So what did I learn at the Forum d’Avignon about the fate of the Internet in Europe?

It’s of course impossible to distill the entire conference, especially since much of the benefit was getting to meet some fascinating people. And, it’s impossible to feel confident about these lessons because the event consisted of 450 invited guests, so my sample was skewed, even though there was an attempt to achieve balance across cultures, beliefs, and genders. (Fully half of the attendees were women.) Nevertheless, …

Within this set of policy makers and large industry players, there is a conviction that the Internet is primarily a threat that has put all of culture and creativity at risk.

Why do they see it that way? Many of them are content publishers. To them, the Net looks like a competitive publishing medium that connects cultural content to consumers via search engines. Although the conference puts this concern in terms of the failure of the Net to connect consumers to worthy objects of culture, virtually all the public discussion was about the economic threat the current purveyors of mass culture feel. They believe that without the strictest enforcement of copyright, creators won’t be able to earn a living, and thus the Net will kill culture. The idea that the Net is actually the greatest engine of culture in history was expressed only three times, each time by Americans. [The next day: That last sentence is an overstatement. Americans expressed this idea the most directly and forcefully, it seems to me, but not solely.]

Authors rights were taken at the Forum as an economic imperative and as a moral imperative. There is no sense at all that those rights might be usefully balanced with the rights of “consumers” and makers. None. Zilch. Fair Use — granted, an American concept — was raised once in passing. (Victoria Espinel, Obama’s IP Czar, mentioned it, very positively.) The attendees were so convinced that authors’ rights are supreme that they left the conference convinced that there is consensus on the topic. Indeed, the conference ended with a summary of the ministerial summit on culture that was held in parallel with the first day of the conference: All the stakeholders agree on the supreme importance of fighting piracy. Of course, that ministerial meeting [Later: it was called the Cultural Summit, I have learned] included no users at all. So much for “all the stakeholders.” (I pointed this out to the person who convened the meeting (which I was not at, of course), and he said that the government representatives were there to represent users.)

Because of their view of the Net as a publishing medium, and because of the abundance of content on the Net, the dominant paradigm of the Forum views Google as the center of the Net. The participants thus wondered what sort of legislation is required to enforce “search neutrality” against Google. Now, there is no denying that Google is a center of the Net, and its algorithms have a great deal of effect on which pages are seen. But the participants at the Forum had what seemed to me to be a monomaniacal focus on Google, which makes sense if you’re thinking of the Net as a pile of content mediated by an index. They seemed to have no sense that there are living networks of people recommending and linking outside of Google’s search box. And for many of us, the transformative effect of the Net has been as a social place, not as an information medium.

Based on random interactions, it seems to me that at this meeting the small coalition that supported users’ rights as well as authors’ rights consisted of Americans, librarians, and students. Had there been more hackers here, I suspect they’d join our little band, but engineers, geeks and techies were woefully under-represented.

Overall, quite depressing, with the most profound anti-Internet sentiment coming from President Sarkozy in an 1.5 talk and discussion he favored us with.

Vive l’internet ouvert!

[All errors in French due to Google Translate.]

________

It is true that European Commissioner Neelie Kroes attacked the focus on copyright as misguided. Many in the media seem to have heard this as a call for copyright reform. (Here’s my live-blogging of her remarks.) I did not. I thought she was fully backing the rights of authors and strong copyright protection, but saying that we need to do more to create business models that create more money for creators. I did not hear Neelie suggesting copyright reform. I hope I’m wrong.

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They move us into the grand hall — vaulted ceilings — for a talk by Pres. Nikolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy has not exactly been a friend of the Internet. The last time I heard him talk was at LeWeb when he was a candidate. Among the three candidates who spoke there, Sarkozy’s talk was clearly the most hostile to the Internet, viewing it primarily as a site of gossip and slander.

President Sarkozy: I was going to give a prepared speech but instead will speak off the cuff. Never before have cultural protagonists — politicians, heads of gov’t — had to make so many efforts to come up with imaginative, new responses to the challenges that humans have never had to face before. I know my presence here surprised some observers. Why talk about culture in such a crisis? Because culture is the bedrock, and the bedrock of our response. The French response to the crisis is to invest massively in culture and anything having to do with culture. That is the French way of doing things. France believes that cultural goods are essential goods. That is the basis of the choices we have made. To live, man needs to feed himself, be healthy, and needs culture. France is the only developed country that has not cut into its cultural budgets — and around in Europe cultural budgets are being cut 20, 30, 50% — but we have increased those budgets.

I’m an optimist. The world has never needed cultural protagonists the way we do now. You give life sense, you build links, you create collective sense. The offshoot of globalization is that citizens need a sense of belonging to their country. What better way than through the adhesion to one’s culture.

Why have we had to show such boldness? Because all cultural protagonists are facing a crisis of distribution. This is a matter of extreme seriousness, if we consider — as I consider — it is no service to culture to say that it is free for all. The disappearance of traditional distribution methods threatens traditional culture itself. You used to go to a record store or a DVD store. That is shattered. So, we have to reengineer a viable economic model from A to Z. This is not simply a matter of imaging. You have to be courageous. I will be blunt. I have always believed that there would be no form of creation if there were no longer to be respect for upholding and respect for copyright and author’s rights. This is of the essence and shapes all the rest.

