Forwarded From: Florian Cramer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > (The following review was commissed by MUTE and will appear in the > forthcoming MUTE issue, see <http://www.metamute.com>. Josephine Berry has > my cordial thanks for editing the text into proper English. The MUTE > people were so kind to let me speak about literature and systems theory on > a panel with Robert Coover and Jeff Noon at Tate Modern. See > <http://www.metamute.com/events/mutetate08042001.htm> for the details. > -FC) > > > > CODE: Chances and Obstacles in the Digital Ecology > > > The recent Cambridge conference CODE amounted to more than a > straightforward expansion of its acronym into - in computereze - its > executable "Collaboration and Ownership in the Digital Economy". It > actually got some of its participants collaborating. The most interesting > idea regarding collaboration came as an off-the-cuff remark from James > Boyle, professor of law at Duke University, who compared the recent > interest in open digital code to environmentalism. The first environmental > activists were scattered and without mutual ties, Boyle said, because the > notion of 'the environment' did not yet exist. It had to be invented > before it could be defended. > > After two packed days of presentations, it could well be that the virus > will spread and make artists, activists and scholars in digital culture > associate 'IP' with 'Intellectual Property' rather than 'Internet > Protocol', whether they like it or not. Unlike many Free Software/Open > Source events with their occasional glimpses at the cultural implications > of open code, the CODE programme covered the free availability and > proprietary closure of information in the most general terms setting it > into a broad disciplinary framework which included law, literature, music, > anthropology, astronomy and genetics. Free Software has historically > taught people that even digitised images and sounds run on code. But that > this code is speech which can be locked into proprietary schemes such as > patents and shrinkwrap licenses, thereby decreasing freedom of expression, > is perhaps only beginning to dawn on people. John Naughton, moderator of > the panel on "The Future of Knowledge", illustrated this situation by > describing how, in the US at least, it is illegal to wear T-Shirts or > recite haikus containing the few sourcecode words of DeCSS, a program > which breaks the cryptography scheme of DVD movies. > > There is little awareness that any piece of digital data, whether an audio > CD, a video game or a computer operating systems is simply a number and > that every new copyrighted digital work reduces the amount of freely > available numbers. While digital data, just like any text, can be parsed > arbitrarily according to a language or data format (the four letters > g-i-f-t, for example, parse as a synonym for 'present' in English, but as > 'poison' in German), the copyrighting of digital data implies that there > is only one authoritative interpretation of signs. The zeros and ones of > Microsoft Word are legally considered a Windows program and thus subject > to Microsoft's licensing, although they could just as well be seen as a > piece of concrete poetry when displayed as alphanumeric code or as music > when burned onto an audio CD. The opposite is also true: no-one can rule > out that the text of, say, Shakespeare's Hamlet cannot be parsed and > compiled into a piece of software that infringes somebody's patents. > > The legal experts speaking at CODE also explained the enormous expansion > in intellectual property rights in the last few years. While patents are > widely known to conflict with the freedom of research and even with the > freedom to write in programming languages, the conference nevertheless > extended its focus beyond this and made its participants aware of IP > rights as the negative subtext to what was once considered the promiscuous > textuality of the Internet. Still, it was surprising to see speakers with > very diverse academic and professional backgrounds position themselves so > unanimously against the current state of IP rights. In another informal > remark, Volker Grassmuck proposed that we refocus 'information ecology' > from software ergonomics to the politics of knowledge distribution. Does > digital code need its own Greenpeace and World Wildlife Fund? > > The conference took its inspiration from Free Software, but didn't bother > going into basics and priming the participants on what Free Software and > Open Source technically are - which was both an advantage and a > disadvantage. General topics were advanced right from the first session > without first clarifying such important issues as the meaning of the > 'free' in Free Software. GNU project founder Richard M. Stallman - who > usually explains this as 'free, as in speech' not ' free, as in beer' - > revealed his own questionable conceptions by proposing three different > copyleft schemes for what he categorised as 'functional works', 'opinion > pieces' and 'aesthetic works': as if these categories could be separated, > as if they weren't aspects of every artwork, and as if computer programs > didn't have their own politics and aesthetics (GNU Emacs could be analysed > in just the same way Matthew Fuller analysed the aesthetic ideology of > Microsoft Word.) It was annoying to hear Stallman reduce the distribution > of digital art to 'bands' distributing their 'songs', and it was equally > annoying to hear Glyn Moody call Stallman the Beethoven, Linus Torvalds > the Mozart and Larry Wall - a self-acclaimed postmodernist and > experimental writer in his own right - the Schubert of programming. > > To make matters worse, the artists who spoke on the second day of CODE > echoed these aesthetic conservatisms in perfect symmetry. Michael Century, > co-organiser of the conference and Stallman's respondent, unfortunately > didn't have enough time to speak about the notational complexity of modern > art in any detail. He was the only speaker to address this issue. > Otherwise, artists were happy to be 'artists', and programmers were happy > to be 'programmers'. Stallman's separation of the 'functional' and the > 'aesthetic' was also implied in Antoine Moireau's Free Art License > <http://www.artlibre.org>, a copyleft for artworks which failed to > illuminate why artists shouldn't simply use the GNU copyleft proper. This > question is begged all the more since the license is based on the > assumption that the artwork in contrast to the codework is, quote, > 'fixed'. While Moireau's project was at least an honest reflection of > Free Software/Open Source, one couldn't help the impression that other > digital artists appropriated the term as a nebulous, buzzword-compatible > analogy. While there are certainly good reasons for not releasing art as > Free Software, it still might be necessary to speak of digital art and > Free Software in a more practical way. Much if not most of digital art is > locked into proprietary formats like Macromedia Director, QuickTime and > RealVideo. It is doomed to obscurity as soon as their respective > manufacturers discontinue the software. > > On the other hand, the Free Software available obviously doesn't cut it > for many people, artists in particular. The absence of, for example, > desktop publishing software available for GNU/Linux is no coincidence > since the probability of finding programmers among graphic artists is much > lower than the probability of finding programmers among system operators. > This raises many issues for digital code in the commons, issues the > conference speakers seemed, however, to avoid on purpose. While most of > them pretended that it was no longer necessary to use proprietary > software, their computers still ran Windows or the Macintosh OS. It would > have been good to see such contradictions if not resolved then at least > reflected. > > Code, Queens College, Cambridge, UK, April 5-6, 2001 > > Florian Cramer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/ > > -- > http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/ > http://www.complit.fu-berlin.de/institut/lehrpersonal/cramer.html > GnuPG/PGP public key ID 3D0DACA2 > > > > > # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission > # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, > # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets > # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body > # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > -- su - ------------------------------------------------ The mailing list archives are available at http://lists.linux-india.org/cgi-bin/wilma/linux-delhi
