| Here is a quick rundown of what I am trying to do:
The state has increasingly intervened to regulate property since World War II, and not just in terms of space - e.g. guiding the course of suburbanization, abolishing racial covenants, building prisons everywhere, waging the War on Drugs, or permitting free confiscation of property for commercial development (as in the recent Supreme Court case). Government has also gotten fervently active in protecting immaterial property, and this agenda takes many forms. Corporations have been granted extraordinary new privileges in owning information, such as the genetic code of an animal or plant. The entertainment industry has enlisted the support of the government in suppressing the circulation of unauthorized recordings. Calls from the pharmaceutical, computer and cultural sectors have led the US government to pressure people throughout the world to comply with property law. The government has even prohibited the creation of software that circumvents the restrictions that companies build into their products - for example, a program that disables antipiracy mechanisms on a CD or computer program. Imagine if the government had forbidden people from popping the hood and tinkering with a car. (We might not have NASCAR!) It is absurd in the context of a traditional manufacturing economy, but this scenario has become reality as far as computer programs go. These policies represent a profound extension of the government's ability to regulate behavior, based on the sanctity of property.
I would tie all this to the emergence of the post-industrial economy. These changes accompanied a transformation in the way people in the developed world lived and worked. The writers of the Port Huron Statement saw this coming as early as 1962, when they spoke of the dimunition of the labor movement, the increase of automation, the rising importance of immaterial labor (education, healthcare, research, management) and the freeing of the corporation from national strictures. Nations like Japan and the United States soon came to focus ever more on the production of services and information, all mediated by communication technology. Saskia Sassen, for instance, has written about how, during deindustrialization, centers like New York and London reinvented themselves as high-tech coordinating centers for production, which has been dispersed all over the globe. Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Paolo Virno have examined how this structural change of the global economy has gradually changed the nature of all work, from agricultural fields to the McDonald's counter, from the shop floor to the sales floor and beyond. I'm looking at media piracy as one instance of the new game: a crucial commodity (entertainment), toward which so many resources are directed, is up for grabs due to the availability of technology that produces (and reproduces) information. It starts with the audiotape recorder and copy machines, and continues through the VCR, personal computer, and Internet. A society that engages so many of its members in producing information carries the vulnerability of its products being misappropriated, or freely distributed.
In the first part of my prospectus, I discuss the many new technologies that became widely used in the 1960s and 1970s. The ones mentioned above hardly make for an exhaustive list. The answering machine, cable television, closed circuit television, surveillance cameras, lie detector tests, databases and many others came on to the scene as well. Although most had been developed much earlier, these devices were increasingly integrated into the workplace, marketplace and government, just as the manufacturing sector began to contract. In short, I argue that the period saw an explosion of new communication technologies, and that these assisted in the shift to a post-industrial or service economy in the most developed nations. I separate these uses into two categories: technologies of control and expression. Certainly, surveillance served to tighten the regime of management in the workplace, and computer technology allowed corporations to monitor consumers' habits and government to track its citizens better. On the other hand, tape recorders, PCs and copy machines afforded new ways for people to produce and transmit information, fostering the independent music scene, the black market for bootlegs, and the proliferation of cheap, self-produced magazines ("zines"). These examples suggest countervailing trends to the larger consolidation of control of the media during the late twentieth century, of which Ben Bagdikian and many others have written. While a boom in new media did occur, one cannot generalize that what resulted was a more democratic, participatory culture or a hyperregulated dystopia. The trends in communication cut both ways, toward both greater opportunities for expression and the intensification of discipline and supervision.
Next, I try to uncover what models of communication might account for these varying uses of media. Thinkers like Jacques Attali, Jurgen Habermas, George Myerson and Gilles Deleuze have criticized a certain tendency to use technology to justify a mechanistic or authoritarian conception of human interaction. Paul Edwards, for instance, has shown how, starting in World War II, psychologists developed the notion of the human brain as an information processing machine or computer. Thinking consisted of the transmission of signals through a chain of command, and noise had to be eliminated in order for commands to be sent and received efficiently. Such a model has obvious appeal for managers who increasingly use computers and cameras to regulate their employees’ behavior, ensuring that orders are carried out promptly and talk takes the most stereotyped, efficient form possible.
I see the problems of the contemporary culture industries as analogous to the worldviews of cognitive psychology, computer science, and Taylorism. When unauthorized reproduction became widely possible, music companies moved to quash piracy on a variety of grounds: the copies made for inferior product; the copies were identical in style and quality to the originals; piracy would cripple investment in new music; pirates wrongly reaped the benefits of promotion, which was necessary to the creation of “hits”; and artists had a right to remuneration for their work and control over it, i.e. they deserved to determine whether a studio demo or a live performance would be sold as a public commodity or not. The alternative was not only injustice but anarchy. Copies of varying quality would proliferate in the market, and consumers could not what they were getting from and who made it. Great numbers of people would get their hands in the music business, recording concerts, repackaging and remixing hits, and compromising the integrity of the individual product as a singular work. These results did, in fact, occur in the 1960s and 1970s, as corporations and the government scrambled to suppress such activities.
It was a messy situation. Contrary to the record labels’ ideal of producing a clean, professional product, the pirated versions included the noise of an amateur concert recording, or the sonic slippage in a copy of a copy of a copy. This literal noise the music companies saw as a defrauding of the consumer. But I suggest that, figuratively, the growth of the musical black market was also a form of noise, viewed in light of the orderly, effective system of distributing information the music business desired. If a corporation, a computer, or a human brain could be conceived of as systems for sending signals through hierarchical branches, then multiplying activity along the lines of distribution would distract, divert, and sap energy from the whole. An industry, even a whole culture, could fit into this model of communication. Songwriters wrote songs, lawyers registered them, performers recorded them, producers prepared them, corporations promoted and distributed them, and consumers bought and listened to them. A discrete, inviolable piece of culture should move efficiently down the supply line. Piracy is an unnecessary and unwholesome form of noise in this system, to be trimmed like stray leaves and twigs that distort the form of a topiary dinosaur. Music executives and their lawyers argued that “it takes a great deal of hard work and promotion to make a hit,” and the unauthorized copiers disrupted that system so much as to threaten its existence. The corporation was sending out many signals – musical recordings, advertisements in sound and print, arranging performances to boost artists’ profiles – and they had a right to see that these efforts reached their targets. Moreover, songs did not just find favor with audiences on their own merits. A successful recording was a social creation of the most delicate kind, and the state had to step in and protect this marvel from the corrosive effect of diversions from the system that created it.
In short, I suggest that the chieftains of the culture industries saw their relationship to the public in much the same way as a cognitive scientist understood a computer, or as the modern manager viewed a productive workforce. None of these systems could function successfully with unregulated noise pervading its structure. As Gilles Deleuze observed, “The societies of control operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is noise and whose active one is piracy or the introduction of viruses.” Post-industrial society came to enforce new restrictions on behavior because the technologies that enabled social change also facilitated activities that threatened the new systems of production. I know this is quite a conceptual leap I am trying to make here, and my research may yet show that it cannot be sustained. Still, I would like to find some larger principle underlying the way that people talked about piracy and tried to handle it as a social problem. I would also like to examine the fruits of the booming black market of the 1960s and 1970s, analyzing the pirate or bootleg recording as a cultural artifact like any other. Are there any features that distinguish these goods as a style or form of culture? In my prospectus, I spend some time considering the significance of the literal noise that characterizes unauthorized recordings. I also relate the practice of manipulating sound through tape recorders, computers and other means to genres that emerged in the 1970s, like hip-hop and electronic music, which “sampled” sound to create collages, and new traditions like punk rock that incorporated noise as a key motif. If there is a connection between all these cultural developments and the economic and political conflict over piracy, I would like to find it. | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment   |
| | Current Music: | planet rock | | Time: | 10:55 am |
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| I am doing a bit of an experiment here. Since I'm writing about media and piracy, the idea of "networks" comes up a lot - both the infrastructure of information technology and the system of connections through which people make and distribute goods of dubious legality. So I might end up using the term in this project, partly to analyze how the underground economy functioned geographically. However, "network" is such a trite old cliché in the new age, bandied about left and right by corporate propagandists and academic theorists and your cousin Shelly. I don't want to be buying into the same goofy language that Cingular's PR department uses, especially if the term is so fuzzily defined that it conceals a lot of other ideas with their own implications. Indeed, the word has been prominent in a lot of political thinking in recent years. The idea of a "network society" has informed the projects of the center-left (like the UK Labour Party) to propose a more social-democracy-flavored response to the post-industrial society, which otherwise seems to be dominated by right-wing parties who find that faith in technology can easily support a belief in unfettered free markets. Some of the more traditional left get really annoyed when people go on and on about networks, rhizomes, affect, identity and so on. They think that this way of thinking obscures the basic conflict between capital and workers, and elevates the consumption enjoyed by upper classes everywhere (such as First World academics) to the ultimate focus of all political thinking. I can definitely see how a discussion of media piracy could end up dwelling only on the goods people consume, turning a blind eye to the productive process and the larger matrix (there we go again) of power relations throughout our society and beyond. My own instinct is to say that entertainment is just another form of production, the same in all the important ways to other kinds of work. I don't really understand those who say that the theory of surplus-value no longer applies in the service economy or to immaterial labor. As long as there is property, and work being done, both of which are under the control of someone other than the person doing the work and using the property, value is still being appropriated. It's still capitalism.
