Wednesday, February 1st, 2012
KindleReads from DragonWeb - Issue 9

IN THE NINTH issue of KindleReads for DragonWeb I collected various topics: Umberto Eco talks about how one should look at the tie of European countries and nations; Andrew Prescott discusses what digital humanities are and what it may become in the future depending on how we steer them in research and curricula; and finally two articles on online piracy - one of them takes a look at the history of the film industry to find patterns one can easily identify in today's anti-piracy efforts of Hollywood, while the other essay shows how piracy has always been pivotal in the development of software. As usual, I hope you find this small compilation worth reading, and if you have anything to share, please do not hesitate to contact me at zoltan@dragonweb.hu.

* * *

Table of contents

- "Umberto Eco: 'It's culture, not war, that cements European identity'" by Gianni Riotta

- "‘An Electric Current of the Imagination’: What the Digital Humanities Are and What They Might Become" by Andrew Prescott

- "Hang The Pirates — But Start With The Movie Moguls And Record Execs" by Alan Parker

- "Why History Needs Software Piracy" by Benj Edwards

* * *

Umberto Eco: 'It's culture, not war, that cements European identity'

by Gianni Riotta

Outside Umberto Eco's office window in Milan looms the intimidating mass of Sforzesco castle, a reminder, with its towers and black birds, of various continental wars. Here once stood the 14th-century Castrum Portae Jovis – the Porta di Giove fortress – which was destroyed by the short-lived Aurea Republic of 1447. Between these walls, Leonardo Da Vinci and Donato Bramante once laboured; these very buttresses were conquered by Napoleon. And just beyond the moat – an area now invaded by tourists who have come to visit Michelangelo's La Pietà Rondanini – Marshall Radetzky's Austrian troops bombarded the rioting city in 1848.

"When it comes to the debt crisis," says Eco, "and I'm speaking as someone who doesn't understand anything about the economy, we must remember that it is culture, not war, that cements our [European] identity. The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other. Today, we've been at peace for 70 years and no one realises how amazing that is any more. Indeed, the very idea of a war between Spain and France, or Italy and Germany, provokes hilarity. The United States needed a civil war to unite properly. I hope that culture and the [European] market will do the same for us."

Eco sips his coffee, preferring suitably postmodern Nespresso capsules, whereas his German wife, Renate Ramge Eco, defends the traditional Italian coffee pot, the moka. He has just returned to Milan from Paris, where the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, conferred on him the rank of commander, the third rank of the Legion of Honour.

"Those were the hours of France's battle for the AAA rating, but Sarkozy still didn't want to miss it – great. I must admit it was also a moving experience when I was conferred the Dodecaneso Cross in Greece: they hand them out right inside Patmos cave, where St John wrote the Apocalypse," says the writer, with a laugh.

"One of the advantages of living in Europe is that I get birthday greetings from the German president, Wulff, and the Spanish prime minister, Rajoy, neither of whom I know. After being at each other's throats for years in fratricidal wars, we're now all culturally European."

Asked to describe European identity in 2012, Eco says it is widespread but "shallow". "I am using an English word that is not the same as the Italian word superficiale, but which is somewhere between 'surface' and 'deep'. We must change this, before the crisis strips it [Europe] of everything.

"The university exchange programme Erasmus is barely mentioned in the business sections of newspapers, yet Erasmus has created the first generation of young Europeans. I call it a sexual revolution: a young Catalan man meets a Flemish girl – they fall in love, they get married and they become European, as do their children. The Erasmus idea should be compulsory – not just for students, but also for taxi drivers, plumbers and other workers. By this, I mean they need to spend time in other countries within the European Union; they should integrate."

It's an attractive idea, and yet pride in Europe appears to be giving way to populism and hostility within the union. "That's why I said that our [European] identity is 'shallow'. The founding fathers of Europe – Adenauer, De Gasperi and Monnet – may have travelled less. De Gasperi spoke only German because he was born within the Austro-Hungarian empire and didn't have access to the internet to read the foreign press. Their Europe reacted to war and they shared resources to build peace. Now we must work towards building a more profound identity.

"When I proposed at a meeting of EU mayors the idea of also introducing Erasmus for craftsmen and professionals, a Welsh mayor said: 'My citizens would never accept this!' And when I spoke about this a few days ago on English television, I was slapped down by the anchorman, who was worried about the euro crisis, about a supranational Europe and about the technical governments of Papademos in Greece and Monti in Italy who were not 'elected', and are therefore 'undemocratic'.

"How should I have responded? By saying that ours is a government approved by parliament and proposed by a president elected by parliament? By saying that in all democracies there are unelected institutions, such as the Queen of England, and the American supreme court, but that no one defines them as non-democratic?"

Even before the debt crisis, Europe's weak identity – as diagnosed by Eco – was apparant. "[For instance,] when the constitution was rejected in a referendum. The document had been written by politicians; it was impossible for any educated man to participate in the process and it was never discussed with voters. It was also evident when euro banknotes were designed without the usual faces of important men and women – instead, there were just frigid landscapes, as in a De Chirico landscape. Or does the problem [of European identity] go back to God - the fact that the United States becomes ever more religious as Europe becomes even less religious?

"That's the way it is. Back when Pope Wojtyla was still alive, there was much discussion on whether they should accept the European constitution and the continent's Christian roots. Secular people predominated and they did nothing about it. The church protested. There was however a third way, more difficult, but one that would give us strength today.

And that would have been to speak of the constitution of all our roots – the Greek-Roman, the Judaic and the Christian. In our past, we have both Venus and the crucifix, the Bible and Nordic mythology, which we remember with Christmas trees, or with the many festivals of St Lucy, St Nicolas and Santa Claus. Europe is a continent that was able to fuse many identities, and yet not confuse them.

That is precisely how I see its future. As for religion: be careful. Many people who no longer go to church end up falling prey to supersitition. And many who are non-practising still carry around a little saint card with a picture of Padre Pio in their wallets!"

Father of semiology, scholar of mass culture, author of essays for the elite and global bestsellers – from The Name of the Rose to The Prague Cemetery, Eco has just turned 80. Whenever he gets tired climbing a flight of stairs, he jokes: "Eh, my friend, we're not 70 any more!"

He is no pessimist: "With all of its defects, the global market makes war less likely, even between the USA and China. Europe will never be the United States of Europe, a single country with a common language like the USA – where for a long time English was threatened to be overtaken by German, now overtaken by Spanish.

"We have too many languages and cultures, indeed, the idea of an unique [European] newspaper is for now just a utopia. The web, meanwhile, makes us bump into one another; we may not read Russian but we come across Russian websites and we are made aware of others.

"I still think that there is no longer a disparity between Lisbon and Warsaw, just as there is no disparity between San Francisco and New York. We will remain a federation, but indissoluble."

So whose faces should we print on our banknotes, to remind the world that we are not merely 'shallow' Europeans, but profound? "Perhaps not politicians or the leaders who have divided us – not Cavour or Radetzky, but men of culture who have united us, from Dante to Shakespeare, from Balzac to Rossellini.

"And since Pierre Bayard is right, we know there are books we have yet to read that will help us reflect on cultures different from our own. Little by little: that is how our European identity will become more profound."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/26/umberto-eco-culture-war-europa

* * *

Back to Table of Contents

* * *

‘An Electric Current of the Imagination’: What the Digital Humanities Are and What They Might Become

by Andrew Prescott

It is a great honour for me to become head of this academic department devoted to the study of the digital humanities. When I first saw experiments in the digital imaging of books and manuscripts in the British Library twenty years ago, it was impossible to imagine that they would develop into an intellectual activity on a scale warranting an academic department. The fact that King’s College London has led the way in this process is due to the work of many pioneers, and I cannot start this lecture without acknowledging their achievements and saying what a pleasure it is to join them now as a colleague. Above all, it is essential to honour the contribution of Professor Harold Short who is without doubt the father of the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. Harold has been an outstanding international pioneer of the digital humanities, and I feel honoured and humbled to follow in his footsteps.

The work you see displayed here is a digital poem called Birdsong Compliance by the British poet John Sparrow. The words are taken from interviews with the composer John Cage and the critic Joan Retallack. This poem illustrates how some artists have become fascinated by the way digital processes can be used to transform texts into new pieces of art. In Birdsong Compliance, two overlapping texts interact with each other. One text is static while the other moves around this background to create random juxtapositions suggesting new and unexpected meanings.

Another poet very interested in processes by which texts can be transformed or, as he prefers it, deformed in order to discover new meanings is my former colleague at the University of Glasgow, Jeffrey Robinson. Jeffrey is not only an interesting poet but also a distinguished scholar of the Romantic period.

In his recent volume of poems called Untam’d Wing, Jeffrey takes the great monuments of Romantic poetry on which he has worked for many years, and subjects them to processes of poetic transformation. He reduces Wordsworth's sonnet Composed upon Westminster Bridge to five key words conveying the ecstasy of a scene witnessed by early morning light. Jeffrey splices lines and phrases from the poetry of Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge with lines from Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell and Gertrude Stein. Jeffrey finds new poems in marginal notes by Keats. He takes lines from famous sonnets of the Romantic period and mixes them up to create new sonnets which reveal surprising interrelationships between the words, rhythm and imagery of the originals. Jeffrey riffs on phrases and words in individual poems, setting out like a jazz musician to renew a body of standard work (in the way that, say, Miles Davies might revisit George Gershwin).

The effect of Jeffrey’s deformations and transformations of romantic poetry is at first disconcerting, then magical. Jeffrey’s reworkings compel us to look afresh at individual words and lines. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem The Eolian Harp, originally published in 1795, has often been taken as the beginning of the Romantic movement in poetry. I have given the text of the first section of The Eolian Harp on your handout. Over the page, you can read one of Jeffrey’s deformations of The Eolian Harp, which picks out words from Coleridge’s poem. I have known The Eolian Harp since I was a teenager, but it wasn’t until I read Jeffrey’s version of it that I really noticed Coleridge’s use in this poem of the startling word ‘sequacious’. This word, rarely used in English poetry, meant in the seventeenth century ‘following a leader slavishly’. By the eighteenth century, ‘sequacious’ came to be used with reference to objects, and mean pliability or flexibility. Applying the word to the ethereal sound of the Aeolian harp, Coleridge here gives ‘sequacious’ a further musical inflection.

Jeffrey Robinson’s poems encourage us to focus on the evanescence of individual words like ‘sequacious’, which we might otherwise skip over. Jeffrey reminds us that new insights can be found in single words just as much as in huge quantities of data. Robinson’s juxtapositions of the old and the new seek, in his words, to generate ‘an electric current of the imagination (as the Romantics might put it) [which] causes transformations that constitute a real thing in the world’.

