Joseph R. Lamonde

Transcription

Is it a good thing or a bad thing that it's becoming harder maybe impossible to encapsulate information in discrete units and sell them? The simplistic answer, the answer that you get from Hollywood and the recording industry is - it's a disaster. This is not a film about piracy. The recording industry's been freaked out. The movie industry's been freaked out. The suits don't know how to think about this. This is not a film about sharing files. They put a lot of money into making those movies making that music. So they want to get something back. but the way they're trying to stop the copying now it's definitely not working. It's a film that explores massive changes in the way we produce distribute and consume media. Ever since Napster, the music industry has been trying to kill file sharing Napster was this huge global party of everybody suddenly had access to the largest music library in the world. And what'd they do? Well, they went after Napster and they shut it down. Napster, Aimster, Audiogalaxy. Grokster. IMash - Kazaa All of these companies were sued. And in the end - essentially - the entertainment industry succeeded in driving that technology out of the mainstream commercial field. The industry's turned to suing individuals, hundreds of individuals ultimately thousands, now tens of thousands of individuals for downloading music without permission. Existing players are trying to make certain things happen that in retrospect will seem kind of barbaric. If you're talking about the distribution of cultural material, of music and cinema, well there is a long history of whatever the incumbent industry happens to be, resisting whatever new technology provides. Cable television in the 70's was viewed really as a pirate medium. All the television networks felt that taking their content and putting it on cables that ran to peoples houses was piracy pure and simple. The video recorder was very strongly resisted by Hollywood. There were lawsuits immediately brought by the movie studios who felt in fact, who said publicly that the VCR was to the American movie industry what the "Boston Strangler" was to a woman alone. New information technologies provide Hollywood and the recording industries with fresh channels on which to sell products, but they can also open unplanned possibilities for their consumers. The sheet music people resisted the recordings. The first mp-3 player by Diamond-Rio sort of the initial company long before the iPod, they were met with a lawsuit. The possibilities suggested by Peer-to-Peer technologies have prompted the entertainment industries to react in an unprecedented way. Traditionally, copyright infringement has just been a civil matter. If a copyright owner catches you doing something wrong, they can sue you and force you to pay them money. Criminal infringement liability, the ability to prosecute you and throw you in jail, has been reserved for circumstances of commercial piracy, circumstances where someone has made 500 copies, is selling them on the street as competition for the real thing. Well, in recent years, copyright owners have not been satisfied with that. They've wanted to reach out and have criminal recourse against people who are engaged in non-commercial activities. We recognize and we know that we will never stop piracy. Never. We just have to try to make it as difficult and as tedious as possible. And we have to let people know there are consequences. If they're caught. What they've sought to do, is sue a few people. Punish them severely enough that they can essentially intimidate a large number of other people. It's really as though they decided to intimidate the village they would just chop of the heads of a few villagers, mount those heads on pikes as a warning to everyone else. The fact that the DVD writer is the new weapon of mass destruction in the world is primarily for the fact that a 50 billion dollar film can be reproduced at the cost of literally 10 or 15 cents. There is a fantastic quote by Mark Ghetty, who is the owner of Ghetty Images, which is a huge corporate image database, and he's one of the largest intellectual proprietors in the world. He once said intellectual property is the oil of the 21st century. It'a a fantastic quote, you could condense it to one word that is, war. He declared war with that saying we will fight for this stuff these completely hallucinatory rights to images, ideas, texts thoughts, inventions Just as we're fighting now for access to natural resources. He declared war. Strange kind of war. I would take it serious. But it's ridiculous and serious at the same time. This is not the first war that has been fought over the production, reproduction and distribution of information. People like to see the contemporary and the digital era as some kind of a unique break. And I think the important point to make here is not to see it as a unique break, but really to see it as a moment which accelerates things that have already happened in the past. Before the arrival of the printing press in Europe in the 1500's, information was highly scarce and relatively easy to control. For thousands of years, the scribal culture really hand-picked the people who were given this code to transmit knowledge across time and space. It's an economy of scarcity that you're dealing with People are starved in a sense for more books There are images from the 16th century of books that were chained, and had to be guarded by armed guards outside a heavy, heavy door because it was