[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> "China:Imitation Nation"-Salon

[Francis Hwang <sera@fhwang.net>]

Just because copyright is becoming an anachronism doesn't mean people 
should starve to be artists. It just means that the payment 
mechanisms we have aren't going to work. We'll need alternatives.

One alternative is called the Street Performer Protocol, and you can 
read a technical paper by security guru Bruce Schneier and John 
Kelsey here:

http://www.counterpane.com/street_performer.pdf

In a nutshell, artists post applications which describe a work and 
how much money they need to be paid to do such a thing and release it 
into the general public. People log into a system, decide whether or 
not to donate some money. Eventually the amount is met and the work 
is released to the general public, or the amount is not met and the 
donaters get their money back. Think of it as a distributed-grant 
process.

Part of the problem has been because solutions like this route around 
the language of commercial transactions and start to sound a lot like 
communal action. Our political imaginations are so atrophied that we 
can't imagine the possibility of anything other than the familiar 
atomized consumer-to-corporation interaction. "You mean I would join 
with others to help fund something that eventually would be released 
to everybody, including people who never paid anything? I don't know, 
sounds sort of socialist to me ... "

But we'll need to start thinking this way, soon. With increasing 
computing power and bandwidth (I'm not pitching a Gilder-esque 
telecosm scenario, just observing that lots of people have enough 
bandwidth to file-share MP3s today), we can no longer treat data as 
if its distribution can be controlled. If you put an artistic 
expression in a digital reproducible form, it becomes less like a 
physical object and more like a natural resource.

Think of oxygen. No society would ever want its citizens to be forced 
to buy oxygen out of individually wrapped containers. Yet oxygen, 
like all resources, has a limit, and it's a society's responsibility 
to make sure there's enough oxygen around. You can't let people chop 
down all the trees, and you can't let industries build too many power 
plants.

Francis

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