[Slide: OPTE project: http://www.opte.org]

This is an image from the OPTE project which was started by Barrett Lyon in 2003 and seeks to create a visual representation of the internet. This image represents the internet connections of a single computer in November 2003. The purpose of the OPTE project is to map the growth of the internet, to identify gaps in the internet’s structure, and to analyse the effect on the internet of major events such as wars and natural disasters. But the images are also aesthetically pleasing, and they have been displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This image conveys something of the scale of the internet, but gives little sense of its growth over the past fifteen years. In 2000, there were about 361 million internet users. Since then, the number of users has grown four fold, so that there are currently just over two billion internet users, about one third of the world’s population. There are currently estimated to be about 12 billion indexed pages on the indexed World Wide Web (and how odd that our unit of measurement for the web continues to be the page).

In 1997, Michael Lesk calculated that the entire holdings of the Library of Congress amounted to about 20 petabytes of data, and guessed that the total information in the world amounted to a few thousand petabytes. By 2003, Lesk reported that the total of new information created every year amounted to 1.5 exabytes, which is over 1500 petabytes or 1.5 billion gigabytes. As of May 2009, the size of the world’s total digital content was estimated at 500 exabytes or over a trillion gigabytes – about 160 gigabytes for every man, woman or child on earth, or about 480 gigabytes for each internet user. Most of this information has been created since 1997. It is also estimated that during the single year 2013 internet traffic will be equivalent to all the information currently in existence.

These figures are dizzying and perhaps rather terrifying. Michael Lesk also calculates that the works of a single author such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge or Wordsworth occupy about one hundred megabytes of data, not so much a drop in the ocean of information, as an atom in a universe of data. How in this context are we to hang on to the resonances and evanescence of a single word in a single poem like ‘sequacious’? In this huge and inhuman world of information, poems start to look as fragile as butterfly wings.

[Slide: Square Kilometre Array: http://bit.ly/rOsHEU]

Scientists frequently deal with vast and intimidating problems of information. When the Square Kilometre Array, a sophisticated radio telescope, is built, it will produce four petabytes of data an hour. Each day, the Square Kilometre Array will process more information than is found in all the printed books in the world’s national libraries. Although film and video can for example generate large quantities of data, humanities scholars in general do not at present confront the same problems of scale of information that astronomers have to deal with. Humanities scholars are often much more preoccupied with the complexities of the smaller scale – with the problem of a word like ‘sequacious’. Nevertheless, in their approach to information, humanities scholars have tended to use approaches more appropriate to the large quantities of data dealt with by scientists. The main concerns of humanities computing have been with such issues as the modelling of data, its interoperability and sustainability, and the control and management of its growth. Yet many of the books, manuscripts, pictures, films sound recordings and artefacts with which humanities scholars are concerned resist such managerial approaches – they are messy, damaged, ambiguous in their meaning and complex in their structure. They refuse to be sequacious.

[Slide: Literature Online: http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk/]

Among the many commercial online packages on which humanities scholars and students have become increasingly reliant is Literature Online, which is produced by Proquest and contains a fully searchable library of more than 350,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose. Here is how The Eolian Harp appears in Literature Online, and this is nowadays likely to be the way in which many students first encounter the poem. We are presented with the text from the 1912 edition of Coleridge’s Poems, and everything looks reassuringly simple and straightforward. Admittedly this isn’t the most recent and authoritative edition of the poem, which was published by J. C . C. Mays in 2001, but there are problems running deeper than this. A study by Jack Stillinger has emphasized how Coleridge constantly revised and altered his poems, so that there are something like sixteen different versions of The Eolian Harp in manuscript and printed form, all dating from Coleridge’s lifetime. These range from 51 to 64 lines in length. Sometimes Coleridge presented the poem as a single section, and at other times he divided it into three, four or five paragraphs, so that the poem’s development could be more clearly followed. The various versions of the poem have different titles, reflecting Coleridge’s uncertainty as to the best way to convey the poem’s abstract and reflective character. Among the titles with which Coleridge experimented were ‘Effusion XXXV’ and ‘Composed at Clevedon, Somersetshire’, and he only settled on the title ‘Eolian Harp’ in 1817. Stillinger comments: ‘There are too many differences [between these versions] to enumerate… they change the tone, the philosophical and religious ideas, and the basic structure rather drastically. The first recoverable version, ‘Effusion XXXV’, recounts an amusing incident of early married life, while the latest version is a much more serious affair’. Many of Coleridge’s poems are characterized by this textual instability – Stillinger calculates that there were at least eighteen different versions of The Ancient Mariner. In this context, we might wonder how far there was ever a single settled version of a poem like The Eolian Harp or The Ancient Mariner. Jeffrey Robinson’s process of ‘deforming’ The Eolian Harp can be seen as the continuation of a process in which Coleridge himself engaged for more than twenty years.

Users of Mays’s monumental edition of Coleridge’s poetry immediately realize how important this textual instability is in understanding both Coleridge and his poetry. The wealth of evidence for the changes in particular texts led Mays to divide his edition between, on the one hand, reading texts and, on the other, a bewildering variorum edition. In the case of The Eolian Harp it was even necessary for Mays to include in the Variorum edition photographs of annotated copies of Coleridge’s 1817 collection, Sibylline Leaves, illustrating Coleridge’s continued reshaping and development of his poem, and I have included one of these in your handout. None of this is even hinted at in Literature Online or other online presentations of the poem. Literature Online irons out the complexities and uncertainties of The Eolian Harp and reduces it to a piece of information which could be transmitted by telegraph. There is an irony here in that cultural commentators frequently emphasise the (often false) perception of online information as inherently ephemeral, volatile and unstable. Yet here the online version presents a very fixed image of a text that is, in its manuscript and printed version, very volatile and unstable. This instability reflects Coleridge’s attempts to replicate the fluidity and interconnectedness of conversation, and so is important in understanding the poem. These are precisely the issues we need to confront in considering the humanities in an information world: how to represent flux and fluidity, how to explore instability and uncertainty, how to represent the complexity of the minute. Scientists want to map the universe; humanities scholars want to investigate the universe contained in a single poem. And, as Coleridge’s work demonstrates, that poem may turn out to be more complex in its structure and interconnections than an entire galaxy.

[Slide: Coalbrookdale at Night: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Philipp_Jakob_Loutherbourg_d._J._002.jpg]

We have been here before. This is a celebrated scene of the early industrial revolution at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire. A sense of being overwhelmed by technology, of anxiety about the way in which new technologies are transforming society, while at the same time feeling excited at the material improvements which these changes might bring is a familiar – perhaps even a necessary – condition of modernity. A standard point of historical reference in thinking about the modern information revolution is the arrival of print in the fifteenth century, but perhaps a closer parallel is the way in which the growth of empire and the resulting changes in industry and agriculture transformed Britain in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. David Simpson has pointed out how Wordsworth’s reference to ‘bright volumes of vapour’ in his poem ‘Poor Susan’ in the Lyrical Ballads may refer to the over-production of cheap and worthless literature – a data deluge whose effects preoccupied Wordsworth. The prostitute Susan in Simpson’s interpretation is one of an army of alienated and rootless people who pervade Wordsworth’s verse: beggars whose anxious movements reflect the pointless and repetitive movements associated with the introduction of machines; vagrant farmworkers who have been disconnected from the land by enclosure; discharged soldiers who move through the landscape like ghosts. Concerns about the nature of the society emerging at that time united such disparate figures as Burke and Cobbett. Burke fretted that the state was becoming ‘nothing better than a partnership agreement in trade of pepper or coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved at the fancy of the parties’. From a completely different stance, Cobbett expressed his horror at the way in which the cash nexus was becoming all pervasive: ‘We are daily advancing to the state in which there are but two classes of men, masters and abject dependents’.

Part of our role as scholars of the digital humanities should undoubtedly be to challenge those glib historical claims frequently made about modern developments in information technology. A longer historical perspective suggests that today’s developments are but another step in a long revolution in in the structuring of knowledge and its representation. The invention of the codex at the beginning of the Christian era was just as remarkable as the appearance of the iPad. The creation of the biblical concordance in the twelfth century was equally revolutionary – the idea that sacred text could be broken up according to an external and abstract pattern of alphabetization verged on the sacrilegious. Without the Western adoption of Arabic conceptions of zero at about the same time, digitization would have been still born. And of all the mechanical inventions which transformed human life, few have had greater impact than the appearance of the mechanical clock in the thirteenth century. In the nineteenth century, factories and railways transformed the very structure of time. Each age has had its information revolution, but nevertheless it seems that what happened at the end of the eighteenth century dwarfed them all. We can see this by the way in which reactions to those changes which so alarmed Wordsworth, Coleridge, Burke and Cobbett are still evident in our everyday language.

In his seminal work Culture and Society, Raymond Williams described how the great social and economic changes in Britain between 1760 and 1830 resulted in the development of new meanings for such key words as class, industry and artist. For example, the idea that the terms art and artist refer to the imaginative or creative arts first appears in this period, and was an attempt to affirm essential spiritual values in the face of the dehumanizing effects of the industrial and agricultural revolutions. Of these major ideological and conceptual shifts at the time of the Industrial Revolution, Williams singled out as particularly significant that term which has become a modern intellectual catch-all: culture. The modern concept of culture as meaning a general body of artistic achievement and activity and, eventually, a whole way of life was, again, a reaction to the appearance of modernity. Williams traces a tradition running from Burke and Cobbett through Romantic artists such as Coleridge and Wordsworth through to John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold, and still evident in twentieth century commentators such as Eliot and Leavis, which articulates the idea of culture as a mechanism for preserving essential human values in the face of a society increasingly dominated by trade, manufacture and the earning of a living. Coleridge is a pivotal figure in this development, declaring to Wordsworth that there was a need for ‘a general revolution in the modes of developing and disciplining the human mind by the substitution of life and intelligence for the philosophy of mechanism which, in everything that is most worthy of the human intellect, strikes Death’. In his Essay on the Constitution of the Church and State Coleridge called for the creation of an endowed class known as the Clerisy or National Church whose business would be ‘general cultivation’. The Clerisy would consist of ‘the learned of all denominations: the sages and professors of all the so-called liberal arts and sciences’. Coleridge had a profound influence on the early development of King’s College London and may in many ways be seen as its presiding genius.

The idea of the humanities was at the heart of this early nineteenth century debate about resisting that mechanistic Utilitarian society which so entranced figures like Jeremy Bentham. Coleridge declared that his Clerisy would counter this mechanistic death of the spirit. The Clerisy would ‘remain at the fountainhead of the humanities, in cultivating the knowledge already possessed, and in watching over the interests of physical and moral science’. The humanities are thus another of those keywords which reflect the ideological shifts associated with the rise of modern society. Just as the definition of art shifted, so the older form of the word humanities, associated with the study of the litterae humaniores was discarded and replaced by a focus on that knowledge which would encourage, in Coleridge’s words, ‘ the harmonious development of those qualities and faculties that characterize our humanity’. Coleridge declared that his intention was to undo the entire philosophical and scientific superstructure associated with the measurement and geometry of the Newtonian world. In his view, this mechanistic concern with numbers and measurement threatened to destroy the life of the mind and crush the human spirit. The humanities were a reaction against modernity, and an affirmation of the human spirit against the cash nexus.

