Muninn

I just read Sion Touhig’s article “How the Anti-copyright Lobby Makes Big Business Richer” on the Register, and I found it deeply problematic, even if I sympathize with the cause he wants to defend: empowering and preserving the livelihoods of freelance professionals. See also his posting at his weblog here. From his opening:

“I’m a freelance professional photographer, and in recent years, the internet ‘economy’ has devastated my sector. It’s now difficult to make a viable living due to widespread copyright theft from newspapers, media groups, individuals and a glut of images freely or cheaply available on the Web.”

Throughout his article Touhig argues that “media democracy” and “citizen journalism,” aggregated free content, Copyleft, Creative Commons etc. has destroyed the little man’s business and, if passed, the Orphan Works Bill will also rob the little man of his ability to defend his copyright.

As I understand it, the basic system works something like. You create something—a photograph, say—and find that it, having value, can be sold, or licensed, for a certain amount to certain companies or directly to individuals. Its eventual price, if it can be sold, is determined by any number of factors, including the demand for your kind of creative work and supply of other cheaper or free content. Your copyright to this work, certainly not a divinely bestowed right, is at least nominally protected by the laws of a society which believes that the protection of a creative work will, in the end, encourage its people to create more such content in the future.

We find ourselves in a situation now where people of lesser talent, dedication, or financial means (for surely you need at least one, if not two of these three to succeed as a photojournalist) can easily share what we produce with the entire world. Our motivations may be many. Some of those who share what they create, or contribute it to large news corporations or other websites, may hope that they can eventually develop their art into a future career. However, many if not most of people are motivated out of the desire for fame or out of altruism—out of the sincere hope that what they created might be enjoyed or found useful by someone else out there.

Touhig’s article insults those people. It belittles that desire, and it reflects a bitterness about change which is found everywhere and in every generation.

No one is forcing Touhig to use a Creative Commons license. No major corporation is the malevolent puppet-master of the Copyleft movement. These are tools, admirable ones in my opinion, which have in mind not just the producers of content (including both those who wish to profit and those who do not wish to profit from their creative work) but the consumers of content. It gives them both a wonderful set of choices related to how they distribute, use, and modify creative works. In the case of the Creative Commons, it is designed to compliment, not replace, copyright protections.

Touhig is perhaps accurate in, and I am in no position to challenge, his claims about the specific changes within his industry that relate to the increasing difficulties of photojournalists to charge certain amounts for their work or be paid certain amounts to be dedicated to their craft. However, he is completely off the mark when he says that supporters of the various movements above are the “unwitting allies, or shills” of big business. If individual copyright holders have few means to protect their copyright by legal challenges, this is hardly the fault of the Creative Commons movement or Flickr or OhMyNews. If the photojournalist’s photographs are not selling at the same price they used to because there is a sudden flood of cheap alternatives created by people who have no profit motive, it is hardly appropriate to chide the charitable for giving away their content. If the consumer is satisfied with the less skillfully snapped photo, the less grammatically correct article, the goofy home video, or even the factually imperfect article on OhMyNews, WikiNews, etc. it is disingenuous for an elitist photographer to lament the world’s decline in standards by criticizing the movements which make it possible for us all to easily share content.

I used to put together some free macintosh software which I host foolsworkshop.com. My creations are all but useless now but there was a time when at least one of the free programs I created competed favorably with other commercial and shareware software out there. Before the rise of the internet amateur freeware developers such as myself did not have the means to distribute our creations. Other software developers, large and small sold their products via catalogs and shops. When a freeware product is well done, and it offers a comparable or least nearly comparable feature set with a shareware or commercial option, it out-competes the latter. Touhig’s position in his article is comparable to a small-time shareware developer accusing people like me of being the shill or unwitting ally of the commercial software companies. “You bourgeois running dog scum, how dare you give away your labor? What about proles like me who make a living out of this? What about my labor? How dare you undersell sell me with your free software. Don’t you see how this plays into the hands of the capitalists?”

