[Commons-law] Social authorship in a capitalist age

[Rana Dasgupta]

Don't know if any of you saw this on Nettime so am
posting here.  

R

--- nettime's roving reporter <nettime at bbs.thing.net>
wrote:
> Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2002 11:17:55 -0400
> To: nettime-l at bbs.thing.net
> Subject: <nettime> Social authorship in a capitalist
> age
> From: "nettime's roving reporter"
> <nettime at bbs.thing.net>
> 
> <via felix at openflows.org>
> 
> 
> 28 August 2002
>
http://www.opendemocracy.net/forum/document_details.asp?CatID=125&DocID=1744
> 
> Beyond romance and repression: social authorship in
> a capitalist age
> 
> Jason Toynbee
> 
> 
> The imposition of punitive new intellectual property
> regimes represents a
> corporate assault on public culture. The connection
> between capitalism and
> copyright helps us to understand why it is
> happening; while the reality of
> 'social authorship' offers a way to open up new
> possibilities for creative
> workers in a reformed copyright system.
> 
>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 
> The copyright debate is certainly polarised, as
> Sandy Starr argues in a
> recent contribution to openDemocracy's copyright
> debate. But that surely
> reflects the reality of the situation, namely a
> conflict of interest
> between the cultural industries, which market words,
> sounds and images,
> and the workers and consumers who make and use them.
> Like Richard
> Stallman, Siva Vaidhyanathan and others, I'm with
> the latter group. But I
> want to make the case from a slightly different
> perspective.
> 
> Cultural capitalism and the Romantic myth
> 
> My starting point is that copyright emerged, and
> continues to develop, as
> a form of property. It was a response not just to
> new technologies of
> replication, but also a new economic order,
> capitalism. On the one hand,
> printing and its descendants such as cinematography
> and sound recording
> enabled the mass production of cultural goods. On
> the other hand, the same
> technologies allowed others to copy and cheaply sell
> the work of
> originators. To use economic jargon, cultural
> artefacts came to take on
> the character of a public good, potentially being
> available to all at
> marginal cost. What copyright law did in this
> situation was construct a
> form of property, a private good, in the work. In
> essence, the work is
> something that cannot be copied, at least without
> the owner's permission.
> 
> Who is the owner? Although attached to the author at
> birth, copyright in
> the work has always been assignable to another
> party. The fact is that
> rights that originate with a creator have to be sold
> on to a business with
> enough capital and technology to exploit them. So I
> would take issue with
> Richard Stallman's suggestion that there used to be
> a golden age when
> copyright 'let authors restrict publishers for the
> sake of the general
> public'. This is an idealised view of history. From
> the Statute of Anne to
> the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA),
> cultural capitalism has
> driven the growth of copyright, always luring
> creators with the promise of
> rights income, while always conceding a degree of
> 'fair use' to the public
> in order to promote the circulation of its
> commodities.
> 
> Quite simply, then, copyright turns symbolic forms
> into property, and
> market conditions ensure it is held and exploited by
> corporations. But
> this is not a reality which sits very easily with
> public opinion. For
> while the concept of private property in tangible
> goods, or chattels, is
> deeply ingrained in Western societies, the same
> cannot be said about
> symbolic works. A strong consensus, emerging first
> in the Enlightenment,
> has it that culture should circulate freely. The
> Romantic movement then
> contributes the idea that art and commerce are
> opposed, that the artist is
> in heroic opposition to the drive for profit.
> 
> It is something of a contradiction, then, that in
> the modern era the
> figure of the Romantic artist is invoked to justify
> copyright - the very
> basis of commerce in culture. Yet this mythology
> lies at the heart of the
> publicity and lobbying of the cultural industries.
> In a prominent position
> on the Recording Industry Association of America
> (RIAA) website, for
> example, we find these words from Sheryl Crow:
> 
> 'Copyright protects the creative processŠ. It's
> rough out thereŠ. There is
> nothing more inspiring to creativity than
> independence and that requires
> protection. If you're an artist that can do
> something nobody else can, you
> need to know that your work will not be diluted or
> mass produced.'
> 
> Now it seems to me that a key task for public
> culture advocates is to
> expose such rhetoric for what it is. Janis Ian's
> contribution has been
> really useful in this respect. She shows just how
> little rights income
> gets back to most artists and, conversely, the
> extent to which file
> sharing promotes CD sales for the great majority,
> outside the palace of
> superstardom. Still, I think a further debunking
> move is required. We
> badly need to blast away that Romantic paint job
> which content owners keep
> applying to copyright's rusty hulk.