In this context, the idea of the digital humanities is problematic. At one level, the computer is simply a sophisticated spinning jenny. Indeed, the great-grandfather of the computer, Babbage’s difference engine, with its programmes developed by Ada Lovelace from the mechanisms used to control looms, was the most sophisticated and forward-looking product of the first phase of the Industrial Revolution. The present information revolution could be seen as an attack by the heirs of Babbage on the very cultural arena established as a refuge against the mechanistic impulse. If we see the digital humanities as merely extending mechanistic arithmetical procedures into the realm of cultural endeavour then they indeed mark that death of the spirit which Coleridge so much feared. Alan Liu has brilliantly described in his Laws of Cool how modern computing is an instrument of that managerial impulse which seeks to make knowledge work as mechanical and controlled as work on a production line. Liu reminds us how the aesthetics and language of computing, with its excitement about the latest ‘cool’ medium, are a refuge from the grim reality of a cubicle in an open plan office on an industrial estate. In the end, Liu sees the digital humanities as an escape from the tyranny of the cool, but there is a sense of despair in his conclusion that the only reaction to art in such a situation is to deform and deface it, in a way which anticipates some of Jeffrey Robinson’s procedures in Untam’d Wing. The work of Liu and other commentators reminds us that the modern information revolution is not simply about machines and the capabilities of new technology. It is about how knowledge is being turned into a commodity, a data steam disconnected from those who produce it and turned to commercial advantage by monopolistic corporations. This is surely something which must be resisted, but it will not be achieved by using open source software or even by engaging in a strategy of resistance. We need precisely what Coleridge called for in his letter to Wordsworth: ‘a general revolution in the modes of developing and disciplining the human mind by the substitution of life and intelligence for the philosophy of mechanism which, in everything that is most worthy of the human intellect, strikes Death’. This cannot be achieved by escaping the digital; there is no escape from the digital, any more than there was from the industrial revolution. What is necessary is to reshape the digital world in Coleridge’s model. The creation of such a world is the mission of the digital humanities.

It would be easy to see Samuel Taylor Coleridge as opposed to science. However, as Nicholas Roe and others have recently emphasized, Coleridge was deeply preoccupied with science. He sought to ‘warm his mind with universal science’ and declared ‘I would be a tolerable Mathematician, I would thoroughly know Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Optics and Astronomy, Botany, Metallurgy, Fossilism, Chemistry, Geology, Anatomy, Medicine’. The Eolian Harp was partly prompted by Coleridge’s reading of materialist scientists such as Thomas Beddoes and Erasmus Darwin, and for Nicholas Roe the poem demonstrates that ‘for Coleridge at this moment there was no separation between imaginative writing and advanced science or ‘natural philosophy’. Coleridge’s preoccupation with science reflected his concern that physicians such as John Hunter only offered ‘mechanical solutions’ to the understanding of life. In 1824, Coleridge supplied notes on the ‘Idea of LIFE’ for Joseph Henry Green, who afterwards became the first Professor of Surgery here in King’s College London. For Coleridge, then, the first step in resisting the mechanistic spirit of the industrial revolution was a profound engagement with science. Likewise, if humanities scholars wish to ensure that their understanding and engagement with human knowledge does not become another Californian commodity, it is essential to engage with the digital world, and not as consumers but as creators.

This then is the challenge for the digital humanities: to create a new type of humanities which will transform science and technology and achieve a revolution comparable to that revolution of understanding sought by Coleridge. How have the digital humanities risen to this challenge? There can be no doubt that the practice of humanities scholarship has been transformed by the increasing availability of digital tools and resources over the past ten to fifteen years. A recent study by Mark Greengrass and Stephen Brown found that 89% of a sample of 149 humanities researchers used the Web on a daily basis and 77% had been using the Web for five years or more. Likewise, in the LAIRAH study, 81% of a sample of humanities researchers identified themselves as extensive users of digital resources, and 83% agreed that digital resources had changed the way in which they did their research. However, these studies also indicate a problem for the digital humanities. Overwhelmingly, the digital resources used by humanities scholars are commercial packages produced by libraries and digital publishers such as Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Early English Books Online, Literature Online or JSTOR. Usage of the specialist packages produced by digital humanities centres based in universities is, by contrast, very low. For many humanities scholars, the most pressing need in developing digital infrastructures is not to increase engagement with the digital humanities but rather to secure access to commercial packages which their institutions cannot afford, such as the monstrously expensive Parker Library on the Web.

The digital revolution has occurred, but its course was dictated by libraries and commercial publishers, and the digital humanities as formally constituted has largely stood on the sidelines. The well-known digital humanities centres in British universities such as King’s, Glasgow, Sheffield and Belfast have of course produced dozens of digital projects over the years, but the impact of these has generally been very limited compared with the major commercial packages. A great deal of effort has gone into developing subject associations for the digital humanities such as the Association of Literary and Linguistic Computing and the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations, but these look increasingly irrelevant and marginal to wider digital scholarship. The international Digital Humanities conferences are, as Jerome McGann has recently emphasized, preoccupied with inward-looking discussion on metadata and standards, and seek to establish what McGann calls ‘tight little disciplinary islands; tight little techie islands’ . Patrick Joula has recently produced a devastating analysis of academic journals for the digital humanities, showing that they are rarely cited by other scholars and fail to attract contributions from scholars in leading universities. The digital humanities consistently punch beneath their weight.

[Slide: Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0: http://www.toddpresner.com/?p=7]

There are signs of change on the horizon. The enthusiasm for the digital recently evident at major subject conferences such as MLA and the American Historical Association has received a great deal of publicity, but perhaps this is just another example of the digital humanities being proclaimed yet again as the next big thing, as has happened many times in the past. More exciting is the work of new groups such as HASTAC, which has been very successful in attracting to the digital humanities large new communities of young scholars who are not only culturally and critically engaged but also emphatically wired. It is striking how many of these younger scholars reject the older institutional structures of the digital humanities and seek, as a recent twitter and blog discussion urges, to transform DH. The case for a new digital humanities is also proclaimed in the Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 drafted by Todd Presner, Jeff Schnapp and others, which declares that ‘The first wave of digital humanities work was quantitative … the second wave is qualitative, interpretive, experiential, emotive, generative in character’.

Despite these recent bursts of optimism, however, the record of the digital humanities remains unimpressive compared to the great success of media and culture studies. Part of the reason for this failure of the digital humanities is structural. The digital humanities has struggled to escape from what McGann describes as ‘a haphazard, inefficient, and often jerry-built arrangement of intramural instruments, free-standing centers, labs, enterprises, and institutes, or special digital groups set up outside the traditional departmental structure of the university’. Such structures, McGann observes, ‘are expensive to run and the vast majority of the faculty have no use for them’. The only answer is to move these various labs and centres into the main academic structure, and this is why the decision by King’s to establish its long-standing Centre for Computing in the Humanities as an academic department and to merge its Centre for e-Research into the Department is very important. A second problem is that the digital humanities has not generated an intellectual programme and, more particularly, a teaching agenda comparable to the work of (say) Thomas Tout in pioneering history programmes at the University of Manchester at the beginning of the twentieth century or Leavis and Richards in creating the study of English literature in Cambridge in the 1930s or more recently Richard Hoggart at Birmingham in developing cultural studies. Pioneers like Leavis or Hoggart did not lack ambition for their new subjects. Both Leavis and Hoggart felt that their new academic disciplines would generate major social and cultural reforms. In the digital humanities, we need to emulate the ambition of a Leavis or a Hoggart and create new teaching programmes articulating new intellectual and social aspirations. I hope that a priority for King’s over the next few years will be to develop a single honours undergraduate programme in the digital humanities which will enable us clearly to set out our overall intellectual agenda.

In America, the growth of digital humanities has often been linked to English Departments, and Matthew Kirschenbaum has given a fascinating account of ‘What Is Digital humanities and What's It Doing in English Departments?’ In Britain, digital humanities has struggled to find a similar relationship with an academic discipline. It has often developed from libraries and information services and it is frequently seen as a support service. One of the things that I am proudest of in my career is the way in which I have moved between being a curator, an academic and a librarian. Museums, galleries, libraries and archives are just as important to cultural health as universities. Indeed, I have found my time as a curator and librarian consistently far more intellectually exciting and challenging than being an academic. Institutions such as the British Library, the British Museum, the National Archives, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the House of Lords Library contain communities of scholars who possess the skills and understanding that will be essential to our society in negotiating a new digital order. I am particularly delighted tonight that my audience includes scholars from all these institutions. Digital innovation is more likely to come from libraries and information services than university departments. One of the great tragedies of university life in recent years has been the way that a distinction has grown up between ‘academic’ and ‘non-academic’ staff, so that for example research active staff in university libraries are no longer eligible for return to the REF, effectively excluding from the academy precisely those people who are most needed by it at the moment. With the collapse of American academic job structures in recent years, there has been a great deal of talk about ‘alternate academic careers for scholars’ or alt-ac as the twitter tag puts it. But I worry that this suggests that libraries or museums are a kind of second best to universities. Far from it - libraries, museums, galleries should be at the heart of the academy. An important current experiment in this area is at the National Library of Wales, where the Chair of Digital Collections of the University of Wales is based within the Library. I am delighted that the holder of this first digital humanities chair based in a cultural institution is Lorna Hughes, previously from King’s, and we look forward to working closely with Lorna.

The Digital Humanities Manifesto declares that ‘Whereas the modern university segregated scholarship from curation, demoting the latter to a secondary, supportive role, and sending curators into exile within museums, archives, and libraries, the Digital Humanities revolution promotes a fundamental reshaping of the research and teaching landscape. It recasts the scholar as curator and the curator as scholar’. I think that hits the nail on the head as to what the digital humanities could become. The process whereby the curator became disconnected from the academy is a mysterious one, and deserves more study. When Frederic Madden, the great Victorian manuscript scholar, was prevented by family circumstances from pursuing his academic studies at Oxford, an appointment as an Assistant Librarian at the British Museum placed him at the heart of Victorian literary and historical scholarship. Likewise, Antonio Panizzi’s appointment to the British Museum in 1831 was a definite step up from his uncertain position as a Professor of Italian at University College London. It is a paradox that, in the late nineteenth century when modern scholarship was stressing the importance of rigorous documentary and textual analysis, the relationship between academic scholars and curators became fatally weakened. By the 1920s Sir Walter Greg and others were lamenting the failure of universities to undertake systematic work in descriptive bibliography. A similar story can be told of palaeography. Although Maitland declared at the beginning of the twentieth century how all history has been rewritten because of the study of manuscripts in libraries, and notwithstanding the initiative of King’s College in appointing Hubert Hall of the Public Record Office to a Chair of Palaeography in 1919, provision for teaching in palaeography has always been patchy. Palaeography has found it difficult to escape the stigma of being an ancillary discipline – something to be got out of the way before one got on with the real research. I look forward to working with our newly appointed Professor of Palaeography and Manuscript Studies, Professor Julia Cricke, in trying to address these issues.