very, very dangerous for people to have access to that. Print brought with it a new abundance of information threatening the control over ideas that had come with scarcity. Daniel Defoe tells of Gutenberg's partner Johann Fust, arriving in 15th century Paris with a wagon load of printed bibles. When the bibles were examined, and the exact similarity of each book was discovered, the Parisians set upon Fust accusing him of black magic. About to change everything, this new communications technology was seen as the unholy work of the Devil. All of the emerging nation-states of Europe made it very clear that they would control information flows to the best of their ability. The printers were the ones who were hunted down if they printed the forbidden text. So, more than we think of persecuting the authors but it was really the printers who suffered most. As print technology developed in Europe and America its pivotal social role became clear. Printing becomes associated with rebellion and emancipation. There's the governor of Virginia, Governor Berkeley who wrote to his overseers in England in the 17th century saying, "Thank God we have no printing in Virginia," "and we shall never have it as long as I'm governor." This was a reaction to the English civil war and the pamphlet wars and they were called paper bullets in that period. The basic idea of censorship in 18th century France is a concept of privilege, or private law. A publisher gets the right to publish a particular text, that is deny it to others, so he has that privilege. What you have is a centralized administration for controlling the book trade, using censorship and also using the monopoly of the established publishers. They made sure that the books that flowed throughout a society were authorized - were the authorized editions - but also were within the control of the state within the control of the king or the prince. You had a very elaborate system of censorship but in addition to that you had a monopoly of production in the booksellers' guild in Paris. It had police powers. And then the police itself had specialized inspectors of the book trade. So you put all of that together and the state was very powerful in its attempt to control the printed word. Bot not only was this apparatus incapable of preventing the spread of revolutionary thought, it's very existence inspired the creation of new, parallel pirate systems of distribution. What is clear is that during the 18th century the printed word as a force is just expanding everywhere You've got publishing houses printing presses that surround France in what I call a "fertile crescent" dozens and dozens of them producing books which are smuggled across the French borders distributed everywhere in the kingdom by an underground system. I have a case of one Dutch printer who looked at the index of prohibited books and used it for his publication program because he knew these were titles that would sell well. The pirates had agents in Paris and everywhere else who were sending them sheets of new books, which they think will sell well. The pirates are systematically doing I use the word, it's an anachronism market research. They do it I've seen it in hundreds and literally thousands of letters. They are sounding the market. They want to know what demand is. And so the reaction on the part of the publishers at the center is, of course, extremely hostile. And, I've read a lot of their letters. They're full of expressions like buccaneer and private and "people without shame or morality" etc.. In actual fact, many of these pirates were good bourgeois in Lausanne or Geneva or Amsterdam and they thought that they were just doing business. After all, there was no international copyright law and they were satisfying demand. There were printers that were almost holes in the wall or down in the - if they were printing subversive material they could sort of hide their presses very quickly. People used to put them on rafts and float down to another town if they were in trouble with the authorities. It was very movable. In effect, you've got two systems at war with one another. And it's this system of production outside of France that is crucial for the Enlightenment. Not only did this new media system spread the Enlightenment, but I won't use the word prepared the way for the Revolution. It so indicted the Old Regime that this power - public opinion became crucial in the collapse of the government in 1787-1788 In Paris, the Bastille had been a prison for pirates. But in the years before the Revolution the authorities gave up trying to imprison pirates. The flow of ideas and information was too strong to be stopped. And I think that's the dramatic change that was affected by the printing revolution That all of a sudden the emergence of a new reading public the emergence of an undisciplined reading public which were not subject to the same norms of reading or the same norms of relation to knowledge as it was in the past. It was a dramatic shift. The fundamental urge to copy had nothing to do with technology. It's about how culture is created. But technology of course changes what we can copy how quickly we can copy and how we can share it. What happens when a copying mechanism is invented? And you can take the printing press or you can take bittorrent. It shapes people's habits. It gives people completely new ideas how they could work how they could work together how they could share what they could relate to what their lives could be. There's no way that an absolutist