All I can say to Touhig is that I hope he thinks through his position again and reflects on the two successful approaches that both small and big businesses (after all, things like Youtube started as a small business) have taken in response to these new developments. When they can, businesses try to co-opt these energies for its own benefit. When they can’t, they resist, with all their legal, lobbying, and coercive power any attempt to dilute their copyrighted assets. The fact that they can do the latter far better than any individual artist or professional is a matter of course. That is why movements such as the Creative Commons and those supporting serious copyright reforms need to be organized, committed, and highly vigilant in order to prevent a stifling of the very forces of creative energy that the internet has unleashed. However, Touhig completely misses the fact that creative professionals stand a much better chance, if not an equal chance, in the former approach—competing with large corporations when it comes to making use of these new developments for their own benefit. Individuals can adapt faster than corporations. This will require a change of thinking on their part; a change of business model; a change of their whole sales philosophy. A failure to do so may indeed, as Touhig predicts, lead to the destruction of his kind. The onus, however, is on him and professionals like him to take the initiative and adapt.

My parents live in Oklahoma. When I was getting ready to begin my final year of high school at the International School of Stavanger my family moved to the United States and I expressed my great reluctance to join them. I stayed behind in Norway and finished high school while, ironically, doing a home-stay with an American family there. Since then I have frequently visited my parents in Oklahoma, especially at Christmas time. I arrived last night in Tulsa, Oklohama after my cheap Expedia travel arrangements took me through Milwaukee (which is a city in Wisconsin, apparently) and Dallas.

I have often flown through Dallas before, but this time I was struck by the huge number of military personnel traveling through both the E and C terminals of that airport yesterday, especially when compared to Boston and Milwaukee. I have a few theories about why this might be the case: 1) Dallas is a large hub and since it is getting close to Christmas many military personnel are going on leave to visit their families. 2) Dallas happens to act as a hub which connects somehow to whatever transportation network that the military has set up for its forces going on leave. 3) Perhaps American Airlines, which uses Dallas as a hub (especially C gates), is especially good at providing for military personnel through various services and discounts. 2) Dallas is in the South and connects to many cities in the south. Perhaps there is a larger percentage of military from the South than other areas of the United States. If this is true then the stereotype that the South is more nationalistic or militaristic or, more likely, the fact that there are a lot of the poorest states in the United States located in the south combined with the fact that the military has a disproportionately larger percentage of recruits from poorer classes can help explain this.

A few further things that struck me. First, I made a rough count of the soldiers I came across, and while this is perhaps not a good sample, I was really surprised to see that a full 1/3 of the soldiers I counted were female. I wonder how female recruiting has changed and what percentage they have come to occupy in the overall makeup of the United States military. I wonder if the struggles to meet recruiting targets in the current wartime circumstances of the US has lead to any changes or special efforts to make further inroads in recruiting women?

I don’t know if it is the only one, but American Airlines opens all its “Admiral Clubs,” which are usually for first class passengers, to military personnel when they show their military ID. They advertise this on a large sign in front of the club’s entrance. I didn’t find this too remarkable. American Airlines can benefit from promoting its nationalist image and its support for the troops, many of which are returning from a wartime theater or going to one.

I was also struck by the strong support for the troops among American travellers. As I walked from about gate C20 to my gate C37 I walked behind a young soldier. In that short 5-10 minute walk I saw two different adults and one child randomly approach the soldier, slap him on the back or shake hands, and give him various words of thanks and support for his efforts. The child that ran up to him gave him some kind of a gift but I couldn’t make out what it was.

As I started thinking about this I realized I had really mixed feelings about all this. Last Christmas when I arrived in Tulsa I saw a couple sit down next to a soldier returning from Iraq near the baggage claim and ask him sympathetically about the challenges of his military duty there. I remembered how difficult it seemed to be for him to put his experiences into simple sentences to share with these inquisitive strangers.

The collection of mixed feelings this all gave me really came to a head when I arrived in Tulsa last night. When the flight landed in Tulsa, there was an extra message issued at landing. The American Airlines stewardess announced that, “I have a favor to ask everyone. In seat 23C we have one of our military boys who has just come back to Oklahoma to visit his wife and family. When the seat belt sign turns off I would like to ask everyone to remain seated and let him get his bag and get off the plane first so he can get to see his wife who is waiting for him outside.” When the seat belt light went off the whole plane erupted into applause and loud hurrays. These continued as the young man in 23C, who was not wearing his military uniform, removed his baggage from the overhead compartment and ran triumphantly off the plane. As far as I could see I alone refrain from shouting and applauding, but instead sat quietly in complete shock and disgust. I felt suddenly and strangely nauseous, even as I tried to reflect on the reasons for own reaction while watching the man and the passengers around me.