Yet, despite the semi-detached relationship of disciplines like bibliography and palaeography with the academy, they should be recognized, as Matthew Kirschenbaum has reminded us, ‘ as among the most sophisticated branches of media studies we have evolved’. Digital humanities offers a means by which disciplines such as bibliography, palaeography, diplomatic and museum studies can be brought back to the heart of the academy. Moreover, at the heart of these disciplines is the perception that our understanding of knowledge is inextricably bound up with the nature of the medium by which it is transmitted to us. The cultural threat of the digital lies in its commodification of knowledge – the way in which (as Robert Darnton has eloquently described in the case of the Google Book Settlement) knowledge is being turned into a monopoly generated and owned by private corporations. Yet this is only a risk if we see knowledge as data and forget its complex material base. The digital humanities should constantly engage with the materiality of knowledge. Kirschenbaum has forcefully reminded us how data is material, and in his grammatology of the hard drive reminds us how data is recorded on a funny whirring object which functions in a way very similar to a gramophone record. The study of such materialities of knowledge requires a much larger and more expansive engagement with science than if we simply see science as data crunching. By forming closer links with such curatorial disciplines as bibliography and palaeography, and connecting these with the theoretical insights of media and cultural studies, the digital humanities can reshape the academy and address those cultural imperatives which confront it.

British Library, Cotton MS. Otho B.X, f. 54v

This digital image is now more than twenty years old, but for me it is an emblem of what the digital humanities can be. In 1731, the great manuscript library of Sir Robert Cotton was severely damaged in a fire. The library was afterwards one of the foundation collections of the British Museum and the unconserved fragments rescued from the fire were preserved in an attic room in the Museum. Sir Humphrey Davy was consulted as to means by which the fragments could be opened up for public use, and a large number of manuscripts were restored, but Frederic Madden was nevertheless horrified to discover in 1837 that thousands of burnt fragments like this one were still preserved in the attic. Madden began a conservation programme for this material which took over twenty years. Yet badly burnt fragments like this one, from an eleventh-century collection of Old English saints’ lives, remained illegible. By 1913, the American forensic scientist Elbridge Stein had demonstrated that ultra-violet light could be used to read damaged writing. In 1934, an ultra-violet cabinet, manufactured by a firm in which the Glasgow scientist Lord Kelvin was a partner, was installed in the British Museum and allowed documents such as this to be read. It was difficult however to get a stable image of the ultra-violet readings.

In the 1980s, my friend Professor Kevin Kiernan was working on these damaged Cotton manuscripts and wondered if there were other scientific methods available which could assist in this study. He was given advice on specialist imaging technologies by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and found the medical imaging equipment could be used to create digital images. He longed to try this new equipment on the burnt Cotton manuscripts. Finally, in 1993, I was able to assist him in getting the necessary access and the medical imaging firm Roche Kontron provided a camera and operator. The result was this image of a phrase in the burnt fragment. Nervous about transporting this image back to the United States only on a hard disc, a second copy was sent by phone modem and as far as I am aware this was the first digital image of a medieval manuscript transmitted across the Atlantic. The initial image was flooded with the blue of the ultra-violet light and required extensive image processing by Kevin to reveal the remnants of Old English script.

This was an experiment which was dependent on collaboration between the scholar, curator, conservator, scientist and imaging technician. We didn’t know whether the imaging equipment would work. The methods we adopted were dependent on scientific advice and guidance. We didn’t know whether the resulting image would ever reach the United States. But we definitely produced important research results.

[Slide: Hyperspectral imaging of the Declaration of Independence: http://engt.co/cVQmFL]

The history of the Cotton collection has been one of engagement with cutting edge science, ever since Humphrey Davy was consulted about the conservation of the fragments. Since our 1993 experiment, digital imaging of manuscripts has become routine and images under special lighting conditions have been produced of manuscripts ranging from early papyri to the early biblical manuscript, the Codex Sinaiticus, and the eighth-century Chad Gospels. It might be objected that such very specialist imaging techniques are only relevant to very early materials. This slide, however, shows hyperspectral imaging of a detail in one of the most celebrated modern documents, Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence. This imaging under a variety of light wavelengths by the Library of Congress has recently revealed how, in drafting the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson first used the words ‘fellow subjects’ and gradually altered them to ‘fellow citizens’. A similar project at the National Library of Scotland has recovered the illegible text of David Livingstone’s diaries. There are countless further research projects in this field which require close collaboration between scientist, humanities scholar, curator and conservator. Thousands of manuscripts were damaged in the nineteenth century by the application of chemical solutions in an attempt to read faint text. The residue of these solutions means that we cannot use the fluorescent effects of ink at different light wavelengths to recover the text. To address this problem requires further research into the chemistry of the ink and manuscripts, which in turn requires closer collaboration with scientists. This is the kind of project which should be at the heart of the digital humanities. The Diamond Light Source, Britain’s national synchrotron science facility, has recently been used successfully to investigate objects ranging from 18th century Spanish manuscripts to Catalan altarpieces. This engagement with ‘big science’ will eventually give birth to a ‘big humanities’ but in order to achieve this we need new forms of dialogue with our scientific colleagues. Such methods are of course familiar in archaeology and art history. The digital humanities must strive to make this creative engagement with cutting-edge science more widespread.

Again, it might be felt that this stress on the materiality of our cultural heritage ignores sound or vision, both of which have become much more readily accessible as a result of digital resources. However, a digital version of the music on a cylinder or record only tells part of the story. We cannot understand the cultural significance of an album like Sergeant Pepper by accessing it on iTunes. The cover of Sergeant Pepper was a celebrated artwork in its own right and even the inner sleeve containing the record added to the overall impact of the album. It is impossible to understand the order and structuring of the music of an album like Sergeant Pepper without knowing that an LP record had two sides, or that there was a lock groove at the end of each side

[Slide: Mitchell and Kenyon: http://www.bfi.org.uk/features/mk]

Likewise, our understanding of film is inextricably bound up with its material basis. I was very lucky while I was at the University of Sheffield to be a member of a group of scholars who worked on the Mitchell and Kenyon collection, a remarkable archive of films of Edwardian life found in the basement of a shop in Blackburn. The restoration of these fragile nitrate films by the British Film Institute was itself a remarkable feat of scientific conservation. The sense we gain from the Mitchell and Kenyon films of proximity to everyday life was in part due to the fact that only the master negatives of the films survived. Most Edwardian films usually survive only in scratched and damaged copies which increase our sense of distance from the scenes depicted. The clarity of the Mitchell and Kenyon films change our relationship as viewers to these depictions of the past, in a fashion that raises questions about the relationship between viewer, cameraman, participant and medium.

[Slide: Data Sea: http://www.takeo.org/nspace/ns030/]

Coleridge’s The Eolian Harp demonstrates how an engagement with the latest scientist discussion can directly contribute to great art. Jeffrey Robinson has also shown us how scholarship can inspire poetry. Both Coleridge and Robinson remind us that, in this dialogue between humanities scholar, scientist and curator, the creative artist also has a vital role. Digital art is increasingly breaking down many familiar disciplinary barriers and it has a key role to play in developing the next wave of the digital humanities. I was fascinated on my arrival at King’s to learn about the collaborations between the artist Michael Takeo Magruder and members of the Department of Digital Humanities. Michael’s artwork, Data Sea, created by him for the International Year of Astronomy in 2009 and installed in Thinktank at the Birmingham Science Museum, uses astronomical databases to create a three-dimensional artwork. Michael’s associates in creating this artwork were Drew Baker, for the 3D visualisations, and an astrophysicist, Johanna Jarvis. This is the kind of collaboration which would have delighted Coleridge, and it makes one think of how those vast data flows produced by the Square Kilometre Array may also provide material for artists.

[Slide: Abbey Theatre project: http://blog.oldabbeytheatre.net/posts/visualisation]

Visualisation techniques may seem like an escape from the material, but they are a powerful way of reengaging with a lost materiality. The Abbey Theatre in Dublin was destroyed by fire in 1951, but a virtual reconstruction by DDH’s Hugh Denard with colleagues from Trinity College Dublin enable the nature of the Abbey as a performance space to be explored and events such as the riot at the first performance of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World to be investigated in their material context.

[Slide: Oplontis: http://www.skenographia.cch.kcl.ac.uk/oplontis/index.html]

Visualisation is thus intimately bound up with the exploration of lost materialities and the recreation of old cultural spaces. An engagement between the virtual and the material is at the heart of this reconstruction by DDH’s Martin Blazeby. It shows a fresco from a Roman villa at Oplontis near Pompeii, and is one of a hundred rooms reconstructed in this way. On the left, you can see the surviving fragments of the fresco, and on the right its reconstruction by Martin.

[Slide: Vanishing Points: http://www.takeo.org/nspace/sl005/]

The work in reconstructing the lost villa at Oplontis has itself become the basis for an artwork by Michael Magruder and Hugh Denard called Vanishing Points which was commissioned for the 2010 Digital Humanities conference and was displayed in the Great Hall here in King’s.

In this and other examples I have shown you, science is used to explore the materiality of our engagement with the past and the nature of our achievements as human beings, thereby producing new art. This is surely the stuff of the ‘universal science’ which Coleridge sought to recreate. Such a new conjunction of scientist, curator, humanist and artist is what the digital humanities must strive to achieve. It is the only way of ensuring that we do not lose our souls in a world of data.

http://digitalriffs.blogspot.com/2012/01/electric-current-of-imagination-what.html

* * *

Back to Table of Contents

* * *

Hang The Pirates — But Start With The Movie Moguls And Record Execs

by Alan Parker

Here’s the scene:

Law enforcement agents smash their way into a private building with sledgehammers and crowbars as part of a broad organized crackdown on “pirates” and “outlaws” who are brazenly flouting U.S. copyright and patent law, supposedly costing the legitimate copyright and patent holders a fortune in lost — “stolen” — revenue.

The legally mandated enforcers cause extensive, malicious damage and confiscate equipment, files, material and money that are the legal property of the building’s owner, who is charged with a variety of offences related to the alleged theft of intellectual property in the form of motion-picture films and technology.

Having shut down the business of the building without the necessity of a guilty verdict in court and having appropriated private property, again without a court finding of guilt, the enforcers leave the victim of their legally sanctioned invasion to pick up the broken pieces of his life.

Sounds a lot like Kim Dotcom (nee Schmitz), the Internet tycoon currently sitting in a New Zealand jail waiting for the U.S. government and its Hollywood backers to finally, slowly (the U.S. won’t actually produce documents for another month) get around to filing a formal extradition request on copyright infringement conspiracy charges.

But it’s not.

The victim could have been Carl Laemmle or William Fox or one of the dozen other independent producers who were later glorified as the founders of Hollywood. The legal enforcers were hired thugs representing Thomas Edison’s motion picture trust, a monopoly combine that controlled almost all aspects of movie technology, production and distribution in the U.S. before World War I. And the time was 1910 — more than 100 years ago.

Edison considered Laemmle and the other independent film producers and distributors to be “pirates” and filed almost 300 legal actions against Laemmle’s Independent Motion Picture (IMP) Company between 1909 and 1912.

