Benjamin Geer | 1 Mar 12:24
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Re: Internet2: Orchestrating the End of the Internet?

On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 16:05:35 -0500, Jon Ippolito <ji@...> wrote:

>This hardware intervention effectively destroys even the possibility of
>fair use, since artists and educators cannot transform, parody, or
>criticize what they cannot record.  [snip] which is why the MPAA will
>do its best to disarm the technology by installing Digital Rights
>Management directly in its routers to stop interesting content from
>ever getting into the pipeline.

Do you really feel that Hollywood and the American recording industry
produce much interesting content?  Is there really much to be gained
by transforming, parodying or criticising it?

Perhaps in 1964, when Susan Sontag wrote _Notes on "Camp"_, she could
legitimately see kitsch as an opportunity to create a liberating
aesthetic.  But for some time now, camp has been the dominant mode of
expression of the culture industry as a whole; it has been co-opted as
an instrument of hegemony.  The desire to remix insipid music, or
parody idiotic films that are already the purest self-parody, plays
into the hands of the culture industry's own ever more intense
navel-gazing.  There's nothing liberating in producing ever more
clever parodies of Scooby Doo.

American consumer culture is already a closed system.  The more
self-referential it becomes, the harder it is for Americans to imagine
that anything exists outside the US.  For Americans, the war in Iraq
isn't happening in Iraq, because they can't imagine Iraq; for them,
it's happening in the imaginary space of the American culture
industry, framed by the reassuringly brutal language of advertising,
with its growling male voices, punchy editing and snippets of heavy
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andy | 2 Mar 00:08

Michael Wolff: 'Free Information is Now the Topic in the Media

michael wolff essentially takes a sledgehammer to 
the intellectual property / digital rights management 
culture 
affecting the mediosphere 
in this article 
located at  
http://cryptome.org/wolff1.html

Jon Ippolito | 2 Mar 03:03

RE: Internet2: Orchestrating the End of the Internet?

Benjamin,

You're right, American consumer culture is largely self-referential. But 
that doesn't mean that all non-consumer repurposing of that culture is 
stuck in the same groove. Remixes like John Oswald's take on Michael 
Jackson, Pat O'Neill's Humphrey Bogart, and Brian Provinciano's Grand 
Theft Auto break the expectations--not to mention the law--of mainstream 
culture's vicious circle.

That said, the worst-case scenario isn't that media conglomerates would 
put a stop to remixed audio and video. It's that they will lobby for 
DRM-enabled routers that can lock out *any* rich media file that doesn't 
meet their approval. It's useless for the MPAA to wrap a Warner Bros DVD 
in Internet2-proof DRM, if someone with a miniDV camera can upload a 
bootleg of "Monsters Unleashed" onto a network that zaps it to a dozen PCs 
across the planet in 5 seconds. Ruh roh, Scooby--there goes your business 
model.

I'm afraid Hollywood will respond by browbeating Internet2's engineers 
into requiring authentication before a user can transfer any .mov or 
.avi--authentication either for the movie or for the user. (Hence the 
Internet2 consortium's preoccupation with biometrics and "security.")

Want to netcast your video expose on the MGM-Credit Lyonnais scandal or 
your documentary on Iraqi casualties? Stand in line--you'll need 
Hollywood's digital watermark (and hence blessing) before you can get it 
through Internet2's routers.

This conspiracy theory is just my extrapolation of Hollywood's current 
strong-arm tactics in cases like MPAA v. Grokster. Referring to the 
(Continue reading)

Benjamin Geer | 2 Mar 15:27
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Re: Internet2: Orchestrating the End of the Internet?

On Tue, 1 Mar 2005 21:03:29 -0500, Jon Ippolito <ji@...> wrote:

> You're right, American consumer culture is largely self-referential.
> But that doesn't mean that all non-consumer repurposing of that
> culture is stuck in the same groove. Remixes like John Oswald's take
> on Michael Jackson, Pat O'Neill's Humphrey Bogart, and Brian
> Provinciano's Grand Theft Auto break the expectations--not to mention
> the law--of mainstream culture's vicious circle.

