[LINK] In other news....

[Janet Hawtin]

On 6/25/07, Stilgherrian <stil at stilgherrian.com> wrote:
> On 25/6/07 6:18 PM, "Janet Hawtin" <lucychili at gmail.com> wrote:
> > The problem is that
> > - I used to be able to buy a book and exchange it with a friend. Now
> > this is sometimes theft depending on the media format of the
> > information.
> > - I used to be able to buy a book and give it to a friend. Now this is
> > sometimes theft depending on the media ULA.
> > - Kids used to cut their fledgeling cartooning teeth on drawing daffy duck and
> > other images in their cultural context and stick them on the fridge.
> > Kids these days
> > use youtube as the fridge and putting your own voice and first efforts
> > into the mix is sometimes theft.
> > - A photo of me is not necessarily my property
> > - An ultrasound of me is not my property
> > - An xray of me is not my property
> > The distributed technologies we use now are a part of our social discourse.
> > Copyright is theft of our right to participate. [snip]
>
> I dunno that the last line there can be anything but a slogan. However you
> do raise some very interesting examples.

As is the original statement regarding theft.

> An X-ray of you isn't your properly (currently), because the law gives
> ownership of an image to the creator of the image, not the subjects who
> appear in the image. In a medical context you (and I, for that matter) find
> it annoying.
>
> However, the flipside is that if a photographer takes a photo of a building
> in a public place, do you want the building-owner to now own that photo?

I want us to get over the idea that one person has right of way over
each component of human knowledge so we can do useful things with it.
Fencing human knowledge into individual parcels means that we are losing
the point that the image is something which is useful to and
contributed to by more than one person. Information has a social
function. We also want to make business around information. We have
technologies and global conversations around science and environment,
health and human endeavour in general that we cannot approach from a
holistic perspective because we can ONLY see information as property
of an individual. We need to be able to talk about ideas as a
community if we are going to have sensible responsible strategies for
environmental and social advancements that are based on an
understanding of whole ecologies or on knowing where the cutting edge
actually is we will need to relook at the way we make profit from
knowledge.
I think copyright is the match for an industrial model of information
distribution.
We are living in a world where much information is created in a
distributed way, or aggregated from our practices. These information
flows are not logically suited to traditional copyright and I think
having a conversation around the social function of information,
ideas, knowledge is overdue.

Patents blocking generic AIDS medicine should not be something which
is costing millions of lives. It speaks explicitly of our values and
our concern  of the property of one over the socal function of that
knowledge that this is even an issue.

CSIRO were criticised for working on the Birdflu vaccine because
another nation owns the virus.

People are buying the DNA of other people.
Where is my right to myself?

Patented organisms have been developed.
the knowledge of what these organisms are and what impact they might
have on an ecology is held by the owners of the patent in the
artificial organism.

Patents are also held on species of crops which are end of line
genetically modified mutations. No next gen if you use this seed. You
need to buy the next gen direct from supplier, tidy for the company,
crap for the ecology. These GM seeds do cross pollinate. Currently it
is the person who is contaminated by the GM pollen which is being
sued. when we start losing species because we have no access to
heritage seed that might change.

Control of information is a fundamental aspect of generic freedom.
Our information law is out of step with our conversations about free
society democracy environmental responsibility. We need to think about
free trade as something which is trade which makes communities free to
participate.
ie freedom as a right and a responsibility, the impact of our choices
on others and on our context as a whole. We need to think beyond "ME"
economics.
Systemically it is expensive of our ability to see what we are doing
as a planet and as a global community. We are choosing to be clumsy of
our impact in order to own pieces of perspective. What happens if
ideas are not property, what business models do we use and can we use
which are not dependent on restriction of access.