Bon Marche invented the very concept of author’s rights. A musician has ownership over the music he writes. An author has ownership over the book he publishes. To deny the ownership of artists on their work amounts to negating all forms of creation. What was the status of creators before they had ownership? They were simply court jesters. Those were the lucky ones. Your predecessors long ago might find a benefactor who fell in love with a particular musician’s works and would protect him. What enabled artists to break out of that yoke? What give musicians and writers independence and freedom? What enabled them to recovery their ownership. Copyright. The idea that you could live on the benefits of what you created. There is no independence when you rely exclusively on the genersoity of benefactors.

I am determined not to accept that a tech revolution, even as positive as the Net in other respects, should call into question the ownership rights of a creator over his or her works. To challenge that is to acknowledge anuy economy of culture.

Why is it so complex? I remember the 2005-6 debate where people on my side said you shouldn’t defend these ideas even if they’re right because youth will rise up against you. But one should not renounce one’s beliefs simply because you have to explain things to people before you persuade them. I even had people say I would lose this election if I did not understand this extraordinary revolution that has turned all on its head. We imposed, against much resistance, legislation (HADOPI) against piracy and to protect author’s rights.

I don’t want there to be any ambiguity, so I want to respond to those who ultimately believed what I believe, but decided not to defend a just idea for political reasons.

First, I was indeed elected as president. One can uphold copyright without alienating the majority of people. People are down to earth and can understand if you explain it.

Second, I was told I lost that war. Piracy is part of people’s lives, I was told. When I saw certain sites where daily newspapers were offering their articles free and people weren’t buying the paper any more. How little respect you have for what you do! And how stupid to think that people would pay for what they would get for free. Within a few months of HADOPI, there was a 35% drop in privacy, so the battle wasn’t lost. The internet society has to be guided by rules, just as real society is. The great USA went about it our way. NZ, S Korea likewise. The battle is not lost.

Now we have to tackle the streaming web sites and there is no reason not to do so. What was ambiguous was that p2p pirating was based on an ideology that was based on an initially positive ideology: sharing. The approach wasn’t in and of itself negative. On streaming sites the ideology of sharing has gone out the window; they’re about making money.

They claimed I’m a fanatic. But HADOPI is just a means to an end. Tech is evolving, so the law must too. All we want to do is protect author’s rights. Once the principle of protecting author’s rights is enshrined, why not?

And at the Digital E8, I said lets invite the Net giants to talk with us. I was told that they’d think we’re trying to gag them. When you invite people to talk, you’re not gagging them. So, we sat down and talked, and there was no tension. The idea is not to protect our backyard but to pull these worlds together. The Net revolution is a phenomenally positive development, but we need to talk. And to utter the forbidden word: Taxation. [Google pays no taxes in France.] I cannot accept that these companies pay no taxes in France. You can’t have all your clients in one customer and your team in another customer, and pay taxes ina third country where the taxes are the lowest.

We can support this Net revolution while still talking with Google, Zuckerberg, Microsoft, and talk about author’s rights, taxations, the fact that the latest Marakesh bombing was done by someone who discovered how to make a home-made bomb on the Internet.

In our mind, there isn’t an opposition between the Net world and cultural world. There is a need to get together, speak the same language, lay the foundations for an economy that is viable for Net giants and creators and that doesn’t ruin what the creators create. Culture is an investment that will get us out of this crisis, not a mere expenditure that one can cut back on. Culture is not a luxury. So, I felt it my duty to be here you in this beautiful city, even though there are heavier burdens to shoulder.

Q: I’m a Bollywood actress and writer. I am French. I am also Indian. Completely both. For me culture means the ability to choose among our own passions, and not the ideas that are fashionable. For this we need cultural diversity. So: What is culture?
A: For me, culture is meaning. “Culture is the response one gets when one wonders what one is doing on Earth?” [He’s quoting someone I couldn’t get.] What gives our life meaning. There is a spiritual and cultural answer to this. Culture is the only area in which there is no notion of progress because culture is the only way man has found to better his condition. When you go to L’escaux Caves you realize it’s the Sistine Chapel of the time — the same sense of transcendence, getting man out of the Kantian chains that bind us. If I take off my head of state cap, I would simply say that culture is an investment. France welcomes 20M tourists a year. What would France be without its culture? If I look at it as a politician, culture is what binds a society. It is the lifeblood. It is why men and women do not know one another share common emotions. Without culture there is no sense of nationhood. If I were to speak as a reader or listener, culture is emotion. A special sort of emotion experience by the composer or writer, but that has universal value. The more personal the feelings expressed, the more unique, the more universal. And, to come around full circle, how can you define culture as what it is not. It is not that extra bit of soul — I hate that expression — for the well-fed society that can afford it. It is not part of the whole. It is the whole. From culture you achieve cohesiveness. You don’t have life and then the spangle of culture. Culture is our identity. Finally, what is culture not? It is the very opposite of sectarianism, of the accepted dogma, of conservativism, of the sheep mentality, of the Pavlovian reflex, of the automatic geographical alignment, of the concern for image at whatever cost.

Q: I am an American anthropologist from India. It is music to my ears to hear that music is a necessity. If there were no investment in culture, my discipline would disappear, which would not be a sorry for the world, but would be for us anthropologists. When you make it clear that culture is a non-negotiable priority even or especially in this time of fiscal crisis, how can make this argument in other countries? Can you draw on your experience with other locations?