The legal manoeuvrings were just the semi-civilized tip of the iceberg. Below the surface, Edison’s gangs of enforcers smashed independent film studios and theatres, stole cameras, projectors and film stock, threatened and beat up cast and crew members on independent productions and, in some cases, burned down buildings and entire city blocks housing the competition.

One hundred years ago, Carl Laemmle’s shoes were a very dicey place to be, just as Kim Dotcom’s are today.

But Laemmle ultimately prevailed.

He held out against Edison’s legal (and illegal) onslaught, he moved his film production activities to the friendlier and safer climes of California, and he was the one who had the last laugh when U.S. federal court, topped up with Teddy Roosevelt’s Trust Buster justices, declared Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company and General Film Company (distribution arm) to be an illegal monopoly and ordered the trust broken up.

Meanwhile, Laemmle and the other independents who invented Hollywood (like William Fox, Louis B. Mayer, Sam Goldfish/Goldwyn, Jesse Lansky, Adolph Zuker, Marcus Loew and the Warner boys) thrived, expanded and exerted increasing control over the motion picture “industry.”

COMPARE THESE TWO LISTS

The first list is the membership of Edison’s MPPC cross-licensing trust group: Biograph, American Vitagraph Company, Selig Polyscope Company, Lubin, American Star Films, American Pathe Pictures, Essanay Studios, and Kalem Company.

Those companies ruled the motion picture world 100 years ago. How many of them exist now? How many of their names even ring a bell except in some antique, ghostly corner of our brains?

Now here’s a list of the “pirate” film companies that were formed by the “outlaws” who fled to California to escape the legal constraints of Thomas Edison back in the eastern U.S.: 20th Century-Fox, Paramount Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Universal Studios (successor company to Laemmle’s IMP) and Warner Bros.

Those five (later joined by Columbia Pictures, United Artists and RKO Radio Pictures) became the undisputed masters of Hollywood’s Golden Age and are still the dominant (monopolistic, some might say) players in the film industry.

Don’t believe me about the “monopolistic” part? You think the current film bid-ness is too diversified and freewheeling to be dubbed a monopoly?

Consider this:

When the Edison Trust was broken up, the U.S. department of justice alleged that the eight corporations participating in the monopoly controlled between 70% and 80% of a $100-million industry.

Today, the North American film industry is a $10-BILLION BUSINESS and ONLY SIX CORPORATIONS CONTROL 81.6% OF IT.

(That $10 billion is just “domestic” North American box office. “Overseas” accounts for roughly two-thirds of Hollywood’s business every year.)

Here’s a rundown of studio share of the $10,174,000,000 North American box office (Canada is considered part of the U.S. domestic market) for 2011, according to industry scorekeeper boxofficemojo,com:

1. Paramount (Viacom) — 19.2% ($1.96 billion)

2. Warner Bros. (Time-Warner) — 17.9% ($1.83 billion)

3. Columbia (Sony) — 12.5% ($1.27 billion)

4. Buena Vista/Walt Disney (Walt Disney Co.) — 12.2% ($1.24 billion)

5. Universal (Comcast-GE) — 10.2%  ($1.04 billion)

6. 20th Century-Fox (Murdoch’s News Corp.) — 9.6% ($978 million)

Everyone else in the world apart from these six companies shares the remaining 18.4%, compared to the 20-30% the independents had in the days of the Edison monopoly.

And those six studios have their own exclusive trade association, the Motion Picture Association of America, which looks after their interests — and their interests alone — in dealing with the world outside Hollywood.

It’s the MPAA which is currently driving the anti-piracy bus and which is howling the most with self-righteous indignation  and which is using every ounce of its bought-and-paid-for political influence (and that’s a lot) in Washington to pursue Kim Dotcom and other perceived “pirates.”

Soooooooooooo … Fast-forward 100 years from the Edison Trust’s all-out war to crush the independents to the modern media wars of January 2012.

The film corporations that were spawned by the very pirates and outlaws who created a hole-in-the-wall getaway hideout in Hollywood are now leading the charge to eradicate uncontrolled Internet access to works and technology they say they hold copyright and patent title to.

And they even use much of the same hypocritical, moralistic language that the Edison Trust used to claim the high ground over the shabby, nasty little rats, weasels, thieves and cheats stealing from them.

And it is that high moral tone wrapped in a judicial gown of legalistic rectitude that I find most offensive about this whole war against Kim Dotcom’s MegaUpload, The Pirate Bay and other Internet independents that the movie studios (and record companies) say are stealing milk from their babies’ mouths.

Why?

Because it is just so much hypocritical bull. The major movie and record companies uphold the law only because in this particular set of circumstances it benefits them.

They would (in most if not all cases) gladly bend or circumvent the laws of the United States or any other nation on earth if it better served their purposes — and they could get away with it.

That sanctimonious, Bible-spouting predator Thomas Edison, by the way, was not above piracy when it suited him.

Here’s part of the Wikpedia entry on Edison:

“In 1902, agents of Thomas Edison bribed a theater owner in London for a copy of A Trip to the Moon by Georges Méliès. Edison then made hundreds of copies and showed them in New York City. Méliès received no compensation. He was counting on taking the film to the US and recapture its huge cost by showing it throughout the country when he realized it had already been shown there by Edison. This effectively bankrupted Méliès.”

Well, Edison’s piracy didn’t actually bankrupt Melies — that resulted from a later, poorly conceived business deal with the Pathe film folks in Europe, but the Edison rip-off sure didn’t help (even though Melies’ American Star Films was one of the corporate cogs in the Edison Trust monopoly.)

So there was certainly no evidence of “practise what you preach” in the behaviour of Thomas Edison or the movie-making kingpins who followed him.

FOR THE RECORD

I’ve focused primarily on the film industry in this piece and left the music business aside because, frankly, the major-label recording industry has committed too many sins against music, art, humanity and common sense to fit into the already bursting confines of this space.

And, despite the proliferation of independent record labels, the “industry” is still quite monolithic and monopolistic in its traditional distribution practices — thus the panic over the uncontrolled inroads the Internet is making.

In terms of control, the cabal of mainstream industry titans is becoming a smaller group every year and none of the current crop of cabalistas is worthy of licking the L.A. grime off Mo Ostin’s shoes.

At the end of the 1980s, the recording industry in North America was controlled by the Big Six (BMG, CBS, EMI, MCA, WEA and PolyGram, the last of which deserved to die because it wouldn’t become a three-letter acronym).

By the end of the ’90s, it was the Big Five after Sony bought CBS and PolyGram and MCA merged into Universal Music Group (UMG).

In 2004, it became the Big Four when Sony acquired BMG.

And now, after Universal’s acquisition last year of the struggling EMI Group,  it is the Big Three: UMG, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment.

Consider this list of SOME (only some) of the labels owned and controlled by the Universal Music Group (the largest of the Big Three), once a subsidiary of the Universal movie empire but now a force unto itself owned by the French media (and formerly sewer) conglomerate Vivendi:

A&M Records, Geffen Records, Island Records, Def Jam Recordings, Motown Records, Mercury Records, Verve Records, Impulse! Records, Roc-A-Fella Records, Decca Records, Interscope Records, GPR Records, Deutsche Grammophon, Polydor Records, London Records, MCA Nashville Records, Lost Highway Records, Casablanca Records, Fonovisa Records,  Universal Music Classical, Universal Music Jazz, Universal Music Latino, Disa Records, Machete Music, Fontana International. And the list goes on.

Sony (second biggest of the B3) has a stable of labels that includes Columbia, Epic and RCA.

Warner Music Group is the un-biggest of the Big Three (and apparently suffering the most … And Then There Were Two?) but still controls more than 50 labels, from Asylum to Atlantic to Elektra and from Rhino to Rykodisc to Reprise.

So there are a lot of labels out there, but only three conglomerates control primary access to most of the recorded music that is today being purchased (or acquired without purchase, as the case may be).

The only thing I will say about the music recording industry and its war on piracy is this: Study after study has concluded that unpaid music downloads do not appear to be a significant factor in the continual decline of CD sales and the slower rise in “legitimate” digital sales.

(Don’t get into an argument with me about this: Argue with the smartypants who conducted the studies and came to the conclusions. And if you don’t know which studies I’m talking about, you have no business being in a discussion about the issue in the first place.)

Most of the blame is laid at the feet of the short-sighted, arrogant and ultimately self-defeating practices of the recording industry itself: As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

“If you want to stop piracy, the way to stop it is by competing with it.”

— Steve Jobs

PERSONAL ASIDE

I have never illegally downloaded any music or video from the Internet or willfully bought pirated CDs or DVDs on the street. I know plenty of people who do, but I don’t advocate the practice and, in fact, I find it philosophically objectionable.

I believe — strongly — that artists, performers and creators of every type should be properly rewarded for their efforts and unique contributions, which enrich us all.

I believe — strongly — that anyone who abuses the rights and intellectual property of those creators, who steals from them and denies them the full fruits of their labours is scum and should be reviled and punished.

I also believe — strongly — that major movie studios and record companies have been some of the worst offenders when it comes to abusing the rights of creative artists, when it comes to stealing from and lying to creative artists, and when it comes to disregarding the laws and moral principles that should protect those creative artists, their rights, and their works.

Just ask any artist, musician, composer, actor, director or screenwriter who has had serious business dealings with either the film or music industry. If they are being honest, few if any of those artists will say they have not been ripped off (to a lesser or greater degree) in the process.

So it’s either laughable or a crying shame that some of the worst offenders when it comes to the abuse of intellectual property rights of others are often the most fervent defenders of copyright laws when it suits their purposes — and only for as long as it suits their purposes.

ANOTHER THOUGHT FOR THE DAY:

“If suing customers for consuming pirate copies becomes central to a company or industry’s business model, then the truth is that that company or industry no longer has a competitive business model.”

— Matt Mason, “The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Re-inventing Capitalism”

LOOK BEHIND THE PROPAGANDA

Let’s get to Kim Dotcom for a moment, shall we?

I hate the guy.

He’s 6-foot-7, says he weighs 300 pounds (I know 300 pounds, baby, and this guy’s at least 350 — on a good day), and he’s got a high-pitched, annoying voice with a cartoon German accent.

Plus he legally changed his last name from Schmitz to Dotcom. What gall! Who does he think he is — Harry Warner (born Hirsch Wonskolaser) or David Bowie (born David Jones) or John Wayne (Marion Morrison) or even Uwe Blab (oh, sorry, that’s the former NBA player’s real name, unfortunately).

And he’s rich — filthy, stinking rich — and not even 40 yet. That really ticks off a poor old man like me.

He owns very expensive cars — a lot of them — and drives them all fast and crazy (although he’s apparently never had an accident or had his licence revoked). And he owns (or leases) a private helicopter, a jet and a yacht.

In short, Kim Dotcom is a greedy, arrogant A-hole.

But that’s not a crime.

If it was, then ALL of the heads of the major movie studios and record companies would be in jail. A majority of the CEOs of America’s top corporations would also be doing bunkies with Bubba. And I’d probably be convicted too.

