A lovely relaxing week. Gabriel is very good compared to Milo. Milo was quite a demanding baby but Gabriel is pretty content as long as he has got his Mummy near by. The only time he really complains is about wind. He is filling out nicely and looks a lot less like a tortoise now. I'm not one of these people who can see that "he's got his fathers eyes" or "his grandfathers nose". He does look a little like Milo did at that age though. He sleeps a lot too which is something else Milo was never very good at.
It's a real struggle to actually have time off and make myself not work but apart from answering work emails and doing a little bug fixing I have pretty much managed it. Like I say its quite a struggle and i'm quite looking forward to letting myself get started again. There is lots to do. Talking of work there is an excellent video of a talk by Brewster Kahle here If you want to know about my new job I can think of no better introduction. Except of course the Library doens't quite have the same get up and go attitude. I'm hoping to meet Brewster in the next couple of months all being well.
A big part of my job has to do with copyright. This may sound like a very dull subject but I think its going to be one of the key things that drives change in our society. The current situation is a little out of control - file sharing and piracy are currently illegal and do not make for a good economy. There are two solutions to this: change the way the economy works and legislate until no one is allowed to share or copy anything. The former is what I and many others would like. The media industry however would like to prevent anyone having access to anything. If the media industry gets its way we as a society will be in for some very lean years. The only recorded media available to us would be expensive and main stream. Innovation would be stifled and i guess the independant music industry would go underground. Its a battle that is being fought right now and will have far deeper consequences than the so called "war against terror".
My arts projects aren't getting much time but I'm getting involved in a highly secret side project that should be very exctiing. Can't talk about that at the moment though. Been reading Cory Doctorow. We met with him at the library - very sharp guy. it was one of the more interesting meetings I've been to. I hope we will get to know him better....
Oh well thats enough babble for now.
How the hell do we get it on the public's radar, though? The public, as best as I can observe in dealing with them, are so brainwashed as to lack even the comprhension that one could question an idea, for example, such as "A performer is "naturally" "entitled" to receive economic compensation for the playback of a mechanical reproduction of their work". I fear they're too far gone to reason and understand-- the publishing industry-- the real evil fuckers in this whole equation, have managed to get everyone onboard with their fucked-up notion that all work of human creativity must pass thru the "publishing tax".
The idea I'd want to put to the streets is "When you buy a CD, you're benefiting the artist's publisher, not the artist. When you're downloading an MP3, you're hurting the artist's publisher, not the artists." In the microcosm of music, this is easy to articulate. It gets more difficult when we start talking about other works of human creativity.
I can rant all I want about this on Slashdot, on my website, and in blog comments, but I have no idea what to do. I know that something must be done, and I know that there are other people who agree with me.
The answers don't like in adopting trendy "alternative" licenses for your own work, like Creative Commons or GPL. The answers don't like in "civil disobedience". I think the answers lie in getting the word out to the public in a manner that they can digest and understand, and in a manner that will cause them to question their beliefs in intellectual property law. We need public discourse, we need discussion, and we need to renegotiate this social contract that is our intellectual property law.
Posted by: Evan at August 7, 2004 11:20 PMTo be fair the Creative Commons license is partly about creating discussion. By making people think about what copyright means in theory it should prompt discussion. You are right though re-negotiation is the only way to do this.
I guess the only way to achive this is for everybody who cares about it (which should be *everybody*) to keep banging on about it until everybody starts paying attention.