Commonspage.net

Grauzonen und Copyright-Verliese

April 27th, 2008

Felix Stalder hat auf der nettime-Mailingliste die “Economies of the Commons”-Konferenz und das Dilemma der “staatlichen” Archivare treffend zusammengefasst:

The most poignant moment came when Edwin van Huis (Netherlands nstitute for Sound and Vision) recounted a discussion with a broadcaster about whether the institute could put online some TV segment that was already on Youtube. The answer was: No! When he asked the broadcaster how he felt about his content being on Youtube the answer was: ‘You can’t do anything against Google’. Thus, as Paul Keller remarked, there is a perverse situation that the official repositories of culture are going to be stuck with stuff that either they cannot make accessible, or nobody cares about. All the rest will be better accessible via Youtube or piratebay.

In short, it became abundantly clear that, no matter how much money you have, the attempt to solve all the legal issues first and only then start to release the material is doomed to failure. Digitization plus strict adherence to the law will not create digital archives but copyright dungeons.

Most of the successful, innovative projects, it turns out, are
operating in zones of varying degrees of grey. In the American
example, Youtube, the grey zone is protected by corporate might (Google). In the European example, piratebay, the grey zone is sustained by mass civil disobedience.

I suspect that the grey zones will not stay grey for ever. Sooner
or later, the basic framework in which they will operate be will
be defined. Google will have settled all the law suits against
Youtube and p2p providers will becomes mainstream (keep an eye on mininova….). However, it seems equally save to predict that the new framework will look considerably different from what it is now, reshaped by the sheer force social reality. But by then, the official cultural repositories will have wasted a huge amount of money by building systems of restriction and a generation of culturally-interested citizens will have learned to look elsewhere to find the material they care about.

Entry Filed under: Netzkultur, Urheberrecht