This experience was made all the more bizarre because in the seat behind me was sitting another, this time female soldier, still dressed in her fatigues and heavy boots, who told her boyfriend (I learnt later that she was engaged) on her cellphone that she had arrived and would be disembarking soon. She waited patiently as the 23C military man was drowned in shouts of support and ran off the plane, propelled all the more quickly by the back slaps of other passengers.

I heard an older woman sitting next to the female soldier say sympathetically, “I think it should be standard policy to always let all the army people get off planes first.”

I walked just ahead of the female soldier as we approached the baggage claim area and left the secure area. There was a whole crowd waiting for her with signs of support and welcome. Her fiance, who had a military style hair cut, was waiting for her in a wheelchair and held a sign, “So, J. are you ready to sign your life away AGAIN?” He read out the sign he was holding as she approached him. After she answered in the affirmative everyone went wild and crowded around her with congratulations.

To be honest, my thoughts and feelings on all of this are just too unprocessed and complicated for me to feel comfortable discussing them here. To cap off an evening of complex emotions, it just so happened that the Netflix movie waiting for me to watch last night when I got to my parent’s home in Bartlesville was “The Best Years of Our Lives” This award winning 1946 movie about three soldiers returning from World War II includes the story of a disabled veteran (apparently he was disabled in the war) who is worried his fiance back home will only stay with him out of pity and cannot possibly love him as he is.

Microsoft’s new book search site Live Search Books is, well, live. It doesn’t work in the Safari browser, but it works fine in Firefox. I have only played around with it a bit, but I can already say that for those interested in doing historical research, the new Microsoft book search offers two major advantages over Google book search, despite the fact that the former only provides search results for books out of copyright (mostly before 1923).

I have at once lauded but also complained about severe flaws in Google’s book search in an earlier posting here at Muninn and also at a Frog in a Well posting. My two biggest complaints at this time are:

1) Not all books which are clearly out of copyright are fully viewable at Google search. Sometimes only partial view, or “snippet view” is available.
2) Though there is the wonderful feature of PDF download on Google book search for books that they recognize as out of copyright, once you download the book, you cannot search the document within your PDF viewer because Google does not supply the text layer for these documents.

Microsoft’s book search has neither of these problems as far as I can tell:

1) All of the books I have clicked on can be downloaded as a full PDF
2) The PDFs I have downloaded are fully searchable on the text layer.

This is wonderful news and I hope Google Books will respond accordingly. Microsoft book search still seems a bit rough around the edges and doesn’t have the nice new smooth scroll view that Google Books recently added, but I am very happy to see that there are two competing services in this area. I hope the Microsoft search will continue to add books, and also, hopefully, consider adding materials out of copyright for later periods when this can be determined.

My last few postings have all been tech related. Since most of my history related postings are also Asian history related postings, I post those increasingly at Frog in a Well. I’ve been in a hacking mood in the last few weeks, especially since I’ve been working on some new projects at Frog in a Well in my spare time. My last two scripts are essentially shortcuts for creating iCal To-Dos. The first provides a fast way to use Quicksilver to create To-do items without leaving whatever application you are working in. The second provides a way for you to email yourself To-dos that then automatically tell iCal to create a To-Do with content from the email.

The script below is not related to To-Dos but is also aiming to increase my organization a bit. I use a program called Yojimbo (it is a great program but I think the title and its Karate Kid icon are both cheesy) made by Bare Bones, the same people who make BBEdit, the essential text editor for web programmers and coders of all stripes. Yojimbo is a program which keeps snippets of notes, web passwords, serial numbers, and best of all: you can drag and drop any web page you are viewing onto a little tab it keeps at the side of the screen and Yojimbo will download a static copy of the web-page and store it along with all your other notes. Great for when you think you might be away from the internet and want to keep the content handy for later searching.

Sometimes I’m away from my laptop, and as in the case of emailing myself To-Dos that I want created automatically in iCal, there are times I jot down notes from something and want to email myself those notes. It would then be nice for Mail to automatically detect those emails, and create a new Note in Yojimbo with the appropriate title and contents. I hacked together a little script which does just that.
(more…)