/Blog

Opposition to Copyright reform

from: Timothy Comeau
to: Peggy Nash
cc: Jim Prentice, Prime Minister of Canada, Stephene Dion, Jack Layton
date: Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 2:10 PM
subject: Opposition to Copyright reform

While I respect the Government’s desire to update copyright
legislation to be fair to all parties within the 21st Century’s
digital environment, I do not feel that the legislation introduced
today is close to achieving that goal. Rather, it attempts to
legislate into law the 20th Century status quo, wherein the consumer
is subject to terms and conditions imposed by producers without
negotiation.

I very much object to the idea - introduced in the bill - that posting
copyrighted material online (specifically pictures) could make one a
criminal. This would have a serious effect on blogging, where it has
become normal to re-post images copied from the source. In fact, it is
often used as a mean to link to the original source. And blogging is
one of the examples of the transformative effect the net has had on
our culture … a vibrant arena for debate, discussion, and the
dissemination of new knowledge. To make any part of its culture
illegal would be equivalent to introducing limits to the freedom of
expression, or - in 20th Century language - to interfere with the
freedom of the press.

This law fails to recognize net-culture as it has developed over the
past decade. There needs to be a fair-use provision which is clear,
and which allows the posting of material within legitimate contexts,
such as those that are promotional and educational.

The Toronto Star has this breakdown

“you could copy a book, newspaper or photograph that you “legally
acquired.” But you couldn’t give away the copies. And you can’t make
copies of materials you have borrowed.”

-with regards to the photographs, this would make a site such as this
(Keil Bryant’s Flickr page, which I enjoy browsing because we share an
interest in such s-f imagery) illegal, if Bryant were Canadian. It
would also become illegal (as I understand it) for me to save a copy
of any of these images for my collection.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kielbryant/

- “- it would be illegal to post a copyright work — picture, song,
film — on the Internet without the permission of the copyright owner.”

As written above re: blogging

As a final word, the Government of Canada would be well advised to
consult with ’share-holders’ who are representative of the base of
potential inf ringers: those under 35, who’ve grown up with VCRs and
computers. It has so far failed to do so. For those us (such as
myself) representative of this generation, a series of social norms
have developed with regard to material on the net. Trying to
criminalize downloading would be like trying to criminalize the great
Canadian tradition of saying ’sorry’ when someone bumps into us.

Whatever legislation is introduced, technological circumvention along
with a young person’s ingenuity would counter it within 6 months (like
the jail-broken iPhone cracked by a kid in New York State two months
after its release). Under the new law, it would be illegal for future
young men ‘who hate AT&T’ do to so. We would thus be deprived of the
right to use a device with a contract we thought was fair.

We do not want to be beholden to the one-sided contracts which limit
our freedom to access digitized cultural material. In the 21st
Century, the more liberal (no pun intended) the copyright law, the
more creative the society is allowed to be. I disagree with Richard
Florida that the path to 21st Century wealth is the enforcement of
intellectual property laws, but I do agree with him that a
society/city’s wealth is a measure of its creativity … it’s a
question of how one’s define wealth. I do not define it in terms of
money, but rather in terms of inheritable, sharable, cultural
products. We thus currently enjoy a net of cultural wealth, and this
bill would seek to impoverish us all in favor of the more narrow
definition of wealth as a measure of how much a company can squeeze
from a consumer.

Timothy Comeau
timothycomeau.com
————————–
[also posted on Goodreads]

When I learned of this late last week, I thought it would have been something awesome to go to.

Until I saw the pictures.

The deets:

Monday, May 26, 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Munk Debates
Be it Resolved that the world is a SAFER place with a REPUBLICAN in
the White House
Discussant: Charles Krauthammer
Discussant: Niall Ferguson
Discussant: Samantha Power
Discussant: Richard Holbrooke
Co-Sponsored by The Globe and Mail, Royal Ontario Museum, Salon
Speakers Series, Aurea Foundation, Munk Centre for
International Studies
Registration: Tickets available only at: http://www.munkdebates.com
The Royal Ontario Museum
100 Queen’s Park Crescent
Toronto, Ontario

timothycomeau.com/onkawara

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

killall Finder

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE

killall Finder

I just found this laying around the hard-drive. It’s something I wrote at the beginning of February, meant as a reply posting on a web-forum before I abandoned it as too long and potentially off-topic. I also read it now and think it dates me as a 30-something pre-Millennial with 20th Century memories. I’m not so sure the sentiments herein expressed would resonate with early 20-somethings who hate old art as being too much Church-stuff. I’m also not sure how many 20-something artists are dealing with legacy-Marxists on a regular basis, as I have over the past decade.