A: Need only look at what has happened throughout the world. When the Spanish steel industry was swept around, the city of Bilbao was ruined because its economy rested on it. They made a tremendous wager, betting on architectural quality (Frank Gehry) and culture (Guggenheim Museum). Bilbao generates 220 million euros because of this. Bilbao was saved by cultural investment. When Germany reunited, they decided that the capital would be in Berlin, and built an exceptional capital. Culture is what Berlin has to offer. They’ve had a time attracting companies to Berlin, so real estate prices have stayed low, attracting artists. But 13% of the jobs in Berlin are in the arts and culture. Liverpool’s response in the crisis was to invest massively in cultural terms, and it worked. The cities of the Ruhr are another example. I have had to make painful decisions in Moselle [?] and Metz [spelling!] where 30% of jobs were military. We had to redeploy bases and barracks once my predecessor, Chirac, abolished compulsory military service. So, we abolished military jobs. The implications were colossal. So, we decided to build the Bourbon [?] Center in Metz. It received more than one million visitors. We’re going to dig our heels on this. We’re going to build a Louvre in Lens [?], which has suffered two brutal revolutions: the collapse of the mining industry and the textile crisis. That will project will be a success. We’ll have the museum of the Mediterranean in Marseilles. The Impressionists housed in the ___ museum, the dream I have is of a magnificent museum in Normandy. When the crisis befell us, we came up with a plan to relaunch the economy which included 400B euros worth of additional money for culture. I think there were 83 cathedrals needed to be restored, of hwihc 50 have been restored. And the living arts! Art is always living art — people go on stage and perform. We have not touched one penny of that money. It is our certainty that the best way to respond to the crisis is to invest in culture, just as in aerospace. And if you look at the history of art, creation has never been better than in countries that feel good about themselves. The two phenomena are intimately interconnected. When I look at French cinema, I think Thank heavens our predecessors set up systems that I have done everything to protect. That’s why the French film industry is not in the situation of some of our neighbors that have seen their film industries go down the drain. I may be bold but I have a sense of risk.

Q: [A film maker – Vanya [?]] Barbara Hendricks this morning said that art is as important as air and water, and you said the same. I am a member of Culture and Diversity. Our goal is create cultural opportunities for poor kids. We want to bring them toward art and art schools, but often the importance of art is often quite removed from their lives. They receive art passively through tv, internet and films. But they have little opportunity to be active. What can we do?

A: Look at the extraordinary way the US puts films, music, etc., at service of their economic interests. The brands take root. I’m not saying it’s deliberate, but it works. There’s a steamrolling effect. The generosity of French artists and film directors is equaled elsewhere. We are very happy to screen American films and show American artworks. We do want our American friends to remember that there are other countries. That’s another debate. Reciprocity has to exist in the cultural industry. Beyond exchange. We have to be able to defend this principle. It’s not just the under-privileged. The privileged don’t always appreciate culture. We want to use this extraordinary instrument — the 5,000 colleges in France — to create the new audiences for opera, theater, film, etc. We have started a program where we by the rights to 200 films and make them available to all these colleges. This was not a way of competing with the film industry, but the idea was that if you start watching films in college, you will continue as an adult. We have 264 national theaters, 600 theater troupes, a huge reservoir of plays. But where are the audiences? I’d like to see these plays, once they have toured, to go to the colleges and schools, to shape and form the audiences of tomorrow. Take opera. The cost of a seat is pretty prohibitive, yet the operas are full. I’d like to buy up the rights to these operas and enable these shows to play in schools and colleges. Then there are underprivileged. We’re taking an initiative bringing exhibitions…going out to meet the people. In one case only 19% had ever been in a museum. We’re trying to decentralize, e.g., the Mobile Pompidou exhibition. It’s a simple stage under a tent so people aren’t intimidated. Suddenly they lay their eyes on a Picasso. Can you imagine the effect? That work of art now is not foreign. It’s part of one’s village. Culture is too often sensed as foreign. Whatever you background, when you set your eyes on a work of art, you appreciate it. There is no pre-determinism. Art’s value should be self-evident. You walk down the street and see something beautiful. You don’t need to be told or have it explained. The more you know the more you need to be told. When it’s simply about emotion, nothing needs to be explained to you. [Wow is that false. And it’s inconsistent with his Net views. If we respond to art without training, then why hasn’t the Net clustered around works of art?]

Q: How about free access to museums?

A: I don’t think that’s the ultimate response because you don’t respect what is free. Everything has a price. Everything has a value. There has to be a bit of an effort for there to be pleasure. But we have for 18-25 and teachers access to museums should be free. The number of visits as a result of this decision: 2.7M youths have gone in. Teachers: 500K. Culture is an amazing, fantastic domain that holds true. You have to be pragmatic, generous, open-minded. I am against access to museums being free because they need to sustain themselves. But for young people and teachers this was a good move. If teachers don’t get into the habit of going to museums, how can their pupils learn.

Q: [a Swedish student] Ever since I was a child, I wanted to make a difference. First as a poet. Then wanting to become the Sect’y General of the UN. My generation was born into the Internet. We invented Facebook, Skype, and Spotify. This has changed how we communicate and interact, across borders. From my point of view, these are great developments. Culture is beautiful and is in all that we do and are. Everything that isn’t developing is degenerating. Values are changing. Why is the defense of IP fundamental in your policy? Isn’t it in opposition to access to culture you’ve stood up for? Isn’t the fight against piracy a hopeless case.