political system can totally suppress the spread of information. New media adapt themselves to these circumstances. And often, they can become even more effective because of the repression. Why should improvements in our capacity to copy be linked to social change? Because communicating so fundamental to what we do in the world is itself an act of copying. The one technique that brought us to where we are is copying. Sharing is at the heart of in some senses, existence. Communication, the need to talk to someone, is an act of sharing. The need to listen to someone is an act of sharing. Why do we share our culture? Why do we share language? Because we imitate each other. This is how we learn to speak. This is how a baby learns. This is how new things come into society and spread through society. Basically what keeps us together is that we copy from each other. When the spoken word was our only means of communication, we traveled far and wide to deliver it to others. Later, as we began to communicate in written form, Armies of scribes multiplied our ideas. Our urge to communicate is so strong that we have always pushed the tools available to us to the limit. then gone beyond them, creating new technologies that reproduce our ideas on previously unimaginable scales. In 1957, the USSR launched Sputnik. In response, the American government authorized massive blue-sky spending on science and technology overseen by a new Advanced Research Projects Agency It was ARPA developing the ideas of visionary computer scientist Joseph Licklider. that came up with the concept of networking computers. It's been hard to share information. For years. The printing press of course was the great step into sharing information. And we have been needing for a long time some better way to distribute information than to carry it about. The print on paper form is embarrassing because in order to distribute it you've got to move the paper around And lots of paper gets to be bulky and heavy and expensive to move about. The ARPAnet was designed to allow scientists to share computer resources in order to improve innovation. To make this vision work, ARPAnet had to allow each machine on the network to reproduce and relay the information sent by any other. A network in which peers shared resources equally was part of a massive shift from the corporate and commercial communications systems of the past - in which messages radiated from a central point or down through a hierarchy. There was no center And no machine was more important than another Anyone could join the network, provide they agreed to abide by the rules, or protocols on which it operated. Ever since, really, the 60's onwards packet switch networks are the predominant style of communications used today. Increasingly so in both voice and data. The western world was transforming itself from the rigid production systems of Fordism to fluid work, lean production and just-in-time delivery. A post-centralized, friction-free economy needed a a communications system just like this. We didn't build in the 1970's networks of hierarchs. The computers that existed in the world were all multimillion-dollar machines and they basically related to one another in very equal ways. One of the really important characteristics of the internet is that it's extremely decentralized and that the services on the internet are invented and operated by other network users You know the network is built so that there's nobody in charge that everybody has control over their own communications. In relying on the internet, society was bringing into its very center a machine whose primary function was the reproduction and distribution of information. It's an inherent function of the networks that we use today that this data is stored, copied, stored, copied normally transient, normally very fast, you know, in milliseconds micorseconds specialized pieces of equipment such as switchers, routers, hubs etc. Do this all in the blink of an eye but it's the way networks WORK. What ARPA's engineers had produced was the blueprint for a massive copying machine without master. which would grow at a fantastic rate into today's internet So this entire area is bristling with information transfer of one type or another For instance the local council, Tower Hamlets and Hackney we're sort of on the border here have some of the surveillance traffic and security cameras linked via wireless networks themselves. The spectrum environment is getting very dirty, or noisy Every single packet that flies through the multitude of wireless networks and through the internet is listened for stored in memory and retransmitted, ie it's copied from one, what's called network segment, to the next our immediate environment now, our immediate ecosphere is so broad, so large that you cannot contain information very easily anymore, you cannot stop or censor information or stop the transmission once it's out there It's like water through your hands It's like trying to stop a dam from bursting. I would say right now, we are likely in range of wireless microwave radio transmissions that are most likely breaching some sort of copyright law right at this moment. To try on the back of modernism and all this international law to make profit out of his own ungenerosity to humankind. One of the main battlegrounds in law, in technology now is the extent to which it is possible to exclude people from information, knowledge and cultural goods the extent to which it's possible to enclose a bit - if you will of culture, and