***

One of the lessons of the 20th Century was that the world changes every ten years. Each decade compressed the changes of a mediaeval century, and yet the arts don’t seem to have clued into this. My reason for pursuing the arts came from it’s humanism, as expressed especially in the 1960s, which I now recognize as being part of the Western World’s healing process following World War II. As a teenager, the Time-Life series on artists produced at that time were an introduction to a cultural world that I was not being taught in my rural Nova Scotia school.

The humanistic aspect of the arts is still what politicians and journalists are likely to throw at us - the arts encourage ‘life’ with mystical overtones. I now understand why that was propagated in the years following the Second World War, but by the time I went to art-school (following the idea that a cultured life was the one the most worth living) I ran into bitter and disagreeable adults who hated the word `beauty`, hated the word `humanism`, and instead taught me to be angry with capitalism, patriarchy, corporations and the other suspects. Thus enraged, I was then encouraged to express my thoughts on the matter through obfuscation, conceptual trickery, (and those other usual techniques) not in writing - since I was expected to be only barely literate - but my making something to be exhibited in a plain white room.

Once out of art school, I thought of myself as a young professional trained in my field and yet found that income-via-arts-employment was rare, the already-expensive credentialing inadequate, and the grant system to be more of a nepotistic lottery, and no one was as smart as they thought they were; more or less they were merely quoters, not thinkers. Old ideas, not new. As long as they could throw a quote at you from one of those bitter French men (they who hated capitalism, humanism and the usual) then they considered themselves not only smart, but superior, and it didn’t matter if their day jobs did not coincide with their training. We were all channeled into a bohemian life of obscurity and intellectual self-deception.

My sense then is that the arts professionals of Canada have totally lost track of the game. They are very quick to adopt the thinking of foreigners while denigrating their home culture. Their greatest ambition is to leave the country. Trained to be hateful of contemporary society, they are too disagreeable to be employable by the corporations who could use them. And here it comes back to the humanistic heritage - your average person who respects the arts does so because of that humanistic heritage, and yet the too-cool-for-school artist today will quickly mock this superficial understanding.

Why then, is there little art is schools? Perhaps because ’sensible’ adults don’t want their kids around the bad influence of either hippy-dippy mystics or disgruntled communists. Those of us who understand why that is an oversimplification and an unfair stereotype are the ones who probably already have their kids involved in the arts. They’re not as rare as we may think, and highlights the political thinking against universalizing art education - politicians think parents-who-want-it find a way outside of the public system. It’s a lifestyle option, and an ethnically specific one at that.

My own, disillusioned sense, is that the arts do not have the value invested into them by 19th Century European snobs. I never use the word `disinterested` for example, except when talking Kantian aesthetics. The writings of John Ruskin I find to be mostly unreadable due to being obsolete. Clement Greenberg, nor Andy Warhol, ever heard the word ‘email’ in their lifetime, let alone ‘world-wide-web’. For that matter, Warhol never got the chance to use Photoshop.

Industrial manufacturing has given us a world of aesthetically pleasing products, and talent for image making is now found in the worlds of design and illustration. (Jutxapoz magazine). Installation art tends to amount to bad set design, and performance art to bad acting. I see better art videos on YouTube than I do in galleries, and on YouTube they don’t try to be art. If you consider the Mona Lisa to be the first viral image, it’s easy to extend the consideration to how much a viral video has passed the test of the audience, making it legitimate art.

These are examples of how our world has changed, and I feel like ‘the visual arts’ are a fossilized cultural product from at most, the 1980s. Future historians will look to illustration, design, and films to gauge our culture, and especially the YouTube archives. Like the photography of a century ago, it’s the stuff taken with Kodaks that are of interest, not the stuff trying to imitate romantic paintings.

If we want to have galleries in our towns and cities, it is important that we all understand why they are important. I still value art for it’s humanism. But our culture is so creative outside of galleries, and it is this creativity that is accessible to people who haven’t studied art. The argument shouldn’t then be to have an art for those professionals - it should be accessible to all. A life in the arts should broaden one’s possibilities, not narrow them to the life of a clique.

When people talk about `art` these days, I no longer know what they’re talking about. I suspect they are talking about some hipster club they don’t want a corporate dork to join. But that exclusion denies someone who needs art is their life from having it - and the result is Canadian culture in 2008.

I sat at the table waiting for my order to be ready. It came on the radio again, the second time I’d heard it that day. An earlier radio speaker, in the morning rain.