So, given all that, here is the dense undergrowth of the word "network." More to come...
TYPES OF NETWORKS (according to Wikipedia)
* Business network
* Entrepreneurial network
* Social network
* Old boy network
* Sexual network
* Radio network, create and distribute radio programming
* Television network, create and distribute television programming
* Network (film)
* Network Records, a record label
* The Network, a band
* Digital network, a coupled network of digital components
* Electrical network, a network of electrical components
* Computer networking, communication between computer systems
* Telecommunications network, a network of telecommunications links
* Network theory, the applied mathematics counterpart of graph theory
* Network (mathematics), a type of digraph in graph theory
* Neural network, an interconnected group of biological neurons
* Transport network, facilities on which people and goods move
* Spatial network, urban networks or networks of rooms within buildings
* Network effect, a characteristic that causes a good or service to have a value to a potential customer dependent on the number of customers already owning that good or using that service
MEANINGS OF NETWORK
channels
Synonyms: arrangement, artery, chain, checkerboard*, circuitry, complex, connections, convolution, crisscross*, fabric, fiber, grid, grill*, grillwork, hookup, interconnections, jungle, labyrinth, maze, mesh, net, netting, nexus, organization, patchwork*, plexus, reticulation, reticule, screening, structure, system, tessellation, tracks, wattle, weave, web, wiring
local area network
communications network, computer network, LAN, workgroup computing
neural network
interconnected system, neural net, semantic net, semantic network
old-boy network
exclusive informal network, age group, Freemasonry, networking, old-girl network, peer group
amalgamate
blend, admix, alloy, ally, coalesce, combine, come together, compound, consolidate, fuse, incorporate, integrate, interface, intermix, join together, meld, merge, mingle, network, pool, team up*, tie in, tie up*, unite
apparatus
system, bureaucracy, hierarchy, network, organization, setup, structure
bond
fastener, band, binding, chain, connection, cord, fastening, fetter, gunk, hookup, irons, ligature, link, linkage, manacle, network, nexus, rope, shackle, stickum*, tie, tie-in, wire
bond (2)
relation, affiliation, affinity, association, attachment, connection, connective, friendship, hookup, interrelationship, liaison, link, marriage, network, obligation, relationship, restraint, tie, tie-in, union
cobweb
entanglement
fiber, filament, gossamer, labyrinth, mesh, net, network, snare, tissue, toil, web, webbing
combine
connectamalgamate, associate, band, bind, blend, bond, bracket, bunch up, coadjute, coalesce, commingle, compound, conjoin, cooperate, couple, dub, fuse, get together, hitch on*, hook on*, incorporate, interface, join, league, link, marry, merge, mingle, mix, network, plug into, pool, put together, relate, slap on*, synthesize, tack on*, tag on*, unify, unite, wed | | comments: Leave a comment |
| We're told businesses have souls, which is surely the most terrifying news in the world...
Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society--not that machines are determining, but because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them. The old societies of sovereignty made use of simple machines--levers, pulleys, clocks; but the recent disciplinary societies equipped themselves with machines involving energy, with the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; the societies of control operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is noise and whose active one is piracy or the introduction of viruses...
( And a great book about the emergence of cognitive science and psycholinguistics ) | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| Ok, here's what I'm thinking:
I read the lit review, and, though I can't say I understood all the material, I can say this: the "territory" idea continues to be interesting but mysterious to me, and I think I get the Kafka thing. I can understand why the idea of a "minority language" could be used to examine independent music, punk, whatever the case may be. It reminds me a bit of these feminist ideas, which have been applied in a lot of other areas, about how the oppressed person or group has a better (closer to accurate) understanding of how the system works, and what the society is actually like, because they have to survive under its more adverse conditions; in other words, they are forced to see a lot of things that the oppressor doesn't really need to in his/her daily business (except of course when there are rebellions and he needs to finetune the craft of oppression, using whatever fuzzy resolution she has available). Doesn't the minority language have an innate value because of what it records about, what it furnishes the means to articulate about the dominant system? (To which it is always in a tense and precarious relationship.) You can see that in Kafka's writing, and you could possibly see it in independent music.
To me, it always comes to this question: what is significant about 40 or 50 people, standing more or less still, in a room in front of some musicians? Or, even better, 15 or 20 standing around at a show in somebody's living room, listening to serious amateurs from their own community? What really is the point of "Q and Not U, Karate, Cave In, Piebald, The Rapture, Further Seems Forever, Between the Buried and Me, Underoath, Velvet Teen, Ted Leo & The Pharmacists..."? Obviously, I love a lot of this music, so I do think it must have value or significance. Here are a couple guesses as to what the music might mean.
Independent music is:
1. a very specific niche market for a cultural product that is loaded with very fine distinctions, allusions, motifs, etc. in a refined tradition
2. the mirror for a highly educated mini-class of white-collar workers with a certain self-image (one that, in varying degrees, is at least a little contrary to the "system")
3. the lowest level of the music industry selection process, as a proving ground for artists or sounds/styles that will later be recruited for higher earning potential
4. a counterpoint to the prevailing capitalist cultural market, containing a necessary critique of the majority experience (sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit)
5. another genre or a group of subgenres
6. the bailiwick of a small group of professionals who make music their lives by writing, playing, recording, producing, booking, distributing music
7. a means for providing a sense of history, continuity and connection to free-floating atomistic atheistic consumers
8. a subculture that progressively innovates over time, unlike much market-researched mainstream music
I'm sure there are many other ways of describing what indie-rock/punk/hip-hop/etc is, but these are the views that first come to mind for me. Are these legitimate ways of conceptualizing music? And do they have any relevance to Deleuze (like, maybe, #7)? | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| Ways to Narrow Down a Study of Piracy
Social uses/practices -- research on consumption patterns, bootleg communities, mixtape; private noncommercial world, separate from black market economy; also, nonpirate uses of tape in independent music (rock, hip-hop, folk, etc.)
Spatial patterns of piracy -- production and distribution -- geographical spin
Discourse -- in law, commercial media; the language used to describe "counterfeiting," "piracy," etc.; what about counter-discourse, any pro-piracy or anti-regulation opinions in Congress, state legislature, media?
Relation to international developments and law -- Interpol, Zulfiqar Bhutto, East Asia, lex mercatoria
Site-based case study -- ex: Long Island or Charlotte as coordinator of production
Cultural formations after the cassette; minority expressions and genres; sites of consumption (gas station, truck stop, churches); based on Peter Manuel's analysis of India market
As problem for post-industrial society; relation to development of security state, and simultaneous media developments: Muzak, cable, satellite | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| "...the observation is correct that the technically integral, completely made artwork converges with the absolutely accidental work; the work that is ostensibly not the result of making is of course all the more fabricated. The truth of the new, as the truth of what is not already used up, is situated in the intentionless."
- adorno | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| Ms. Matissered and I are going to try using this livejournal to sort ideas for our dissertations, which are both supposed to be getting out of the embryonic stage with a quickness right about now. We will be putting up bits and scraps of outlines and recipes for consumption and comment in the next couple of months; to share research, strain out the promising leads, and figure out what the heck we're doing. I've posted some of my notes from Jacques Attali's Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1977), Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media (2001), and David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity (1989).
NOISE
Attali
“Already, material production has been supplanted by the exchange of signs. Show business, the star system, and the hit parade signal a profound institutional and cultural colonization. Music makes mutations audible.”
“Any theory of power today must include a theory of the localization of noise and its endowment with form. Among birds a tool for marking territorial boundaries, noise is inscribed from the start within the panoply of power. Equivalent to the articulation of a space, it indicates the limits of a territory and the way to make oneself heard within it, how to survive by drawing one’s sustenance from it.”
