The financial crisis: what does it mean for the creative industries, the arts, the cultural sector in the UK? Our friends John Kieffer and Shelagh Wright, along with John Newbigin and John Holden have put together a rather fabulous little collection of essays looking at this very question. Running to a 100 pages, After the Crunch features essays by a whole bunch of luminaries - artists, entrepreneurs, thought leaders and the like - including Clay Shirky, Tony Hall, Charles Leadbeater, Richard Florida and Chris Smith.

We're also in there, having contributed a sawn-off version of our essay-in-development The Trouble With Poetry, which we first rolled out as a presentation for IT4Arts back in March.

There's a limited edition of the book available, handsomely designed by Elmwood. If you can't track down a copy, you can download a PDF of it here.
Simon

It's all music and IPR today...

Yes, we go on a lot here about Trent Reznor (amusingly, we're not even especially big fans) but for good reason: no-one else in contemporary popular music is quite as vocal (and articulate), visible and imaginative in their engaging with the new recorded - and, increasingly, live - music business. In this intelligent and honest post on the NIN forum, Reznor explains his take on the whole practice of ticket scalping (or, for the UK, touting) - and the somewhat furtive role of promoters and artists in it.

At the other end of the, er, hard rock spectrum, meanwhile, it looks as though a Guns N' Roses/Chinese Democracy uploader may well go to jail for his misdemeanors. The interesting thing in this Register articleis the disparity between the RIAA's calculation of lost revenue and the CIA's, the latter coming in at a third of the former. (We're sure NN Taleb would have something to say about either calculation. We're also pretty sure that whatever the true figure, Chinese Democracy's poor sales are the result of several phenomena, among them an audience which has moved on and an media environment which has rather more distractions than in the late 80s. Oh, and that it's a piss poor piece of work.)

The World Service's excellent Business Daily took an appreciative and intelligent look at Spotify this morning.

We are loving ThuYou, Israeli collage artist & musician-composer Kutiman's video project, essentially an EP of pieces made entirely from (utterly unrelated) clips on YouTube. It's a thrilling piece of appropriation-art, an essay in creative IPR-abuse... but, perhaps rather more significantly,  a collection of joyful funk pieces and soul ballads. Check the CREDITS link to see a creative attribution at work. Lovely.

This excellent and clear-thinking/straight-talking editorial in the Telegraph takes apart the push from the European record industry to extend the copyright term in sound recordings from 50 to 95 years.

Wall Street Journal Europe reports that Guy Hands has stepped down as CEO of Terra Firma in the face of investors' anger over the EMI, well, fiasco.

And finally, a bit after the fact, I'm afraid, but here's Norman Lebrecht reflecting on Dutch station Radio 4's free Bernard Haitink downloads and how they rather show up the BBC's "capitulation" to the UK record industry in the wake of Radio 3's Beethoven downloads success/scandal (delete as your standpoint dictates... you know where we probably stand).
Simon

Also in the news today...

In a move not dissimilar to the BBC's launch of Backstage a little while back, The Guardian has announced that it will be opening up some of its back-end as part of the Open Platform project.

Nielsen's evidence of the rise and rise of social networking has been making headlines everywhere. Here's Hypebot's brief take on it.

A UK gov campaign aimed at getting parents to take their kids' health a little more seriously has provoked a storm of protest from the UK games industry for a pretty daft poster portraying a kid sitting on a sofa, clutching (a barely disguised) PS controller under the headline Risk an Early Death, Just Do Nothing.

Rory-Cellan Jones has interviewed Media Molecule co-founder Mark Healey about Little Big Planet for the BBC's excellent dot.life blog.

U2 go from intellectual strength to strength by, to all intents and purposes, ditching their relationship with Apple because of their indirect investment in the Palm Pre. The regular reader will be unsurprised to learn that Bob Lefsetz is pretty amusing on the matter.

Lord Carter has announced the launch of a Digital Rights Agency to help the digital media industry sort out ownership and distribution issues and "combat illegal file sharing". Somehow or other.

Oh, and follow-ups on the YouTube/PRS fall-out... The Guardian asks whether MySpace will be next... and the Times has dusted off a story from January, in which the PRS's pursuit of public performance licence revenue seemed to be getting a little, er, heavy-handed.
Simon

There's been an awful lot of coverage of the news that YouTube is taking down a whole load of "premium" pop promo videos from its UK service in response to the Performing Rights Society's demand for higher rates of compensation. Depending on one's standpoint it's either all about the UK recording/publishing industry greed/short-sightedness/desperation (delete as appropriate) or its quite correct defense of artists' rights.

