the trials and tribulations of Napster, but there’s another copyright story that’s just as important, and in many ways is the flip side of the coin. Freelancers’ rights have been drastically eroded over the past several years as big publications have drooled over the record labels’ “work for hire” contracts with their bands and have tried to implement the same for writers. Wired News is reporting on Featurewell.com, who have joined the issue on behalf of freelance writers.
The Economist
The Economist printed a story about new telescope technology involving a mirror made of spinning liquid (instead of highly polished glass) that was largely pioneered here in Quebec. Which is great, and pretty interesting to read about. Best, though, is the opening graf:
ON THE face of it, a telescope with a liquid mirror sounds about as useful as a chocolate teapot.
Heh. Those wacky Economist writers!
Is a lesson
starting to be apparent coming out of some of the spectacular dot-com failures? Soundbitten’s article on the failure of Verde and the possible contribution Scient made to the failure is instructive. Verde was trying to be a web-only content site, with e-comm built in at the ground level. OK, fine. But they outsourced the very lifeblood of the company – the platform on/in which it was to live!
Maybe it’s just me, and my biases (the company I work for does its own design, programming, editorial, hosting – everything) but I think that if you’re going to live on the web, you have to develop for the web in-house. That’s the real challenge for marketing and sales types with an idea – to figure out how to work with developers – and developers who themselves are radically different from one another (i.e., programmers and designers are different from one another in dozens of ways, in general). But if you’re a retail bookseller, you don’t farm out your retail sales staff to a consultancy – that’s what you’re about, to a great extent.
There may be a place for consultants in all of this, don’t get me wrong. But if you’re a net company, you have to have to develop your own internet infrastructure – you can’t get around it. Doesn’t mean you can’t purchase products that will help you do this – a company doesn’t have to invent everything from the ground up.
Maybe the real lesson is that new dot-coms try to separate back end from front end too much. It isn’t enough to be good marketers, writers, strategists. To split form (content or marketing) from function (CMS, design, UI) is to tie one hand behind your back as you try to get a dot-com off the ground.
I just received
the September-October issue of Artbyte in the mail and there is no longer any doubt about it: it’s the best magazine going on the subject of digital culture etc. It used to be too focused on art stuff before – not that arts coverage is a problem, obviously it’s the starting point for the mag. But now it does a better job of extending from the aesthetic to more general cultural, social, and political arenas. And in a way it lives up to McLuhan’s idea that artists are probes into the future, something I think is true.
Although I like mags like the Industry Standard (and some of the other net-biz-porn mags), they don’t tell me anything about what’s in the pipe – it’s all about what has happened. When they try and predict, they’re almost always wrong. After all it was one of those pubs that said – not two months ago – that “obviously” drkoop.com would be the great success story in the consumer internet space? Uh, not. Artbyte features great writers, great thinkers with a real provenance as commentators on these issues (like Geert Lovink, for example), and of course looks gorgeous.
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.
