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by
Miltos Manetas
One
of the most beautiful aspects of contemporary
life is that we can easily emulate forms, copy
ideas, styles and objects. It makes from life
an open project, a work in progress. But our
freedom to emulate is limited.
Say we want to make a copy of the Coca Cola
logo. Incorporate a metaphor from a poem to
another poem, do a double of a well known painting
by Picasso, sing a Beatles song in our record, or install to our computer a piece of software.
All these are stuff that somebody discovered
and put into market.
But
shall they stay property of their "inventor"
? Or do they belong to all of us, to use them
as we wish ?
Lets
examine first how these "intellectual discoveries"
function . They are very different from a house,
land or objects, because they don't really exist
without a user.
They
actually use their user and most of the times,
they modify him irrevocably.
Think
of our perception as a piece of land. Once you
will access any information, something is built
over this land. What you've seen, heard or learned
becomes part of your self, literally your "property".
There is no way to undo this information. You
will even have to work to put it in order in
a way that it fits in your mental scheme. The
more intelligent you are, the more you will
have to "work". Some people, will
have to "work" more than the creator
of the information in order to accept it.
Once
you get the message, you are a vehicle, a wall
of a subway train and a cultural slave. You
cannot go back and become a person who doesn't
know how to write FedEx, but if you will actually
decide to write it over your paintings, FedEx
may sue you, because it hold a "copyright"
it owns the part of your brain where the FedEx
logo is located. Think of the part of yourself
that carries this -mostly unwanted info, as
another person. Given the copyright and Intellectual
Property legislation, this person is a slave.
There
is a company based in Amsterdam, which produces
screen recognition software. It's clients, use
this technology to help their newest computer
systems communicate with their older machines.
A New York based company recently sued the Dutch
company on the basis that they already keep
a pattern on screen recognition.
They
( the American company ) had "discover"
already how to read and translate obsolete computer
talk and they believe that they should own it
!
Content
(what, in this case, the old computers are
"saying"), becomes a valuable for
whoever will register a successful way to read
it. In the case of the arts, this promises double
profits. A painter will become famous because
his images are published everywhere. He will
sell the physical object- the canvasses but
he will still demand control over the public
imagination, using his copyright.
Writers
are comfortable with copyright. They believe
that without such a protection, magazines and
even their own editors, will simply ignore them
and publish their texts anonymous or under another
name. They don't understand that in a copyright
free society, the more credit you will give
to the creator of an idea, the more valuable
your work will become. Because in our times,
everybody can be a creator and every creator,
can be also Media : a web domain registration
is only 16 $ per year.
In a world where any person can be a public
persona, the Media organizations will compete
for who will pay more the creators in order
to publish their signed contributions and to
offer to their readers a feticist version of
the "facts".Because in our times,
ideas are "facts" and it would be
crazy to try sell them face to face.
Many
will suggest, that the question of Intellectual
Property, is a complex problem which cannot
be addressed with a simple Yes or NO
But we must remember, that the question of
Slavery was yesterday a complex problem and
it was considered naive and even criminal to
try abolish it .
Both,
intellectual property and slavery, are basically
philosophical problems :
""Do
ideas belong to everybody or some of them shall
become for profit property that a person or
a community can own" for IP and copyright
and
"Do all human have the right to be born
free or some of them shall become for profit
property of a person or a community " for
slavery.
But whenever a philosophical problem cross the
paths of exploitation and
ideology, it becomes complex . Because society
is based on both ideology and exploitation,
any radical position seams an extremist one.
But if Plato was in his time against slavery, that, would look today more significant than
unrealistic. ( He was for slavery instead).
This
is the reason we initiate the "I
am gonna copy dot com" poll. Feel free
to have an opinion and also, eventually to
change it : your vote then, will be updated.
Miltos
Manetas, 2001
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