I haven't seen them, so forgive me for hazarding some guesses that
might be wide of the mark.  Doesn't the very presence of Michael
Jackson or Humphrey Bogart serve to anchor the work in what the viewer
sees as their world?  And doesn't this reinforce the viewer's belief
that "my world" can only be the world that the culture industry has
created for me, and that its utterly alienated system of references is
something so important that every piece of art has to either emanate
from it or be a comment on it, as if it were a holy text and all
artists were its theologians?  Wouldn't it be much more liberating to
treat that system as the minuscule, putrid bit of rubbish that it
really is, and therefore ignore it completely, in favour of the much
larger and infinitely more human world outside?

> Want to netcast your video expose on the MGM-Credit Lyonnais scandal
> or your documentary on Iraqi casualties? Stand in line--you'll need
> Hollywood's digital watermark (and hence blessing) before you can get
> it through Internet2's routers.

Wouldn't one of Internet2's main selling points for the consumer be
the ability to send videos of your new baby to your friends in
seconds?  How would it be feasible to ban the documentary but not the
(Continue reading)

Geert Lovink | 2 Mar 17:31
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manifesto by thierry chervel (launch of signandsight)

Dear nettimers,

since yesterday an english version of the German 'perlentaucher' site
(www.perlentaucher.de) is online. It was Janos Sugar would pointed me
to this great online resource a couple of years ago. It's daily updated

site/e-newsletter that summarizes the 'cultural pages' of German and
also non-German newspapers and weekly magazines. In German that genre
is called 'feuilleton' but that concept doesn't really exist elsewhere

or let's say, it's a bit hard to translate. Now you can read
signandsight and get an idea what the German speaking world is
discussing.

Regards, Geert

http://www.signandsight.com/

--

Manifesto

By Thierry Chervel

Un ange passe, say the French when everybody in the room suddenly stops

talking. The angel is Europe. Recently it passed over the grave of
Pierre Bourdieu.

It's not much of a story - slightly sad, slightly ridiculous, not
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double-plus-unfree digest [byfield, elloi]

t byfield <tbyfield@...>
     Re: Michael Wolff: 'Free Information is Now the Topic in the Media
Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@...>
     Re: Internet2: Orchestrating the End of the Internet?

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Date: Wed, 2 Mar 2005 14:30:28 -0500
From: t byfield <tbyfield@...>
Subject: Re: <nettime> Michael Wolff: 'Free Information is Now the Topic in the Media

andy@... (Tue 03/01/05 at 06:08 PM -0500):

> michael wolff essentially takes a sledgehammer to 
> the intellectual property / digital rights management 
> culture 
> affecting the mediosphere 
> in this article 
> located at  
> http://cryptome.org/wolff1.html

It all sounds strangely familiar. Jamie Boyle's contribution from
the ~same fortnight's more interesting -- and I don't think he's
using similar phraseology because it's "now the topic in the media." 
Wolff could used a refresher course in immanent critique, imo.

Cheers,
T

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Gurstein, Michael | 3 Mar 01:09

De-Peering comes to NZ (next the world?)

New Zealand Herald: Science & Technology

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?ObjectID=3D3569738

Juha Saarinen: Paying the price of peer pressure

COMMENT

How would you like an internet where your neighbour can watch webcasts
of the latest Peter Jackson film premiere in Wellington, but you can't?

Let's imagine that you come up with a Kiwi version of online auction
site Ebay. It is a big success but you have to pay your customers'
internet provider for them to get to it.

This is already happening in New Zealand thanks to Telecom and
TelstraClear using "peering" as a business weapon.

In simple terms, peering means network operators agree to exchange data
instead of swapping cheques for bandwidth charges.