But, as I’ve already said, none of those character flaws is a crime.

So why is Kim Dotcom sitting in a New Zealand jail right now and the rest of us greedy, arrogant A-holes aren’t?

Because the MPAA, through the auspices of the FBI and the U.S. government (abetted by the RCMP and the Canadian government and other governments), has ACCUSED Mr. Dotcom of engaging in a conspiracy to pirate the intellectual property of said MPAA members.

And Mr. Dotcom’s global Internet business — one of the largest Internet businesses in the world with millions of legitimate, lawful customers suddenly cut off from access to their legitimate, lawful personal data — has been shut down lock, stock and barrel while Mr. Dotcom sits in jail waiting to find out exactly what the details of the charges are and what the evidence is supporting those charges. So he can begin preparing a defence, first against extradition to the U.S. and secondly against the charges themselves in a U.S. court.

UPDATE (from The Wall Street Journal, 5:04 a.m. Jan. 26, 2012):

“WELLINGTON— A New Zealand judge granted bail to Megaupload.com executives Bram van der Kolk and Finn Batato as they await possible extradition to the U.S. on charges including copyright infringement, after the judge decided they posed a minimum flight risk.

“Mr. Van der Kolk, 29 years old, and Mr. Batato, 38, were arrested (last) Thursday in Auckland along with Megaupload.com founder Kim Dotcom, 38, and Mathias Ortmann, 40, the chief technical officer, after they and four colleagues were named in a Federal Bureau of Investigation indictment.”

Kim Dotcom’s bail application was turned down Wednesday and Matthias Ortmann’s bail application is expected to be heard Friday, Feb. 3 (it has been postponed once).

Hmmm, which ones have cut the deal, I wonder?

And it will be interesting to see which company employee provided the insider e-mails that the U.S. government is using (selectively and out of context) to help make its case.

Just stop and think about your opinion of Kim Dotcom for a moment.

If your opinion is, like mine, a largely negative one, consider the source of the information on which we have based our views.

The general picture of Kim Dotcom is, in large part, the result of a co-ordinated, sustained negative PR campaign launched and directed by Dotcom’s enemies in the film and record industry.

Of course Dotcom has revelled in his bad boy image and hasn’t helped his cause by flaunting his obscene wealth and apparent disrespect for his elders.

But why is it that all of his actions are seen in the worst possible light instead of the best possible light or — even better — in a neutral, unbiased light? Because spin doctors are paid to put the worst possible valuation on Dotcom’s actions, appearance, attitudes and acquisitions. And he’s not even a GOP presidential candidate. Crikey.

Everybody seems to be buying into the propaganda and selling the same story when — if you consider the facts without the bias — it would be just as easy to put a less sinister (or even benevolent) spin on the Dotcom story.

When Dotcom appeared at a bail hearing in New Zealand on Monday, Crown attorney Anne Toohey even cited Dotcom’s alleged “lack of respect for authority” as one of the reasons why Dotcom posed an extreme flight risk.

The Edison Trust carried out a similar damning PR campaign against Carl Laemmle and other “pirates” a century ago, mocking Laemmle’s appearance (he was a wizened little five-foot-nothing gnome with a funny German accent and strange personal habits) and casting his actions in a sinister, conspiratorial, anti-American light.

Every story I see about Kim Dotcom’s arrest refers to the fleet of expensive cars he owns or leases.

And the crime in this is …? Quick, somebody — anybody — arrest Jay Leno. I think he owns more expensive cars than Kim Dotcom. And I don’t like the way he looks, either.

Speaking of which, many stories about Kim Dotcom refer to his Hollywood enemies calling him “Dr. Evil.” That’s just for home consumption. Actually, Dotcom is more often compared in Hollywood to another Austin Powers villain, also played by Mike Myers: Fat Bastard.

See what I mean? There’s no crime in how Kim Dotcom looks or acts, but it certainly helps his enemies if he is seen in the worst possible light. Hang the Fat Bastard!

His criminal record? Actually he has no criminal record. Really.

Kim Schmitz was convicted of computer hacking in Germany in 1998, fined and given a suspended sentence. In 2002, he was convicted of insider trading, fined and placed on probation.

He has never been convicted of a criminal act anywhere else in the world.

For the past decade, Kim Dotcom has kept his nose clean, as far as the courts are concerned. Under German law, with its clean slate provisions designed to help convicted felons re-integrate into society, that means Kim Dotcom’s criminal record has been expunged and he now, for all intents and purposes, has no criminal record.

I know that sounds like legalistic sleight of hand, but it does make you think a little differently about the man than the pre-packaged Fat Bastard storyline projects, doesn’t it?

“He has no criminal record, has never been convicted of a crime of violence, and has never been sent to jail for committing a crime.”

Not quite the same picture as the one we’ve been fed, is it?

That doesn’t make it right or true or good — and it certainly doesn’t make Kim Dotcom an innocent man — but it does take a little of the sting out of the “guilty by appearance” mudslinging campaign.

And why exactly did it take 60-70 New Zealand police officers in helicopters to raid Dotcom Mansion and arrest a man who would have shown up in a Crown attorney’s office with his lawyers if asked?

Who’s idea of a Wild West show was that?

As many helicopters and twice as many attackers to take down Fat Bastard as the U.S. used to take out Osama bin Laden?

Somebody’s been watching too many Hollywood movies — and has their law enforcement priorities seriously screwed up.

By the way, when was the last time you saw a story on Dotcom mention the number of cops involved in arresting him? I think a few people in New Zealand are a little embarrassed by the serious overkill and are trying to quietly disengage a bit.

How about the gun?

Here’s what Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald had to say about Monday’s bail hearing:

“(Crown attorney Anne) Toohey detailed how, during the police raid, Dotcom had run from police to a safe room, hiding behind a pillar and refusing to show his hands despite repeated pleas. A gun — believed to be a modified shotgun of a kind illegal in New Zealand — was found in an open safe just metres away.”

I am absolutely confident that no charges or criminal proceedings will ever be launched against Kim Dotcom regarding this weapon “believed to be a modified shotgun of a kind illegal in New Zealand.”

It suits the purposes of all Dotcom’s accusers much more to leave this vague, threatening image of a murderous, illegal gun floating around out there than it would to have the gun’s particulars examined in court and to examine exactly how the whole invasion of Dotcom Mansion went down.

It would probably turn out that the shotgun is perfectly legal and part of a standard New Zealand safe room protection/survival kit much like LOTR director-producer Peter Jackson probably has in the safe room in his New Zealand mansion.

These guys are fabulously wealthy and as such are subject to the constant possibility of violent home invasion and/or the kidnapping of themselves or their families.

(Kim Dotcom, by the way, has three adoring children and is married to a loyal, loving woman who is now pregnant with twins. They’re all living in New Zealand. The New Zealand government holds all their passports. And Kim Dotcom’s known assets have been frozen. Does this really sound like a man who is an extreme flight risk? Or does it sound like a man who is being put in a position where he looks bad and is least able to defend himself?)

Again, I’m not defending Kim Dotcom. He’s more than able to do that himself — if he’s given a fair, fighting chance. But that takes money and Dotcom’s attackers are doing their very best to deprive him of his own money with which he can mount the best possible defence.

The FBI and MPAA claim that Dotcom has made something like $175 million from his acts of piracy in the last couple of years. The MPAA represents a business group that made more than $8 billion in North America alone in the single year 2011. Even if Dotcom were allowed out of jail and allowed access to his own money, it’s not really a fair fight — but at least it would be a little fairer.

I do not like the way this whole thing has gone down. It stinks.

I don’t like the bully-boy tactics. I don’t like the idea that justice has to be bought. I don’t like the idea that crushing one man can become a government priority because he offends the commercial interests of a specific group of well-connected businessmen.

And I most definitely do not like the hypocritical, moralistic stance that these self-serving moneymen and their hired vassels adopt when they are, in fact, just trying to eliminate someone whom they perceive — rightly or wrongly, but so far without proving anything — as profiting from the usage of their property.

Like I said, they only get up on their high horses and proclaim the sanctity of copyright law and intellectual property rights when it is in their financial interests.

Consider this:

The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works was an international copyright agreement signed by most of the major countries in Europe in 1886 and 1887. Since then, roughly 150 other nations around the world have signed on.

Canada has been a member of the Berne Union since 1887 (under the auspices of Great Britain) and signed on itself in 1928 in the run-up to full self-government independent of the British Privy council.

The United States finally joined the Berne Convention in 1989, only a couple of years before Bill Clinton became president and more than 100 years after the original signatories.

Such beacons of artistic enlightenment and human rights as Burkina Faso, Libya and Zimbabwe and 100 other nations had all signed the Berne Convention before the U.S.

And before joining the Berne Union, the United States gave copyright protection only to works produced in the United States.

A book could be published in France or Japan or Canada and, if there was no deal with an American publisher, anyone in the United States could appropriate the contents of that intellectual property for their own purposes and the U.S. government had boo-all to say about it.

Same went for movies and music.

There were some individual cross-deals that muddied the water, of course, but the United States in general didn’t recognize the proprietary rights of foreign copyright holders.

ONE FINAL KICK AT THE KIM DOTCOM CAN

You’d think Kim Dotcom would have a fair shot at beating the (possibly) bogus extradition case since New Zealand is one of the fairest, most democratic countries in the world, but you would be wrong.

The film industry and related businesses (such as Weta Workshop and Peter Jackson’s CGI computer animation operations) form the fourth largest economic sector in New Zealand, after the service industry, agriculture and tourism. And most of that sector is directly tied to the Hollywood status quo represented by the MPAA.

So I am willing to bet that pragmatic power politics will play a strong enough role in the New Zealand judicial process to boot Kim Dotcom’s fat ass out of his erstwhile island paradise.

I hope I’m wrong — for New Zealand’s sake more than Dotcom’s — but my money, if I was a betting man, would back extradition.

I am willing to bet that Kim Dotcom will ultimately beat the pirating charges — much as Hollywood founder Carl Laemmle did 100 years ago — IF he has the money to pursue the court fight through the five years — at least — it will take to resolve.

That is why the MPAA (through the FBI and the U.S. government) has done everything it can to seize Dotcom’s assets around the world and shut down every source of income stream Dotcom has available.

They — the MPAA and its U.S. government agents — want to choke off Dotcom’s money supply so he can’t afford to pay for the massively expensive top-drawer legal defence that will be necessary to fight the massively expensive top-drawer prosecution being brought against him.

Again, my money is on Kim Dotcom.

When asked why he had the effrontery to suggest he would one day be richer than Bills Gates, Dotcom said: “Because I’m smarter than he is.”

I think Dotcom’s also smarter than the (other) greedy, arrogant A-holes who run Hollywood. So as long as Dotcom has enough money to pay for a level legal playing field, I think he will eventually win.

But in the meantime — based solely on accusations — Dotcom’s business, MegaUpload, has been shut down.

Why is this any different than the U.S. government seizing the property and assets of an accused Mafioso crime boss?