Hearing it this second time, I flashed forward fifteen years. One day in the early 2020s, I’ll hear it buried on a radio playlist, and think back to these days. Just as I do with these songs:

Which always reminds me of the early summer of 1990. Specifically, hearing it on the car radio in the Annapolis Valley. But of course, there are also the memories of dancing to it weekend nights in 1994.

This

reminds me of gardening in the summer of 1991.

and this

brings me back to that year, half-way down the aisle under the ‘fresh’ sign in this grocery store, looking back toward the camera’s viewpoint.

But while we’re at it, let’s keep in mind that this time next year, this:

will be twenty years ago.

Warren Wagar, A Short History of the Future, page 244:

…sharp witted, yet outgoing and cooperative, the young members of Homo Sapiens altior fashioned a new model of human behavior ideally suited for life in autonomous communities. They were less inclined than the old human type to take advantage of others and too intelligent to be taken advantage of themselves. Their extraordinary powers of mind and heart were another form of wealth, shielding them, as ample personal incomes and education helped to shield everyone, from the age-old tendency of most of Homo sapiens to fall victim to predators.

As integration deepens, the generation whose identity was created by separation can feel left behind, betrayed, and lash out … at other members of the minority.

– Andrew Sullivan, parsing Wright, Sharpton, and Obama

You’ve suggested that there might be certain functions of the mind, certain aspects of consciousness, that don’t have a material foundation.

Yes.

Advanced contemplatives in the Buddhist tradition have talked about tapping into something called the “substrate consciousness.” What is that?

Just for a clarification of terms, I’ve demarcated three whole dimensions of consciousness. There’s the psyche. It’s the human mind — the functioning of memory, attention, emotions and so forth. The psyche is contingent upon the brain, the nervous system, and our various sensory faculties. It starts sometime at or following conception, certainly during gestation, and it ends at death. So the psyche has pretty clear bookends. This is what cognitive neuroscientists and psychologists study. They don’t study anything more. And they quite reasonably assume that that’s all there is to it. But as long as you study the mind only by way of brain states and behavior, you’re never going to know whether there’s any other dimension because of the limitations of your own methodologies. So here’s a hypothesis: The psyche does not emerge from the brain. Mental phenomena do not actually emerge from neuronal configurations. Nobody’s ever seen that they do.

So your hypothesis is just the reverse from what all the neuroscientists think.

Precisely. The psyche is not emerging from the brain, conditioned by the environment. The human psyche is in fact emerging from an individual continuum of consciousness that is conjoined with the brain during the development of the fetus. It can be very hampered if the brain malfunctions or becomes damaged.

But you’re saying there are also two other aspects of consciousness?

Yeah. All I’m presenting here is the Buddhist hypothesis. There’s another dimension of consciousness, which is called the substrate consciousness. This is not mystical. It’s not transcendent in the sense of being divine. The human psyche is emerging from an ongoing continuum of consciousness — the substrate consciousness — which kind of looks like a soul. But in the Buddhist view, it is more like an ongoing vacuum state of consciousness. Or here’s a good metaphor: Just as we speak of a stem cell, which is not differentiated until it comes into the liver and becomes a liver cell, or into bone marrow and becomes a bone marrow cell, the substrate consciousness is stem consciousness. And at death, the human psyche dissolves back into this continuum.

So this consciousness is not made of any stuff. It’s not matter. Is it just unattached and floating through the universe?

Well, this raises such interesting questions about the nature of matter. In the 19th century, you could think of matter as something good and chunky out there. You could count on it as having location and specific momentum and mass and all of that. Frankly, I think the backdrop of this whole conversation has to be 21st century physics, not 19th century physics. And virtually all of neuroscience and all of psychology is based on 19th century physics, which is about as up-to-date as the horse and buggy.

(source)

John Adams: Spring 1772

Government is nothing more than the combined force of society, or the united power of the multitude, for the peace, order, safety, good, and happiness of the people … There is no king or queen bee distinguished from all others, by size or figure of beauty and variety of colors, in the human hive. No man has yet produced any revelation from heaven in his favour, any divine communication to govern his fellow men. Nature throws us al into the world equal and alike … (source)

***
The preservation of liberty depends upon the intellectual and moral character of the people. As long as knowledge and virtue are diffused among the body of a nation, it is impossible they should be enslaved …
(source)

***
Ambition is one of the more ungovernable passions of the human heart. The love of power is insatiable and uncontrollable…
There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty. (source)

***
Better that many guilty persons escape unpunished than one innocent person should be punished. “The reason is, because it’s of more importance to community, that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt should be punished.” (pg 68) -Quoted from The Legal Papers of John Adams, Vol III, 242