“Eavesdropping, censorship, recording, and surveillance are weapons of power.”
“Information theory uses the concept of noise (or rather, metonymy) in a more general way: noise is the term for a signal that interferes with the reception of a message by a receiver, even if the interfering signal itself has a meaning for that receiver. Long before it was given this theoretical expression, noise had always been experienced as destruction, disorder, dirt, pollution, an aggression against the code-structuring messages. In all cultures, it is associated with the idea of the weapon, blasphemy, plague.”
“In the network of representation, it is in general a flow of information, but it can create the conditions of a new order for the listener. The repetition of music always creates disorder since it does nothing but replicate a recorded presentation, imperfectly and without creating anything new: it is thus necessary in repetition to spend increasing amounts of value to maintain order.”
“Noise is the source of these mutations in the structuring codes. For despite the death it contains, noise carries order within itself; it carries new information. This may seem strange. But noise does in fact create a meaning: first, because the interruption of a message signifies the interdiction of the transmitted meaning, signifies censorship and rarity; and second, because the very absence of meaning in pure noise or in the meaningless repetition of a message, by unchanneling auditory sensations, frees the listener’s imagination.”
Marx: “In history as in nature, decomposition is the laboratory of life.”
“Today it has become possible for each listener to record a radio-broadcast representation on his own, and to manufacture in this way, using his own labor, a repeatable recording, the use-value of which is a priori equivalent to that of the commodity-object, without, however, having its exchange-value. This is an extremely dangerus process for the music industry and the authors, since it provides free access to the recording and its repetition. Therefore it is fundamental for them to prevent this diversion of usage, to reinsert this consumer labor into the laws of commercial exchange, to suppress information in order to create an artificial scarcity of music. The simplest solution would be to make such production impossible by scrambling the quality of the broadcast representation, or by truncating it, or again by taxing this independent production, financing royalty payments on these unknown recordings through a tax on tape recorders – this is done in Germany. The price of music usage is then based on entirely on the price of the recorder. But the number of recordings could increase without a change in the number of tape recorders. We could then conceive of a tax on recording tape, which woud mean paying music royalties in proportion to the exchange-value of nonmusic.”
“Usage becomes transformed, accessibility replaces the festival… it ceases to be a unique, exceptional event, heard once by a minority.”
“It [music] remains at bottom the only element of sociality, that is to say of ritual order, in a world in which exteriority, anonymity, and solitude have taken hold, music, regardless of type, is a sign of power, social status, and order, a sign of one’s relation to others… Music has thus become a strategic consumption, an essential mode of sociality for all those who feel themselves powerless before the monologue of the great institutions.”
“[The price of a record] depends very heavily on the process of the production of the demand for music and on its fiscal status, in other words, on the role assigned to it by the State.”
Manovich
“So rather than being an aberration, a flaw in the otherwise pure and perfect world of the digital, where not even a single bit of information is lost, lossy compression is the very foundation of computer culture, at least for now. Therefore, while in theory, computer technology entails the flawless replication of data, its actual use in contemporary society is characterized by loss of data, degradation, and noise.”
Blade-Runner v. Macintosh GUI : two visions (1982 and 1984) of what the future would be like. One was the cyberpunk noir of high futurism + grimy reality, and the other was a crisp, modernist array of minimalist lines and clarity.
“The non-transparency of the code” - see McLuhan on media, Whorf-Sapir hypothesis on code, Lakoff on cognitive linguistics, and Derrida on logocentrism.
“from the ‘abstraction’ of the 1910s to the ‘process’ of the 1960s, artists have continued to invent concepts and procedures to assure the impossibility of painting some preexistent content.”
“to think of an interface as a separate level, as something that can be arbitrarily varied, is to eliminate the status of a new media artwork as art.”
What about taking a digital picture of a digital photo? These are pixels of pixels – but would they actually portray the original pixels If the resolution was high enough, the original pixels would be present but would be subdivided into smaller pieces – if the resolution were lower, the larger relationships of the pixels would be reconstituted along new lines (i.e. noise, generative distortion).
POLITICS OF THE MEDIUM
Attali
“Musical distribution techniques are today contributing to the establishment of eavesdropping and surveillance. Muzak, the American corporation that sells standardized music, presents itself as the ‘security system of the 1970s’ because it permits use of musical distribution channels for the circulation of orders. The monologue of standardized, stereotyped music accompanies and hems in a daily life in which in reality no one has the right to speak anymore.”
David Harvey
Flexible accumulation results from 1. diversification of production geographically, which 2. automatically means access to cheap labor and 3. intensified competition between nations and localities (if not between corporations, which A. get more consolidated or B. are illusorily fragmented into many subcontracted producers), all of which results from advances in communication (satellite, internet, cable, tapes/CDs/DVDs) and transportation (air travel, containerization). All of these trends unfolded after World War II -- new technology driven by military investment, the rebuilding of Japanese and European economies, the subsequent emergence of Asian and Latin American competition via excess investment from the highly advanced countries, the entrance of new labor onto the market (women, immigrants), and so on. If it's all the same, and goods can be produced rapidly with cheap labor and high technology almost anywhere, then signs, images, fashions, ads -- making full use of the communication system -- can make all the difference where a margin of competitive advantage is concerned.
"Benetton, for example, engages in no production directly, but simply operates as a powerful marketing machine, which transmits commands to a wide array of independent producers." (158-9)
"Access to, and control over, information, coupled with a strong capacity for instant data analysis, have become essential to the centralized coordination of far-flung corporate interests. The capacity for instantaneous response to changes in exchange rates, fashions and tastes, and moves by competitors is more essential to corporate survival than it ever was under Fordism." (159)
"Control over information flow and over the vehicles for propagation of popular taste and culture have likewise become vital weapons in competitive struggle." (160)
"Computerization and electronic communications have pressed home the significance of instantaneous international co-ordination of financial flows." (161)
"New technologies have empowered certain privileged layers, at the same time as alternative production and labour control sytsems open up the way to high remuneration of technical, managerial, and entrepreneurial skills. The trend, further exaggerated by the shift to services and the enlargement of 'the cultural mass,' has been to increasing inequalities of income, perhaps presaging the rise of a new aristocracy of labour as well as the emergence of an ill-remunerated and broadly disempowered under-class." (192)
Heidegger: "At a time when the furthermost corner of the globe has been conquered by technology and opened to economic exploitation; when any incident whatsoever, regardless of where and when it occurs, can be communicated to the rest of the world at any desired speed; when the assassination of a King in France and a Symphony in Tokyo can be 'experienced' simultaneously; when time ceased to be anything other than velocity, instantaneousness and simultaneity, and time as history has vanished from the lives of all peoples... then, yes, then, through all this turmoil a question still haunts us like a spectre: What for? Whither? What then?" | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Sassen argues that, while industrial production has become more dispersed around the globe, command of the world economy has become increasingly concentrated in a few key urban centers, whose function has been transformed since World War II. Especially since the US-centered, Bretton Woods system ended in the 1970s, industry has shifted out of places like New York or Tokyo into certain Third World locales, turning the old metropolises into bases for information control (finance, services, education, culture). She looks particularly at NY, Tokyo and London, although she also mentions Frankfurt and Paris as models. The three cities have undergone the same parallel process of change in economic base, spatial organization and social structure. "The territorial dispersal of current economic activity creates a need for expanded central control and management," she writes, pointing out that the control of the economy has not become more decentralized along with production. A certain kind of production does occur in the command center, she insists, that of innovating in finance, building networks and literally making markets. Sassen sees these functions as not purely managerial.
As the producers of intellectual goods have risen to the apex of power, the victims of decentralization in the developed world (e.g. Detroit, Nagoya, Manchester) have become disempowered; Sassen links the shift of jobs out of Nagoya and into Thailand or the US to the creation of the first ever Toyota headquarters in Tokyo. These changes alter social relations both between the hollowed-out regions and the intellectual command center and within the new global city itself. Sassen juxtaposes Daniel Bell's 1973 thesis that post-industrial societies would be marked by a highly educated working class in a more rational relation to management with the developing reality. "Major growth industries show a greater incidence of jobs at the high- and low-paying ends of the scale than do the older industries now in decline. Almost half the jobs in the producer services are lower-income jobs, and half are in the two highest earning classes." In other words, the growing class cleavages in the new city parallel the stark stratification between cities in the global economy. Sassen says the proliferation of low level service is essential to satisfy the desires of educated (technocratic?) elite in the landscape of gentrification - laundries, maids, gourmet shops, boutiques, hotels, food service, etc - while manufacturing has moved from a First World union model to a dependence of sweatshops and homework. She warns against notions of progress that imagine menial work diminishing in society. "Backward sectors, such as downgraded manufacturing or low-wage service occupations, can be part of major growth trends in a highly developed economy. It is often assumed that backward sectors express decline trends. Similarly, there is a tendency to assume that advanced sectors, such as finance, have mostly good, white-collar jobs. In fact, they contain a good number of low-paying jobs, from cleaner to stock clerk."