It could also, quite plausibly, be about the fact that YouTube still can't find a way of making any money from streaming such things.

Anyway, over the course of the day we've tracked the story on The Register, The Guardian, Hypebot and the BBC among others. Make your own mind up.
Simon

Does the Street do your job better than the Court?... Oh, and what does this mean for art dammit?

Answer: yes – but a. only because the Court is so restricted by, er, the Court and b. only so far...

OK, some terms-defining for a kick off. When we say ‘The Street’ here. We’re obviously borrowing heavily from William Gibson, who, in his now-famous and hugely insightful essay Rocket Radio claimed that ‘The Street finds its own uses for things - uses the manufacturers never imagined.’

The Street we identify here is The Web and with we’ve termed above Social Norms. Its ‘opposite’ we set up as the Court (of the royal type – though the legal kind has a rich role to play here too) or, if you prefer, Industry, The Market. The Law.

What we set out to look at in this last section are ways in which, in the arts sector at least, the Street is often doing the job one might actually expect of the Court, precisely because the latter is beholden to laws so often circumnavigated by the Street.

What kinds of ‘jobs’ are we talking about here then?
•    Invention of new business models
•    Archiving or building bodies of knowledge and collections of content
•    Curation – a more ‘flavoured’ kind of archiving, giving context and meaning to an archive. And closely related…
•    Education – for both arts practitioners and consumers
•    Effective Contracts or Rules of engagement

It’s worth pointing out upfront that you’ll notice what we’re not talking about here are the rights and wrongs of uploading, downloading or – ahem – piracy. Of course, as a practice, the unauthorised consumption, sharing or manipulation of another’s copyrighted material undercuts everything in this presentation. But we’re trying to broaden the picture here. Yes, another month, another P2P cause celebre; this month, stand up Pirate Bay trial!

Next month… well something else - perhaps YouTube vs PRS. This stuff is the battleground, of course, but essentially we work from the position that this poop will sort itself out… that the law will catch up with the norms, the court with the street… even if there’s a lot of pain in the working out.

Rather, what’s interesting to us is what could be done by the arts sector in a world in which these issues have - to a greater or lesser degree - been put to bed; and clues about that can be gleaned from what the Street is up to – now.

But for an example of the street sorting out some great business ideas at work, check out Nine Inch Nails, whom we’ve talked about elsewhere. In this video, Michael Masnick talks a MidemNet audience through some of Trent Reznor’s activity around the Nine Inch Nails album Ghosts I - IV.

A recap on that then…

•    The full album (of 36 tracks) released as downloads under a Creative Commons licence.
•    The first 9 tracks released for free – in high quality.
•    For $5 you can download the lot
•    For $10 you can buy an standard double CD
•    For $75 the deluxe set with extra materials
•    For $300 asuper deluxe set - limited to  2500 (which sold out in 30 hours, making $750,000 alone off of music he was giving away elsewhere!)
Additional activity included …
•    Encouraging remixes by the public by releasing mix elements
•    Leaving full album copies on memory sticks geo-cached at various locations (apparently mostly male public lavatories)
•    Pictures taken by the public aggregated on the band’s official website
•    Alternate Reality Games
•    HD video

As an aside here, we ask: where is the value in your proposition? Is it quality? Scarcity? ‘Keep-ness'? The copy itself? Re-sale? Personal enhancement of the user's reputation? A short answer might be: all of the above. But if Reznor’s approach to business models seems promiscuous we have to say at this point in time, experimentation with your business seems like the best policy.

Now, onto Archiving, Curation etc…Let's talk about video artist and tuntablist-improviser Christian Marclay. We've chosen CM because his art is already made up of others’ art, so it’s an essay on cultural ownership in itself… but that’s not necessarily what we’re going to be talking about…

Here's a little documentary about him:

And here he is in performance:

Now think about this. Less than a generation ago, easy access to a documentary film about an underground musician would have been unthinkable. Ditto easy access to a TV performance. Note that the videos above are accessible because a member of the public - someone from the Street - has uploaded their own recording of these shows.

This starts to look even more extreme when looking for a representation of Marclay's ingenious video work Video Quartet. Here's an excert from it, in the form of a clandestine film of it made by a member of the public while it was installed at the Tate Modern in London.

