To the meat of b.TWEEN 08 then, where individuals from across the media and technology industries (and a few artists) gather to share ideas. My plan for these sessions is that each half day to do a write-up of some of the more interesting discussions that I think have wide appeal. If you’re keen to follow along live, you can watch some of the sesssion via webcast completely free of charge – be warned your messages in the text box at the bottom appear in front of an audience. Be nice.
After short intros from Tony Hill, Director of MOSI, and Katz Kiely of Just-b Productions we got into the first talk of the day by Cory Doctorow.
Cory is well known within geek circles. As a co-editor of boingboing.net and regular contributor to The Guardian he is bordering on outright fame, not just infamy, but his schtick for some years has been around copyright law, Digital Rights/Restrictions Management and how in the modern era large entertainment companies (and some small ones as well) seem to be approaching the Internet in completely the wrong way.
His talk dived in and out of many topics around his core theme: DRM is easy to break, but in the US and EU it is illegal to discuss how to do it, or for anybody to tell you who you should ask to tell you how to do it; ‘take down’ notices of copyright material on file-sharing networks don’t seem to work – as Cory puts it “you can’t get the food dye out of the swimming pool once it’s in there”; the wonder of being able to share producing open source software projects, a little akin to thousands of people turning up on a construction site with whatever they have to hand and building a perfect skyscraper over twenty years; and, how open sharing has unforseen results that are to the benefit of society.
As an example of sharing and collaboration producing something greater than the sum of the whole, he pointed to the example of tags being used to collaborate in ways we could never have imagined before they were put to use. For the last four years he has been following the flickr.com tag ‘decay‘. Each day, 100 to 200 photos are posted with that tag wide in scope, and so each day a new photo essay is produced of hundreds of photos around a common theme. Every tag is like this to some extent, and I have to confess to being regularly fascinated by the photos I find at ‘manchester‘.
Cory feels strongly that the increasing trend of companies attempting to define what can and can’t be done in this space is something we should resist. To him, it makes sense for copyright to be reformed not because he is an anarchist, but because it produces a much richer cultural landscape that will actually make more money for the artists involved: the biggest enemy to writers, musicians and other artists is not piracy, but obscurity.
Dim Sum Digital 