> 
> Social authorship: collaboration, combination,
> accumulation
> 
> We could start by showing how authorship is not at
> all a matter of heroic,
> individual creation. Rather it is a social process.
> There are three
> aspects to this. Firstly, there is collaboration,
> the fact that creative
> acts depend on interactive networks. These extend
> way beyond the 'primary'
> creator of songwriter, novelist or director, to
> include intermediaries and
> entrepreneurs, technicians and tea makers. Audiences
> are part of the
> creative network too, in that they play the role of
> editor, rejecting some
> works and trends while affirming others.
> 
> Secondly, authorship is social in that it involves
> the recombination of
> existing symbolic materials from a
> historically-deposited common stock.
> These range from conventions such as the novel form,
> shot-reverse-shot
> editing in cinema or machine code in software,
> through to realised pieces
> of symbolic fabric such as War and Peace, the
> opening scene of Aliens or
> Word 2. The key point is that there is a practical
> continuum between what
> copyright law would keep as separate categories:
> idea (something freely
> usable by all) and expression (the privately owned
> work). Symbol makers of
> every hue are constantly re-using materials with
> different mixtures of
> these elements.
> 
> A significant feature of contemporary culture is
> that this idea-expression
> series is actually being reversed. Digital sampling,
> appropriation art and
> the film essay (which uses existing footage) all
> employ the fabric of
> previous works to depict new ideas and emotions.
> They therefore make a
> nonsense of copyright fundamentalism.
> 
> The third aspect of social authorship is its
> incremental nature.
> Significant new developments result from many small
> innovations rather
> than major breakthroughs by single creators. As a
> result we can't say that
> Charlie Parker was responsible for modern jazz any
> more than 4 Hero
> invented the musical style known as drum and bass.
> Instead, the so-called
> 'greats' are summarisers of collaborative research
> and development work
> undertaken over time. This echoes Richard Stallman's
> point about the role
> of continuous modification in software design. I
> would simply add that
> incremental change isn't confined to software.
> Rather it is a general
> principle encountered in symbol making everywhere.
> 
> In all three aspects, then, the practice of social
> authorship belies a
> crucial part of the rationale for copyright, namely
> that creativity is a
> matter of individual and self-sufficient expression,
> and that ownership
> should be attributed accordingly. What can we do
> with this argument?
> 
> The corporate assault on public culture
> 
> We are faced today with a major copyright offensive.
> Just as content
> owners fought for the extension of property rights
> when earlier
> technologies opened up access to existing cultural
> forms (broadcasting and
> the video cassette are the most important cases in
> recent history), so too
> the cultural industries today are fighting
> intensively to commodify the
> new communication system of the Internet. With the
> Internet, the
> difference is the vastly increased monopoly power of
> cultural capitalism.
> A short history lesson bears this out.
> 
> In the early 1940s the radio industry struggled with
> music publishers in
> the US to break the latters' stranglehold on the
> supply of songs for
> broadcasting. The networks set up their own
> publishing agency, boycotted
> ASCAP (the organisation of the established
> publishers) and finally forced
> down music licensing fees across the board. A
> Justice Department decree
> then consolidated the new competitive environment.
> In effect, conflict
> over copyright between two sectors of capital had
> opened up public access
> to music on the airwaves, and to new kinds of music
> too - R & B, country
> and later rock'n'roll.
> 
> We cannot rely on such a process this time around.
> Content owners are more
> powerful and more thoroughly integrated. They also
> have the ear of
> governments, which through international treaties
> and national laws are
> imposing an increasingly punitive intellectual
> property (IP) regime across
> the world - so much for 'free trade'. In the case of
> webcasting, as Brian
> Zisk points out, recent legislation extends
> phonographic performance
> rights to the digital domain. Over-air broadcasters
> in the US have never
> had to pay record companies in order to play
> records. Now an extra, and
> impossible, burden is being imposed on webcasters,
> most of who will be
> forced out of business.
> 
> The fact is that each week the list of restrictions
> and coercive measures
> being proposed just gets longer. In this situation,
> the key objective must
> be to formulate a counter strategy to that of the
> Motion Picture
> Association (MPAA) and RIAA. So I entirely agree
> with Siva Vaidhynathan
> when he calls for the formation of a coalition and
> 'a set of political
> slogans and principles that can appeal broadly'.
