father raced being made available to the family as an act of kindness. It was probably in and around that time and because of what I had both seen and imagined, that I came to feel in my heart that modding was an act of creation which is should be rewarded and not restricted.
- All of which also again affirm that the act of creation is anything but solitary. In this story who are in fact the “creators”? Is it the daughter, the modders, the makers of GPL, the father, or I for witnessing through a particular and romantic lens? In fact we all are. In fact, equally, none of us are. Creation is a paradox and a prism. The light of creativity is refracted, moved and ultimately changed and set off to the next interaction – the next prism. There is a new act of creation in each and every new interaction. Though it may currently be a legal fiction that modding is not a breach of copyright, philosophically it appears to be an even greater fiction to suggest that creativity can lie within any one individual or be attributed in that way. Reasons for that fiction must prominently include a wish for convenience and order, or at least their appearance. An appearance very much put to the lie by the outward metaphor of the digitally interconnected world of the Internet. An outer world that only makes more manifest and identifiable the constituent elements of how creativity manifests through often-unseen interactions. Why this process is often so invisible from our conscious sight is perhaps a bit of a mystery.
- Modders as artists – mods are in fact a way the gamer can play their “theory of the game”. The mod often ends up making the original game “disappear”. See presentation on “Games and 21st–Century Literacy” by James Paul Gee, Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies, Arizona State University @ MOMA’s Contemporary Art Forum: Critical Play—The Game as an Art Form – Thursday, May 17, 2012, 6:00 p.m. http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/events/13985
- “Cloned game experiences can lead to innovation” - Nathaniel Dziomba – June 10, 2012
http://bitmob.com/articles/clones-copies-and-rip-offs
E. CREATIVE RIGHTS
1. The Right to Play: Expressive & Creative Freedoms
Threshold: “Text of the Costa Rican ruling declaring Internet as a fundamental right” http://t.co/a4kXWBKD
@arstechnica: Facebook “likes” aren’t speech protected by the First Amendment-Bland v. Roberts: http://t.co/fv3ztgvJ
2. Rights to Mod & Transform: Intellectual Property as shield, sword and conundrum
- @techdirt: Study: Sharing Patents, Rather Than Blocking Others, Encourages Innovation And Market Success http://t.co/szMLbIs9
“The research, by economist Gilad Sorek, found that the free-licensing of patents to competitors actually increases the likelihood that a company’s profits will grow as the result of a particular innovation. In other words, contrary to what many believe (that the best thing to do with a patent is to restrict others from using it), this research suggests that openly sharing that information for free actually tends to help the patent holder in the long run by opening up new opportunities that increase their profit.
“The study, to be published in a forthcoming issue of Economics Letters, shows that the benefits of giving up patent protection outweigh the risks of surrendering a share of the market. By inviting further research, Sorek says, the original innovator is able to stimulate demand for its product. The company may lose a share of the market, but its product ultimately becomes more valuable as a result of the extended innovation effort.””
- Twitter Announces Innovator’s Patent Agreement, Gives IP Control To Engineers And Designers – TechCrunch
- iiNet wins landmark copyright case against Hollywood studios | The Australian | The ruling finally gives certainty to internet providers around Australia that feared being exposed to millions of dollars in damages claims by copyright owners unless they took on the daunting task of policing it.
- “The biggest IP battle in memory: FOSS Patents: List of 50+ Apple-Samsung lawsuits in 10 countries”
http://www.fosspatents.com/2012/04/list-of-50-apple-samsung-lawsuits-in-10.html?m=1
- Michael Geist – “India Passes Digital Lock Rules That Link Circumvention to Copyright Infringement”
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6508/125/
- “Defensive Patent License created to protect innovators from trolls: The first rule of Patent Club is you do not sue members of Patent Club.” – Jon Brodkin – June 12 2012
“The idea is if you want to be part of this network of defensive patent people, you are committing that all of your patents, every single thing you’ve done, will be available royalty-free to anyone who wants to take a license, if they commit to only practice defensive patent licensing,” Schultz said today in Boston at the Usenix conference on cyberlaw issues. “As long as they don’t offensively sue anyone else in that network, everything’s cool.”