Pondside Thoughts...: May 2008

We visited Halibut Point this weekend - a State Park that includes a former granite quarry, hiking paths, and absolutely fantastic ocean vistas from the eastern-most point of Cape Ann, in Rockport.

Winding paths lead you to spots that overlook both the quarry and the ocean beyond, and then to the rocky ledges and tide pools at the ocean's edge. It is a lovely, natural setting with few signs of the human virus. At this time of year it is lush with spring greenery, wildflowers, an extravagance of poison ivy and honestly, the biggest dandelions I have ever seen. Huge things, reminiscent of Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors. Feed me, Seymour!

We took a different path on the way back, and came to a clearing where visitors have built cairns from the huge selection of granite pieces scattered about, remnants of quarrying.

So what is it about rocks lying about that makes them irresistible to pile into cairns? It is such a human thing to do. Rock cairns are found all around the world and we know that people have always built them, from ancient times. They appear in Greek mythology, on isolated islands, on every continent. They mark paths, summits, burial sites, spiritual places, directions, and just decorate. They must somehow satisfy our need to leave our mark; to indicate humans have passed time here.

On this day, every person walking down this trail stopped to look and then picked up shards of granite and added them to a selected cairn with a kind of reverence, a contribution, a way to connect with those who came before. Some cairns were simple and tall, reaching only upward. Others were complex and broad, intricate conglomerations of shapes and balance strategies. All were beautiful and somehow very... satisfying. I was particularly drawn to the ones that seemed precariously balanced and added my contribution to one of these.

I am creating this post during a session of the OnCopyright workshop in NYC on May 1, 2008. This is an experiment for me, and I apologize in advance if it is difficult to read or disjointed...

This session focuses on societal aspect of ongoing evolution of Copyright. Tim Wu, Professor at Columbia Law School, acting as moderator, tells us this session will stress what is "right" or "wrong" or culturally accepted, rather than what is legal. For example, there is a blog called Lostpedia that focuses on the characters and weekly Lost shows. It includes photos, character information, excerpts, full transcription (!) of shows, etc. The content and images are extensive. Copyright infringement seems obvious, most especially in the case of the full transcription of episodes. Is this legal? Is it right? And from the corporate view, is this infringement or is it free marketing? If you look at the site you see that one of the many advertisers is ABC itelf. Ironic to say the least. When these fan sites first cropped up, the networks sent cease and desist letters, but over time they have become far more friendly, even to the extent of supporting them with ad revenue.

There are limits of course, best illustrated by weirdly obsessed and crazy Harry Potter fan sites, foremost among these being Steve VanderArk's Harry Potter encyclopedia site called The Harry Potter Lexicon. VanderArk at some point promoted the notion of 'exorcising' JK Rowling, author of the series, from the continuation of the story, claiming, "we [the fans] are in charge now". After much debate and publicity and filing of law suits, Steve VanderArk has himself been 'excommunicated' from the fan community by the elites of the community itself. What apparently enraged Rowling was not the site itself, but rather the idea that the site would be puiblished as a book - a physical instantiation of the work.

Douglas Rushkoff claimed that the reason VanderArk was shunned was not because of any high principles, but rather because his actions threaten the other fans' ability to do what they like to do. He believes Rowling's complaint is more focused on the site as a useless work of relatively poor quality. She has chosen to pursue her case against VanderArk because she feels that his work infringes as it is simply a re-sorting of her own work. Ironically, she admits to herself using this obsessive encyclopedic site to look up a minor character during her writing process.

So what's the difference between a website and a book? Is a book that much more of an infringement? Gigi Sohn, President of Public Knowledge, suggests that most people still feel that the internet and blogosphere are the domain of amateurs only. So creating a book feels to most like a different level of infringement - infringement in the realm of the physical. Rushkoff adds that books live in the domain of extractive currency - pulling money out of non-constructive 'work' - while the internet is a more creative platform, of non-extractive currency - the acts of creation and construction are additive, not subtractive... they create value in themselves rather than trading on existing value created by others at other times.

Matt Mason, author of The Pirates Dilemma, makes the point that these issues boil over only when someone's economic biosphere is being damaged or has the potential to be damaged. In his book he argues that rather than squelching them, it makes more productive sense to compete with pirates.

John Blossom of Shore Communications believes that VanderArk's work is a very legal derivative work, creating an index of the words and sentences of the book, and is protected by copyright law. Sohn points out that this is a similar issue to the Google case of secondary copyright infringement, in which Google is being sued by Perfect 10 for surfacing images that have been stolen from their pornography site, posted on other sites and then spidered, indexed, and surfaced as search results by Google.

And what about the notion that everything that is user created on the web is amateur crap? The entire panel argues that this is no different from other arguments that denigrate the value of amateur efforts and pop culture. Are comic books crap? Is alternative music crap? And of course there are very accomplished, renown authors who blog regularly. Is their work any less valuable when it originates online in blog format.

Interesting session. On to lunch and the next session, focusing on copyright and the law... much to be discussed. This entire day is an act of remarkable courage for CCC. We are a company that has traditionally been quite guarded about our public position on copyright, and of course we walk a fine line on so many of these issues. It is refreshing and emblematic of the enormous positive influence Tracey Armstrong has had on the organization in her brief (one year to date) tenure as CEO. Very exciting.

So that's it - my first attempt to blog in situ. Let me know what you think... I'm now going to bravely hit the Save button to post this to the blog...