A: I see haven’t persuaded all of you. An artist who wants music to be disseminated free of charge always has that option. I am challenging the pirating of works who do not want that. Who would buy the film or music if you can access it free of charge. There is now a quite cheap offering on the market. It’s right that you should pay less for a record or CD you buy on the Internet. For music we’re going to set up a system comparable to the CNC system we set up for film. I want providers to contribute musical creation just as a certain number of actors contribute to creation in the film industry. Just as there’s a national film center (CNC) there should be a national music one, which should be partially funded by the providers. When there are no writers or music, what is your generation going to get? For music there has to be composers, for films etc. If they don’t have ownership, what will they become of them? The famous will remain in the catalog until their rights fall into the public domain. If your first film or record is not enough to live on, how will you do the second? I asked Zuckerberg — who is remarkable and I admire — if he’d like his work pinched, and he said “Of course not.” Explain to me why a famous author or film maker should have fewer rights than those who are not famous. Go ask Google or Microsoft. Don’t tell me I’m not in favor of the free market! We should fight harder for author’s rights! I think it’s beginning to sink in. I know in Sweden, regulation is a dirty word. We defend our rights, but we’re not refusing the Internet. France is where the Net has developed the fastest and the most. Let us not ask the wrong questions. Illegal streaming sites are doing untold damage and I fully intend to fight them. I do not want to see profit made from the simple theft of other people’s work, just as in the national bond issue, I have earmarked a lot of money so Frederic Mitterand can digitize what are in the French national libraries. Big companies wanted to do it, but we said no. Freedom needs laws. Not too many regulations, but when there is no regulation, it is those who have the most clout and fewest scruples win.

Q: When we try to understand the current revolution, we should look back to the Printing Revolution. Technological rev is not only a change in tools, but influences all levels of culture.: distribution, production, communication, and sharing of culture. We have to rethink all aspects concurrently. We need mediation and explanation. With my students we explore other economic models, or a global license. Shouldn’t we try to reconcile technology and our culture in a period of massive piracy?

A: Yes, it’s a massive revolution, but that shouldn’t lead us to turn our backs on our democratic traditions. We have to find the right balance. On a global license: I am completely against this completely crazy idea. I believe that the identification between the author and his work is of the essence. If we all into some kind of melting pot, we are denying everything that is individual and specific. No one is defending this crazy idea. We are indeed facing challenges. E.g., digital TV that puts on the same screen the traditional, regulated services and the Internet world, which is not regulated and that does not contribute to the film industry the way the traditional services do. The latter will be stealing audience share. So we are going to have to work on how to regulate digital, connected TV era. Or, cloud computing: There again, what happens to your private copy that no longer needs to be uploaded? The battle against illegal downloading will become a matter of the past because in cloud computing there won’t be any need to download anything. But as I said initially, we’re ready to have a third or fourth version of our anti-piracy laws. We believe in protecting author’s rights and them getting individual remuneration for their work. The ways and means of doing this will change, and no one could not say that the Net is not a major step in social connection. But we don’t want our democratic principles thrown out the window. Of course we have to regulate and do it within a framework. It takes 3 mins to download a film. We want to be flexible but stick to our fundamental principles.

Q: [economist] I work on the economics of art and culture. You’ve today demonstrated how clearly you understand the connection. You’ve made the tax system a priority in your own cultural policy. The VAT on some cultural goods has risen in France. Is this consistent with your support of culture.

A: For France, the VAT on the same goods should be the same, whether hardcopy of digital versions. I understand the problems that may arise out of this for the European Commission. But as of Jan 1 2012 we’ll apply reduced VAT for hardcopy goods. Why should it be 7% on the Net and 19.6% for hardcopy. The globalization caused by the Net leads to major distortions in competition, which we cannot accept. So, I’m requesting that VAT on digital and ebooks be the same, at a reduced rate. It will be implement on Jan 1., and I hope that the European Commissioner will not come down to us too hard. This is a personal message to her. I do not understand that there should be a VAT differential to books, films, records, music, because in my mind cultural goods are the same and should have equal standing. In France cultural goods are considered to be essential goods, like food. Now, why we have increased VAT from 5.7 to 7% on cultural goods, is a way of protecting that sector; VAT in France is 19%. I cannot ask the French to tighten their belts and hear one sector complain about a rise from 5.7 to 7%. We have maintained VAT at 2.2% for living arts and press. So let no one say we’re being unfair to culture. We have protected the cultural area ferociously. We have smoothed the burden across the board. I hope the EC lets me work calmly on the record industry. I take this very seriously. Your memories are of smell and music. The systematic destruction of the music industry I cannot simply shrug off. That’s why I’m thinking about reduced VAT for music, as I’ve done for films.

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Rebecca MacKinnon has an excellent op-ed in the NY Times about the latest bill from the Senate that would censor the Internet.

For a 5,000 word post on a topic I didn’t even know was a topic, there’s Harold Feld’s piece about “Will Cisco’s war against the TV white spaces tank incentive auctions? “

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If we believe (as did our Constitutional founders) that the purpose of copyright is to provide a sufficient incentive for the creation of works that would then enter the public domain at the earliest possible moment — because that’s how works have lasting value — then why can’t we figure out the proper length of copyright with a little science?

