A transparent and nice American/Swede who likes cultural patterns and Social Media. A creative early-adopter who sports, discusses and explores. More about me & the blog
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Who is stealing from who? (A guest post by Antonio Garcia under a CC-BY license)
“The Statute of Anne had a much broader social focus and remit than the monopoly granted to the Stationers’ Company. The statute was concerned with the reading public, the continued production of useful literature, and the advancement and spread of education. The central plank of the statute is a social quid pro quo; to encourage “learned men to compose and write useful books” the statute guaranteed the finite right to print and reprint those works. It established a pragmatic bargain involving authors, the booksellers and the public.[14] The Statute of Anne ended the old system whereby only literature that met the censorship standards administered by the booksellers could appear in print. The statute furthermore created a public domain for literature, as previously all literature belonged to the booksellers forever.” (source)
What has become of that social focus, the social quid pro quo?
I do not believe many of us grasp the real situation here. The problem of the editors with the Internet and digital copying is not principally the fact that we copy today’s books, films and music even before they hit the shelves… it is the fact that people only have X hours a week to devote to leisure under the form of reading, watching and listening to artistic production, and besides time at a far second place there is the need for a budget.
While production of books, films and music relied on physical media and they were difficult to copy in good quality, the editors could discontinue production of older creations and make them rare, in such a way opening the market of attention for new creations because the old, even if you wanted them, could not be found easily anymore.
With digital copying as production mechanism and the internet as distribution medium… what they face now is the fact that all those discontinued productions that are in the public domain but did not become available because they ceased to produce them physically (not keeping their part of the bargain -remember, the continued production of useful literature, the quid pro quo? they took the quid, and forgot the quo!-) do now become available to all in enormous quantities. Enormous quantities of top quality works… for free (with only the effort to digitalize once generously donated by a few) become available through the Internet that acts as a worldwide, immediate and very convenient distribution system.
More works… means less of the chunk of the available time per work, and as commercial selling works are now only a fraction of what is available, they get only a tiny fraction of our time. That is bad news for an industry that has been working on the optimization of their production through economies of scale. Say you invest in a printing plant because you can sell 100.000 copies a week, and you take a 40 years mortgage because selling 100.000 copies a week you will earn enough to pay for it… and 10 years into that bargain, the internet and digital copying emerges. That leaves you with 30 years of mortgage you do not know how to pay. Sad but true, I know about newspapers that have had to sell their new printing plants because they could no longer pay the fixed costs of their maintenance, renting part of their production capacity back to continue printing the newspapers.
Another aspect is the budget part… as we are being squeezed into austerity, the first thing people can forfeit is optional culture and leisure, so less and less people have enough to spend to keep the industry in the black numbers, and more and more people find it convenient to pay for a good internet access and fill their leisure time with anything free that can be accessed (for the ethically strict) or anything that can freely be accessed (for the not so ethically strict and those that are so pissed off that they strike back where they can).
There is only one way the industry can really stall its demise: close the Internet to downloading.
Prolonging the terms of copyright protection (like when they avoid Mickey Mouse to enter the public domain) is only short term relief.
Pursuing those that download productions actually under copyright is nothing more than a harassing technique intended to scare people and stall the inevitable.
And they can harass us… because the governments are using their struggle as an excuse to impose measures through which they can censor the Internet without coming out as the ones that really want it… for reasons that have nothing to do with the copyright industry.
“There’s no final solution, no definitive theory, no solve-all methodology. We have to constantly test and explore new temporary solutions. Change, uncertainty, ambiguity and complexity must not be seen as sources of problems to be subsequently solved, but as transitions, potential sources of opportunities, innovation and profit” (Angell&Ilharco 2004, p.55).
Looking forward and reaching for our visions keeps us in course. Having something to strive for makes us find new solutions and constantly evolve. This is why it is good that the 24hour government has high visions and ambitions.
Some old and some new problems will arise from the digitalization. Integrity issues is a major problem that gets amplified by the increased amount of information available from an electronic government. Another issue that the 24hour government has to deal a lot with is security in protecting all of their sensitive data. Some of the problems are diminished with the digitalization, we no longer have the same time and cost for transportation of data. Amplified problems are not only bad. They enable us to see problems that previously went undetected due to being too small. Once a problem is detected we can work on changing the organization to fix the problem.