"The cross-border delivery of services is the only mode of delivery that has the characteristics of trade in goods, with the difference that only services embodied in goods (software or tapes, etc.) or those value-added can be put on paper (evaluations, drawings) can actually cross borders independently of producers. Telecommunications technologies make possible and can be expected to contribute to the growth of transborder flows, especially for information-intensive services. This technology has raised the tradability of many of the professional services. But, surprisingly, this type of transborder flow accounts for a small share of international transactions in services. Telecommunications technology has raised intrafirm flows of services in transnational corporations and other corporate organizations." 47
"In the United States, major cities such as New York and Chicago have large centers that have been rebuilt many times, given the brutal neglect suffered by much urban infrastructure and the imposed obsolescence so characteristic of U.S. cities. This neglect and accelerated obsolescence produce vast spaces for rebuilding the center according to the requirements of whatever regime of urban accumulation or pattern of spatial organization of the urban economy prevails at the time. In Europe, urban centers are far more protected and they rarely contain significant stretches of abandoned space; the expansion of workplaces and the need for intelligent buildings necessarily will have to take place outside the old centers." 124
"Up till now the major outcome of the development of telecommunications capability has been to expand the spatial dispersion of the economy. But this dispersion has required the expansion of central functions. At what point will telecommunications be applied to centralizing functions and the complex of professional, managerial, and executive functions at the top? The urban form that had developed in the last two decades associated with this spatial reorganization of economic activity has clearly been one of growing densities and extreme locational concentration of central functions and of the production of innovations. In 1990 I asked whether we were reaching the limit of this urban form, notwithstanding the massive high-rise office complexes under construction in London and Tokyo, with a few more planned for New York. New York suggested to me that we had partly because of an increasingly disadvantageous trade-off between the benefits and costs of this agglomeration. Yet the late 1990s launched a whole new building phase in London and New York (and other emergent global cities) which is further expanding the space of the high-priced center.
"An important factor that needs to be consideed is the massive infrastructural investments required by telecommunications systems and the organizational complexity that allows firms to maximize benefits they can derive from such systems. This effectively creates barriers to entry. While in principle any city could consider developing telecommunications capability of the first order and hence compete for a number of functions now concentrated in leading cities, in practice entry costs are so high, in addition to the costs of continuous incorporation of the newest technology, that for the foreseeable future, major cities, have an almost absolute advantage." 336
Is the new telecommunications infrastructure really that costly? If the more basic industrial base is in place - an electric grid, for instance - then certain new devices and systems can be grafted onto it easily. The VCR was embraced more rapidly in some less developed countries than in the United States, though partly because there was a dearth of entertainment and communication alternatives in these places as compared to the options American consumers faced. Still, the hardware dropped in cost rapidly and became affordable for many throughout the world, whether purchased firsthand or obtained by way of guest workers and other migrants. The software was even cheaper, such that a new basis for local production and distribution of culture became possible in Africa, Asia and elsewhere. A telephone system of the traditional landline fashion required great investments in infrastructure, as did cable television; broadcast TV and radio involved somewhat lower costs but still demanded a significant amount of hardware scattered over the landscape in a hierarchical, defined and centralized network. The newer technologies, such as videotape, CDs and the internet, have proven more flexible, rhizomic, and multilateral, and built upon existing networks (electricity, telephony). Cellular phones and wireless internet could combine these decentralized characteristics with the low-cost of infrastructure (immaterial transmission) for a recipe even more conducive to moving control out of the information command centers that Sassen describes.
"We know that manufacturing, as epitomized by the two decades after World War II in the United States, had a strong multiplier effect and contributed to the expansion of a strong middle class. In the period when manufacturing based on mass consumption and large scales of production was the leading economic sector, there was a pronounced orientation in the general economy toward the production of housing, roads, shopping centers, new schools, and all other components of the suburbanization process that dominated economy and society. The decline of Fordism entailed a change in the economic and political place of unions and mass production as well as the demise of a broader institutional framework sustained by that model of production, one with significant shadow effects for larger sectors of the economy. The historical forms assumed by economic growth in the post-World War II era - notably capital intensity, standardization of production, and suburbanization-led growth - contributed to the vast expansion of a middle class. And so did the cultural forms accompanying these processes, particularly as they shaped the structures of everyday life insofar as a large middle class contributes to mass consumption and thus to standardization." 337 | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Apparently, file-sharing kills, and Osama Bin Laden is hawking mixtapes on Canal Street. Jack Valenti is a sick old fart, and I can't believe Gurinder Chadha allowed him to take her for "Show & Tell."
INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT PIRACY: A GROWING PROBLEM WITH LINKS TO ORGANIZED CRIME AND TERRORISM
HEARING BEFORE THE SUBCOMMITTEE ON COURTS, THE INTERNET, AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY OF THE COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED EIGHTH CONGRESS. FIRST SESSION. MARCH 13, 2003
Mr. Smith:
In 2000, the annual seizure of pirated discs for the Motion Picture Association was 1.9 billion units. By the close of 2002, it was up to 6.1 billion units. In just 2 years, the annual piracy rate had increased five times.
In some places, such as Asia and parts of the former Soviet Union, pirated software accounts for nearly 90 percent of the software used. At the close of 2002, for example, seizures of pirated Microsoft products alone exceeded $1.7 billion.
The copyright industries drive the engine of the American economy. Exports and foreign sales of U.S. copyrighted products total $100 billion, which helps the national balance of trade. Copyrighted works are a result of American creativity. When properly commercialized, these works lead to jobs, profits, and a more enjoyable quality of life for us all.
There is good reason why the Founders embraced the concept of intellectual property protection. They realized that if creators cannot gain from their creations, they will not bother to create. And actors and writers and composers and singers cannot gain if their work is stolen. Would any other American industry be able to sustain its operations for long if a third of its sales were lost to theft?
A recent article in Time Europe noted that an average drug dealer pays $47,000 for a kilo of cocaine with an estimated street value of $94,000, which yields 100 percent profit. For the same $47,000 investment, a pirate could buy or produce 1,500 pirated copies of Microsoft's Office 2000 professional software and resell it for a profit of 900 percent.
Mr. Berman:
While Internet—international hard goods piracy may seem a dull subject to some, it is a critical issue to U.S. copyright holders. The aggregate hard good piracy losses suffered by U.S. copyright industries in foreign nations are pretty astounding. You've mentioned some of the figures. You talked about 56 countries. I have an estimate that it probably equals $20–$22 billion annually worldwide, not including Internet piracy.
Individual foreign countries—China, $1.85 billion; $770 million in Brazil; $800 million in Italy; $757 million in Taiwan; and $756 million in the Russian Federation. Another interesting statistic—93 percent of business software sold in China, 47 percent of music sold in Taiwan, 80 percent of movies sold in the Russian Federation were pirated.
In 2001, 99 percent of entertainment software sold in Brazil was pirated, while, in 2002, 55 percent of entertainment software sold in Italy was pirated.
As piracy percentages climb in a particular nation, it becomes increasingly difficult for U.S. copyright owners to establish a legitimate market. In some cases, as with entertainment software in Brazil, U.S. copyright owners have had to abandon the market entirely. They simply can't justify the expense of maintaining a presence in a nation where the demand for their copyrighted works is almost entirely met by vastly cheaper pirated versions.
The piracy-related inability of U.S. copyright owners to access a legitimate market in many foreign countries results in real harm to the U.S. economy. The core copyright industries make a tremendous contribution to the U.S. economy, accounting for more than 5 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product. That's more than the deficit will be in about 5 or 6 years. [Laughter.]...
I don't want to steal her thunder, but I want to highlight a couple of the issues that I think her particular situation represents. In Joan's case, the theft of her intellectual property rights is not some private syndicate operating in distant shadows within a foreign government, but it is the foreign government itself—the Russian Federation government.
Mr. Malcolm:
Highly organized criminal syndicates pose special challenges for law enforcement because they have significant resources to devote to their illegal operations, thereby increasing the scope and sophistication of their activity. They control international distribution channels, which allow them to move massive quantities of pirated goods, as well as any other illicit goods, throughout the world.