say it's in a container you have to pay me in order to access it. You can make something property if you can build a fence for it, you can enclose something, if you can build a wall around it. In the American west, the range land was free, and all could graze it because it was too expensive to fence it barbed wire changed that and you could turn it into property. Culture came in these boxes. Control came naturally as part of the process of the existence of the medium itself. There's a thing, a book a record a film that you can hold onto and not give somebody else or you can give it to them. And the whole payment system was built around: Do I give you this unit of information? or don't I give it to you? And that was how the whole model of copyright was built from the book on up. What used to be property - music, cinema - now becomes very, very easy to transmit across barriers. We have today the ability to make copies and distribute copies inexpensively. If one copy leaks out on the internet very rapidly it's available to everyone. One can always try to create artificial boundaries, technological boundaries which prevent us from sharing files prevent us from sharing music etc. But how do you create a wall or a boundary against the very basic desire of sharing? I think the war on piracy is failing for social reasons. People like to communicate. People like to do, to share things. People like to transform things and technology makes it so easy that there's no way of stopping it. The new generation is just copying stuff out of the internet. It's the way they're brought up. They started with Napster music is free to them. They don't consider music being something you pay for. They pay for clothes. They pay for stuff they can touch. Intellectual property is - What the fuck is that? I've never bought a piece of music in my life. We don't think it's illegal 'cos everyone's doing it. We can't really be blamed for just downloading something that's already on the internet. People think it's legal 'cos it's like copying, like, without the copyright or something. If it's a crime, why put it on there? So whether you're using a long-lost peer-to-peer system, like the original Napster, or you're using Gnutella, or you're using bittorrent the principle here is that you are actually engaging in internet communication as it was originally designed, you are able to serve content as well as consume. Especially after the Napster lawsuit we saw an emergence of a lot of more decentralized file-sharing services. Computer programs that people could run on their own computers that would make them part of the network, without having any one place where there's a master list or a master coordination. What this means is that in fighting file sharing the entertainment industry is fighting the fundamental structure of the internet. Short of redesigning and re-engineering either the internet or the devices we use to interact with the internet, there's nothing that Hollywood or Washington or Brussels or Geneva can do anything about. They shattered Napster into millions of little pieces, spread across computers all around the globe and now if you want to shut it down, you have to track down every single one of them and turn it off. And they just can't do that. They send out letters every month trying to shut down a couple here and there but it just doesn't work. There are just too many. It's out of the bag now. Once it's that far distributed, it's really going to be hopeless. You can sue people forever. You can sue a handful of college students, university students in the United States You can sue the investors of Napster. - and Napster - You can sue the company that provided the software for Kazaa. But it doesn't shut anything down. We recognize and we know that we will never stop piracy. Kazaa lost a big case in the United States in the Supreme Court. Kazaa and Grokster and a set of other companies. So those companies no longer operate. But the network still works, in other words, the interface is still installed on millions of computers and people still use them. never stop piracy The music industry, if they want to stop file sharing, there's no central computer for them to go to and shut it down. They have to go all the way to the ends of every wire. They have to snip all the cords across the globe. So when the Pirate Bay got shut down last year, and during the raid Amsterdam Information Exchange, AM6 reported that 35% of all the European internet traffic just vanished in a couple of hours The files have been shared. There's no way back. You can't - it's not about shutting down bittorrent it would be about confiscating everyone's hard drives. The files are out there. They have been downloaded. They're down, there's no up anymore. They're all down. never never never There's nobody you can go to and say: Shut down the file sharing. The internet's just not built that way. We're surrounded by images. Every day, everywhere. There's nothing you can do about it. But the problem with these images is that they're not yours People's lives are determined by images that they have no rights to whatsoever, and that's - I'd say it's a very unfortunate situation. There's this work of mine that people have described as a series of unattainable women, in fact it's a series of unattainable images. The one last mission of cinema is to make sure that images are not seen. That's why we have DRM - copy protection - rights management region coding, all that stuff but if an image is seen then it tells you one thing: it's not your image it's their image. It's none of your business. Don't copy it. Don't modify it. Just forget about it. You can't just say - hey it's just a movie It is reality. It's a very specific reality of properties. Radio. Television. Newspapers. Film. At the heart of all of them there is a very clear distinction between the producer and the consumer. And the idea is a very, very static one. That here is a technology that allows me to communicate to you. But it's not really a conversation that one has in mind. It use to be, if you had a radio station or television station or a printing press. You could broadcast your views to a very large number of people at quite a bit of expense and a fairly small percentage of the population was able to do that. The materials were produced by some set of professional commercial producers, who then controlled the experience and located individuals at the passive receiving end of the cultural conversation. I'm John Wayne. We believe in many things but I'm John Wayne. If you wanted to change the way the television broadcast network works - good luck you're going to have to get the majority of the shareholders to agree with you - or you're going to have to replace some very expensive equipment. In the world of that universe where you needed to get distribution there were gatekeepers that stood in your way. I know that there's gatekeepers out there at every level by the way certainly production, funding, exhibition. They can get fucked as far as I'm concerned. You would need to satisfy the lawyer for the network or the lawyer for the television station or radio station that what you've done is legal and cleared and permissions have been obtained - and probably insurance has been obtained before you could get into the channels of mass media communication. The number of people who could actively speak was relatively small and they were organized around one of the only two models we had in the industrial period to collect enough physical capital necessary to communicate either the state or the market usually based on advertising. This is the question that faces us today. If the battle against sharing is already lost - and media is no longer a commodity - how will society change? Those whose permission was required are resisting this transition because control is a good thing to get if you can get it. The control that used to reside in the very making of the artifact is up for grabs. Should we expect changes as massive as those of the printing press? There's plenty of people who are watching, you know, the worst kind of Soap Opera right now they're a planet and I can't save them. As hard as I've tried, I can't save them. But do we need saving? Will there still be a mass-produced and mass-oriented media from which to save us? Music didn't begin with the phonograph and it won't end with the peer-to-peer network. alright, listen man, I couldn't give a shit if you're older this young'n's bin colder give it ten years then I'm going to be known as a better than older I swear now people stayin colder so don' try n tell me your older you could be roller or be more music mix tapes promos and everythings out there, so don't try tell me I don't The panic of the movie industry and the music industry is that people could actually start to produce and that file sharing networks - file sharing technology enables them to produce stuff. To do this I'm colder better than most out older I take out any that are younger diss me, are you dumb you're an idiot you will never get this chip of your shoulder this kid's colder than you were when you were this age [...] please don't play - why you can't see that playtime's over. playtime's over - since year six i been a playground soldier dem days were lyrical dat lyrical G but now everything is colder now there's content flows and everything - mix tape promos everything - who'd you name your favorite MC, I'll write the sixteen make him look like... People have lamented much the death of the author what we're witnessing now is far beyond - It's the becoming producer of former consumers. and that suggests a new economic model for society. why? cos I'm going on show I move fast - goin on show like your team be out for the ratings by my team be out for the do(ugh) in the air tha show - eh what we're goin on show so your put man pay me - I'm doin no less I got the vibes, that run down the show It's not so much the fact that the Phantom Menace is downloaded 500 times, or 600 times etc. Yeah of course, there is an imaginary specter of economic loss that informs that but the real battle or the real threat lays in a shift in the ways that we think of the possibilities of ourselves as creators and not merely as consumers. It's like a whole network This is something that I've given out and I've let people download it and they can download it, do what they want I've made a blog about it saying oh look, DJs you can play this where you want There's this guy in Brooklyn and he's just done a remix of it, just like - It's totally different to what I thought but He's just - this guy from Brooklyn and I really respect that he came back to me and said look and it's going on his mix album. One of the things that intrigues me tremendously about the proliferation of material that's out there in the world for people to grab, is the potential creation of millions of new authors. Thanks to the internet, thanks to digital technologies the gatekeepers have really been removed. People can take more of their cultural environment make it