Because the shutdown of MegaUpload affects millions of people — honest, legitimate, law-abiding people around the world who have bought and paid for a legitimate hi-tech data storage and retrieval service.

The formal charges against Kim Dotcom — when they finally come — will not say that Dotcom stole anything from anyone; the charges will accuse Dotcom of participating in a conspiracy because the legitimate hi-tech business he created was used by a very small portion of his clientele to share possibly illegal pieces of data.

Every legitimate service provider in the world — outside of Hollywood — should pray that Dotcom is ultimately vindicated or else we’re all in danger of being victims of a witch hunt.

Consider this fictitious (but imaginable) scenario:

Suppose Bell Canada feels threatened by Rogers Communications. Because this fictional Bell Canada suspects that some Rogers customers are using the Rogers telecommunications network to carry out illegal activities and because Bell Canada can make up a convincing (if spurious) case that Rogers is aware of  and profiting from the illegal activity, the Canadian government charges four or five senior Rogers executives with conspiracy — and shuts down the whole Rogers telecommunications network.

And closed-for-business the Rogers network remains until the whole nightmarish case can wind its way through the labyrinth of the Canadian judicial system, with the strong likelihood that Rogers will end up winning and be allowed to resume business — five or 10 years after it has been knocked out of the marketplace, its income cut off and its customers long gone.

And imagine the millions and millions of legitimate Rogers customers who suddenly found themselves denied the telecommunications service they had paid for and counted on. Their lives would be in chaos, their businesses immeasurably harmed, and important stored data lost forever in a technological lockdown.

For this evil, fictional Bell Canada, the process is a success. Rogers doesn’t have to be convicted of anything for make-believe bad Bell Canada to be a winner in that scenario. Just by killing Rogers’ business for five or 10 years, the fictional Bell Canada heavyweight comes out ahead.

In the short term, anyway. In the long term, fictional evil Bell Canada would probably go the way of the dinosaurs because somebody else was investing in innovation to take away their advantage instead of investing in retrograde, malicious litigation to sustain a fatally flawed business model.

That’s essentially what’s happening in the Dotcom-MegaUpload case.

I am not pre-supposing that Kim Dotcom is innocent of everything — or anything, for the matter. But is it really right that he be pre-supposed guilty of everything of which he is accused?

Hollywood has already won by the simple fact that MegaUpload has been shut down — at a tremendous cost to both a legal international business and millions of innocent-victim customers.

Not one damn thing has to be proved against Kim Dotcom and the other executives of MegaUpload for this attack on their business to be a complete success.

That scares me tremendously — and really makes me mad.

Should the full might of the American government, the Canadian government and several other governments around the world be brought to bear on a legitimate company that is (possibly) being used for (possible) illegal data sharing to mollify Hollywood?

Let’s take a look at what the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty, a 1996 sister agreement to the Berne Convention, has to say:

“It is understood that the mere provision of physical facilities for enabling or making a communication does not in itself amount to communication within the meaning of this Treaty or the Berne Convention.”

But that doesn’t matter.

Hollywood wants to take out the communications enabler — Kim Dotcom and his company, MegaUpload — rather than trying to catch the little fishes one by one.

I think we all suffer a far greater loss if this abuse of power and arbitrary authoritarianism is allowed to prevail than any loss we would suffer as free and law-abiding people if we make them actually prove the crimes before administering the punishment.

So I’m in Kim Dotcom’s corner because I tend to favour the underdog — even if he is a greedy, arrogant A-hole.

UPDATE: Here’s a link to a very informative (and quite short) analysis of the MegaUpload situation by Yochai Benkler, professor of entrepreneurial legal studies at Harvard Law School, from the Bloomberg business news agency. Interestingly, the clip is posted on YouTube, which Prof. Benkler points out could be charged with all of the same conspiracy trespasses the U.S. government is levelling at MegaUpload. The difference, Prof. Benkler says, is that YouTube is now too big and powerful for the U.S. Department of Justice to take on. Plus, the government (and film industry) tried to whack YouTube five or six years ago through civil litigation — and got its ass handed to it on a platter by YouTube.

Here’s part of what Prof. Benkler has to say:

“When a new technology comes along … and destabilizes the way the industries have always made money, the first gut response throughout the 20th century has been: Let’s shut down this technology…

“What’s chilling here is that a company can be served with a one-sided indictment that lists a whole set of quasi-legitimate and legitimate technological components that lots of other companies use…

“By the time it will be finished litigating whether that’s enough or not it is dead, because these procedures for forfeiture during the trial will kill the company.”

In other words, the status quo wins just by tying up the accused offender in court and shutting down the targeted business for the duration of the litigation process — which can be three, four, five, even 10 years.

http://blogs.canoe.ca/parker/general/hang-the-pirates-%E2%80%94-but-start-with-the-movie-moguls-and-record-execs

* * *

Back to Table of Contents

* * *

Why History Needs Software Piracy

by Benj Edwards

Amid the debate surrounding controversial anti-piracy legislation such as SOPA and PIPA, our public discourse on piracy tends to focus on the present or the near future. When jobs and revenues are potentially at stake, we become understandably concerned about who is (or isn’t) harmed by piracy today.I’m here to offer a different perspective, at least when it comes to software piracy. While the unauthorized duplication of software no doubt causes some financial losses in the short term, the picture looks a bit different if you take a step back. When viewed in a historical context, the benefits of software piracy far outweigh its short-term costs. If you care about the history of technology, in fact, you should be thankful that people copy software without permission.It may seem counterintuitive, but piracy has actually saved more software than it has destroyed. Already, pirates have spared tens of thousands of programs from extinction, proving themselves the unintentional stewards of our digital culture.Software pirates promote data survival through ubiquity and media independence. Like an ant that works as part of a larger system it doesn’t understand, the selfish action of each digital pirate, when taken in aggregate, has created a vast web of redundant data that ensures many digital works will live on.

Piracy’s preserving effect, while little known, is actually nothing new. Through the centuries, the tablets, scrolls, and books that people copied most often and distributed most widely survived to the present. Libraries everywhere would be devoid of Homer, Beowulf, and even The Bible without unauthorized duplication.

The main difference between then and now is that software decays in a matter of years rather than a matter of centuries, turning preservation through duplication into an illegal act. And that’s a serious problem: thousands of pieces of culturally important digital works are vanishing into thin air as we speak.

The Case of the Disappearing Software

The crux of the disappearing software problem, at present, lies with the stubborn impermanence of magnetic media. Floppy disks, which were once used as the medium du jour for personal computers, have a decidedly finite lifespan: estimates for the data retention abilities of a floppy range anywhere from one year to 30 years under optimal conditions.

A floppy stores data in the form of magnetic charges on a specially treated plastic disc. Over time, the charges representing data weaken to the point that floppy drives can’t read them anymore. At that point, the contents of the disk are effectively lost.
This becomes particularly troubling when we consider that publishers began releasing software on floppy disk over 30 years ago. Most of those disks are now unreadable, and the software stored on them has become garbled beyond repair. If you’ve been meaning to back up those old floppies in your attic, I have bad news: it’s probably too late.

To make matters worse, software publishers spent countless man-hours in the 1980s preventing us from archiving their work. To discourage piracy, they devised schemes to forever lock their software onto a single, authorized diskette. One popular copy protection method involved placing an intentionally corrupt block of data on a disk to choke up error-checking copy routines. It worked so well that it also prevented honest attempts to back-up legally purchased software.

If these copy protection schemes had been foolproof, as intended, and copyright law had been obeyed, most of the programs published on those fading disks would now be gone forever. Many cultural touchstones of a generation would have become extinct due to greed over media control.

protection_quote2

It’s not just floppy disks that are under threat. Thousands of games published on ROM cartridges and as enormous arcade cabinets are now hard to find and can only run on electronic hardware that will not last forever. Publishers have re-released a handful of the most prominent games among them on newer platforms, but the large majority of legacy video games don’t get this treatment. Pirates liberate the data from these ROM chips and allow them to be played, through software emulation, on newer consoles and PCs.

Pirating also makes foreign game libraries easily available for historians to study. Some games only appeared on writable cartridges in Japan via download methods like the Nintendo Power flash cart system and the BS-X Satellaview. Those would be entirely out of the reach of Western historians today without previous efforts to back them up illegally.

For a sample slice of what’s at stake when it comes to vanishing software, let’s take a look at the video game industry. The Web’s largest computer and video game database, MobyGames, holds records of about 60,000 games at present. Roughly 23,000 of those titles were originally released on computer systems that used floppy disks or cassette tapes as their primary storage or distribution medium.

23,000 games! If game publishers and copyright law had their way, almost all of those games would be wiped from the face of the earth by media decay over the next 10 years. Many would already be lost.For the past decade, collectors and archivists have been compiling vast collections of out-of-print software for vintage machines (think Apple II, Commodore 64, and the like) and trading them through file sharing services and on “abandonware” websites. Through this process, they’ve created an underground software library that, despite its relative newness, feels like the lost archives of an ancient digital civilization.As a journalist and historian, I rely on these collections of pirated software to do my job. I’d rather it not be that way, but there is no legal alternative (more on that in a moment).The compilation of this underground library–a necessary resource for future historians–is a brave act of civil disobedience that needs to continue if we are to protect our digital heritage. As we’ll see, the greatest threats to software history lie not behind us, but directly ahead of us.

Why Preserve Software?

Before we go any further, let’s take a step back and consider why we should preserve software in the first place. Software often seems inconsequential because of its ephemeral nature. It’s a dynamic expression of electrons on a computer screen, and that doesn’t mean much, instinctively, to brains that evolved to recognize value in physical objects.

But software is also a powerful tool whose mastery says something profound about our civilization. If we look back through a museum, we can get a good idea about a certain society’s potential by examining its tools. If a civilization could build threshing machines, for example, we know that they could harvest and process wheat much faster than people 100 years earlier. That, in turn, might explain a known population boom.
Likewise, we can measure mankind’s recent potential by looking at his software tools. Future historians may ponder how people achieved a surreal vocal effect in music or created the CGI animated films of today. They may wonder at what point a certain tool allowed fantastic, photorealistic image manipulations that now dominate advertising. Without knowledge of and experimental access to various versions of Auto-Tune, Pixar RenderMan, and Adobe Photoshop, they’ll have a difficult time finding accurate answers to those questions.

Software is also entertainment. It is culture. Like books, music, and films before it, the art form expressed in software entertainment programs–usually games–has both reflected and influenced the cultural behavior of multiple generations around the globe.

Is there an American alive between the ages of 15 and 35 that doesn’t know who Mario is? (I’m sure you can find someone who has not heard of Mario, but he was locked in a basement from 1980 to 1999.)

Thanks to the work of preservationists that flout the law, future historians will be able to more fully consider Mario’s cultural impact and answer deeper, ancillary questions like “Why did people wear T-shirts with pixelated mushroom people on them?” and “What games, exactly, did Mario appear in and why?”
It’s possible that Nintendo will be around 200 years from now, but it is unlikely to provide all the answers. The company will only convey the history that is in their best commercial interest to show you (i.e. Super Mario Bros. 3, over and over). Historians will show you everything without restraint — even Hotel Mario, Mario Roulette, and I Am A Teacher: Super Mario Sweater. None of those games will survive 200 years without piracy, because Nintendo would rather see those embarrassingly low-quality titles rot away in a tomb sealed by copyright law.