What is the curve of sales for most books? How many years do books sell more than a handful of copies? Where are most the authorss reward and compensation coming from with regard to sales? How much of our culture do we have to sacrifice in order to support the 0.0001% of authors whose book sell anything worth a damn after ten years?

Of course, I made up that 0.0001% figure for rhetorical purposes, but getting the actual figure is exactly what I’m asking for. Is this info available somewhere?

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Having written in opposition to the Google Books Settlement (1 2 3), I was pleased with Judge Chin’s decision overall. The GBS (which, a couple of generations ago would have unambiguously referred to George Bernard Shaw) was worked out by Google, the publishers, and the Authors Guild without schools, libraries, or readers at the table. The problems with it were legion, although over time it had gotten somewhat less obnoxious.

Yet, I find myself slightly disappointed. We so desperately need what Google was building, even though it shouldn’t have been Google (or any single private company) that is building it. In particular, the GBS offered a way forward on the “orphaned works” problem: works that are still in copyright but the owners of the copyright can’t be found and often are probably long dead. So, you come across some obscure 1932 piece of music that hasn’t been recorded since 1933. You can’t find the person who wrote it because, let’s face it, his bone sack has been mouldering since Milton Berle got his own TV show, and the publishers of the score went out of business before FDR started the Lend-Lease program. You want to include 10 seconds of it in your YouTube ode to the silk worm. You can’t because some dead guy and his defunct company can’t be exhumed to nod permission. Multiply this times millions, and you’ve got an orphaned works problem that has locked up millions of books and songs in a way that only a teensy dose of common sense could undo. The GBS applied that common sense — royalties would be escrowed for some period in case the rights owner staggered forth from the grave to claim them.. Of course the GBS then divvied up the unclaimed profits in non-common-sensical ways. But at least it broke the log jam.

Now it seems it’ll be up to Congress to address the orphaned works problem. But given Congress’ maniacal death-grip on copyright, it seems unlikely that common sense will have any effect and our culture will continue to be locked up for seventy years beyond the grave in order to protect the 0.0001 percent of publishers’ catalogs that continue to sell after fourteen years. (All numbers entirely made up for your reading pleasure.)

As Bob Darnton points out, this is one of the issues that a Digital Public Library of America could address.

James Grimmelmann has an excellent and thorough explanation of the settlement, and a prediction for its future.

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Larisa Mann (AKA DJ Ripley), a doctoral candidate at Berkeley Law, is giving a Berkman talk titled “Decolonizing copyright: Jamaican street dances and globally networked technology.” [I had to talk a phone call during the first ten minutes :( ]

Her question: Does globally networked technology and/or copyright law reinforce the coloniality of power? She explicitly takes coloniality as undesirable because it unequally distributes power. She is looking particularly at Jamaica. Copyright law is colonial in Jamaica, she says, since it was written by the British for their colony.

There are culturally specific assumptions at work in copyright law: that there are discrete, identifiable, individual authors who are separate from consumers, it’s about originality, and works are “fixed” (discrete and identifiable).

An example. A riddim is the instrumental part of a song, Larissa says. Riddims circulate independently from vocals in Jamaica. They’ve been recorded since the 1950s, if not before. Many songs use the same riddim. One site has cataloged 279 songs that use the Stalag 17 riddim, for example.

DJs will play series of songs using the same riddim, which many dancers like since they know what’s coming. Riddims become “shared cultural knowledge,” she says. People know them by name. They recognize the samples in songs. Riddims create shared knowledge and enable engagement with the current musical environment.

But riddims contradict copyright: shared, repeated, unoriginal. “Technology can bring copyright law considerations into people’s daily practices.” Law gets embedded into tech. But this can disrupt valuable cultural practices, like riddims.

Dancers have become among the most highly discussed and famous in Jamaica, at least in part due to the availability of video. E.g., videos of the Boasy Tuesday party are online, and you can learn the dances from it. People become famous from these videos.

The good side of network tech is that it eases circulation, you can achieve international fame, and it can increase your local reputation. And in Jamaica, financial and social relationships overlap.

The bad side is that there’s more surveillance, both of daily life and of the circulation of audio/video materials. This can lead to lawsuits that could discourage practices such as sampling or using riddims.

“Exilic spaces” are spaces at the margins of law. That’s where a lot of culture lives, and where there’s a lot of potential for equality.

Q: Has there been any move to change Jamaican copyright law?
A: In 1993, when Jamaica joined the WTO, they rewrote their copyright law to be aligned with the WTO approach. There’s some pushback at WIPO where some Southern countries are trying to get a developing world agenda. Jamaica is not a part of that. And it would be a tremendous problem for Jamaica to withdraw from the WTO.

Q: The sound systems and crews also contribute to the music…

A: Producing CDs to sell the music isn’t an important part of the Jamaican music scene. The sounds and crews were often associated with liquor stores, and made their money that way. It’s still the case that they generally don’t generate money by selling recordings but through events.

Q: If you’re a music producer in Jamaica and would like to have your artist go for the big money, are you pro or con copyright?
A: I’ve spoken with many, and they’re divided. If people want to buy recordings, they tend to buy unlicensed mix CDs. Producers both want a cut and want their artists’ names to be known. (Artists frequently put their producers’ names into their music so others can find the producers.) There’s payola, too; people are desperate to get their music on the radio.

