Permission Culture

This video is a future artifact, designed to evoke a possible future for copyright. The scenario it manifests is an increasingly ubiquitous, invasive and granular regime for policing intellectual property -- leading ultimately to what we've called "Neural Rights Management".

A number of us in UH-Manoa's Department of Political Science produced it for fun, with Jake Dunagan at the helm, and a budget of zero, for a 48-hour film competition in Honolulu at the start of March 02007. I posted the final edit at YouTube shortly after that, so it's been online for about 20 months, gradually accumulating a little over 1000 views -- waaaay back in the long tail of online video content, some instances of which attract millions of viewers in just a few days.

Just after midnight on 1 November, I received this automated email from YouTube:

Dear futuryst,

Video Disabled

A copyright owner has claimed it owns some or all of the audio content in your video Neural rights management, Hawaii-style. The audio content identified in your video is Pretty Brown by Elvin Jones. We regret to inform you that your video has been blocked from playback due to a music rights issue.

Replace Your Audio with AudioSwap

Don't worry, we have plenty of music available for your use. Please visit our AudioSwap library to learn how you can easily replace the audio in your video with any track from our growing library of fully licensed songs.

Other Options

If you think there's been a mistake, or you have other questions, please visit the Copyright Notice page in your account.

Sincerely,
The YouTube Content Identification Team

This was interesting, for a few reasons.

One. Before this I had not, at any point, actually been aware of the name or source of the piano piece. With just two days to organise, shoot and edit the film, locating a suitable instrumental accompaniment to this playful IP riff on the MasterCard ads had been delegated to our friend Noah, a music lover and himself a musician. All I knew, as I worked on the final edit the following week, was that he'd come through with this great find, a match with the jaunty tone of the video. The YouTube email was helpful in this respect: now I know the music was cut by jazz drummer Elvin Jones, half a century ago.

Two. I'd been only dimly aware of the scope of YouTube's efforts to police copyrighted content. Certainly I knew that entire TV shows or movies, brazenly posted at user-powered video sites, had raised the ire of media companies, who in response have been becoming more aggressive about deterring copyright infringement. What I hadn't realised was that teams of people and/or robots had begun scouring the back catalogue for one minute long, zero-budget video clips with miniscule audiences, searching for unauthorised music in their soundtracks, and sending midnight emails to announce the suspension of said clips.

Three. The film we made, intending to warn about overzealous copyright enforcement, has been blocked due to overzealous copyright enforcement. I relish such ironies as much as anyone, but even though the video makes the point in a fun way, the kernel of the scenario is quite serious. This development for me is not, then, a welcome one. In his excellent and extremely important 02004 book Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig gave us a language for understanding what's at stake in these questions:

[W]e come from a tradition of "free culture" -- not "free" as in "free beer" (to borrow a phrase from the founder of the free-software movement), but "free" as in "free speech," "free markets," "free trade," "free enterprise," "free will," and "free elections." A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from the control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free culture is a "permission culture" -- a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past.
...
[The] rough divide between the free and the controlled has now been erased. The Internet has set the stage for this erasure and, pushed by big media, the law has now affected it. For the first time in our tradition, the ordinary ways in which individuals create and share culture fall within the reach of the regulation of the law, which has expanded to draw within its control a vast amount of culture and creativity that it never reached before. The technology that preserved the balance of our history -- between uses of our culture that were free and uses of our culture that were only upon permission -- has been undone. The consequence is that we are less and less a free culture, more and more a permission culture.

~Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture, 02004, original emphasis. [The top quote is from the Preface, p. xiv in the print edition, or para 9 in the online/html version; the lower quote is from p. 8 in print or para 49 online.]

I don't mean to argue with those who would point out that the copyright in "Pretty Brown" persists, or that it was used in the video without anyone paying a licence fee (we didn't have any money for our 48-hour effort, but of course, neither have we earned anything from it). I'm grateful for the opportunity to tip my hat to Elvin Jones, and his brother Hank on piano, for a great little tune (that I've had stuck in my head periodically for the last year and a half). However, I don't currently have time to re-edit the video, and frankly, remain puzzled as to the argument for doing that.

