activefreemedia

Mike Godwin, Legal Director, Public Knowlege

In the 1990s, people wanted to build infrastructure that would build capacity even though we weren't exactly sure what we were going to do once we built that capability.

1. Content companies tend to seek more control over tools for you.
2. Tools. The Inducement of Infringement Act was trying to reframe the debate from the Sony Betamax case to a new notion that technology can induce people to infringe on copyright law.
3. Grokster case: Supreme Court is taking up the Grokster case. The issue that will come before the Supreme Court is how to adapt the Sony Betamax case for the digital era. No question that sharing files online has many many lawful uses. Lawmakers tend to see filesharing as a rogue application. But people who know about technology and the internet know that filesharing is at the heart of what the internet is.

The edge that we're really at right now is about this choice between the roads of deploying and innovative technology or a closed off, boxed off, big content friendly world. I do not believe that in order for us to win, the content industries have to lose.

Nelson Pavlosky, Founder, FreeCulture.org

Two paths to creating a movement: 1. create our pool to play in. 2. fight the big boys and challenge their control. In order for you to be able to critique them, your going to have to quote what their saying. Like "Outfoxed," which needed to use examples of footage from Fox News to be effective.

Dieboldt had flawed voting machines, and memos about their flaws leaked onto the internet, and the company scared people into taking the copies off of their websites. Swarthmore was the last place where the memos exists, and they decided to take on the legal battle, with the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Stanford Cyberlaw Center, and they won the case.

Basically, what Dieboldt was saying was, "We own the copyright to the evidence of our wrongdoing." --- laughter.

In April, they started FreeCulture.org, invited Lawrence Lessig. Now we're up to 14 chapters across the United States. Savetheipod.com and barbieinablender.org. Mostly, we want you to get involved. Are you going to be able to own your computer, or is the company that made it own it? Will we be able to fast forward through commercials in the future?

Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky that Sublimal Kid

Invoke the idea of the gift economy. There are various mixes, pass them around. He's passing out what seem like mixed CDs.

In order to get started, ask everyone a few questions.
Rhythm Science: making art out of patterns of culture.

How you live in an information economy is depended on highly regulated spaces.
Here we had an election in which the influence of code was felt. What we're seeing is a democratization of information and what happens when you mess with the rules.

Voting machines where we can't look behind the scenes.
Global Election Management system, but you can't see it.

Examples of some work, and then
Discourse of the nation state. Living in an information ecologies.
Political economies of sound. DJs are global storytellers.

Here we are in the culture of the copy. It's all about exchange.
Thanks for having me. All I can say is, I'm happy I've never been sued.

First examples on laptop. Loops. I'm going to loop sound. The changing same.
Quicktime 5 second loop that he plays for about 30 seconds.

DJs "break things down".

Here we are in the nation-state discourse, fragments of culture. Media ecology. How we think at the American Operating system. We are seeing a radical transformation of what we call the "public domain." DJs are active plagiarists, turning things upside down. Private expression in public space. Public memory. Public expression, private space.

He's showing a remixed version of the Bush state of the union, remixed. Among many irre "We have a great opportunity to lead the world toward suicide and murder."

Public memory. Memory as a shared collective experience. Everyone walks away with a different memory. You can call it use value, outsourcing.

More examples. Sample every flag of the world. Each flag attached to a key on the keyboard. The idea is information and playfulness. It looks like an swf file on the computer, and he's mixing tracks and scratching along with the sound with flags of the world overlapped, along with the UN symbol. The idea of a media ecology.

Beastie boys sample with some blues samples. About 10 flags a second. What does that do for the system. What does the system of symbols of nation state, and a flags are nothing more than logos. What happens

The Joe Wecker story. Put a song online where he sung the instructions of how to decode DVD. DJing as global storytelling. What happens with 20th century folk storytelling. Corporate narrative that's being reappropriate.

css_descramble_joe_wecker, singing a math equation.

People are absorbing information. blackster, a reappropriation of napster.

Hip Hop has been highly confrontational with the legal structure. The whole system has ...
The idea of copyright law was ...
Early 70s, Robert Moses, accumulated a lot of power through highways through neighborhood. Hip Hop came from those spaces. Kool Herc plugged power into the lighposted. The streets themselves. The internet as the new streets. Hip Hop is the CNN of youth culture.

My next album is a collaboration with Chuck D. So Spooky was bored with mainstream hip hop, so Chuck D sends spooky his voice. Social Structure. Distributed network, anonymous. Slayer was the first rock band on Def Jam records. Everyone sent me elements and files, and I made the following.

You sequence things in this culture. The idea is, never ever ever just use the loop. Make the fragments dance.

Now he's starts Rhythm Science: Notes for a Shattered Culture. (using Keynote)

Breaking it into fragments, and then sequencing the fragments.

Question for Spooky: Are you willing or interested in contributing elements to the Creative Commons, or using elements from the Commons.

Garrett A. Morgan - invented the streetlight, 1923
Choreography - movement, starts, stops, operating system of culture

Hip Hop came out of the mixed tape, using pieces of broken spaces into something new.

Alan Dershowitz book "Rights and Wrongs"
What we're seeing is 2 different views of law. European, and the digital.

He sees 9-11, the falling of the towers, as the closing of an era. He remixed Pierre ___, old school French composer. Sampling as an acceleration of processes. Musical origami.

How do you make something new from the old. Collective memory.

Remix of Birth of a Nation. He's going to release it on the internet.
How to break these loops and let the future creep through. He has DVD turnables, and can do a live version of the Rebirth of a Nation.

Human beings as they related to material memory. The James Earl Jones effect.

What happens when Culture is taken back? DJ culture is the folk culture of the 21st century where everyone ones the songs. The distributed network is part of the creation of the story.

"The future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed."

Question and Answer period

Question about copyright: Anwer: Spooky transforms things to the point of unrecognizability, whereas Negativland makes things that are still recognizable. Both are important.

A question of strategy:
Answers: Mike Godwin from Public Knowlege said he would quote someone to help show why his study was fake. Spooky: NWA's case - of someone's breath of a flute. Try to dig into the sounds. By leaving things on the surface, you invite more response, but it's copyright satire. Trying to find the tension between context and content. Mark Hosler: Planaphonics - they re-released the 'illegal' CD recently and nothing happened. The industry is too busy with file sharing to care about a CD. So now, the biggest challenge is getting the CD replicators to make it.

Negativland helped Creative Commons write the Sampling license, which is becoming one of the most popular. It allows sampling in everything except advertising, which is paid speech.

Question from an architecture student (there were several contingentsl at the event): Is something different happening here, is there an over-looping of looping happening, like the equivalent of genetic inbreeding?
Spooky's Answer: architecture is nothing but frozen music. music is nothing but liquid architecture. Transformation as a continuous process, and the challenge is how to think of that in a legal framework.