On the Tate site, I'm afraid all you'll come across is some information about the piece; essentially: metadata. The Tate are restricted by legal considerations not taken that seriously, or just not part of the community's norms of the person shooting the video.

Which brings us to "The Seashell Problem".

Let us explain, again through example. Some weeks ago, BBC Radio 1's electronica DJ Mary Anne Hobbes made a show about the exciting electronic dance music currently emanating from the West Coast of the US. If you go to MAH's showpage on the Radio 1 site, you can no longer listen to the show; the 7 day post-broadcast "window" for on-demand listening via the BBC iPlayer has well and truly lapsed, the 'rights' the BBC have purchased have expired. Note that at the site you can look at a tracklisting for the show. As before, a home-made video doc MAH made while out in the US is available on YouTube and linked to from the Radio 1 show. Here it is:

So there's no sign of the original show, but a whole lot of 'collateral' content. That's what we call the Seashell: when only the record of something's existence remains - the living thing itself long disappeared.

Here's another example from Radio 1. Again, a few weeks ago, legendary UK electro-funk DJ Greg Wilson played a Radio 1 Essential Mix. And once again, at the showpage, you can find a full tracklisting, and, perhaps even more tanatalisingly, hundreds of comments from listeners saying what a fantastic show it was. Again: only the Seashell remains.

Funnily enough though, if you go to Wilson's Facebook page you'll notice a link to a site hosting a download of the entire set. Just to ram the point home: the Street is, again, way ahead of the Court.

One last example, non-BBC this time. The Saturday night Live Christopher Walken/Don't Fear the Reaper sketch became a cult phenomenon a few years ago when recording of it started appearing on YouTube. 'Gotta Have More Cowbell' became something of a po-mo catchphrase.

Now, almost inevitably, it's pretty difficult to find the original. (Although there seems to be a tiny and lo-res version of it here.) My guess is that lawyers have been all over this like an especially nasty rash. But, what you will be able to find, if you Google, say, 'more cowbell', is dozens of User Generated Content clips skitting the original skit.

For instance, hand-held footage of a high school concert skit:

Or this dance music piece made up of samples from the sketch:

Oh, and here's a couple of guys just jerking around in their basement… but mashed up with the original skit:

So what other roles, normally thought of as jobs for cultural institutions, are being done effectively by the Street.

Well, how about education?

In previous workshops for music educationalists, we've explored how the web enables a new form of peer mentoring. One of our favourite instances of this is how young kids are now learning to play extremely complex guitar parts from songs by Swedish math-metallers Meshuggah. In each of the examples below, look at the comments and see how, to all intents and purposes, there's instant peer feedback and review. Sure, much of the language is robust, and some of the comments merely inflammatory, but at their best these kids are helping each other to learn with incredible speed. Here are two high school kids playing the rhythm parts to (Meshuggah guitarist) Frederik Thordendal's mesmerisingly complex metal-jazz piece Sol Niger Within:

And here's young Samuel from Brazil trying his hand at the same piece.

And here's Achokarlos, from Spain, performing Meshuggah's Combustion in his bedroom - just a week after this track had been released. Check the eyebrow action. Remember in each case these young guitarists are ripping off their heroes' music - breaking the law - so that they can learn the music they love - fast.

So how do all these issues about IP and creativity affect Art itself? This presentation has been largely about the implications of IPR for arts organisations, but let's leave off with a little bit about art itself, and go out with a couple of anecdotes.

•    Negativland vs U2 – where art is made about the art/IP relationship
•    Jimme Rodgers – where one man’s business dealings very possibly altered the course of 20th Century popular music

From Wikipedia:

Negativland's next project was the infamous U2 EP, with samples from American Top 40 host Casey Kasem. In 1991, Negativland released a single with the title ‘U2’ displayed in very large type on the front of the packaging, and ‘Negativland’ in a smaller typeface. An image of the Lockheed U-2 spy plane was also on the single cover.The songs within were parodies of the group U2's well-known 1987 song, ‘I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For’, including kazoos and extensive sampling of the original song.

The song ‘The Letter U And The Numeral 2’ features a musical backing to an extended profane rant from well-known disc jockey Casey Kasem, lapsing out of his more polished and professional tone during a frustrating rehearsal which had gone out to many stations as raw feed and was taped by several engineers, who had been passing it around for a number of years. One of Kasem's milder comments was ‘These guys are from England and who gives a shit?’ (U2's members are in fact from the Republic of Ireland).U2's label Island Records quickly sued Negativland, claiming that placing the word ‘U2’ on the cover violated trademark law, as did the song itself. Island Records also contended that the single was an attempt to deliberately confuse U2 fans, awaiting the impending release of Achtung Baby, into purchasing what they believed was a new U2 album called Negativland.