All the time “organizations are emergent, undergoing continual change driven by social and environmental dynamics” (Baskerville&Land 2004, p.264). When encountering problems and trying to find a ’final solution’ you do good as long as you keep trying. If you manage to find a ’final solution’ it probably means you have failed by letting the organization become static and obsolete. —
Josef Ohlsson Collentine, 24 Aug 2010, josef@collentine.com CC-BY, please link to http://collentine.com if you use this material. Written for the course ’Verksamhetsutveckling i den digitala myndigheten’
Angell, I. & Ilharco, F. (2004). Solution is the problem: a story of transitions and opportunities. In Avgerou, C., Ciborra, C. & Land, F., ed. The social study of information and communication technology. New York, Oxford University Press. Ch. 2.
Baskerville, R. & Land, F. (2004). Socially self-destructing systems. In Avgerou, C., Ciborra, C. & Land, F., ed. The social study of information and communication technology. New York, Oxford University Press. Ch. 13.
Part of an assignment I wrote in a course about ‘the digital government’. Part 1 Fundamental Changes —
Part 2/3 – How Internet changes the citizen interactions
Internet breaks down a lot of barriers in society. We are now able to communicate easily across time and space with each other. This conversation without borders is one of the visions in the 24hour government. When technology changes and is improved it is important to consider all aspects of the change. “In most cases the development of electronic services is considered a technical project. Even if [...] questions concerning users, usability and organization are more important they are fully [ignored]” (Grönlund 2001b, p.191, translated from Swedish)
“Information systems needed to be seen as social systems, admittedly with an increasingly technical component—but not as technological systems per se” (Galliers 2004, p.248). We live in a social revolution when more and more communication is taking place across the Internet (mainly through Social Media tools like Facebook, blogs or Twitter). It’s important for the Government to be able to take a part of this social revolution and be a part of the discussed.
With the shift towards a participatory culture in our society people become more collaborative. Tools on the internet are increasingly improved to work in a collaborative fashion. Some examples are Piratepad.net (allowing people to work in the same notepad at the same time) and dropbox (allowing an easy sharing of documents between people). Another very important example for political change towards participation is the use of liquid democracy.
Involving the citizens in collaborative project that would help the government and the society is one of the opportunities an electronic government brings. To enable easy citizen engagement it is important building a platform system enabling participatory use. By building a platform and sharing a lot of the data freely it would enable citizens with specific interests to have access in a collaborative environment where they could create new data or knowledge. This new information might not have been constructed if it was not easily available. —
Josef Ohlsson Collentine, 24 Aug 2010, josef@collentine.com CC-BY, please link to http://collentine.com if you use this material. Written for the course ’Verksamhetsutveckling i den digitala myndigheten’
Galliers, R. (2004). Reflections on information systems strategizing. In Avgerou, C., Ciborra, C. & Land, F., ed. The social study of information and communication technology. New York, Oxford University Press. Ch. 12.
Grönlund, Å. (2001b). “The long and winding road”. In Grönlund, Å. & Ranerup, A., ed. Elektronisk förvaltning, elektronisk demokrati. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Ch. 5.
A presentation made with two others for my literature course about Thomas Mann who wrote Death in Venice.
Thomas Mann has a very strong and rich language with many images to evoke connections: “Black as nothing else on eath except a coffin”. He uses many symbols and comparison in his texts. Throughout Death in Venice we see several comparisons with greek gods: Apollo, Dionysus, Phaex, Eros etc. By using such a rich language he does wonders with his writing.
“This was a broad and tolerant atmosphere, of wide horizons. Subdued voices were speaking most of the principal European tongues. That uniform of civilization, the conventional evening dress, gave outward conformity to the varied types”
Death in Venice is about an artist named Gustav and his travels to Venice where he gets obsessed with a boy named Tadzio. The text is written from Gustavs perspective and gives us an insight into his inner world. One of the main themes running through this text is the struggle between the aestheticism and intellectualism.
In Thomas Mann’s diary from 1965 it seems like he suffered from repressed homosexuality. He grew up in a conservative and religious family with a strict father. Many parts of Death in Venice are autobiographical references to his own trip to Venice where he met a boy named Baron Wladyslow Moes.
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