> This is a matter of
> resisting extremely well-organised and powerful
> interests. The libertarian
> alternative - just keep hacking - is simply not
> going to work. As
> Vaidhynathan points out, the problem is that a
> combination of
> tightly-focused laws, tough sanctions and (in
> prospect) legally protected
> cyber-sabotage from the corporations means that only
> a handful of
> dedicated enthusiasts will be able to carry on
> sharing files.
> 
> Perhaps most worrying of all is the increasing
> integration of software,
> hardware and content. The implementation of
> 'trusted' technology based on
> protocols agreed between these rapidly converging
> sectors would
> effectively spell the end of the PC and the Internet
> as we know them. The
> new apparatus? A tightly-policed delivery system for
> e-commerce, with only
> files certified by 'trusted' corporate agents able
> to move around the
> network and, even worse, around the PC itself. In
> this all-too-possible
> scenario, encryption and coercive copyright are
> ubiquitous.
> 
> Restrict copyright, revive creativity
> 
> Here's where the social authorship argument comes
> in. Quite simply, we
> must enlist creative workers in the campaign to open
> up access to culture.
> But we need to do so in a way that reflects the
> reality of their role as
> collaborators and remixers. If this runs against the
> Romantic self-image
> of some, it would actually benefit most artists in
> economic and creative
> terms.
> 
> The high proportion of sales taken by a few stars
> means that, for most of
> the time, the great majority of creative workers
> earn little. Clearly,
> demand factors are at work here - people want stars.
> But there's no doubt
> that the existing system of copyright also boosts
> the institution of
> stardom by channelling rewards to the highly-visible
> few, and by providing
> an artificial incentive for success over time.
> Long-term copyright
> encourages the cultural industries to market
> long-term superstars. One way
> of 'flattening out' cultural markets, of increasing
> innovation and
> acknowledging the social nature of authorship would
> be to radically reduce
> term. Michael Fraase's interesting four-step
> copyright solution includes a
> fourteen-year proposal. There may be an argument for
> making it even
> shorter.
> 
> Along with reduction in term, a reformed copyright
> system should include
> comprehensive digital rights management (DRM). At
> the moment, rights
> revenue distribution is extremely uneven. For
> example, music performance
> fees paid by broadcasters stream back to a few hit
> makers in
> disproportionate amounts because the crude sampling
> systems currently in
> use simply fail to register songs receiving lower
> airplay. So, DRM would
> not only enable more efficient collection, but also
> a much fairer pattern
> of distribution.
> 
> Equity would be further enhanced by making rights
> non-alienable. With
> copyright in their own hands, authors and performers
> would receive a much
> higher proportion of rights income. Such a move
> could also provide the
> opportunity for renewing and extending mutual
> collection societies.
> Instead of corporate rights holders arranging
> revenue collection and
> management, this would be done by author-performer
> co-ops.
> 
> Of course, these reforms would radically change the
> shape of the cultural
> industries, reversing the balance of power between
> creative workers and
> the corporations. I don't have a problem with this.
> 
> Let me make two final points. Like Michael Fraase,
> I'd advocate repealing
> the DMCA (in other countries this means forestalling
> the equivalent
> legislation). We need a fairer copyright system, and
> that includes keeping
> copyright out of the Internet and not-for-profit
> digital replication.
> These are, respectively, a public space and a
> well-established fair-use
> activity. On creative re-use of materials, copyright
> clearance tribunals
> should be set up in all sectors to ensure that
> cultural workers are able
> to get access to the stock of existing works quickly
> and cheaply. Surely
> we want more sampling, quotation, and parody.
> 
> Of course some will squeal 'unwarranted regulation!'
> at these suggestions.
> I would say: if you want to see what partisan state
> control of culture
> really looks like, go no further than your local
> legislature where new and
> coercive IP measures are being drafted right now.
> 
> 
> 
>
-------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 
> Copyright © Jason Toynbee, 2002. Published by
> openDemocracy. Permission is
> granted to reproduce articles for personal and
> educational use only.
> Commercial copying, hiring and lending is prohibited
> without permission.
> If this has been sent to you by a friend and you
> like it, you are welcome
> to join the openDemocracy network.
> 
> Jason Toynbee is Lecturer at the Institute of
> Popular Music, University of
> Liverpool, and author of Making Popular Music:
> Musicians, Creativity and
> Institutions (Arnold, 2000). Some of the ideas in
> this article are
> developed at greater length in Creating Problems:
> Social Authorship,
> Copyright and the Production of Culture (2001),
> available at £3 or $5 from
> the Pavis Centre for Social and Cultural Research,
> The Open University.
> 
> 
> 
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