In June, 1992, R. U. Sirius, publisher of the magazine Mondo 2000, came up with an interesting idea. Publicists from U2 had contacted him regarding the possibility of interviewing Dave ‘The Edge’ Evans, hoping to promote U2's impending multi-million dollar Zoo TV Tour, which featured found sounds and live sampling from mass media outlets (things for which Negativland had been known for some time). Sirius, unbeknownst to Edge, decided to have his friends Joyce and Hosler of Negativland conduct the interview. Joyce and Hosler, fresh from Island's lawsuit, peppered the Edge with questions regarding his ideas about the use of sampling in their new tour, and the legality of using copyrighted material without permission. Midway through the interview, Joyce and Hosler revealed their identities as members of Negativland. An embarrassed Edge reported that U2 were bothered by the sledgehammer legal approach Island Records took in their lawsuit, and furthermore that much of the legal wrangling took place without U2's knowledge: ‘by the time we [U2] realized what was going on it was kinda too late, and we actually did approach the record company on your [Negativland's] behalf and said, 'Look, c'mon, this is just, this is very heavy...''

That says it all, really. Here's an edit of the song.

And here's a version by avant-doo-wop (?!) group the 180 Gs, taking Casem's words, turning 'em into doo wop lines and spinning them over a Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For backing.

Unpick the IP issues in that!

And finally, an anecdote about the (arguable) father of modern country music, Jimme Rodgers, from the excellent Faking It - The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music by Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor.

Prior to Rodgers, most popular song had not been personal or especially confessional - with some noble exceptions. But the influence of Rodgers' autobiographical songwriting on Woody Guthrie and, through Guthrie, Bob Dylan and even John Lennon, helped make personal authenticity in songwriting de rigeur in the second half of the 20th Century.

Rodgers was not especially fixated on performing autobiographical songs; they were simply part of his repertoire. But his A&R man, Ralph Peer, had different motivations. His deal with the record company, Victor, was a publishing only one. 'Peer was completely uninterested in songs whose provenance was known and established, for he himself could make no money on these.'

It might be a bit of a leap to say that the entire trajectory of 20th Century popular song was affected quite so massively by, essentially, an Intellectual Property assertion, but then again, maybe not...
Simon

Making property out of ideas

Essentially, Intellectual Property can be protected by law in three main ways:

•    Patents
•    Copyright
•    Trade Secrecy

These laws are designed to create a property value from particular kinds of creativity thus enabling a market economy to be built on top. These ‘properties’ can be sold and licensed and therefore generate financial value. This cash value functions as a great incentive for creators to continue to create, of this there’s no reasonable doubt.

But there’s an important fourth type of protection/incentive that does not use law as its basis: social based ‘Norms’ which are more likely to found at street level than in the courtroom. Here’s a useful grid Eric Von Hippel made to help define the differences between these systems:

(Click for larger version)

So what the hell do we mean, ‘norms’? Well, think about a social norm relevant to our discussion here : a mum back in the 80s was very unlikely to tell her child that taping a mates’ LPs was a bad thing. (Simon includes his own mother here – and she worked in the record industry!) - yet the music industry were putting enormous efforts in to try to educate their users that what was wrong in law ought to feel wrong for them too.

Another very different 'Norm' noted by Eric von Hippel, Professor and Head of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management in his paper Norms-based intellectual property systems: the case of French chefs.

He found that although the law could potentially protect the creativity of chefs through ‘Trade Secrets’ legislation, none of them used the law or even considered it an option. Instead they established their own norms based system, though not necessarily in a premeditated way.

These are some of the norm based rules he found:

Norm 1: It is not honorable for chefs to exactly copy recipes developed by other chefs.

Norm 2: a chef who asks for and is given proprietary information by a colleague will not pass that information on to others without permission

Norm 3: One has a right to be acknowledged as the author of a recipe one has created.

Whatever you do, don't defy the norms! French chefs who do are well and truly ostracised.

