| #717 |
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2004 |
Perilous 717 Unfortunately it looks like the Government will be locking us in to the proposed Free Trade Agreement with the USA. Apart from all the usual concerns about the FTA, I am particularly interested in the issues around Copyright and intellectual property that the FTA foists upon us. I’ve just finished reading the new book by Lawrence Lessig called Free Culture (Penguin, 2004). Lessig is a well known Copyright lawyer and activist and was recently brought out here by a Linux group to speak to the Senate committee investigation the FTA. He is not an anti-captialist radical, indeed, far from it he is a firm believer in the primacy of the free market system and is a strong supporter of Copyright. What he is not a supporter of is the continuing ‘extending’ of the length of Copyright terms, and especially the monopolistic and draconian reactions from companies whose interests have come under threat from digital media and the Internet. Of concern to us here in Australia is that if the FTA is enacted then our Copyright laws get brought into line (synergy) with those of the USA including the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the extended Copyright periods. All this happens without the balance of having the idea of ‘fixed term protection’ and ‘free speech’ being built in to our Constitution. Lessig’s book is an excellent dissection of all that is wrong with the way Copyright is being used to protect monopolies in the USA and how the important concept of the ‘public domain’ is quickly being erased from the common parlance. Now, very few of us will be alive to see/hear any of today’s popular culture enter the public domain, and worse, when their Copyright finally does expire, the media on which these artefacts are stored will most likely have disinitegrated or be rendered unplayable by ‘built in’ copy protection and ‘digital rights management’. And in the intervening period, because there is no central registry of Copyrighted work, it can be very difficult to track down the owner of something you might wish to repurpose if even to check if the Copyright has expired or not! The whole idea of Copyright is that it offers LIMITED protection for a FIXED period for the artist/creator to have sole right to exploit their work before the work passes in to the public domain where it can be freely replicated and built upon, sampled, used as an element in something else, adapted etc. This is a critical right and limitation – even more so now that we have the digital tools to make almost limitless creative output from ‘mashing up’ other works. Anyway, I recommend the book to anyone concerned about sampling, media and Copyright. On to music made from other people’s Copyrighted works, I’ve been sent the DJ Shadow DVD In Tune and On Time (Island). This DVD cuts together two live shows in London from Shadow’s last world tour to support The Private Press album. Anyone who saw Shadow on the same tour in Sydney last year knows how amazing the show was and the DVD captures well the experience with the video tracking both the technical cut ups and drops from Shadow as well as the excellent video work from Bay Area artist Ben Stokes. The sound quality is excellent and there are a few little bonus bits but what is slightly annoying is that despite the ability to have different camera angles on the DVD (say, for example, just the decks or just Ben Stokes’ animation) these are not utilised – and instead you get a changing set of wideshots, picture-in-picture, etc. I guess the compensation is the included music CD of just the audio for taking on the road. At Frigid over the next fortnight we have Brisbane’s Lawrence English, a sound artist and minimal electronics producer who runs the excellent Room40 label, and then an all local lineup on the 15th. Check www.snarl.org/frigid for details. Yellow Peril (www.snarl.org)  Goto
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