We Have Everything To Lose

It would be nice if the problem of disappearing software was limited to the past, but there’s a disturbing parallel at work in the current software marketplace. App stores and other digital distribution methods–which often inextricably link purchased software to a unique licensee, sometimes on a unique machine–threaten to deprive us of even more software in the very near future.

Thanks to widespread adoption of aggressive digital rights management (DRM) and a single-source model of distribution, most digitally distributed software will vanish from the historical record when those stores shut down. And believe me, they will shut down some day. If this doesn’t scare you, then you need an allegorical history lesson. Here it is:

Imagine if a publisher of 500,000 different printed book titles suddenly ceased operation and magically rendered all sold copies of its books unreadable. Poof. The information contained in them simply vanished. It would represent an cultural catastrophe on the order of the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria in 48 B.C. In that fire, a majority of the Western world’s cultural history up to that point turned to ash.Now take a look at the iTunes App Store, a 500,000 app repository of digital culture. It’s controlled by a single company, and when it closes some day (or it stops supporting older apps, like Apple already did with the classic iPod), legal access to those apps will vanish. Purchased apps locked on iDevices will meet their doom when those gadgets stop working, as they are prone to do. Even before then, older apps will fade away as developers decline to pay the $100 a year required to keep their wares listed in the store.From a historical perspective, we can only hope that hackers and pirates have been quietly making archives of as much as they can grab from download services like the iTunes App Store, the PlayStation Store, the Wii Shop Channel, Xbox Live Arcade, and other online app stores.

scholars_quote

And what about cloud software? If all of our software tools become centralized and run over the Internet, it will be hard to pirate them, which also means they won’t get preserved. That’s bad for history.

When paleoanthropologists wonder if a 13,000 year-old Clovis point can take down a Bison, they tie one to a spear and let it fly. If spear points had been automatically cloud updated over the course of their development, however, we would only know of the most recent iteration in the design process. Clovis points wouldn’t exist today, and we’d be wondering how ancient Native Americans managed to hunt game with uranium-tipped bullets.With that in mind, think about this: What did Gmail’s interface look like just one year ago? How did Google Maps work before it added Street View? Lacking experimental access to older versions of cloud-based software tools, future historians will have to depend on screenshots and personal testimony to work out exactly what the tools were capable of at any time, if they still exist.But if future historians retain access to old versions of non-cloud software, they will be able use the tools, as they would with a Clovis point, to experimentally duplicate the activities of people in the past. For example, they could run the AtariWriter word processing program on an Atari 800 emulator to reproduce a document from the 1980s in a way that would explain its format.A complete reliance on cloud gaming (think OnLive) is also a very bad idea. Looking to OnLive to preserve game software would be like expecting your local movie theater to preserve film history. It’ll only show what is commercially viable to show at the time, and they discard the rest. That is how cloud gaming will work as well.

The new Great Library is already burning, and we are only just beginning to smell the smoke.

When Corporations Own History, They Change It

The DRM found in digital app stores today poses a significant threat to our future understanding of history. Sure, the companies that create this software own the rights to these products now, but once a work becomes consumed and embedded into mass culture, it belongs to the ages. It assumes a role larger than that of a mere commercial product, and copies of the work should be protected and preserved as cultural treasures.

It’s hard to protect and preserve that which is liable to change or disappear at any time. If VHS tapes worked like app stores, George Lucas could force all of us to upgrade our purchased Star Wars films to the Special Edition versions (to maintain compatibility with LucasOS, of course), overwriting the old ones in the process. Heck, one day he could decide he doesn’t like the movies at all and replace them with copies of Willow. It would be within his legal rights, but it would also be cultural robbery.
It bugs me that iOS software today updates at a galloping pace that deletes previous versions unless you’ve taken pains to archive them. It is convenient and wonderful functionality in many ways, but the practice also rewrites history with every download. What if Photoshop had been updated that way throughout the 1990s? Would anyone have a copy of the first version that could work with layers? Such a historically important piece of software would be lost. Similarly, if we move to a completely controlled, single-source, automatic update scheme for all PC applications–it’s almost here with Windows 8, by the way–we will be destroying digital artifacts with a fervor heretofore unseen.

By accepting restrictive DRM into our lives, we are giving not only software publishers, but all media publishers the power to erase, control, or manipulate digital cultural history if they choose. That is why DRM feels fundamentally wrong from a humanistic standpoint: it conspires, in conjunction with time, to deprive humanity of its rightfully earned cultural artifacts.

To be sure, every creator of software should be rewarded appropriately with exclusive rights of reproduction for a certain period of time, as they are now, but only in a soft legal sense, not with a virtual lock and key that stymies the preservation of history.

Let’s not repeat what happened 2000 years ago in Alexandria. The only scrolls that survived the burning of the Great Library were those that had been copied and distributed, likely without the permission of their authors. (Unfortunately, library officials strictly limited library access to prevent this, so very few texts escaped destruction.) If we don’t open the doors to the legal preservation of all software, civilizations thousands of years from now will only possess copies of programs that pirates illegally duplicated and distributed while the works were still officially available.

The cultural impact of software easily equals that of any other creative work. It is time to legitimately preserve this digital art form in libraries alongside books and films. Setting up such a library, however, is a very difficult proposition.

The Plight of the Digital Librarian

If you wanted to study the history of our culture up to the present, you’d probably turn to a library. There you can find comprehensive collections of analog data to study for free. If you want to study software in the same way, you’re out of luck: operating a practical, comprehensive software library is currently illegal in the United States.

Don’t get me wrong: it is possible to create a legal software library, but its implementation would make it nearly useless. The best a library can hope to do, within its legal limits, is to stock physical copies of officially duplicated software media on physical shelves. That means that all the problems with decaying and obsolete media come along with it. There’d be plenty of bulk and very little guarantee that you’d be able to access what is sitting in the stacks.
A more practical approach for a software library would be to liberate the data from fixed media and store it in arrays of redundant hard disks. Librarians could upgrade the arrays over time to avoid obsolescence, and the software could be painlessly transferred over a network to be run on emulators (which would simulate the original software platforms) for historical study.

Unfortunately, the practical approach doesn’t work because it’s currently illegal under US copyright law to copy software — a necessary part of freeing it from its original media — and then share it with the public without the publisher’s permission. (The law provides for legal backup copies, but you can’t share them with other people.) Moreover, it’s illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to circumvent copy protection schemes to actually make those copies in the first place.

Right now, there exist libraries that store floppy disks on their shelves as if they were books. These organizations make the mistake of assuming that, like books, the data on computer disks will last indefinitely if carefully shielded from the elements. But there is nothing they can do to ultimately stop the loss of data. The data needs to be copied onto a new medium. At some point, the law needs to be broken — or changed.

Copyright’s Obsolete Legal Assumption

Current U.S. copyright laws have good intentions, but they ultimately jeopardize the survival of digital property because they do not take into account the rapid pace of digital media decay and obsolescence.

Our body of copyright law makes a 19th-century-style legal assumption that the works in question will stay fixed in a medium safely until the works become public domain, when they can then be copied freely. Think of paper books, for example, which can retain data for thousands of years under optimal conditions.
In the case of digital data, many programs will vanish from the face of the earth decades before the requisite protection period expires (the life of the author plus 70 years in the U.S.). Media decay and obsolescence will claim that software long before any libraries can make legal, useful backups.

A potential solution would be to limit copyright terms on software to a more reasonable period of time — say, 20 years maximum. Then archivists would have a far greater chance of properly retrieving and storing the old software before it deteriorated into oblivion.

It should also be permanently legal for librarians to circumvent copy protection schemes to archive software. Currently, limited exemptions to the DMCA provide temporary DRM-breaking provisions under very narrow circumstances, but that is not enough.

As an alternative, a new law could require publishers that seek copyright protection to deposit DRM-free versions of software to the U.S. Library of Congress for media-independent archival. The software could later be digitally “checked out” on a limited basis by patrons doing research. If necessary, these digital library materials could become available only after a period of time, say five years, to further protect commercial interests

Don’t Let Software Disappear

We live in a civilization dominated by commerce and those who benefit from it, so we instinctively want to protect those who fairly engage in business. There are those among us who, in pursuit of that goal, would like to assault piracy with heavy-handed legislation. But piracy, which is endemic to and inseparable from digital distribution, can never be fully controlled without depriving freedom. Legislation that attempts to do so will only drive the practice further underground while punishing those who don’t even engage in it by crippling the technology that allows software to exist in the first place.

At the moment, you can obtain just about any entertainment work or software program for free if you try hard enough. Despite that, millions of people still pay real money to obtain legal copies of software, films, and music, in the process making those industries bigger and more profitable than ever.

The fact that people still buy access to digital media in large numbers means that piracy is simply not the problem they think it is. In fact, piracy is itself the solution to another problem: the problem of over-protected intellectual property. It would be wonderful if those companies utilizing strict DRM and pushing for aggressive anti-piracy legislation saw the need to be a little less profiteering for the greater historical good, but since that is rarely the objective of the free market, don’t hold your breath.

It is up to us, as a generation, to preserve our cultural history. We must also push for reforms in copyright law that allow software to take its rightful place in historical archives without the need to rely upon the work of pirates.

If you love software, buy it, use it, and reward the people who make it. I do it all the time, and I support the industry’s right to make money from its products. But don’t be afraid to stand up for your cultural rights. If you see strict DRM and copy protection that threatens the preservation of history, fight it: copy the work, keep it safe, and eventually share it so it never disappears.

Some people may think ill of your archival efforts now, but they’re on the wrong side of history: no one living 500 years from now will judge your infringing deeds harshly when they can load up an ancient program and see it for themselves.

There are four main techno-cultural forces pushing software toward extinction.

Force 1: Physical Decay

No form of digital media holds data forever. Every computer data storage medium physically deteriorates over time, losing data in the process.

Force 2: Medium Obsolescence

As technical innovations continue, every storage format will become obsolete and rarely used at some point, making retrieving the data in the future difficult.

Force 3: Copy Deterrence

For economic reasons, software publishers have historically tried to deter users from copying the publisher’s software without permission. These methods prevent the legitimate archival of software.

Force 4: Economic Obsolescence

Every software product has a limited market lifespan, which is the result of rapid technological progress. This means that software will only be duplicated and distributed commercially for a short period of time.

Benj Edwards is a historian and freelance journalist who specializes in video game and computer history. He is also editor of Vintage Computing and Gaming, a blog devoted to those subjects.

http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,248571/printable.html

* * *

Back to Table of Contents

* * *

KindleReads from DragonWeb - Issue 9

http://www.dragonweb.hu/projektek/e-konyv/#kindlereads

Composed and sent to your Kindle via SENDtoREADER