Animator. Director. Artist. Scapegoat.
Note: Please, please continue uploading my comics to WikiMedia Commons, beloved uploaders! Nina’s Adventures is next. I completely endorse and support this work! Thank you! I love you! I post the rant below because, well, it’s on my mind now, and life isn’t perfect.
Continue reading “My Wikimedia Rant”
Amazon erased purchased e-books from consumers’ Kindles. Wait’ll you find out what books. This is an inevitable consequence of Digital Restrictions Mongering.
Meanwhile, US courts banned a book using ©ensorship law!
Now’s as good a time as any to plug QuestionCopyright.org‘s ©ensorship T-shirts. They’re actually quite inexpensive, and wearing them does a huge public service as you educate people around you.
“Wearing them really works, by the way. I wore one on a train recently and wound up having a great conversation about copyright with two people, one of them a musician coming back from a gig, after they asked me about the front.” –Karl Fogel
Cultural value is related to monetary value, but they are not synonymous. Just as air has more value when it circulates freely, culture is more valuable when it is shared.
Consider the value of language (which is culture). The more people use any particular language, the more valuable it becomes. A scarce language is far less valuable than a common one like English. The more people speak English, the more desirable English becomes; the more songs, books, films, and other communications are produced in English. The value of a language comes from those who use it.
But suppose we commodify language. I’ll start. Let’s say I’m granted a monopoly on the letter “F”. I could have patented a big letter like “E” (12.702% frequency) or “T” (9.056%), but my aspirations are modest. At 2.228%, “F” is below average frequency, so it shouldn’t be any major hardship if I start collecting a royalty of, say, 20 cents per use. Even a pauper can afford $.20 to splurge on an “F” from time to time. And they will! Because you can’t spell “FUN” without “F.” Not to mention “FREEDOM”.
(Since my permission is required for any use of “F,” I won’t permit its degradation in uses I don’t approve of. That word that ends in “uck,” for example. That won’t be allowed under any circumstances, to protect the integrity, quality and reputation of my letter.)
Assigning monetary value to an intangible is the first step towards having its real value recognized. All those other, un-patented letters suddenly seem worthless in comparison. How valuable can “A” (8.167%) be, after all, when you can get it for free? “F” is clearly worth more, or I wouldn’t have invested in privatizing it.
Yet in spite of its clear monetary value, my letter seems to be showing up less and less phrequently. Gradually people adopt cheap phakes instead oph the real thing. They phind a way to spell “PHREEDOM” without paying me.
Soon, the letter “eph” is so scarce, no one recognizes it. Like Avestan, Elbasan, Old Uyghur, and the Dodo, “eph” goes extinct.
And that is the dipherence between cultural value and monetary value.
RiP: a Remix Manifesto is a fun, accessible introduction to “Intellectual Property.” Below is one of my favorite sections, showing how culture is more than just songs and images.
Of course it’s open source, so go watch the whole thing – or remix it.
And crazy busy. Chicago and Urbana and Ebertfest were great, amazing, beyond my ability to emotionally comprehend, I’ve never had a week like that before. Then to top it off, Sita won Best Narrative Feature at the Indian Film festival of Los Angeles, and moved to #1 on Critical Consensus. That’s just nuts.
Anyway, it was great being back in Urbana, my hometown, where nerds are made as well as born. I was raised nerd, by nerds, and it’s only a fluke that I appear to be an artist; my heart belongs to nerd-dom. Want proof? Here I am visiting family friend, genius, and art-supporter Theo Gray at Wolfram Research:
My Free Culture activism is nerdy too, inspired as it is by the Free Software movement. Theo doesn’t like it, and made fiercely pro-copyright arguments as only a proprietary software nerd can.
For contrast, here’s a picture of me with Richard Stallman in New York:
Whose side am I on, anyway? The side of NERDS!
Content is an unlimited resource. People can now make perfect copies of digital content for free. That’s why they expect content to be free — because it is in fact free. That is GOOD.
Think of “content” — culture — as water. Where water flows, life flourishes.