Q: What type of actual enforcement attempts are there against individual Jamaicans,? Also, do artists’ positions about copyright change as they become successful?
A: Sometimes artists’ positions change. They’re sophisticated about knowing when to use the formal systems. Enforcement depends on how much power you have. I can’t find a single Jamaican who’s sued another.

Q: Jamaica has strong class distinctions…
A: The coloniality of power filters all the way through the system. People at the top are more comfortable using the legal system to enforce their will. The upper classes are often uncomfortable with what goes on in exilic spaces and they are often unwilling to invest in the culture of the urban poor.

Q: How does gender play into this, which is a different power dynamic. The previous prime minister was a woman. Are women producers?

A: Women are important force on the dance floor. There are not a lot of women producers. I met two female engineers. There are not as many female vocalists as men. But women are much more employable in Jamaica in other jobs; they have more access to economic stability. So it’s not that the men have the opportunity to achieve global fame and fortune and thus are better off; the men have much more difficulty getting stable jobs.

Q: How do the riddim creators get compensated?

A: Riddims tend to be made once and then re-used, although sometimes they get re-done. People don’t get royalties. If your riddim is hot, you’re a hot producer, which means people hire you.

Q: Are people trying to come up with a more legalistic, more open license for riddims, etc.?
A: Not really. In part that’s because the law is presented as if it were the rational way to do things. It’s presented as the professional way. If you want to make it, you’re told that’s how you ought to transform yourself. If it’s going to change, it should map the way artists actually work.

Q: How do you think Jamaica will change its means of cultural production? Has there been a chilling effect?

A: People’s ability to participate in these networks can be chilled. As channels get successful, they often clamp down. We should be looking to Jamaica for inspiration as we globally think about copyright. The amount of artistic and cultural production in Jamaica is astounding.

Q: Copyright is crazy.
A: Yes. If you post your tribute to a rock guitar solo, as you get better at the solo, the more likely it’ll be taken down. It’s like an accolade.

Q: You said that if a policy is divorced from reality, why have it? Maybe the answer is that they constructed their copyright law in order to get into WPO, without any effort to enforcement.
A: The problem is that the WTO requires compliance and can enforce trade sanctions against you.

Q: Do you think Jamaicans’ attitude toward copyright is different than that of Americans?
A: It’s hard to generalize about Americans about this. Many Jamaicans are very positive about copyright law because it manages what you’ve already made and gets you what is yours, but they often don’t think about the effect it has on culture and creativity. Also, Jamaicans have not had an historical experience of being treated well by global systems, so it’s important to them to own stuff. The question is: What does ownership mean in this context? They have a different idea of what is ownable.

Q: You fundamentally misstate the situation. You say that we don’t have colonialism now. But now we have neo-colonialism.
A: That’s what I intended. I didn’t mean to leave the opposite impression. [She didn’t leave that wrong impression with me – dw]

Q: As a Jamaican, I agree that it’s very much bottom up. And why don’t producers take more ownership? Because the shelflife of these riddims is measure in weeks. By the time you get your paperwork approved, it’ll be over.
A: Since there isn’t ownership of that sort, there’s a tremendous impetus to keep creating.

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Jim Lucchese, CEO of Echo Nest, is giving a talk on the future of music, which he says is in the hands of app developers.

Echo Nest analyzes music tracks (16M so far), looking at many, many parameters. It makes that information available to developers of apps.

MTV uses Echo Nest to figure out who is listening to what, how the audio sounds, and what they’re saying about it on the Web, in order to build a personalized station. More interactive, more web-connected, more personalized, and more engaging, he says. Shifts in how we interact with and experience music are occurring every day. “Music apps are thriving” he says, referring to IOS (iPhone, iPad). The bad news is that most of the thousands of developers reshaping music are locked out of the business. They have to navigate all of the rights issues, and get access to the players. Echo Nest has a community of 6,000 developers, but many of the apps are sitting on the shelf because they can’t get access.

The aim of Echo Nest is to build a machine learning system that understands music, but does it at Web scale. It analyzes music and finds the pitch, tempo, etc. Pandora does this by hand, and has analyzed about 800,000 tracks; it doesn’t scale to 10M tracks. Echo Nest combines this with cultural understanding, which it gathers by crawling the Web. Out of this comes “a ton of data”: similar artists, how popular, tag clouds, hotness, bios, song structure, “fanalytics” (demographics of who is listening, psychographics, etc.) They make this info available to developers, who have made 120 apps, including visualizers, targeted marketing apps, etc.

Many were built during music hack days (weekend coding fests). E.g., more granular control over a Pandora-like app. Or, provide detailed info about artists and tracks. Or, Six Degrees of Black Sabbath: find connections between any two artists. Or, a social trivia app (name the tune, identify the fake band, etc.). Or, turn any tune into a swing tune using Echo Nest’s audio manipulation tools. Or, Audio Kicker: location-aware social music discovery act (uses tastes of a group in the same room).

But, there’s an industry chokepoint. The transactions costs are too high for dealing with a lot of developers. So, Echo Nest is working on open content API’s. If the artist is comfortable with more open models, Echo Nest makes the content available to developers. E.g., the DMCA allows streaming within some limits, e.g., no more than two tracks per album per hour. IF you comply, you can pay a compulsory license and not have to first negotiate the rights. Nest Echo lets developers access DMCA streaming of 10M tracks (because Echo Nest has done a deal — Seven Digital in the UK — with a license to those 10M for DMCA streaming). This approach means we don’t have to wait for copyright reform, it lowers the tansaction costs, and provides a filtering mechanism for content owners.

