 Home page in English |
 feed en  feed es |
 feed it  feed pt |
Except where stated otherwise, the content of this website is licensed under a Creative Common License. You are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work. You are also free to make derivative works, under the following commandments: thou shalt give the original author credit; thou shalt not use this work for commercial purposes; If thou alter, transform, or build upon a text, thou shalt distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one. |
|
An Interview with Wu Ming on Copyleft and Intellectual Property from Blow Up Magazine (Italy), #86/87, Summer 2005). Interviewer: Michele Coralli
Q. In the interviews we've done so far on copyright in the 'cut and paste' era there's been a number of interesting issues raised, ones that could be starting points to this conversation. The most striking feeling is that in many places when you talk about the internet and new digital technologies there's still a certain anxiety which prevails. It's a little bit as if, confronted with a change that's got the reach of a global revolution, the fear of losing a position which is more or less dominant is the only thing that determines the direction of editorial policies. What is it that still frightens people? A. If you're talking about the entertainment industry, the fear is about knowing the opportunity's been missed, of clearly having arrived late, of having had to deal with the innovation rather than having anticipated it, and all this after decades of the rhetoric and propaganda of the 'new', 'the next big thing', 'cutting edge' and 'state of the art'. The bosses of the cultural industry fear the new, they fear it viscerally, but they can't admit it, they're embarrased by this: to fear the new is …anticapitalist…it's…illiberal! The culture in which they formed their ideas doesn't accept the idea of second place at all, let alone last place with the black guernsey (like that cyclist in the 80s, Gambirasio). It's alarming and worrying when you discover your opinions are behind the times, 'conservative', rendered old hat by a momentous cognitive change; one of the most important steps forward in the diffusion and socialisation of knowledge since the Neolithic age. So what do you do? Dismiss the new in order to criminalise it later: "What cognitive change? What copyleft? What peer-to-peer? It's called theft, it's called fraud, it's called being deceitful! What's so epoch-changing about committing crime?" The bosses had gotten used to huge profits in conditions where they had the supremacy of format (cds, dvds) and exclusive ownership of the means of production (recording studios, sound stages, burning facilities etc.). The partial shift from the emphasis on formats (the flow of data counts more than the means of its delivery) and the democratisation of computing (by now every home has broadband and a cd burner) has hit them in the hip pocket. They'll have to get used to 'normal' profits and producing and selling entertainment in other ways. They could have acted sooner, they could have caught the wave from the beginning, but they didn't have the right mentality, they didn't have the right information. The web has been in existence and growing for eleven years, the internet itself for even longer, connection speeds have gotten faster and faster (from dial-up to isdn to adsl to optic fibre). These people pay exorbitant amounts on pollsters and market research and yet they weren't able to see the trend.What's more, the traditional media hasn't helped them: every day sensationalist journalism paints a hellish picture of pedophiles, pirates, password thieves, credit card cloners and very rarely are the real developments currently in progress ever described. Usually, the media arrives after the fact, and they describe the situation from the previous year. There's a lot of ignorance and narrowmindedness even in the specialised press, 'niche journalism': a few months ago in an Italian music magazine some idiot defined copyleft as 'freedom to steal.' Q. The idea that free downloads have the capacity to encourage sales of an editorial product, be it a book or a record, struggles to find acceptance. Why? A. You're correct in writing 'the capacity to'; in suggesting a potential. It's not at all automatic. An artist needs to work at it, offer a quality product, show they believe in it, follow the product's circulation and the effect it has, then a reputation grows, there's the desire to discover other works by the author etc. If culture circulates, it produces a beneficial cycle. In the case of a book, it works really well. By now there are figures to hand which show this - it's up to others to try and prove us wrong. Our books keep selling because of continuous word of mouth, fostered by downloads. In the case of music, what's needed is a change of mentality. The issue is no longer the delivery format: the majority of profits will continue to come less and less from cd sales. We're not talking about multi-cd box sets with really beautiful artwork and amazing booklets: they're always things that are worth buying; touching, feeling. We're talking about the standard new album release. The cd today is an accessory, albeit an important one, but an accessory nevertheless. It's one of the ways of making the music and the name of the composer circulate; of releasing messages in bottles to the currents. It's a way of storing music's memory, handing it down to other generations (even if the cd is a format which is easily damaged, contrary to what was said when it was released on the market). But the real moment of validation and earning will increasingly be live performance, besides the various other commercial avenues (including soundtracks, tv ads, radio jungles). It should be noted that this is also true for lap-top oriented music: you may sell few copies of a cd, but venues call you to do sets, to build a sonic performance etc… Q. Cooperative labour as impetus for development and innovation. This is the challenge of initiatives born under the