So, in the meantime, internauts everywhere; for however long or short a time, enjoy.

This post is dedicated to my modest but seemingly forlorn hope for a Free Culture -- somewhere out there, an increasingly imperilled and improbable future.

[Below, for the record, are our original credits, now vanished from YouTube together with the video.]

In the future, experience itself could be regulated on a user-pays basis... A short film from the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies (HRCFS). Produced for the 48-hour "Showdown in Chinatown" short film challenge in Honolulu, March 2007. The theme was "the last chance", required line of dialogue "...of course you are...", and a tree and a car were required props.

The newlyweds - Amanda McCann & Lorenzo Rinelli
Concept - Stuart Candy & Rohan Kalyan
Director & cameraman - Jake Dunagan
Co-director - Rohan Kalyan
Editing - Aaron Rosa & Stuart Candy
Music provided by Noah Viernes

Related posts:
> Futures video clips from HRCFS
> In memoriam
> The Darfur Olympics

In memoriam

A priest pays tribute to Dirk Diggler (Eddie Adams) at his memorial service, 11 March 02025
[Image via coquedesign2000's Flickr photostream]

On 11 March, Jake Dunagan and I staged one of four experiential scenarios set in the year 02025 for the annual South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival in Austin, Texas. A trio of fellow future-mongers, Jamais Cascio (Open the Future), Wayne Pethrick (Pitney Bowes), and panel coordinator Michele Bowman (Global Foresight Associates), each devised and presented their own immersive fragment of a different 02025 in the same session. Thus was the audience for "Futurists' Sandbox" serially bombarded with a quartet of alternative futures exploring possible directions for social networking technology.

Together, the five of us had sketched out four very different settings to ensure maximum diversity in the ideas we would present. Jake and I chose to breathe life into the one dubbed "mobilisation", which resembled the generic image of the future that we usually call "discipline" at Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies. Back in March, Jake posted a detailed description of the scenario and its theatrical translation at the HRCFS blog, in two segments, and the quotations below are his:

Combining our concern with expanding IP [intellectual property] rights and their impact on expression and freedom, we decided to integrate elements of the aesthetic economy, IP expansion, and surveillance culture--thus creating a disturbing totalitarian corporate-state.
...
[W]e chose to tell the story of the locked-down Dream Society through a eulogy for Eddie Adams, aka Dirk Diggler from P.T. Anderson's film Boogie Nights [i.e., the central character played by Mark Wahlberg].

Our experiential scenario, a memorial service for pornstar-turned-copyfighter Dirk Diggler, was advertised at SXSW with "in-world" flyers...
[Photo: Stuart Candy]

...dated 02025.
[Design: Eliot Frick]

There was no indication in the SXSW festival materials that our group would be 'performing' scenes from our scenarios, and, after some debate, we decided not to preface the panel with an explanation of the method. This was a risky choice, and with access to the active twitterati and audience members commenting live on the SXSW Meebo chatrooms, we could see that the reaction to the panel was mixed, but passionate. Still, for what might be risked in subverting audience expectation, we feel this performative, immersive technique is much more effective at engaging the audience at both emotional and intellectual levels—creating an unusual, thought-provoking and memorable event.

For those who haven't seen Boogie Nights (01997), the movie chronicles, with documentary plausibility, the rags-to-riches story of a surburban LA busboy whose astonishing endowment in the trouser department leads him to become a 01970s porn icon. Our scenario picked up Diggler's tale where the movie leaves off in the mid-80s, with the protagonist battling alcoholism and impotence. In our hands, his career then weathers a fallow period, during which he sells the rights to the image and likeness of his famous 13-inch member to a dildo company. Years later, in the 01990s, thanks to Viagra he revives his flagging fortunes and re-enters the porn movie business. Things seem to be going swimmingly, until the early 2010s when the long-anticipated technology of teledildonics (virtual sex) comes of age, and his attempt to market the virtual experience of sex with the enviably well-hung Dirk Diggler runs aground. These entrepreneurial efforts are met with a lawsuit by Disney, the company which (in our *hypothetical scenario*) has, via a series of mergers and acquisitions, come into possession of property in his penis. The case drags on for years, eventually finding its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Diggler/Adams fights it with everything he's got. Ultimately, he loses the case, as the court's expansionist reading of the rights he signed away for dildoes in a moment of weakness are deemed also to cover the haptic experience of sex with the "Diggler" character, as well as revenue from his post-contract comeback catalogue of pornographic performances. Eddie Adams, dispossessed of his very manhood by the ubiquitous corporate surveillance and lockdown of intellectual property, dies in 02025, beaten but unbowed. He is a hero of the embattled "copyfight" movement in an America where market logic has come to infuse every social transaction.