These groups will not hesitate to threaten or injure those who attempt to interfere with their operations. Throughout Asia, organized crime groups operate assembly lines and factories that generate literally millions of pirated optical discs. These groups pirate a full range of products, ranging from music to software to movies to video games. Anything that can be reproduced onto an optical disk and sold around the globe is available...
Of course, this problem is not limited to Malaysia, but occurs in other parts of the world such as in parts of the former Soviet Union. Additionally, many organized piracy groups from Asia use South America, most notably Paraguay, as a transshipment point for pirated products. Industry groups have reported that organized crime from Taiwan and other parts of the world control much of the distribution of optical disks into Latin America through Ciudad del Este...
Mr. VALENTI. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Berman, and Members of the Committee.
Before I begin, I want to introduce a gifted young independent filmmaker from Britain, whose blockbuster film, ''Bend It Like Beckham,'' is proving very popular in Europe. But, alas, it's been hijacked all over the world, and here it is avalanching this country. And guess what? Her film doesn't come out yet in the United States for another week.
Ms. Gurinder Chadha. Stand up. I want them to see you.
Because in the words of Peter Finch in the movie ''Network,'' she's mad as hell, and she's not going to take it anymore. [Laughter.]...
PREPARED STATEMENT OF JACK VALENTI
America's crown jewels—its intellectual property—are being looted. Organized, violent, international criminal groups are getting rich from the high gain/low risk business of stealing America's copyrighted works. We don't know to what end the profits from these criminal enterprises are put. US industry alone will never have the tools to penetrate these groups or to trace the nefarious paths to which those profits are put. For these reasons it is entirely suitable and necessary that the Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property of the House of Representative's Committee on the Judiciary hold this hearing and illuminate the nature of the problems and the effect on the copyright industries (consisting of movies, TV programs, home videos, books, music, computer games and software).
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THE ECONOMIC WORTH OF THE COPYRIGHT INDUSTRIES
The copyright industries were responsible in 2001 for some five percent of the GDP of the nation. Over the past quarter century, these industries' share of GDP grew more than twice as fast as the remainder of the economy. They earn more international revenues than automobiles and auto parts, more than aircraft, more than agriculture. The copyright industries are creating new jobs at three times the rate of the rest of the economy. The movie industry alone has a surplus balance of trade with every single country in the world. No other American industry can make that statement. And all this comes at a time when the U.S. is suffering from some $400 billion in trade deficits.
DIGITAL PIRACY: THE DELIVERY DREAM, THE PIRACY NIGHTMARE
It would be a serious mistake to take our past successes for granted. While piracy has been a sad fact illuminating our lives since the blossoming of the home video entertainment business a quarter century ago, the forms of digital piracy we now face raise serious, new challenges that we need your help in addressing.
I must admit, with all appropriate modesty, that we had become fairly good at combating the old forms of analog video tape piracy. With the help of our government and international trade agreements, such as the World Trade Organization's Agreement on Trade Related Intellectual Property, most countries have adopted modern copyright laws. We had been seeing declining loss rates in many of the traditional centers of piracy. Despite our successes, we were losing close to $3 billion dollars a year.
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And then the world changed. Digital technologies, which offer so much in terms of enhanced clarity of image and sound, and exciting new ways to deliver high quality entertainment directly to people's homes, also gave birth to serious new forms of piracy.
By now, I presume that all of you have heard of our concerns about Internet piracy—and I assure you, that dialogue will continue. The mysterious magic of being able, with a simple click of a mouse, to send a full-length movie hurtling with the speed of light to any part of the planet, is a marketing dream and an anti-piracy nightmare. Ask the music industry how Internet piracy can devastate an industry's bottom line. As computer modem speeds accelerate and broadband access spreads across the United States and around the world, more people are gaining the ability to download full length motion pictures quickly. The threat to the motion picture industry from Internet piracy is growing.
Internet piracy is not the only digital threat we face. Today, I'd like to focus on another form of digital piracy—widespread piracy of optical discs—CDs, Video CDs, DVDs, and recordable versions like CD-Rs and DVD-Rs. The piracy of DVDs and other optical media products is dominated by organized crime and increasingly threatens our international markets, which account for 40 percent of revenues earned by the filmed entertainment industry. Indeed, all industries that rely on intellectual property protection, including the music and video game industries, are facing huge losses from optical disc piracy, especially in international markets. Microsoft products are another favorite target for the pirates.
The motion picture industry seized over 7 million pirate DVDs worldwide last year. DVD piracy didn't exist for our industry as recently as 1999.
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''DIE ANOTHER DAY:'' AN EXAMPLE OF PIRATES IN ACTION
The damage from pirated DVDs is enormous. DVD piracy erodes our home video revenues, but also corrodes revenues from our international theatrical business. Pirate DVDs often enter the market months before the release of legitimate DVDs—often before a movie is released into the theaters. Let me give you just one example. MGM's latest James Bond film, Die Another Day, was released theatrically in major cinemas in the United States on November 22. The first pirate copy, camcorded from a press screening in the United States, showed up in pirated DVD format in Malaysia on November 21. By the 28th, only six days after its US theatrical release, every major market in Asia was already infected with pirate copies of Die Another Day. In Taiwan, theatrical release wasn't scheduled until February 1 to coincide with Chinese New Years holidays—normally a big period for cinema sales in that part of the world. The pirates had nine full weeks to sell our products in pirated form before the film was legitimately released in theaters.
A SNAPSHOT OF OPTICAL DISC PIRACY AROUND THE WORLD
The problem of large-scale pirate optical disc production began in China in the mid-90s. When China cut off the export of piratical discs in the late 1990s, the pirates packed up their equipment and relocated to more hospitable areas where enforcement was lax or absent. Now we are seeing major problems with DVD production in Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan, Philippines, and Indonesia. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Ukraine, and elsewhere in Central Europe are host to factories replicating pirate copies of music CDs. The music industry's problems today are always a danger sign for us, since pirates often start with music and then move on to movies, video games and other products.
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In the past year, we have also witnessed a major surge of large-scale factory production of DVDs in Russia. Today there are at least 26 optical plants in Russia, including at least five that specialize in the production of DVDs. The number and overall capacity of these plants has more than doubled in the past two years. Nine of these plants are located on property owned by the Russian Government.
Pirate DVDs have devastated the local market in Russia. Pirate DVDs have so saturated the Russian market that the pirates have resorted to selling them on the streets by the kilo. Pirate DVDs are sold everywhere—at street markets, in kiosks, in retail stores and over the Internet.
Those 26 plants in Russia currently have capacity to replicate about 300 million DVDs and CDs a year; legitimate demand in Russia is approximately 18 million units. This excess capacity points to the fact that the Russian pirates are targeting export markets—OUR export markets. Piracy in Russia poses a major threat to revenues across Europe. In 2002 MPA's anti-piracy operations seized pirate Russian DVDs in markets across Central and Eastern Europe. In July a raid at a retail market in Poland turned up over 4000 copies of pirate discs from Russia. Those discs contained 15 different language tracks—from Finnish and Swedish to Greek and Turkish, Dutch, Danish, to Indian and Arabic. If bold actions aren't taken quickly to shut down this piracy, American sales of copyrighted works to Western Europe—our most lucrative market in the world—will be demolished by these pirated imports from Russia. The time to act is now before these criminals further build out their distribution networks and alliances throughout Central and Western Europe.
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Even before large-scale factory production has been brought under control, we are now seeing the rapid growth of local burning of movies and other forms of copyrighted content onto blank recordable media—CD-Rs and DVD-Rs. This kind of piracy is more dispersed geographically, since the piracy takes place in medium to small ''labs'' with banks of CD burners, but is often still highly organized. The retail markets in Taiwan are filled with this kind of pirate product; not coincidentally, Taiwan is one of the world's largest producers and exporters of blank optical discs, fueling this problem around the world.
Joan P. Borsten Vidov:
We are proud to have contributed to the safeguarding and promotion of Russia's rich artistic heritage. We accomplished this by investing millions of dollars to acquire, repair, restore, and distribute these films, making them accessible for the first time to the general public outside the former USSR. The Soviets had freely ''borrowed'' Western literature and music to make some of the best animated films—a bad habit that did not end after the USSR signed its first intellectual property convention in 1973. So we also had to plead and cajole representatives of these writers and musicians to license us the rights necessary to keep these films alive...