umbrella of Open Source like the on-line encyclopaedia Wikipedia or the Creative Commons project - free licenses created to foster exchange between authors. Between these tendencies and the ones which push for an ever tightening restriction on copyright, like the 'Mickey Mouse' law written ad hoc by the American Congress for Disney, is there a real clash happening or are these impulses which will be able to co-habit in peace? A. There's a Woody Allen aforism that goes like this: 'The lion and the lamb shall lie down together but the calf won't get much sleep.' Peaceful co-habitation is impossible, perhaps we should speak of conflictual co-existence. They're two horses pulling in opposite directions. Thesis and antithesis will produce a long line of precarious synthesis, until a more stable outcome is reached, which we hope will be a radical reform of copyright legislation. But it'll take years and years. Q. In music, like in literature, it seems that one reaction to certain protectionist practices has been a real eruption of new material. Beyond the ease of use of the new technologies, of course, you get the impression that in reaction to the way lawyers are so reddily unleashed to safeguard protected works, there's a lot of productivity that's often free from the onus of self-censorship. In other words, don't you think that zealous protectionism is responsible for determining opposite, almost excessive outcomes of artistic spontaneity? A. Absolutely. It's always been that way. Put up a fence and you'll give someone the idea of trespassing. The act of trespassing produces a new sense of the space: where before there'd been only one, now there are two – the 'over here' and the 'over there'. Pure dialectics, the one which becomes two. From the one comes the multiple. Control produces lines of escape. Q. Your copyleft notice is based in the first instance on an intellectual honesty which makes whoever reutilises materials responsible for not doing so for commercial gain. Isn't it naïve to think that I can copy everything by simply promising not to make any money out of it? A. Copyleft has, as a foundation, copyright. A copyleft notice is nothing more than a copyright notice with a list of exceptions to the rule. The text is mine because I'm the author, it's up to me to decide, and I decide that if you want to you can reproduce it and use it in such and such a way…but not in such a way. If you make unauthorised use of it, you violate the copyright. Without copyright you don't have copyleft, you have works in the public domain. This is the case with the great nineteenth century novels which are now free of copyright. Anyone can republish them, even with hasty and badly done translations. With copyleft this can't happen, because the conditions of use are very clear. Trust is a really great thing, it's always hoped that there's intellectual honesty but if it's lacking, there are the courts. If you fall from the trapeze when you're making a leap, it's not bad knowing there's a net below. Q. An 'electronic' or 'digital' approach is no doubt more visible in a musician than in a writer. How do you think that this technology, that's determined a profound change in the relationship between producer and product, has been capable of influencing human creative thought? In other words are we simply in a phase that started with something Walter Benjamin identified seventy years ago or is it something more? A. We don't believe that a digital sensibility today in a writer is 'less visible'. The passage from the typewriter to the word processor, that you could say had been completed by the end of the Eighties, had already revolutionised the way of composing a text. The development of the web has done the rest. The 'recursivity' of writing (that is to say the possibility of modifying something an infinite number of times without destroying the temporary document, using white out, or throwing it away etc), the end of the fear of the empty page, the cut and paste function, the speed with which you can send the text to other people for an opinion, the ease with which you go from a file to a book (once the manuscript had to be recomposed on a sheet in lead characters!), the greater interaction between writers and readers via emails, blogs, web sites…All this radically changes the psychology of writing, the approach to the written word. It restores to writing its social dimension. Q. Which artists are best interpreting this sharing oriented technological aesthetic? A. More than artists, it's interesting to talk about 'initiatives.' The 'cd brulé' initiative done by Einsturzende Neubauten and Elio e le storie tese (at the end of the gig you can buy a recording at a low price); the 'Grey Album' initiative by DJ Dangermouse (and in general the whole bootleg remix aesthetic that was in vogue a few years ago and has now transformed into something undefinable); the Beatallica operation (a creative parody that's been established and developed thanks to the resources of the web); and then all the artists who aren't afraid to put their music on-line for download because they know that, if they're intelligent, they have everything to gain. As far as writing is concerned, we won't talk about ourselves, and we'll 'limit ourselves' to point out the spectacular growth in literary blogs. Q. Bill Gates recently stated that "there's more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises." Do you consider yourselves communists? A. Let's let the facts speak for themselves, beyond the ideological tags. |
Home page in English |
 THE BLOG |
feed en feed es |
feed it feed pt |
Except where stated otherwise, the content of this website is licensed under a Creative Common License. You are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work. You are also free to make derivative works, under the following commandments: thou shalt give the original author credit; thou shalt not use this work for commercial purposes; If thou alter, transform, or build upon a text, thou shalt distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one. |