Intellectual Property

Athens.
Next up at WebSci '09 is Ethan Katsh, whose focus is on online dispute resolution. Disputes are a major online phenomenon, and as Fisher and Ury suggested even in 1983, "conflict is a growth industry". Dispute resolution also makes for a very useful case study for Web science, Ethan suggests - and he notes that many of the trends identified at this conference may also cause further disputes.

Last year alone, eBay handled some 40 million disputes (making it 'the largest small claims tribunal in the world'); ICANN handled some 25,000 disputes over its 100 million domain names in ten years, Wikipedia has instituted a broad range of dispute reolution processes and Second Life with its 5.5 billion Linden Dollars in circulation has started to generate a number of virtual property rules to manage its operations. Technology, then, is a great dispute generator, as a byproduct of online transactions and online relationships, but also of the increasing value of information, the brader distribution of information, the growing range of virtual goods and property, the increasing creative activity, the increasing complexity, and the accelerating pace of change.

Athens.
Next up at WebSci '09 is a panel session on cultural convergence and digital technology, with representatives of the Greek creative industries sector. The first speaker is PASOK MP Maria Damanaki, though,who notes the importance of the Web and of digital technology for culture and creativity. Any form of human activity which is not expressed in a digital form could even be considered to be obsolete, she says, and there are new horizons for the creators of culture in this digital environment - namely, cultural convergence.

Gießen.
I've made the trip to a very cold and foggy Gießen in central Germany for a conference on what could be loosely described as the political dimensions of Web 2.0: "Das Internet zwischen egalitärer Teilhabe und ökonomischer Vermachtung". I'll be speaking later this morning, but we begin with a keynote by Karl-Heinz Ladeur. All of this will be in German, so blogging it in English will make for an interesting experience...

He begns by pointing out that new media are understood first through the paradigms of the old - TV dramas were filmed theatre, TV news were a reading-out of print news. The same is true for media law; it tends to transfer and tinker with old approaches in order to deal with new media, more or less successfully. This also foregrounds the individual, and places the medium as a means for the individual to communicate - which is not necessarily inappropriate, but takes focus away from the development of independent, indigenous principles in new media forms. (Another example is how long it has taken for arts publics to be treated differently - e.g. in terms of decency and pornography - from other publics. The juridical treatment of political publics is a further example here, as is the treatment of the private matters of celebrities.)

Following up on a previous post on this subject: Tony Walker over at ABC Digital Futures notes the likely impending demise of one of the most innovative Webcasting projects of recent years: Pandora, the online radio station of the Music Genome Project. For the uninitiated: the MGP is a database of the specific traits of thousands of songs by a wide variety of artists, which enables it to suggest to users that if they like a specific song, they're also likely to enjoy a variety of songs from other albums and by other artists. On that basis, Pandora offers personalised Webcasting of tracks which the MGP identifies as similar to those tracks that a user has already said they like.

Singapore.
The keynote lecture this afternoon at ISEA 2008 is by Creative Commons co-founder Lawrence Lessig, speaking on the proper place of copyright. He begins in 1906, when John Philip Sousa went to Congress to rail against the recently invented record player. The new technology, he suggested, would undermine cultural participation (a kind of read-write participation) - record players were 'infernal machines' which would promote the development of a 'read-only' culture, driven by commercial agendas. (Sousa was taunted in response with the suggestion that copyright already prevented participation in a read-write culture, however - a suggestion he strongly rejected.)

Singapore.
My afternoon session at ISEA 2008 is on copyright and the Creative Commons in Asia. In the first place, this begins with the official launch of the Creative Commons licencing suite for Singaporean copyright law - the 47th such translation into a national legislative framework.

CC co-founder Lawrence Lessig is here to do the honours, and he outlines some of the basic tenets of the Creative Commons philosophy now: in particular, the need to allow for a suite of licences which could offer a more sophisticated model for licencing content beyond the 'all rights reserved' model of copyright itself. This model, of course, has been forcefully exported from the U.S. to the rest of the world - and CC offers a different approach: not a disrespect for copyright, but a different understanding of copyright licencing.

Brisbane.
The final session here at the CCi conference is billed as a copyright perspectives panel in the context of user-led content creation on Web 2.0. The panel begins with Oli Wilson from New Zealand indie band Knives at Noon and Otago University. Knives at Noon released its EP online under a Creative Commons 3.0 (BY-NC-SA) licence, free to share and remix for non-commercial purposes. The band was somewhat unhappy with the content of the EP itself, but wanted this creative material not to be wasted - they hoped that it would take on a life of its own by releasing it online as a ProTools source file (roughly following Linus Torvalds's logic in releasing the initial Linux kernel). Release in this format also allowed users to access the individual components of their tracks, not just the mixed end product - and it suited the band's creative philosophy.

Brisbane.
The post-lunch sessions on this last day of the CCi conference take a somewhat more legal angle. The keynote speaker here is Graham Vickery from the OECD, which has just published a set of high-level recommendations related to making public sector information more publicly accessible, as appropriate to the emerging participative Web environment. The OECD is interested in the economic framework for this new environment (for example, online games, music, publishing, film, video, advertising, and news distribution) in order to identify what aspects (of value chains, business models, etc.) are shared across these environments.

Brisbane.
We're back to paper sessions at the CCi conference now, and for a change I'm in the cultural science stream. The first speakers here are Chris Brennan-Horley from the University of Wollongong Susan Luckman from the University of South Australia and deals with mapping the creative industries in Darwin. This ties into wider creative industries and creative cities theory, and Chris's approach here has been to focus especially on mapping the micro-level through qualitative ethnographic approaches - this is necessary as much grassroots-level creative industries activity remains unaccounted for in standard quantitative surveys of creative industries performance. Chris operated especially through interviews with creative industries practitioners in the city, and he was interested especially in geographic information - what spaces in the city were of importance to such practitioners in relation to their creative work?

Brisbane.
The second plenary speaker here at the CCi conference is Richard Allan, a former UK member of parliament who is now working with Cisco Systems and is involved with the UK government Power of Information Task Force. Public sector information consists in part of information about people and places, about public services, and about public culture; traditionally it exists across a data, an analysis, and a presentation layer. The former two are increasingly open for access, the latter also for more flexible interaction. With the rise of the Web as a public information medium, the number of public information Websites has multiplied almost beyond control, and in the UK there is now a drive to consolidate government Websites from over 2500 to a more manageable number in the future. (Even the UK and Australian secret services now have their Websites.)