their own use it as found materials to put together their own expressions do their own research, create their own communications, create their own communities when they need collaboration with others rather than relying on a limited set of existing institutions or on a set of materials that they're not allowed to use without going and asking Please may I use this? Please may I create? Basically, in terms of samples not many people go out of their way to clear samples Right about now I've got the things on the fruity slicer like this on different keys it's just different parts of the sample actually just some Turkish shit i don't even know who it's by - like it's just some random sample I make mainly instrumentals so really I've made a tool for that to sort of MC to anyway It's good that people are ruthless enough to use another person's tune and record themselves spittin bars over it. Look I'm takin over now but then the game says too free to october now I'm fuckin it up - listen it's over now i'm settin the pace. how they gonna slow me down? look - it's over clown I got the skippigest flows in town plus - you niggas can't fuck wit my word play - I switch it back - DJ bring it back Sometimes you get the big artists freestylin your stuff sort of put it out there on their CDs and you don't even know about it We live in this world in which absolute abundance of information is an everyday fact for a lot of us and this means we have a certain attitude towards the idea of information as property. It's like you've heard, sharing is in our blood, so the struggle to hold on to knowledge and creativity as a commodity by force it's going to be met by our strong urge to share, copy and cooperate. Kids, if they sample my music to make their music, that would be another good thing as well I would like that as well I want them to do that. If I made an old tune, take a bit from it, drop something over it and make it music make it big - if you can do that - do that. When you put primary materials in the hands of ordinary citizens really, really interesting things can happen. I ain't no musician - I just know how to make things sound good I want to make people realize their own value - I want them to realize that they are the masters of their own content, that they are they create something, they can share it if someone else created something they can contribute, they can help they can get it and use it the way it's supposed to be. So it's a terrorism of the mind that actually sustains concepts like intellectual property it's a terrorism that's grounded on an idea of brutal repression of that which is actually possible. If everything is user-generated it also means that you have to create something in order to be part of the society. I think one of the things that we are seeing coming out is culture where things are produced because people care about it and not necessarily because they hope other people will buy it. So what we will see is things made by the people for themselves. I don't think I know a person who just listens to it and doesn't try and get involved in some way by producing or something You know all these things that are taking the copyright industry totally by surprise - and they're scrambling with and not able to deal with - for the next generation it's just part of the media landscape They're natives, they're natives in that media landscape absolutely. And they're not alone. I think of myself as a pirate. We are pirates. I'm a pirate I'm proud cos I get my music free so it's alright - I'm proud I think we need to have a broad conversation - it's probably gonna be an international conversation where people who make things and people who use things - I'm talking about cultural works - sit together and think about what kinds of rules best serve these interests, I don't know that we're going to agree, but I think we need to ask a little bit more about utopia we need to really figure out what kind of a world we'd like to live in and then try to craft regulations to match that - being reactive doesn't cut it. The future isn't clear for sure but that's why we're here, we're trying to form the future, we're trying to make it the way we want it - but obviously most people want it to be and that's why we're doing this. Let's build a world that we're actually gonna be proud of, not just a profitable world - for a few very large media companies Making money is not the point with culture, or media - making something is the point with media, and I don't think that people will stop making music, stop making movies stop making - taking cool photographs - whatever Although it's difficult to believe it now, we can do without the entertainment industries, we'll find new ways to get the stuff we want made - we want a world in which we can share, work together and find new ways to support each other while we're doing it. This is the world we're tyring to bring into being. A force like this, a power like this. Zillions of people connected sharing data, sharing their work, sharing the work of others this situation is unprecedented in human history, and it is a force that will not be stopped. People always ask us who are the League of Noble Peers? And we tell them, you are. I am. Even your bank manager is. That's why I'm a vague blur. It's kind of like: Insert yourself here. Because we all produce information now, we all reproduce information. We all distribute it. We can't stop ourselves. It's like breathing. We'll do it as long as we're alive. And when we stop doing it, we'll be dead.