The most significant advance in the protection of foreign copyright proprietors' rights in the USSR occurred in 1973 when the Soviet Union acceded to the Universal Copyright Convention and for the first time in history granted broad legal protection in USSR to the works of foreign authors. This step forward was the direct byproduct of the intensive trade negotiations between the United States and the USSR that began in 1972. One of the special concerns of the Soviets in these negotiations was the legal protection abroad of Soviet technology. The Soviet government was desirous of expanding the sales and licenses of Soviet technology in the United States, but the Soviets believed that this would not be possible unless the U.S. eliminated the 30 percent withholding tax on royalties earned by Soviet organizations. In the commercial negotiations that followed in 1972 and 1973, the U.S. government negotiators offered to rescind the withholding tax if the Soviets would recognize the rights of U.S. copyright proprietors and compensate them for the use of their works. The culmination of this negotiation was Soviet accession to the Universal copyright convention...
PREPARED STATEMENT OF TIMOTHY P. TRAINER
The International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition (IACC) would like to thank the distinguished members of the Subcommittee for the opportunity to offer its views with respect to the links between intellectual property theft and organized crime and terrorism.
The IACC is a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit organization devoted solely to combating product counterfeiting and piracy. Formed in 1978, today it is comprised of a cross section of business and industry—from autos, apparel, luxury goods, and pharmaceuticals, to food, software and entertainment—the IACC's members' combined annual revenues exceed $650 billion. The touchstone of the IACC's mission is to combat counterfeiting and piracy by promoting laws, regulations and directives designed to render the theft of intellectual property undesirable and unprofitable. The IACC serves as an umbrella organization, offering anticounterfeiting programs designed to increase protection for patents, trademarks, copyrights, service marks, trade dress and trade secrets.
Critical to the IACC's purpose is its belief that acts of counterfeiting create severe public health and safety hazards, as well as economic harm. The IACC supports government actions that will ultimately result in increased enforcement, lead to the prosecution of intellectual property infringers, and create a strong deterrent to counterfeiters and pirates. In pursuing its mission, the IACC provides law enforcement officials with information and training to identify counterfeit and pirate products and in the methods of product security to prevent the infringement of its members' intellectual property rights.
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In an effort to create conditions under which its members' intellectual property rights are safe from illegal copying, infringement and other forms of theft, the IACC engages in substantive dialogue with governments and intergovernmental organizations worldwide. In pursuing its mission, the IACC provides law enforcement officials with information and training to identify counterfeit and pirate products and in the methods of product security to prevent the infringement of its members' valuable intellectual property rights.
SCOPE OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY THEFT
There are no product lines, corporations, or consumers that escape the counterfeiters' and/or pirates' reach. Dangerous counterfeit products have appeared in retail stores across the United States. Organized crime is increasingly attracted by counterfeiting's high profits and relatively low criminal penalties. In addition, the manufacture, distribution and sale of counterfeit goods rob local economies of precious tax revenues, and costs Americans jobs.
Many pirate and counterfeit goods are not as visible as you might think. Many people think of the counterfeits and pirated products purely in terms of street vendors' products—music CDs, sunglasses, t-shirts, hats, cosmetics, cell phone covers, handbags and watches—bearing easily recognizable and known names and logos. But, on a different level, product counterfeiters and pirates are trading on names and logos often associated with things such as razor blades, shampoos, pharmaceuticals, foods, hand tools, auto parts, light bulbs, film, skin lotions, laundry detergent, band-aids, insecticides, batteries, cigarettes and practically anything else that bears a name that consumers are familiar with in the market place. Very few products, if any, are beyond the reach of skilled counterfeiters.
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PUBLIC HEALTH AND SAFETY DANGERS
Of particular concern to IACC members and consumers is the increasing availability of fakes that present severe health and safety risks. For example, the World Health Organization estimates that counterfeit drugs account for ten percent of all pharmaceuticals. That number can rise to as high as sixty percent (60%) in developing countries.(see footnote 14) In another case, and according to a federal indictment made public in May 2002, U.S. Customs officials seized 59,000 bottles of counterfeit vodka in a Massachusetts warehouse. The fake vodka had been imported from a former Soviet republic.(see footnote 15) In Estonia in 2001, illicit vodka containing methyl alcohol killed 60 people.(see footnote 16) The problems, however, do not end with pharmaceuticals and alcohol.
In the 1990's, a major shampoo manufacturer was forced to place half-page advertisements in at least 27 national newspapers informing the general public that counterfeit versions of its shampoo were available in retail stores. Of particular concern to the manufacturer was the fact that the fake shampoo may have contained bacteria, risking infection in users with weakened immune systems.(see footnote 17) Even more disturbing was the case where the operational life of counterfeit bearing seal spacers removed from a United Airlines plane were found to be only 600 hours—the genuine parts had an operational life of 20,000 hours. The fake parts came complete with fake boxes, labels and paperwork and were only discovered because of a very alert maintenance technician.(see footnote 18) Finally, counterfeit-labeled infant formula found its way onto shelves in grocery stores in 16 states.(see footnote 19)...
These are just a few examples. For more stories about the well documented links between intellectual property theft and organized crime and terrorism, please refer to the attached document containing a list of relevant public source news articles and government reports compiled by the IACC.
The IACC believes that the best deterrent to counterfeiting and piracy is criminal penalties that result in actual imprisonment. Based on this policy, the IACC has led efforts that resulted in the passage of the 1984 Trademark Act that established federal criminal sanctions for trademark counterfeiting,(see footnote 28) the Anticounterfeiting Consumer Protection Act of 1996 that increased civil penalties and provided U.S. Customs with the authority to assess administrative fines against those that import counterfeit products,(see footnote 29) and the establishment of specific criminal provisions for trademark counterfeiting in 31 states and the District of Columbia. By providing federal and state law enforcement officials with the jurisdiction to prosecute counterfeiters, and U.S. Customs with the discretion to penalize known importers of counterfeit merchandise, the IACC has sought to promote a comprehensive enforcement system to stop illegal goods at the borders, punish manufacturers and distributors of counterfeit products in interstate commerce, and address counterfeiting at the retail level within the states, counties and cities where it is most prevalent.
Recent world events have caused federal and state government officials to correctly reevaluate the mission priorities of law enforcement personnel to address national security issues. As pointed out above, the IACC is concerned that the low risk, high-profit nature of counterfeiting and piracy has and will continue to attract the attention of organized crime and terrorist groups looking to fund their operations. The IACC and its members look forward to working with Congress, law enforcement and the new Department of Homeland Security to identify and eliminate links between counterfeiting and the funding of terrorist groups that may arise in the course of protecting U.S. economic interests and intellectual property rights.
http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/judiciary/hju85643.000/hju85643_0.htm
International Association for
the Study of Organized Crime
http://www.iasoc.net/news.htm
TURNING A CONVICTION INTO PUBLIC EDUCATION: In December 2002, David Rocci pled guilty to conspiracy to violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Rocci was the owner and operator of an Internet site dedicated to providing information about copyright infringement (www.iSONEWS.com). Rocci used this web site sell circumvention devices known as Amod chips, which defeat security protections in the Microsoft Xbox---allowing unlimited play of pirated games on the Xbox gaming console. As a condition of his guilty plea, Rocci transferred his domain name and website to the U.S. government. In an imaginative move, the government replaced iSONEWS.com with a new web page providing information about the case U.S. v. Rocci, as well as a general anti-piracy message outlining the potential criminal consequences for engaging in illegal piracy. This case was the first time that the United States assumed control of an active domain name in an intellectual property case. After 2 weeks, the site received over 550,000 hits.
SOFTWARE PIRACY: Don Clark, “Microsoft reports big loss in sales from piracy ring,” The Wall Street Journal, (April 22, 2002). Microsoft lost between $200-$300 million from an international piracy ring that operated for at least 2 years involving 50 suspects with links to organized crime. The FBI's Operation Firestorm resulted in 27 arrests for copyright infringement, fraud and money laundering. Mirza and Sameena Ali were charged in a scheme involving Microsoft's educational discount program. Some of the defendants stole access codes to unlock Windows XP. Adobe Systems and Symantec products also were counterfeited. Most of the arrests were in Silicon Valley with ties to Pakistan and Taiwan.
Volkov, Vadim. Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Capitalism (Cornell University Press, 2002).
Felia Allum and Renate Siebert. Organized Crime and the Challenge to Democracy (Routledge, 2003).
Chin, Kolin. Chinatown Gangs: Extortion, Enterprise, and Ethnicity (Oxford University Press, 2000).