It was a lot to try to convey all this experientially in 15 minutes (one quarter of the hour-long session), but we figured it as an interesting twist on a story and character that many in the audience would recognise. By no means was it the stand-and-deliver panel discussion format that many had expected.

So, when people entered the auditorium, they were greeted by sombre organ music, a suitably reverential arrangement of ELO's "Living Thing", from the Boogie Nights soundtrack (arranged and prerecorded by our talented friend John Maus). This was the first element of immersion in our memorial service for Eddie Adams, to be followed by impassioned eulogies by his priest (me), lawyer (Jake), and erstwhile co-star, Rollergirl (the incomparable Sandy Stone, who lives in Austin and graciously agreed to be involved).

The presentation was six months ago yesterday, and this post is long overdue (mea culpa). One reason for that is I'd been hoping, at first, for some video of the panel to surface, since the material shot on an ancient Hi-8 camera by our friends at the back of the hall didn't turn out. We do however have components from the slideshow we produced to accompany the Diggler eulogies, to provide a little more flavour...

Above: some nostalgic shots from Rollergirl's Polaroid archive
[Images: Captured from Boogie Nights by Stuart Candy, composited by Matthew Jensen]

An automated copyright protection system prevents unauthorised / unpaid glimpses of the Diggler jewels
[Image: Stuart Candy, captured from Boogie Nights]

Copyfight Protesters turn out in droves supporting the Adams/Diggler bid to ressert rights to his famous appendage
[Round placards design: Melissa Jordan, PinkergreenFound image: Stuart Candy | Compositing: Eliot Frick]

Outside the Supreme Court, Eddie Adams reflects on the judges' decision
[Found image: Stuart Candy, via Caroline Bonarde Ucci's Flickr photostream
Aged by Melissa Jordan, Pinkergreen]

Eddie Adams, copyfight hero, at the sunset of his life
[Image captured from Shooter by Stuart Candy
Aged by Melissa Jordan, Pinkergreen]

The other three presentations were wildly different, both from ours and from each other.

Wayne's was a slick corporate presentation by Datapoints.net, a shadowy, all-seeing data aggregation enterprise (with a real website that you can find here):

Screenshot from Datapoints.net, a successful personal data aggregation and marketing site in 02025
[Design: Wayne Pethrick]

Michele's took the form of a charity auction benefiting the "Make A Friend Foundation" (for kids who can't afford to join Facebook), featuring a number of coveted future products and services on which attendees could bid.

Some of the items under the charity auctioneer's hammer of Michele Bowman in 02025
[Designs by Pinkergreen | Images via FringeHog]

Finally, Jamais staged an other-worldly ultimatum from a hive-mind called "The Chorus". The question for audience members: will you join, or will you opt out?

Screenshot from "The Chorus"
[Performed by Jamais Cascio
Audio available in full [mp3, 6.4Mb) here, via Open the Future]

Looking back six months later, what Jamais wrote at Open the Future on the day of the show still resonates:

The futurists' panel was... weird.

No, scratch that. It was freaking bizarre.

Indeed it was. From my point of view, that's partly because of the frenzied preparation which took up the entire time from flying into Austin until going onstage. Combined with which, of course, the content was somewhat surreal (twenty-four hours before the panel, our shopping list included dry ice, a 13-inch dildo, and a priest's outfit). Also, more poignantly, although we had decided long beforehand on the memorial setting for this experiential scenario, in the previous week both Jake and I had been obliged to attend funeral services in the wake of real bereavements.

