Over The Counter Culture

A paragraph taken from a letter written by (or on behalf of) the Rt Hon Jeremy Hunt MP, Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport, to a Member of the UK Parliament, who had expressed their voters’ concerns over the government’s moves to encourage ISPs to block websites aimed ‘primarily’ at copyright infringement:

“Many users of infringing sites may be unaware that the sites they are viewing carry content unlawfully, and they may find it useful for such unlawful sites to be less readily available.”

Just… wow. Orwell would be proud of such a literary creation. I thought previous New Labour governments were Big Nanny, but this is just absurd. A website owner does not have full rights to the words on the website. Please, Mr ISP, take an active and detailed concern in what websites I visit, and save me from the commercial horror!

Full letter available from its eventual recipient, Matthew Temple (http://www.mattytemple.com/)

We’re not rational, we’re lazy: hence economic models, assuming rational decision-making, are often very wrong.

In 2008, economists Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein made waves with a book called Nudge. It advocated the idea that socially beneficial policy could be implemented without forcing anyone to behave a particular way. All you had to do was make the socially optimal option the default; e.g. saving a certain percentage of your monthly wages.

Anybody not happy with that could opt out and do something different. No freedom or choice is taken away from anyone: you’re just nudged in the right direction.

Well, could nudges help something as ‘far out’ as copyright?

Advocates of the copyleft movement think that in this day and age, more of culture should be in the commons: free to be shared, remixed and disseminated. Scarcity business models are completely out of touch with a world where copy, paste, share & remix is such a ubiquitous feature of cultural participation.

So why not nudge creative works into the commons? I’m talking about default public licensing of copyrighted works (not to be confused with – illiberal and paternalistic – compulsory licensing).

The idea is that by default, new published work would be licensed to the public for non-commercial sharing and remixing (those familiar with the Creative Commons will recognise this as a CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence).

The author would still be free to override that with any other licence. Copyright it would still fully apply to works; the rights “castle” is still there from day zero of a work. But by default, a non-commercial share/remix “drawbridge” is let down.

You would still have to go to the artist and negotiate a deal (or at least, ask for permission) if you intended to make money from the work or a from remix of it. And she would always be credited, and so the more you share, the more famous the artist would get.

I am posting this because it surely can’t be a new idea, but my googling hasn’t thrown anything up yet. I have a dozen questions/ideas, and so was hoping you either could refer me to existing discussions, or give me your own thoughts (in the comments below, or contacting me directly).

Mulve: a RIAA lobbyist’s wet dream, and a Spotify killer.

Wonderful.

Was the current piracy regime so badly broken that this needed to happen?

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the Gallo report, the UK’s Digital Economy Act, and in particular, the brand Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Bill, will all:

a) seem completely warranted, and yet

b) will make even moderates presently optimistic about Spotify making copyright enforcement hardening unnecessary, despair

c) finally, the awful copyright policy we’ve seen pushed in 2010 (see above) will seem inadequate to all, and even harsher measures will be necessary. “Throw the safe harbour / intermediary immunity out the window, allow wanton monitoring, consider making wilful downloading of infringing content illegal, bring back DRM, etc… Three strikes? Let’s make it two!! Children are in danger in this Somalia of unregulated theft and piracy*.

And if Mulve had never come along? people would just learn how to conduct their business online with greater discretion. Privacy, anonymity, encryption, closed communities, being selective about which computers you let your PC connect to – hardly a bad schooling?

If it ain’t badly broke, don’t fix it. This is a step backwards for all concerned, not least the freetards that will gorge themselves on a service that seems too good to be true. As an acquaintance recently pointed out, if you don’t know who the free lunch is, there’s a good chance you’re it.

*yes, Lord Andrew Lloyd-Webber really is that cock-mouthed. Children in danger – what a hammy line to trot out, and in the House of Lords. I mean really. And a ‘Somalia of unregulated theft’? As opposed to what, a Somalia of regulated theft? A Wales of unregulated theft? What on Earth does that mean??

How tragic that a legislator can admit that “I do not come equipped with the answers; frankly, they are way beyond my world of musical theatre” in Parliament, then gets so widely lauded (for a rhetoric and bad stat-laden tragic, melodramatic pantomime of a speech) as to be able to kick start the horrifying fisting of the Digital Economy Act (by which I mean hijacking a good bill that was about boosting Britain’s digital telecoms infrastructure, and filling it with copyright enforcement measures so draconian they would have derailed the bill completely but for the use of the ‘wash up’ subterfuge).

In shopping mall design, the Gruen transfer refers to the moment when consumers respond to "scripted disorientation" cues in the environment. It is named for Austrian architect Victor Gruen

(…)

The Gruen transfer refers to the moment when a consumer enters a shopping mall and, surrounded by an intentionally confusing layout, loses track of their original intentions. Spatial awareness of their surroundings plays a key role, as does the surrounding sound and music

Would love to hear from anyone that knows of any research into this. Is it serious, or speculative?