"Is It Safe?"
http://www.emedialive.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?CategoryID=27&ArticleID=4884
Copy protection has taken on many forms since Hollywood studios began fighting the villainous VCR back in the 1970s.... Whatever their (mis)fortunes on the Web, technology companies have enjoyed some success in fighting disc copy protection in the streets: March 2002 saw the first-ever publicized bust of DVD-R pirates in the Bronx, New York, and the LAPD nabbed a similar piracy ring in Long Beach in July. While these busts brought down relatively small operations, they appear for now to be proportional to the problem in the U.S. Piracy overseas, however, particularly in Asia, continues to run rampant. While there is a thirst for American culture, there is also a distaste for perceived American greed, so until these attitudes change, would-be protectors of copyrighted content will continue to wage an uphill battle.
Statistics
Software piracy grew from 37 percent in 2000 to 40 percent in 2001 around the world, according to the Business Software Alliance's (BSA) seventh annual survey on global software piracy. "In the seven years that we have conducted this study, this is the first time piracy has increased two years in a row. This is particularly disturbing in light of the fact that more and more software companies are moving their distribution systems to the Internet," says BSA president and CEO Robert Holleyman. Vietnam, China, and Indonesia topped the piracy charts although in the last year we've seen minor percentage declines there. North America continued to be the region with the lowest piracy rate at 26 percent, up one percentage point from 25 percent in 2000. However, North America accounted for the third-highest piracy dollar losses, totaling $1.9 billion, down from $2.9 billion in 2000. That decline can be deceiving. BSA attributes it to the strong U.S. dollar relative to local currencies and to lower software prices.
The Recording Industry Association (RIAA) says they were more successful in busting up illegal operations in 2001 than they were in 2000. Raids on more than 230 distribution operations and more than 145 manufacturing operations led to the seizure of 2.8 million unauthorized CD-Rs. Raids aside, the RIAA says the music industry loses more than $1 billion per year from the illegal activities conducted in the world's four leading pirate marketplaces: Brazil, China, Russia, and Mexico. Not including losses resulting from Internet piracy, the sale of pirate recordings exceeds $4.2 billion worldwide.
Dave Gussow, "For entertainment industry, resistance is usually futile"
http://www.sptimes.com/2003/09/15/Technology/For_entertainment_ind.shtml
It has balked before, at the player piano and the VCR. Now its target is file sharing. Will the entertainment industry again fail at its efforts to thwart a new technology it feels threatened by? ...
Looking back, some of the lawsuits involving the entertainment industry and new technology may seem quaint. In 1908, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Apollo Co., which made player pianos, did not violate the copyright of the songs Little Cotton Dolly and Kentucky Babe, held by the White-Smith Music Publishing Co., by putting the music on piano rolls.
In 1976, Universal Studios and Walt Disney Productions sued to block Sony's Betamax video cassette recorder, saying they wanted surcharges added to the cost of the machines and blank tapes to make up for the loss of copyright royalties.
It took eight years, but the Supreme Court ultimately decided in Sony's favor, with the majority finding that people taping TV programs "is legitimate fair use." The Betamax eventually died, with the VHS format becoming dominant, but the precedent stood.
One of the first real tests of the digital age came in 1998. The Recording Industry Association of America sued to stop the sale of the Diamond Rio, the first MP3 digital music player, saying it would encourage piracy. The association lost.
Last year, 5.5-million portable music players were sold in the United States, according to market research company IDC, a number predicted to grow to 19.3-million units by 2007...
Music has drawn most of the attention so far because the technology has not evolved to make movie downloads fast and easy - yet.
Even on a fast digital subscriber line connection, downloading a 136-minute movie can take 75 minutes. (A faster connection can accomplish the task in about 15 minutes.) In fact, the movie industry's main nemesis at the moment is illegal copying of DVDs, mostly in Asia.
But the industry expects file sharing to become an issue as technology advances and more people use high-speed Internet connections, said Fritz Attaway, executive vice president of the movie group. "We don't have a clear idea of how to solve the problem. It is probably a combination of technology, education and legislation."
Martin Ryder, "The Global Digital Divide: Technical Responses and Social Implications"
http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~mryder/dig_div_2003.html
And herein lies the central problem posed in this volume: the Digital Divide - the cultural disparity that results between those who are highly connected into this global information interchange and the rest of the world. There are more Internet Service Providers in New York City than in the whole of Africa (Adam, 2002). In today's world where 80% of the population lack access to basic telecommunications facilities and where nearly half the people have never made a telephone call, there is a small, highly connected segment of us who are creating rapid changes that impact the lives and habitat of all the rest. The industrialized countries with only 15% of the world's population represent 88% of the Internet user population. South Asia, home for 20% of humanity, makes up less than 1% of Internet users. At the present time, a greater plurality of the world's population remains isolated, disconnected, and uninvolved with regard to the multiple changes that affect them, their habitat, and those who will follow after them (UNESCO, 1998)...
The philosophical stance of constructivism is offered in contrast to determinism. A constructivist view of technology in society stresses free agency, individual will, conscious deliberation and choice among human agents. Constructivists insist that people are active agents and not helpless automatons or passive victims; they are always able to make deliberate choices and to exercise control over change. Constructivism argues that human feasibility is not tightly defined by external objective forces alone. There is generally a surplus of workable solutions to any given problem. Technology, including the technology of language, is just another dependent social variable and not the key to the riddle of history.
From a constructivist point of view, social actors make the final choice among several technically viable options. If one option is closed, an agentive actor selects another route to accomplish a critical task. In the real world, the problem-definition often changes in the course of solution (Feenberg, 1992).
A good example of agentive activity by marginalized people is the so-called Radio Defiance Campaign that emerged in South Africa in the late 1980s (see Michaud, 2003). It was a time when the radio airwaves were strictly controlled by the white ruling class. What black South Africans heard on the radio was white-owned and white-controlled programming. In the black townships the programming promoted the notion that apartheid was good, that it was natural and inevitable, and that any expression of resistance amounted to nothing less than terrorism. Attempts toward community controlled programming in broadcasting were strictly out of the question, and black South Africans had become generally alienated from the medium of radio.
During this period, tape cassette players were becoming popular in black townships. Under the leadership of the African National Congress, people began to produce their own programming, mostly music with news and community interest productions, using the medium of magnetic cassette tape! These produced 'radio' broadcasts were passed from hand to hand in small communities. In time, a sofisticated distribution network emerged, where tapes and copies of tapes found circulation into the tens of thousands. In townships where official radio programming was completely ignored, the cassette distribution system developed into a vibrant phenomenon. A complex actor network had been created, connecting human and non-human agents into a viable, coherent, collective organism that was capable of translating the absence of community radio into a force of social change. The Radio Defiance Campaign was a small but significant factor in community organizing that eventually toppled the apartheid regime.
It has been argued that communication technology is a critical factor for influencing social organization and change. But technology is simply one factor among many. Social change is too complex and too subtle to be explained in reductionist terms of media and message. Grand theories tend to ignore the socio-historical contexts. Social change involves an interaction of social, cultural and economic forces as well as scientific and technological influences.
One grand theory about the digital divide suggests that the marginalized will remain silent until they have direct access to the Internet and they have mastered the skills necessary to use the technology effectively. But the example of the Zapatista Movement in Chiapas Mexico suggests otherwise. The manner in which the Zapatista rebellion was covered on the Internet has become one of the most successful examples of the use of computer communications by grassroots social movements. Local Zapatista support was well established in Chiapas. And the human connections with multiple communities outside Southern Mexico was a growing phenomenon. There was no sophisticated ICT network in Chiapas. There were no skilled technicians to wire these connections. There was no government grant or NGO benefactor to underwrite this project.
Gustav Guldberg and Johannes Sundén, "Pirates and Merchants - An Ongoing Struggle on the Hightech Seas"
http://www.msi.vxu.se/forskn/exarb/2004/04106.pdf.