One chef whose former student did – and on TV! - wrote this to the non-attributor:

‘Sir: First, I must tell you that seeing on TV a former employee showing things I have taught him is a real pleasure. Unfortunately this pleasure was brief, as your presentation has revealed a rare ingratitude.  Never did I hear you say what you owe to the master I have been for you. You should admit that presenting recipes that are mine and that I taught you without referring to my name constitutes an unacceptable indelicacy.  ...   I hope that in your future presentations you will repair these errors and shall credit me with what I have taught to you. Only after this honest acknowledgement will I be happy that you receive a share of my notoriety.’

Strong stuff – if elegant. Very French.

And here’s another chef:
‘[If someone were to violate an important norm], ...my esteem for the guy becomes very low. I think the chef has no self-esteem, and does not respect the code of honor.’

(As an aside, have a look though some of the cookery books on your shelves; this kind of acknowledgment is practiced pretty widely, isn’t it?  We’re very keen on Madhur Jaffrey’s interventions. One at random: ‘I got this recipe several years ago from the mother of the Darbar Sahib of Jasdan’, she says of The Rajmata of Jasdan’s Steamed Peanut Diamonds in a Garlic-Onion Sauce.’)

This turning away from the law of the ‘courts’ is apparent in other important creative disciplines. A study by Walsh in 2005 found that only 5% of Biomedical researchers working in universities, governmental or non-profit organisations bothered to check whether their work might be infringing upon existing patents. Their conclusion was that the ‘law on the books’ need not be the same as ‘law in action’ if the law on the books contravenes and community’s norms and values.

So then, it becomes clear that Wendy Cope was very much focussing on the ‘Law’ in her argument about people ripping off her poetry and making the somewhat hopeful jump that the ‘Law’ and ‘Social Norms’ do or should act the same way.

But there is a very strong reason why they don’t… and why these regulatory worlds can act completely in parallel – often without having much to do with each other at all.

Let’s look at some reasons why this is the case.

The first reason why these worlds often exist in parallel universes is that, as we know from our own everyday lives – for most people, and many organisations, the protection of the law is simply out of kilter with the way they live their lives – too costly, too slow, overly complicated and often impenetrable. IP law is governed by Civil Law and requires the injured party to Sue, thereby employing lawyers and potentially spending considerable time and money - much simpler and cheaper to rely on the 'rules' of the street, the honour code of those around you. 

Secondly, and I think more importantly, the reason that the law and the norms can end up so different is because they are there to serve two very different economies. One is the very familiar ‘Market Economy’ where things can be bought and sold thanks to the protections of the law. The other, more exotic perhaps, is the ‘Gift Economy,’ more often regulated by social norms. Both enable ideas, services and products to be exchanged, but there are significant differences.

(Click for larger version.)

Why should the gift economy exist at all – why can’t the market place be the place for all of our exchanges? Well, for one thing it seems there are things we instinctively find it troublesome to sell: sex, perhaps, or babies, or body parts, or votes all lead to ethical dilemnas.

Not only are there some things we’d rather not sell, there are some exchanges which just work better within a ‘gift economy’. A classic example is commercial blood donor systems, which generally produce blood supplies of lower safety, purity and potency than volunteer systems.

Another beneficiary of the gift economy is Alcoholics Anonymous, an organisation that exists solely through members’ contributions (the program itself is free); it’s widely perceived that the charging of fees would cut out the motivating factor of communal gratitude – a major source of AA’s energy.

Although both of these economies have been around as long as humans have needed each other, each new technology has enhanced the capacity, speed and reach and has successively drawn new users in. Most recently the internet has been a massive accelerator of both systems. On the one hand all manner of shops and services have taken advantage of this accelerated global market economy – on the other new human endeavours like the communal creativity of Wikipedia have taken advantage of the souped-up nature of the web based gift economy.

Although these worlds are often parallel cultures – sometimes they can co-exist and be utilised by the same organisation. These hybrids don’t necessarily cancel each other out – the market and the gift economies in some form of opposition – but perhaps counter intuitively, they can often thrive.

Recently we have seen this with GlaxoSmithKline’s radical change of strategy towards the developing world. GSK’s head, Andrew Witty, picked up a huge amount of attention for announcing the slashing of drug prices in poor coutries, but his most radical proposal is to create a ‘patent pool’, allowing the development of IP owned by GSK.

 ‘The move on intellectual property, until now regarded as the sacred cow of the pharmaceutical industry, will be seen as the most radical of [Witty's] proposals. ‘I think it's the first time anybody's really come out and said we're prepared to start talking to people about pooling our patents to try to facilitate innovation in areas where, so far, there hasn't been much progress,’ he said. ‘I can't tell you how many speeches I've heard about – oh, you know – 'I wish we could make progress on TB' or 'Why haven't we got treatments for these things?' We all sit there saying well yes, it's terrible isn't it, instead of actually trying to do something about it. So … what I really hope this does is stimulate people to start engaging with us, and maybe other people to say look, actually, if you did it this way it could really work.

