randomWalks

A "prisoner"



by Miltos Manetas



One of the most beautiful aspects of contemporary life is that we can easily emulate forms , copy ideas, styles and objects. It makes from life an open project, a work in progress. But our freedom to emulate is limited.



Say we want to make a copy of the Coca Cola logo. Incorporate a metaphor from a poem to another poem, do a double of a well known painting by Picasso, sing a Beatles song in our record , or install to our computer a piece of software. All these are stuff that somebody discovered and put into market.



But shall they stay property of their "inventor" ? Or do they belong to all of us, to use them as we wish ?



Lets examine first how these "intellectual discoveries" function . They are very different from a house, land or objects, because they don't really exist without a user.



They actually use their user and most of the times, they modify him irrevocably.



Think of our perception as a piece of land. Once you will access any information, something is built over this land. What you've seen, heard or learned becomes part of your self, literally your "property". There is no way to undo this information. You will even have to work to put it in order in a way that it fits in your mental scheme. The more intelligent you are, the more you will have to "work". Some people, will have to "work" more than the creator of the information in order to accept it.



Once you get the message, you are a vehicle, a wall of a subway train and a cultural slave. You cannot go back and become a person who doesn't know how to write FedEx, but if you will actually decide to write it over your paintings, FedEx may sue you, because it hold a "copyright" it owns the part of your brain where the FedEx logo is located. Think of the part of yourself that carries this -mostly unwanted info, as another person. Given the copyright and Intellectual Property legislation, this person is a slave.



There is a company based in Amsterdam, which produces screen recognition software. It's clients, use this technology to help their newest computer systems communicate with their older machines. A New York based company recently sued the Dutch company on the basis that they already keep a pattern on screen recognition.



They ( the American company ) had "discover" already how to read and translate obsolete computer talk and they believe that they should own it !



Content (what, in this case , the old computers are "saying"), becomes a valuable for whoever will register a successful way to read it. In the case of the arts, this promises double profits. A painter will become famous because his images are published everywhere. He will sell the physical object- the canvasses but he will still demand control over the public imagination, using his copyright.



Writers are comfortable with copyright. They believe that without such a protection, magazines and even their own editors, will simply ignore them and publish their texts anonymous or under another name. They don't understand that in a copyright free society, the more credit you will give to the creator of an idea, the more valuable your work will become. Because in our times, everybody can be a creator and every creator, can be also Media : a web domain registration is only 16 $ per year.



In a world where any person can be a public persona , the Media organizations will compete for who will pay more the creators in order to publish their signed contributions and to offer to their readers a feticist version of the "facts".Because in our times, ideas are "facts" and it would be crazy to try sell them face to face.



Many will suggest , that the question of Intellectual Property, is a complex problem which cannot be addressed with a simple Yes or NO

But we must remember , that the question of Slavery was yesterday a complex problem and it was considered naive and even criminal to try abolish it .



Both, intellectual property and slavery, are basically philosophical problems :



""Do ideas belong to everybody or some of them shall become for profit property that a person or a community can own" for IP and copyright and



"Do all human have the right to be born free or some of them shall become for profit property of a person or a community " for slavery.





But whenever a philosophical problem cross the paths of exploitation and

ideology , it becomes complex . Because society is based on both ideology and exploitation, any radical position seams an extremist one. But if Plato was in his time against slavery , that , would look today more significant than unrealistic. ( He was for slavery instead). This is the reason we initiate the "I am gonna copy dot com" poll. Feel free to have an opinion and also , eventually to change it : your vote then, will be updated.



Miltos Manetas, 2001