<nettime> Re: (Fwd) Re: <.nettime> Terror in Tune Town

[Treevibes@aol.com]

Intellectual Property -- Valid for all People:

Creative expression is a unique human ability and gift.  The subject matters 
for creative expression are of course infinite on one hand, but on the other 
can be conceived of as variations on uniform eternal aspects of human 
condition.  All That Is exists for everybody.  Perception - how All That Is 
filters into individuals through layers of unique experience, personality and 
creative gifts - is where artistic distinctiveness begins to bud.

That one is then moved to Express that perception creatively, is the next 
step.  Whether a person is driven to produce and produce creative expressions 
of whatever fuels it, or a person spends a lifetime writing one book, or 
writes a single song and goes to work every day as an accountant, artistic 
product has a personal stamp on it that should rightfully be acknowledged in 
the scope of eternity as having been produced by that particular person at 
that point in time and space.  A person took her perception of All That Is 
and did this with it as a creative outlet that now exists as something to 
experience in physical reality.  The ownership of the product is ownership of 
an aspect of one's essential identity.  Artistic product is a co-mingling of 
one's eternal self -- the spark that lights your body and your eyes, the part 
that intuits meaning and essence and creative extrapolation of what IS - with 
the physical self -- the voice -- that exists and feels and experiences and 
has physical abilities through which to express this co-mingling.

We all have abilities, we all have and warrant rights to our creative, 
artistic products -- our "intellectual property."  In addition, authorship of 
artistic product that is sought as entertainment warrants ownership not on 
the basis of pride or even acknowledgement of unique essence and creative 
capability, but for the service it provides.  Entertainment improves the 
quality of life.  Compensation for improving life for others seems a healthy 
way of perpetuating good things in life and the world in a natural give and 
take flow.  Restated, the absence of compensation for things that improve the 
quality of life for so many people on the planet, seems like withholding 
nourishment for what nourishes us.  It seems like a conscious effort to 
stifle or halt that which we would - I would hope - want to perpetuate in 
fuller and richer ways -- to bring us increased pleasure in a reciprocal 
feeding cycle that has been coined in other contexts as a "sustainable 
environment."  A "sustainable environment" is one which supports itself as a 
whole.  Thus, ecologically speaking, all the elements of food chains and 
nature cycles are present within a specified ecosystem; community-wise, the 
needs are met within a single community from food to services to 
entertainment to love to personal fulfillment and expression, for its 
successful peaceful existence and growth forever.  Balance, equal ability to 
give and take from various arms of the community, and such harmonious 
abilities on all levels are necessary for the optimal prototype of a 
sustainable environment.

RE: 
"My concern is that if you can't 'propertise' the information, then all
power resides with whoever owns the vector. The pipe -- the part that
is still physical and material property -- will be where the power lies.
The pipe guys will be king. 

This surely is the other part of the corporate bet hedging that's been
going on for 10 years now. Besides securing stocks and flows of
information, the biggies have been suring up their grasp of the vectors.
If copyright law is strong, they win because they won the content. If
copyright law is weak, they win, because they own the vector."


This is true of the corporate status quo (pipe ownership and copyright 
fencing) -- which, as we all know, is flailing.  The Napster order of 
yesterday is a joke in the long run -- a bandaid on a leaking dam.  The truth 
is that the pipe is not ownable anymore.  Let's use our anger at the 
historical status quo, our self-recognition as voices in the spectrum of time 
and space, at uniform rights to unique creative output -- intellectual 
property - and its varying value and contribution to a better world (measured 
by how sought-after it is?) -- and peacefully and cheerfully evolve new modes 
of compensation and ownership and new technologies to defend these rights and 
reshape the scared corporate illusionary power.
L

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