‘Some people might be surprised it's coming from a pharma company. Obviously people see us as very defensive of intellectual property, quite rightly, and we will be, but in this area of neglected diseases we just think this is a place where we can kind of carve out a space and see whether or not we can stimulate a different behaviour.’ He is aware that others in the pharmaceutical industry may accuse him of selling the family silver. Some people, he said, ‘are going to hate this’. But he added: ‘I do think that many CEOs of many companies do worry about this issue and do have it in their minds and who knows, maybe somebody has to move before many people move. Equally I could imagine getting a phone call saying 'What are you doing?'‘

But what place has art in this ‘gift economy’ – it clearly seems also to straddle both worlds – it can be sold and resold, it can be nothing more than an investment, its originality can be protected by law, but I suspect everyone in the room has a sneaking feeling that a large part of it always remains a gift.

Creativity is for many a gift and a privilege – the nascent creator often converted to art by art itself.

Here is a warning from a wonderful New Yorker essay - the Ecstasy of Influence - by Jonathan Lethem:

If we devalue and obscure the gift-economy function of our art practices, we turn our works into nothing more than advertisements for themselves. We may console ourselves that our lust for subsidiary rights in virtual perpetuity is some heroic counter to rapacious corporate interests. But the truth is that with artists pulling on one side and corporations pulling on the other, the loser is the collective public imagination from which we were nourished in the first place, and whose existence as the ultimate repository of our offerings makes the work worth doing in the first place.
Justin

Part 3: Does the Street do your job better than the Court?

On March 5th we gave a presentation to IT4Arts, the arts panel of the IT Livery Company; The Trouble with Poetry took a wide-ranging look at the constant interplay between art (and the business of art) and intellectual property rights to find out how the internet is affecting both. We’re reproducing our ‘script’ for it here partly for the benefit of the sessions’ attendees, partly as a capture of much of the thinking we’ve been doing on the topic over the last few months and perhaps most of all as the starting place for an entire category in this blog.

The talk was broadly divided into three parts:
•    In the deep end… with poetry
•    Making property out of ideas
•    Does the Street do your job better than the Court?

As it was such a long session we’ve split it into separate blog posts for each of the sections.

Part One: In the deep end… with poetry

We hear a lot about the record industry being the canary in the coalmine for digital media, sound files being so much smaller than video files. But text-based files are much, much, much smaller… so, without much of a fanfare at all, poetry became part of the web right from the start.

Not everyone is happy about the consequences of its pioneering spirit. Wendy Cope is outraged to find her poems all over the internet.

‘The authors of short, funny poems are especially vulnerable. Such poems have a tendency to run off on their own and detach themselves from the names of their authors.’

‘My poems are all over the internet. I've managed to get them removed from one or two sites that were major offenders, but there are dozens, if not hundreds of sites displaying poems without permission.’

‘Free publicity has no value if all that happens is that even more people download your poems from the internet without paying for them.’

That’s pretty clear on the matter, but not everyone sees it that way. Oliver Burkeman for one:

‘For a start, there's something fishy about any argument that begins from the position that poetry, which has been created and shared for millennia, depends for its flourishing on the strict application of copyright law (which dates, in any recognisable form, only to 1709). *

‘Suppose I email a Cope poem to 10 people, along with a note urging them to read it. Most recipients, presumably, will be neither more nor less likely to buy one of her books as a result. One or two, I suppose, might dislike the poem and resolve never to pay money for a collection. But of those who read the poem and respond positively, what is really more likely - that they will savour it and conclude that, having done so, they need not buy a Wendy Cope collection as they had previously been planning to do? Or that her work will strike a chord with them, prompting them, now or at some point in the future, to buy a book, for themselves or as a gift for a friend? Cope surely can't really believe that the former response is more likely than the latter, can she? Apart from anything else, what about the people who'd never even heard of Cope until the email reached them?’

(* As an aside, we were struck by Cope’s observations’ similarity to the ‘Home Taping is Killing Music’ line from the 70's and 80s. Not so much the specifics of the message: more the equation of the industry of art is the same as the art itself. It’s a common mistake; even the reliably insightful Seth Godin has made the mistake recently, as discussed briefly by Simon on DGMS.) 