Q: The CEO of Pandora says that Pandora’s survived because humans do the music analysis.
A: It comes down to the quality of the results. We’re powering personalized radio for MTV, Mog, Thumbplay, Spottify, and for an enormous catalog of tracks. There are humans in our system as well: we’re aggregating what people say on the Web. Pandora has problems. E.g., if they want a Klezmer channel, they need about 5,000 tracks, and they can’t afford to put an army of Klezmer musicians to work finding and analyzing tracks. There are also problems with purely machine analysis: it can be hard to tell low-fi punk vs. country, Christian rock vs. heavy metal.

Q: Is your adio analysis violating copyright?
A: We don’t sell directly. As for copyright, there are a couple of cases. Gracenote (nee CDDB) uses a fingerprint to identify tracks. There’s been no litigation around whether what they or we are doing are derivative works. Our agreement with the holders is that we’re deriving facts that are not copyrightable.

Q: Among your developers, which countries are represented?
A: We just did a survey, but we made the mistake of letting the enter a free text answer to “Where do you live?” So, I’ll get back to you in a year. But there have been music hack days in Europe, Sao Paolo, maybe one coming in India…

Q: What’s the backend?
A: For audio analysis, we send out a lightweight binary that will analyze an audio track in about 2 seconds. We also offer that as a web service. We make the analysis data available for about 16M tracks. On the cultural analysis side, it’s highly customized, uses some open source (SOLR, Lucene), web crawlers.

Q: Business model?
A: We’re a data analysis company. Open API is for noncomercial use. If you’re a ommercial developer, we’ll charge a monthly fee and take a piece of your app’s revenues. If you’re MTV, you’re willing to pay a great license fee and don’t want to share as much with us. But if you’re developing, say, a jogging music stationthat matches the beat to your jogging tempo, we charge much less.

Q: Scholarly interest in analyzing your data?
A: Yochai Benkler was interested in the activity data, especially around artists who are giving away their music: we have data on playcount and how people are trending.

Q: Apps do well on the IOS, but is it just a few apps?
A: There was more churn than we expected. We looked at the top 100 music apps per month for a year, categorized them, and look at the number of new names. Streaming apps had 34 different apps in the top 100 in a year. No consolidation yet. (We don’t have access to the long tail of apps.)

Q: What will happen to copyrighted music?
A: Cloud based access is the answer to peer-to-peer sharing. If Spottify etc. offer a better experience than going through a file sharing network, that’s what people will do. But that will change the model: A user’s interaction with a track on Pandora is worth much less to an artist than the user buying a CD.

Q: Cost?
A: The apps are often free, but it costs maybe $10/month to get access to the music. The digital music market was about $4.5B last year. RPU in England is about $55/yr. If that goes to $120/yr, that’ll be a much bigger music. But maybe it won’t be $10/month, especially if you do a deal for a subset of tracks. Or an ISP opt-out plan for $5/month; the opt-out wold make the penetration rates much higher. Too early to tell. Most of the services are just beginning. Spotify, though, has grown to a million subscribes in Europe in over a year.

Q: Access from car?
A: We’re working with some companies. But, if you have a mobile phone and a car with audio in, you’re there. OTOH, the biggest music subscription company in the US is probably XM Radio.

Q: Selling your service to advertisers?
A: Record labels buy data from us to help them understand their market. One company is using our music data as a way to figure out how to target consumers for non-music products.

A: We are matchmakers between developers and large brands. The brands want apps built.

Q: How big is a catalog of 10M tracks?
A: 10M x 3.5mb ? Warner Music has to update hundreds of repositories and catalogs every week. There ought to be one centralized catalog. It’ll happen someday. Every time so far it’s been muli-year industry efforts among players who don’t want to standardize on a competitor’s standard. We’re very interested in opening up music metadata. We think there’s a commons approach. Problem: 50 ways to spell Guns ‘n’ Roses [sp]. We’re a text analysis company, so we do that. Every collection has its own ID sets. We released an open service called Rosetta Stone that maps among them. A free service. We’ve released an open source audio fingerprinter and do lookups against our database of tracks for free; if you’re compiling additional fingerprints you have to share them (and we share them, too). (We don’t download the tracks when we analyze them.)

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Creative Commons is good for the ecology. It makes it easier for creators to let people use their work without having to worry about a copyright goon squad showing up with truncheons…all within the copyright framework. CC needs some money. Now would be an extraordinarily good time to donate, what with the tax clock clicking both in the CC offices and in yours.

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[Two days later: Ethan Zuckerman liveblogged this better than I. Get thee hence. Also, check Jillian York‘s comments.]

Wayner Marshall, an ethno-musicologist at MIT (and of wayneandwax) is giving a lunchtime talk at the Berkman Center. He’s talking about the “unstable platforms and uneasy peers of brave new world music.” Music can tell us a great deal about politics and culture, he says. We can see the fault lines in public culture as it appears on the Web. The aesthetic qualities of works bear traces of the technology by which they’re made.

