the work of art in the age of digital reproduction..

Went to a panel on illegal art last night (it's taken awhile to plop this out, it was on Wednesday). Some great minds talking aboout copyright, copyleft and everything in between. The site is worth checking out, lots of great downloads in the video section.

Among the speakers were a couple of my heroes,
Larry Lessig of Creative Commons, EFF among other things and Rick Prelinger of the Prelinger Archives. Also in the panel was Kembrew McLeod, who successfully trademarked "Freedom of Expression" (tm). Both the work shown in the exhibition and what the panel had to say on this topic were very inspiring; however it's hard to be hopeful in today's legal environment. I'll have a mp3 of the panel discussion sometime next week..

Some of the memes floating around:

• Ideas are not property (Intellectual "Property" is a misnomer).
  
• Copyright laws were intended to spur innovation and creativity, they now hamper and prevent it.
  
• A society which requires artists (and creative people in general) to have lawyers is not a free society.
  
• Appropriation as a form of resistance.
  

I'm working a larger page that deals with these issues, until that's ready enjoy this gem from Marshall McLuhan's 'The Medium is the Massage':

Medieval scholars were indifferent to the precise identity of the "books" they studied. In turn, they rarely signed even what was clearly their own. They were a humble service organiation. Producring texts was often a very tedious and time consuming task. Many small texts were transmitted into volumes of miscelaneous content, very much like "jottings" in a scrapbook, and in this transmission authorship was often lost.

The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literacy fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property. Mechanical multiples of the same text created a public--a reading publci. The rising consumer-oriented culture became concerned with labels of authenticity and protection against theft and piracy. The idea of copyright-"the exclusive right to reproduce, publish, and sell the matter and form of a literary or artistic work"-was born.

Anybody can now become both author and publisher. Take any books on any subject and custom-make your own book by simply copying a chapter from this one and a chapter from that one -- instand steal! As new technologies come into play, people are less and less convinced of the importance of self-expression. Teamwork succeeds private effort.