Julian Gough responds to Wendy by announcing how much he appreciates the fluidity of movement the web allows:

'I wrote a story called The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble. It was the first short story ever printed in the Financial Times, for which I was paid a decent sum. (It was also published in New Writing 12, for which I was paid also.)The Financial Times put it up on their website. Now, the story is a comedy set in Somaliland, (part of the disintegrated carcass of Somalia), a territory not yet officially recognised by the UN. And a number of Somaliland websites, and websites campaigning for recognition for Somaliland, immediately ‘pirated’ it, as Wendy would see it. They copied it, and they stuck the story up on their websites, without permission.

I was delighted. I'd been paid, and this spread my story, again, to people who would never normally read me. Now, what good would it have done to order them to take it down? To enforce my ‘rights’?

Wendy, in her original article, says she's upset about people emailing a poem of hers to their friends. This seems a wildly inappropriate response. The alternative to that email is not the copyright-breacher buying ten Wendy Cope books and posting them to ten different people around the world. It's no Wendy Cope poem being sent, or read, at all, by these people, in any form.One possible response (Faber could do it for her): A polite, form email thanking those who've (mis)used one of her poems, and including a html link to the Amazon page for the relevant book. Ask them to put the link up alongside the poem.'

Meanwhile, The Reader magazine tried to do it legitimately and fell foul of errant legal nonsense.

'In the last of our poetry recommendations for this week Reader outreach worker and Reader Online editor Katie Peters chooses Simon Armitage’s ‘The Stone Beach’. She says: ‘I like stanzas 4 and 6 best, and especially the idea of living in the present but simultaneously carrying the memory of a distant past life which lives on in the present through that memory and through those who shared that life with you.’Of course we asked permission to print this poem and

Simon Armitage replied through his agent that he was happy for it to appear here, but to contact Faber, the publisher, to confirm. The agent said there was unlikely to be a problem. Unfortunately it wasn’t to be. I contacted the permissions department of Faber earlier in the week to ask if we could post the poem here. We promised of course to cite the conditions of the permission offered and it goes without saying that we would have linked to the Faber catalogue and to places where our readers could buy the collection The Universal Home Doctor, which was published in 2002.In the end on Friday I received word from Faber that we would be able to publish the poem here, but at a cost of £155 (ex. VAT, naturally). That would buy us a year of having the poem on this page, but Faber would retain the right to take it down with a month’s notice. Since we would be providing publicity for Faber*, rather than the other way around, I declined this generous offer.

(* this argument is something we see over and over in debates around IP, whether it be YouTube vs PRS or the Radio sector vs Music Labels - the question about who should pay who, promoter or creator, is never likely to be resolved)

So instead of the poem, let us all consider Faber’s permissions letter, published in full below. I’m going to be writing more on this topic in the next few days, since it seems to resonate with the mistakes made by the music industry over the last few years. I just love the bit about not ‘photocopying downloads,’ whatever that means. In the mean time if you think this document is as ridiculous as I do, feel free to contact Faber to tell them so.Fee: £155.00 plus VAT. This permission is granted for the period of one year only and we reserve the right to withdraw our permission with one month’s notice. A copyright line including the title of the work, the source of the poem, the author and Faber and Faber Ltd as the publisher must be printed, as well as a warning that photocopying downloads is against copyright law. We would also request that your web site is linked to a book shop site or our own web site [www.faber.co.uk]. Please indicate below how you wish to proceed and then return this fax to (+44) (0)20 7465 0108.If we do not receive a reply within thirty days we will assume that you have proceeded.

If after all that you still feel like reading the poem ‘The Stone Beach’ is freely available online here. Interestingly very few of the conditions imposed above have been met'

Let’s be clear about where the poem is ‘freely available’ again: The Guardian!

A quick look at PoemHunter.com – the poetry ‘piracy’ website - gives a sense of the problem’s scale. Try this:

•    Perform a quick search for Wendy Cope
•    Notice there’s there’s nothing thee!
•    Now imagine a half-remembered pub conversation about a Ted Hughes poem about a fox, or something.
•    Perform a quick search for ‘Ted Hughes fox’
•    Bingo!

There are, of course, other ways in which the web is making poetry very (or too?) accessible.  Shanna Compton, poet blogger,  says ‘Just get the poems out there’.