Life's ironies can be pretty extraordinary.

In any case, thanks are due to all who made this possible, including our hosts in Austin; our talented designer friends who helped bring the story to life; guest star Sandy Stone (for her compelling portrayal of Rollergirl, at ridiculously short notice); and of course our fellow futurist panelists who boldly agreed to immerse the audience in these four 02025s, FoundFutures guerrilla-style.

It made for an experience that I, for one, won't ever forget.

Related posts:
> Experiential scenarios on video
> Found futures> More found futures
> McChinatown

The Darfur Olympics

Advertisement: Saatchi & Saatchi, Brussels | Photo: the sceptical futuryst

This newspaper advertisement, featuring a hypothetical "Darfur 2020" Olympic flag, has been at the centre of a recent controversy in Belgium. It's an ad for the University of Ghent, and the Flemish (Dutch) slogan "Durf Denken" means "Dare to Think".

The Darfur region in Western Sudan has been riven by conflict and humanitarian crisis for the past five years, so the incongruity of the ongoing tragedy with the presumably sunny prospect of Olympic candidacy not far in the future deliberately evokes a kind of cognitive dissonance in the reader in early 02008.

The International Olympic Committee requested that the university pull the ad on the grounds that the use of the trademarked olympic rings is forbidden. As yet, there seems to have been virtually no English-language coverage of the story, but here's one report from Radio Netherlands Worldwide; and one from weekly news magazine Flanders Today.

The Brussels office of advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, which produced the piece, defended itself at the company blog (posted March 5th):

We presented the ad above to the Communication committee of the university in the beginning of December 2007, after a check with the BOIC [Belgian Olympic Committee] who told us we would be allowed to use them in this context. The campaign never intended to be a political statement, but it sure is one way to view the ad.

For the record, that's what we've been trying to do with all the ads for the University of Ghent from the beginning: invite people to start thinking. In this case, the ad raises several questions: will the world be changed by 2020? how would you start organising such a thing? what is the role of sports in global politics?...
[...]
It is true that the whole commotion surrounding Steven Spielberg and the role of China (as the host country) in the african conflict became hot news at a certain point (culminating in the heading 'Breng de Olympische droom naar Darfur' -transl. bring the Olympic dream to Darfur- in De Morgen on the 15th of February). But as we did not see it grow into a bigger issue we decided to publish the campaign anyway.

And while we can understand the IOC's decision to ask the University to withdraw the campaign (even though we had permission from the BOIC), we don't agree with the allegations that we capitalise on a small political event to use in a campaign for a client which steadfastly allows us to make great work for a fantastic brand.

Radio Netherlands Worldwide reports:

University rector Paul Van Cauwenberghe insists: "It's all a big misunderstanding. We never intended to offend anyone ... All we wanted to do with our posters was to get students thinking ... And it looks like we achieved our objective."

For my part, I think it's a brilliant bit of artwork. Also, as a piece of advertising, I find it entirely appropriate to the client/subject -- a state university -- an institution which properly ought to engage its public in grappling with provocative ideas, continually. (A purely commercial entity could more understandably be accused of poor taste or political insensitivity.)

Now, clearly the ads are intended to be mildly disruptive or arresting. If they didn't contain any sort of edginess or risk, the phrase "Dare to Think" wouldn't mean anything.

But how disturbed should we find the Olympic Committee's choice to police its intellectual property in this manner? As my colleague Jake "Neurofutures" Dunagan might point out, patrolling IP in this context is effectively policing thought. Which is insidious enough in any form, but the stakes somehow come out in sharper relief when it comes to curtailing expressions of possible futures. It could be said that the IOC, in exercising its copyright-holders' veto, is literally curtailing the public's ability to imagine a future in which a now-conflicted region turns things around to the extent of becoming Olympics-ready. Regardless of what might be added about the probably feeble motives of the Committee in doing so, and whether or not permission had already been granted by the IOC's Belgian arm; the point stands. This situation is structured such that IP obstructs, rather than facilitates, the public interest in free expression.