Peering usually takes place in well-connected exchanges (there are two
in New Zealand: the Auckland Peering Exchange and the Wellington
Internet Exchange) and is a cheap and effective way to boost the
performance of the internet.

As Citylink's Neil de Wit says, it's the internet equivalent of creating
a big local-call area for New Zealand instead of making everyone dial
long-distance.

(Continue reading)

Benjamin Geer | 3 Mar 01:08
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Re: double-plus-unfree digest [byfield, elloi]

Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@...> wrote:

> In media content this likeliness of monetizing is much lower.

You have to use your imagination.  Film viewers don't need support
contracts, but they might like to have more of a say in the sorts of
films that get produced, and they might be willing to pay for that.  I
certainly would.

> 'Value' of the content for the masses *is* created mostly by
> publishing labels.

This is a symptom of the problem I was pointing out.  Alienation can't
be overcome by media alone, because it's inherent in the way people
live.  Slaves who watch great free films are still slaves.  But slaves
who are creating the economic and political conditions for their own
emancipation can certainly make free films to help that effort along,
and will have no need whatsoever to parody the filmmaking of their
former masters.

Ben

Morlock Elloi | 3 Mar 07:37
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Re: double-plus-unfree digest [byfield, elloi]

> You have to use your imagination.  Film viewers don't need support
> contracts, but they might like to have more of a say in the sorts of
> films that get produced, and they might be willing to pay for that.  I
> certainly would.

The payment is the crucial problem for un-labelled content. Currently only the
big ones can handle the cost of charging for the content and more-or-less
effectively manage piracy problems. It is too expensive for small content
creators to charge for it, and their ability to sell the 2nd copy after the
first one is sold and replicated is nearly zero. If you think that
freedom-fighting avangarde p2p networks will not copy quality content from
independents think again. This is why the business model for small software
publishers evaporated. Especially for good software. And everyone is trying to
get into service model ... but that's a different rant.

The independent micropublishers will flourish when (a) it becomes as easy to
charge/pay for content as it is to put a coin in parking meter (forget credit
cards, secure web sites and related complex & expensive schemes), and (b) when
copying unpaid content becomes prohibitevely expensive in any juristiction
(meaning technological, not legal barriers.)

I find it nauseating that the current freedom fighters are fighting for freedom
for masses to view/copy media outlet crap for free in the guise of freedom of
thought, freedom to program etc (the last time I looked p2p traffic was 100%
corporate media content ... no political manifestos or banned books there).
That it the sickest phenomenon of the Internet age. Good thing I'm not into
conspiracy theories.

=====
end
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Benjamin Geer | 3 Mar 15:12
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Re: double-plus-unfree digest [byfield, elloi]

On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 22:37:38 -0800 (PST), Morlock Elloi
<morlockelloi@...> wrote:
>> You have to use your imagination.  Film viewers don't need support
>> contracts, but they might like to have more of a say in the sorts of
>> films that get produced, and they might be willing to pay for that.  I
>> certainly would.
>
> The payment is the crucial problem for un-labelled content. [...] If you think that
> freedom-fighting avangarde p2p networks will not copy quality content from
> independents think again.

That's fine with me.  I think you missed my point.  If there was, say, a 
worker's collective of independent filmmakers that produced films on 
subjects proposed and chosen democratically by their paying supporters, I 
would be happy to be one of those paying supporters. And if the resulting 
films were then copied and distributed free of charge, so much the better. 
I'm sure I'm not the only person who would contribute to such a project.

If all I can do is choose among content that's already been created, I'm 
reduced to the role of passive spectator.  I feel about as involved as 
when I have to choose between political parties.  No wonder I'm not very 
interested in paying.  But if paying gave me a say in the subjects covered 
and in the way they're covered, so that I and my like-minded friends could 
get, say, documentaries produced on the subjects we really want to know 
more about (or want others to know more about), that would be a real 
reason to pay.

Ben

(Continue reading)


Gmane