'The handful of print journals I’d appeared in had each arrived on the newsstand or bookstore shelf with a meager fwipple, then promptly vanished, like a half-stifled sneeze.On these emerging blogs, as well as on e-mail lists and forums, I’d finally found what I’d been looking for working in publishing, hanging around at readings, and going to grad school: other poets. Not famous ones, elder ones, teaching ones, laureate ones, or the ones with books from Knopf stocked at Barnes & Noble. The other ones. Ones like me.

But what most engrosses me are the more disputatious conversations, I’ll admit it. I’m not talking about blogwars or exercises in flaming. (File those under Personality, not Poetry.) I mean those times when poets really engage, discuss, argue, propose, question, or plead.'

Eileen Tabios, publisher of Meritage Press and editor/publisher of the review Galatea Resurrects, finds the openness, spontaneity, and relative accessibility of blogs and online journals to be corrective:

'One of the healthiest elements about poetry blogging is how poetry blogland more accurately mirrors the nature of Poetry than has traditional canon-making poetic machinery. There have always been more poets and poems than those marble-ized in Norton anthologies, ‘best of’ anthologies, et al. . . . There is no center—or there are many centers—in poetry.'

Let’s sum up what she was noticing about the effects of the web on publishing, diagram-style:

(Click on it for a larger version)

Interestingly, The Telegraph thinks that the internet is causing ‘a poetry boom’

Richard Price, a published poet who is also head of modern collections at the British Library, thought computers were actually helping poetry.Competitions are also booming: the number of entries for the Foyle Young Poets Award more than doubling from 2003 to 2008 to almost 12,000. He said: ‘What's interesting is it's counter-intuitive. You would have thought that poetry and pamphlets would be failing in the face of the internet, but that isn't happening.’ He argued: ‘It's very like the relationship between the net and live music. ‘It's perfectly possible to make music records fairly cheaply, put them up on the net and that's it. ‘You would expect live music to disappear but it hasn't, the opposite has happened.’ And rather than making poetry pamphlets ‘obsolete’, Mr Price said the internet had provided ‘a limitless shop window for a new generation of small presses and micro-publishers’.

The number of pamphlets sent to the Poetry Book Society for publication rose from 37 to 90 between 2006 and 2008. Andrew Motion, the Poet Laureate, thought poetry as an art form was simply well suited to the internet. He said that because the web allowed people to listen to poetry once more, it had helped return it to the position it held in the ‘mead halls’ 1,000 years ago. ‘The last 1,000 years is not exactly an aberration, but a long loop,’ said Mr Motion, whose 10-year term expires on May 1. ‘Poetry is as much to do with the noise the poem makes as about what the words mean when written on a page,’ he explained. ‘It is crucially an oral form – its character depends on it.’ Websites like Poetry Archive, which enables people to listen to recordings of poets like TS Eliot and Allen Ginsberg reading their work, are now enjoying unprecedented success.

Poetry Archive , which Mr Motion helped set up, now receives 135,000 visitors a month and a million page hits. Its ‘surprising’ success had led him to conclude that the real problem with poetry was ‘not one of appetite, but of delivery’.'

And finally… China embraces the democracy of the web with a poetry competition!

A middle-aged primary school teacher reciting a 1,300-year-old poem could become China's answer to an American Idol-type superstar thanks to on-line voting in a government-sponsored competition. The 40-year-old from the eastern Anhui Province, Fang Baojiu, was leading the field of 179 performers one week into the three-week poetry recital contest with more than 38,060 votes as of Friday evening. All the contestants have submitted videos of their recitals to the Ministry of Education, which has organized the competition and posted the performances on the official website.

Since the videos were posted on Nov. 7, the website has attracted an average of 19,933 votes a day and with the daily record of 54,306, including 676 votes from Hong Kong.‘It was out of my expectation that the on-line voting would draw such attention,’ Wang said. ‘We thought young people might have lost interest in classical Chinese literature.’ On the website and forums of many colleges and schools, young people had debated the performances and posted supportive messages for their favorites. ‘The contestants have become stars,’ Wang said.

So popular has the contest been that Internet technology firms approached the ministry to host the on-line voting, but the ministry wants to keep the contest non-profit, said Wang. ‘To guarantee fair play, we try our best to supervise the voting and prevent any manipulation,’ he said. The annual nationwide contest began last year and is intended to raise awareness of traditional literature. The on-line vote, the first of its kind in China, will last till Nov. 30 as part of the preliminary contest. The result of this stage is to be decided by both on-line voting and a panel of judges.'
Justin

Part 2: Making property out of ideas