while I was away (no, not the sub or DemCon2K) was that my friend Michael‘s company was bought by Peregrine Systems, which is really cool. Someday I want to start a business with Michael, or to work for him or something like that. He is a huge geek in a way that I am not nor will ever be – and he’s also deeply interested in the more personal, quotidian applications of networking and whatnot. I like people who can work the heavy steel end of networking and the web but also understand and appreciate the everyday, individual applications as well.
The use of freelancers’
material on the web (and in other electronic media) without additional payment has been a huge issue in Montreal for some time, but hasn’t received a whole lot of coverage. Editor and Publisher Online reports today that Freelancers are picketing the Boston Globe, and I’m sure similar things have happened throughout North America. The newspaper business, in my experience, is playing hardball on this one – at least that was the case here. It’s interesting in the context of the Napster debate, because it shows the differences between how copyrights are handled. Freelance journalists generally only sell a license for first publication, but newspapers want to extend that (thus cutting into potential sales to other papers) without additional payment. In the music biz, the record company buys the copyright itself, so presumably any additional revenue stream won’t make a difference in the amount they pay the artists. That should be an issue but it isn’t.
What if it were
illegal to buy a copyright, if they could only be assigned for a limited time? What if, unless you were a salaried employee (hence making your work a product of the company paying you), you owned your work, period? If you were permitted to lease it, but not sell it outright?
I’m always torn in a discussion of Napster and the other digital music schemes. I have, from time to time, made my living (or an important part of it) as a writer. My brother’s a musician. Many, if not most, of my friends are writers or artists of some sort or another. These people work hard at what they do. But when I look at a particular acquaintance of mine’s CD, she doesn’t own the copyright, the record company does. When I write an article, I own the copyright – the newspaper or magazine it is published in only owns certain rights; usually the right to first publication.
I think a clearheaded study of how copyright works and a legal expression of how that system should function would go a long way to solving a lot of the current issues. It’s one of those situations, I think, when the road ahead in terms of the specifics will only be apparent when the first principles are reiterated and strengthened.
Trouble is, the pattern is clearly in the other direction – away from privileging the rights of individual copyright holders, towards rights of corporate copyright holders and other businesses involved in such matters. I have personally been involved with a number of publications that have asserted that their purchase of first publication rights includes, with no further compensation, the right to place the work in databases that, essentially, exist in perpetuity. And the DCMA points in that direction pretty clearly as well.
For the moment, I don’t have a huge problem squaring my deep belief in copyright – the right I have over my creative and intellectual work with the free distribution of songs on the net, but that’s only because of the total belligerance and seeming cluelessness of the recording industry, and it won’t hold indefinitely. At some point, I believe that copyrights should be inviolate. So my conclusion, for now, is that the whole concept of copyright must be strengthened and affirmed. Trouble is – I doubt it would be by those with the deepest pockets in this ongoing dialogue.
Followup
on the IAM.com/Razorfish saga: “Our Work’s Fine, Just Pay the Bills“
I may be naive, but I think it’s ridiculous for a dot-com company to farm out their web design work. I can understand a bricks-and-mortar company hiring a company to do pure design work that will be overlaid on a structure they build themselves, or that they have partnered with someone else to do. I can even relate to a strategic partnership with a web company with the latter providing the actual site. But to hire someone straight up like that? I think it invites failure. It’s like a recipe. The knowledge of designers or programmers has to be deeply accounted for by management of a dot-com – it’s an essential piece of the puzzle. Their familiarity with the business model, the history of the project, but from their own unique perspective, is critical. And – the key challenge of a dot-com is just that – to integrate the technical knowledge of designers and programmers and others with the “product” as defined by a deep knowledge of the market, the business proposition, the value to users and to investors/clients. That’s not a casual thing – it’s a mission. I have some understanding of that – it’s a grandiose way of describing a big part of my job.
Community computing centers
are an interesting way to bring technology, libraries, modern communications and the like to areas with insufficient infrastructures to support home or even business connections, like in Africa. Lots of people are working on them in that context. It seems that people find it an interesting idea in the US too: Cyber Centers Burn Up Atlanta [in Wired News].
The digital divide does exist, it’s just not as simple a matter as most nay-sayers propose. It’s a cultural and political issue, mixed intricately with questions of pedagogical theory, infrastructure development (and hence market issues in the development of major capital projects), among other things.
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