"A BRIEF BUT INCOMPLETE HISTORY OF BOOTLEGS"
http://log.on.ca/hotwacks/zhist.html
Geoff Boucher, "Mix tapes: Piracy or talent mother lode?"
www.chicagotribune.com/technology/ chi-030430epmixtapes,1,5446515.story
"Screen Digest - Global Media Intelligence" | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Digital bridges : developing countries in the knowledge economy / John Senyo C. Afele. (Business HD30.2 .A35 2003)
Cultural rights in a global world / [editors], Anura Goonasekera, Cees Hamelink, Venkat Iyer. (Lehman JC571 .C745 2003g)
Civilizing the Internet : global concerns and efforts toward regulation / Joseph Migga Kizza. (Science HM221 .K588 1998)
Borders in cyberspace : information policy and the global information infrastructure / edited by Brian Kahin and Charles Nesson. (Lehman K4305.4 .B67 1997)
Globalization of services : some implications for theory and practice / by Y. Aharoni and L. Nachum (eds.). (Business HD9980.5 .G58 2000)
Valuation of intangible assets in global operations / edited by Farok J. Contractor. (Business HF5681.I55 V36 2001)
"Authors' Rights in Light of New Technologies," Howard B. Abrams. American Journal of Comparative Law Vol 38 1990 p. 283
Sony v. Universal: US Supreme Court Betamax Decision January 1984
http://www.virtualrecordings.com/betamax.htm
The Piracy "Industry"
http://world-information.org/wio/infostructure/100437611725/100438659531/?ic=100446326327
World Intellectual Property Organization
http://www.wipo.int/
The Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre was founded in 1990 at St. Peter’s College through a generous gift from the Hitachi Corporation. The Centre's mission is to facilitate and conduct advanced research into all aspects of Intellectual Property, particularly the proper role of intellectual property in the light of the new technologies. The Centre's present and future projects include the conduct of long-term interdisciplinary research aimed at involving researchers drawn from not only the law faculty but also those of economics and management.
http://www.oiprc.ox.ac.uk/Aim.html
"INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY: WHERE’S THE WORLD GOING?" David Vaver. A seminar paper presented on January 19 1999, in St. Peter’s College, Oxford
From today’s perspective, it is easy to think that the Internet must have caused the internationalization of IP law, but the proposition has only euphony on its side. The growth of world trade and of digital communication networks has created a corresponding demand for IP to become more internationalized more quickly, but internationalization as a project was firmly in place by the beginning of the 20th century...
Copyright goes back to early 18th century. It first protected books, then expanded to cover various forms of art, drama & music. In the 20th century, copyright has expanded to cover almost anything written, drawn, or expressed in any way. The doodling of toddlers and business letters written in commercialese are all protected alongside the works of Francis Bacon and Joanna Trollope. The protection covers copying in any dimension, public performance, broadcast, sometimes even renting. The protection lasts a long time, some say too long. From a maximum of 28 years in the 18th century, copyrights today can easily last well over a century - the life of the author plus 70 years is now the European norm and since 1998, also that of the US...
Thirty years ago, Benjamin Kaplan concluded his examination of plagiarism and copyright law with the observation that
"when copyright has gone wrong in recent times, it has been by taking itself too seriously, by foolish assumptions about the amount of originality open to man as an artificer, by sanctimonious pretensions about the iniquities of imitation. I confess myself to be more worried about excessive than insufficient protection, and follow Voltaire in thinking that plagiarism, even at its worst, 'est assurément de tous les larcins le moins dangereux pour la société.'"
Anthony Murphy, "Queen Anne and Anarchhists: Can Copyright Survive in the Digital Age?" Tuesday 26 February 2002
"Nor should we think that the idealised view that Cyberspace is - and should remain - a lawless, unfettered environment is confined to students surfing the 'Net for free music in a frenzy of Angst, Alco-pops, and acne. Because that view is as old as the 'Net itself, part of its underlying philosophy and motivation. People like Ian Clarke and Justin Frankel and Linus Torvalds, and indeed Shawn Fanning, should be seen not as looking forward but rather harking back to a Golden Age. John Clare [the 'Peasant Poet' who railed against the enclosures] would have clasped them to his bosom." 3
"Amid the fuss and frenzy surrounding the Internet and the e-commerce explosion we tend to forget that in the last quarter of the nineteenth century the electric telegraphy - basis of what has been the 'Victorian Internet' - and the triple expansion steam engine were creating what today we would with all the smugness of the living call an Information Society or a Knowledge Economy - new international markets for literature and music which necessitated a new international framework of copyright law. The Berne Convention in 1886, the foundation-stone of today's international copyright system, was the result." 5
Eugene Volokh, "Cheap Speech and What It Will Do," Yale Law Journal Vol. 104 No. 7
"1. Democratization and Diversification: Many more speakers will be able to make their speech widely available, including many who can't afford to do so today; and listeners will have much more choice than they have now. 2. The Shift of Power Away from Intermediaries: Control over what is said and heard will shift from intermediaries - publishers, bookstore and music store owners, and so on - to speakers and listeners themselves. Private parties will thus find it harder to use their market power to stifle speech. Listeners will find it easier to become well informed about the issues in which they're interested. On the other hand, it will be easier for people to choose only the information they know they want, and to ignore other topics and other views. And the extra diversity of speech may reduce social and cultural tension." 1807
"Ease of Being Closed-Minded: On the other hand, part of the value of the mass media is that they expose readers to topics and viewpoints the readers didn't select. A reader who thinks he doesn't care about science might come across a science story on the front page and find it interesting. A liberal reader may stumble across a conservative column in his daily paper and be persuaded by it. Yet the reader might not have subscribed to either story if he'd had the choice." 1834
Peter Manuel, "The Cassette Industry and Popular Music in North India," Popular Music Vol 10 No. 2 p. 189
"Since the early 1970s the advent of cassette technology has had a profound effect on music industries worldwide. This influence has been particularly marked in the developing world, where cassettes have largely replaced vinyl records and have extended their impact into regions, classes and genres previously uninfluenced by the mass media. Cassettes have served to decentralise and democratise both production and consumption, thereby counterbalancing the previous tendency toward oligopolisation of international commercial recording industries." 189 | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Here is an oral history of Mischa Schwartz, a Columbia prof in Electrical Engineering. I want to take his class "History of Telecommunications" next semester, but it looks like he might be the history he's teaching. This guy was there with his nodes in all the right places, after the war, gyroscopes, ARPAnet -- working on the earliest dispersed networks through the Dept of Defense and the university system. Yo, check it:
http://www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center/oral_histories/transcripts/mschwartz.html | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | Current Music: | billy liar | | Time: | 10:36 am |
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| Taking over the means of production is different when the most significant systems are:
A. communications - the traffic is in information - words, images, signals vs tractors, guns, natural resources
B. digital - low barriers to entry, almost zero marginal cost of production/replication
C. distributed - a dispersed network allows greater access
The system itself, as a whole, is much less vulnerable than traditional broadcasting, so its momentum might be unaffected by actions that target any piece of it. Anyway, we don't want to destroy the communication system so long as it is not an authoritarian one-way transmission (like 1984's telescreens, or the old days of the Big Three networks). Its freedom and its sensitivity lay it open to massive manipulation.
Audre Lorde says, "You can't dismantle the master's house using the master's tools." This is what Marxists have been recommending for a long time. So far it has not amounted to much**, but the tools change over time. Some means have different qualities from others. "The medium is the message," as they like to say.
**To see the difficulties that arise when such a thing does happen, check out this article on Argentine workers who took over abandoned factories after their nation's economy collapsed. "Occupying, Resisting, Producing," by Andres Gaudin
"Using the Master's Tools," by Sanya Sarnavka. www.awid.org/publications/gen_dev/sarnavka.pdf | | comments: Leave a comment |
| "Zero degree architecture is a field of the meaningless, a series of signals, a code reductive in individual signs and complex in its multitudinous instructions. Yet the architecture and spaces of the modern city are not wholly constraining, for there is a contradiction between the homogenizing reduction of space by business, and the open differentiation of urban space in the city as a whole -- and it is this contradiction that skateboaring works within. While advertisements and controlled spaces contribute to the 'terrorism' of everyday life, part of the intensification of the everyday as a mode of production and of administering society, skateboarding offers both an apparently non-commercial realm of compensation and a confrontation of the instructive mechanics of signals.
'There are no more white lines to stay within, sidewalks to conform to or bases to tag. It's all an open highway with hydrants, curbs, bumpers, shopping carts, door handles and pedestrians.'
Skateboaring counters signal architecture with a body-centric and multi-sensory performative activity, and with an indifference to function, price and regulation, creating new patterns of space and time, and turning the signals of the city into ephemeral symbols of everyday meaning and duration." 229
"More conceptually, the main ground that this theoretized history of skateboaring opens up seems to me to be the question of how to construct a materialist history of the experience of architecture. In particular, how can one relate the specific phenomenal procedures by which people engage with the built world to the ideological and material processes which condition them? In particular, is there a correlation between walking, talking, breathing, listening and so forth in the same way that has begun to be understood for vision and the gaze? It may well be, then, that further theoretical study of the encounter and debate between existentialism, phenomenology and Marxism in the 1950s would be a fruitful arena of further theoretical study. How might, for example, we relate Merleau-Ponty's assertions that the body 'contributes more than it receives,' and that 'movement, touch, vision' are all part of the paradox of expression,' to the strictures and demands of the modern capitalist city?" 266 | | comments: Leave a comment |
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