One observer has argued, as reported here, that the University of Ghent's usage of the olympic rings logo in this case probably qualifies for the "fair use" exception to the copyright holder's dominion (and if this were to prove correct, the university could have insisted on its rights and refused to withdraw the ad). In any event, to my mind this situation really crystallises what's at stake in the distinction Lawrence Lessig draws between "permission culture" and "free culture". The withdrawal of the ad is a symptom of a permission culture, in which a public intellectual institution that is trying to encourage its constituents to think unusual thoughts is itself cowed into backing off from its own mandate.

To pull the ad is a direct negation of its message. Dare to Think, indeed.

Some of the other ads produced for the campaign (which has been running for several years), mentioned in the advertisers' blog above, have functioned very similarly to futures (or counterfactual) artifacts. Some of these visual thought experiments also -- again, appropriately, in my view -- press political buttons...

Video: Saatchi & Saatchi, Brussels (posted at weblog 17 April 02007)

Image: Saatchi & Saatchi, Brussels

Image: Saatchi & Saatchi, Brussels

Image: Saatchi & Saatchi, Brussels

Some of these strike me as even less likely to pass muster in the United States than in Belgium. And yet: these are precisely the kinds of ridiculous thoughts which comprise the essence of useful, provocative futures thinking.

My hat goes off to Saatchi & Saatchi for this piece of work. It would be great to see the University of Ghent insist on its right to proceed with the campaign; but failing that, to hear the International Olympic Committee explain its trepidation about lending its logo to a region of the world whose futures desperately need to be reimagined.

(The ad was published in a Belgian daily newspaper, De Morgen, on 3 March, p. 7. It was spotted -- and thoughtfully delivered to me in person! -- by Belgian futurist Maya van Leemput, who just visited Hawaii. Dank u, Maya!)

Futures video clips from HRCFS

As regular readers of t.s.f. already know, at the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies we continue to seek alternative ways to communicate our thinking around alternative scenarios. (It has been suggested that we need to find other hobbies. We're currently examining those options.)

Meanwhile, however, the "Showdown in Chinatown" in Honolulu each month, gives participants 48 hours to conceive, shoot and edit a completed video, up to seven minutes in length, on a given theme. So far, we've seized this opportunity twice (this month and last month), to produce no-budget short films addressing possible futures, with the help of our friends in the Political Science department, and beyond. Our hope is that they may be considered entertaining, or thought-provoking, or possibly both... that goes for our friends, as well as the films. These two short pieces join the four clips from "Hawaii 2050" featured here in an earlier post.



Neural rights management, Hawaii-style
This concept, and the structure (based on MasterCard's long-running "Priceless" advertising campaign) were generated over an energetic discussion at Manoa Garden, our campus bar. Jake Dunagan, armed with his PhD dissertation research about the political implications of new brain technologies, was the ideal candidate to step in and direct. The "Showdown" requirements for the month were worked into the mix along the way -- topic being "the last chance", a tree and a car as featured items, and the required line of dialogue, "...of course you are". (Cast and crew credits appear on this clip's YouTube page.)



"Aloha Tonight" investigates...
This time the parameters included the topic "addiction", the line "that's it", and two items; an apple and a pencil. We brainstormed an outline on this basis, shot it all on Friday afternoon and Saturday morning, and edited through Saturday evening, again narrowly missing the deadline for screening in the official "Showdown" competition. Everyone improvised their dialogue with a minimum of direction, and fortunately our five year-old star proved willing to appear onscreen in exchange for handfuls of M&Ms. The late, great comic actor W.C. Fields famously warned against working with animals and children -- so this one's dedicated to him. (The rest of the credits appear in the film.)

Thanks to all who helped make these experimental forays into quick-draw filmmaking possible -- we're looking forward to doing this on a regular basis. Watch this space, the HRCFS blog, or this YouTube channel for future releases.

Update (17/11/08): YouTube has withdrawn access to the "Neural Rights Management" clip. The link now goes to a message that "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by a third party", although oddly enough, at the time of writing the embedded version above still plays back. In any case, for now the video can be viewed (and is discussed in a little more detail) here.