The ability to publish to a near limitless audience with production-grade tools has created a brave new world. The watermarking (“remove this stamp by paying”) of some of these works, and the maintaining of these watermarks rather than removing them, ( bears witness to a change in attitudes and culture. He points to a YouTube video titled “Marvel Inc Jerkin in Hollywood,” which uses a brand name, and includes more in the tags. It’s aimed at their peers but is posted in a public site. It’s got a visible watermark in the middle. Wayne then points to the audible watermarks in a jerking track (Fly Kidd – Buckle My Shoe) — every 15 seconds a voice interrupts it. But first we have to listen to an ad to see the video. These are the compromises we’ve made to create public music.

He talks about the New Boyz who created a video using FrootyLoops, posted it, and found other videos of people dancing to their song. Their song became so popular that the New Boyz got signed and produced an official version of their video, far slicker. (Jerkin kids foreground their embrace of technology. Plus they project skateboard culture, skinny jeans, etc. There are arguments about whether they’re violating black masculinity, Wayne says.) Once the professional version came out, YouTube started finding the videos using the soundtrack, so the video creators began began swapping out the audio for other tracks. (In a discussion we learn that Amazon lets music owners register their tracks, triggering a takedown notice or an offer to post a link to a buy link if someone uploads a video that uses the registered track.)

Wayne points to the Jamglue site where users could mix tracks. It’s now shuttered.

Now he switches to “uneasy peers.” Videos and music obviously travel much more easily than before; he shows a Panamanian video that reproduces the original New Boyz vid quite closely, with a new rap over the beat. “They’ve inserted themselves into jerk culture.” This is the music of a brave new world, he says. But it also becomes a new world music. E.g., blogs follow the global spread of music and dance: ghettobassquake. We’re seeing a reimagining of what world music is about: Not so much about West vs. the Rest, but a local dance style (jerkin) circulates throughout the world, peer to peer.

We’re seeing many problems on the platforms that we consider to be part of public culture, e.g., YouTube. Are there other ways to go about it. It’s important to teach new media literacies, but they only go so far. Maybe there are more design and architectural issues to think about.

Q: Are the dispays of cellphones in the vids a sign of new media literacy or just a sign of status or of sociality?
A: I wouldn’t disagree. I don’t want to be too optimistic about the technical savvy. They have certain literacies, but there are other issues.

Q: Maybe people use the audible watermark as a part of the music or culture. Maybe it’s part of the style.
A: Interesting thesis. I haven’t heard people bragging about their watermarks.
Q: They used to blur commercial logos…
A: That was because MTV didn’t want to give away free ads.

Q: As recently as 5 yrs ago, it was pretty much impossible to have access to these productions without access to an underground trading network. Is there no more underground or margin?
A: Those boundaries between underground and mainstream have of course been increasingly blurred. It’s not so much new as easier to do.
Q: Are there some people who are avoiding the public platforms because they want to keep it outside the public?
A: Undoubtedly, although I have not encountered much of it. More often it is being done for friends and just happens to be public.

Q: What sort of architectures ought we be to looking at?
A: The public platforms make the works vulnerable. After the Great Blogocide of ’10, many of the music blogs switched to WordPress. We could use ways to host your own music, for example.

Q: What terminology are you comfortable with?
A: “World music” too often implies non-Western vs. the West, with the West being the real music. [I missed some of this]

Q: Do you think there’s a new kind of underground forming — mainstream platforms vs. underground platforms? Non-US platforms?
A: Yes. Dailymotion in the francophone world, or SkyRock. In Latin America, fotolog is a popular way. 4Share. And more dark net places.

Q: Should the record labels be using you as a consultant?
A: I don’t know what will save the labels.

Q: What are the ethnographers responsibility to the artist if the music makes no copyright statement?
A: As a researcher, I have fair use rights. My masters thesis was about sample-based production and the litigation around it, I refused to identify which music I was talking about. Now, when I blog about a video I know I may be bringing an unwelcome audience to it. It’s an interesting question.

Q: Is the New Boyz story a success story for them and their label? If so, what’s the harm?
A: They’ve had two big hits. But some of the videos that helped elevate them are disappearing because of copyright claims. But I don’t see any chilling effect here: The vid disappears but that was last week anyway. And, of the three groups mentioned in the NYT as signed by Warner Brothers (proof of it going semi-mainstream), Wayne says he’s heard nothing from them since.

Q: You said we may be at the end of the W vs. the Rest or North vs. South paradigm. But, as ___ said, there are four outcomes when cultures map: One dominates. War. Fusion. Thanks but carry on. You’re talking about fusion, but in all the videos we’ve seen, the kids are wearing NY caps, t-shirts, etc. It’s as if they’re saying they’re as NY or LA as the rest of you. Have we hit the point where the remix impacts outside the ethnic community or specific music community? Are we seeing that cross-over?
A: Yes. And we have to look at how the local audience views the performance. Often there’s contentious conversation about the local group aping US culture. OTOH, I look at it and do not see homogenization. It’s locally accented. And the best example of this bleeding out of local communities is MIA, who’s won a Grammy and is frequently sampled; she’s one of these uneasy peers, who’ll issue a CD that nods to local genres but has the attention of the national media.

Q: Has the circle turned? At PlayingForChange, people around the world can play music today. Do the New Boyz look at what the Dominican boys do and want to work with them? Are we getting actual collaboration?
A: Yes, to some extent. That’s burgeoning. More of these videos are echoes. Wayne points to Lil B.

Q: What propagates this music style? The music? The dancing?
A: Hmm. Hard to know. The fact that it’s dance music helps.

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