The UK government has said it will accelerate the use of open source software in public services.
Tom Watson MP, minister for digital engagement, said open source software would be on a level playing field with proprietary software such as Windows.
Open source software will be adopted "when it delivers best value for money", the government said.
It added that public services should where possible avoid being "locked into proprietary software".
Licences for the use of open source software are generally free of charge and embrace open standards, and the code that powers the programs can be modified without fear of trampling on intellectual property or copyright.
According to some in the open source industry, the shift from proprietary standards could save the government £600m a year.
Simon Phipps, chief open source officer for Sun Microsystems, said the UK government's stance was part of a "global wave" of take up for open source in governments.
"We waste a fortune on proprietary computer software because of paying for licences and promises up front and not demanding value," he said.
Mr Phipps said schools, government departments and public services would have a "crucial freedom" because of the choice of whether to pay for support and training when using open source software.
The government's action plan could see a wave of open source software being deployed in areas such as office applications (word processing and spreadsheets), document management and database infrastructure, the backbone of many large-scale IT systems.
'More teeth'
Steve Shine, European vice president of Ingres, an open source support vendor, said the government's action plan had "more teeth" than policies being adopted in other countries because the plan was tied into policies regarding how IT managers procure new software.
He said the move had partly been driven by a series of high-profile IT failures in recent years that had relied on proprietary software.
He said: "Open source can help avoid many of the hidden costs of proprietary software such as making organisations re-pay for licences if they want to shift use of a particular piece of software from one place to another.
"This is irrelevant in the open source world."
Announcing an open source and open standards action plan, the government said it would:
* ensure that the government adopts open standards and uses these to communicate with the citizens and businesses that have adopted open source solutions
* ensure that open source solutions are considered properly and, where they deliver best value for money are selected for government business solutions
* strengthen the skills, experience and capabilities within government and in its suppliers to use open source to greatest advantage
* embed an open source culture of sharing, re-use and collaborative development across government and its suppliers
* ensure that systems integrators and proprietary software suppliers demonstrate the same flexibility and ability to re-use their solutions and products as is inherent in open source.
Government departments will be required to adopt open source software when "there is no significant overall cost difference between open and non-open source products" because of its "inherent flexibility".
Expected backlash
Mr Phipps and Mr Shine said they expected a backlash from proprietary software firms.
"I am absolutely certain there have been communications extremely high-up in proprietary vendors with management high up in government," said Mr Shine.
Mr Phipps added: "Measured over the short term traditional vendors will cut prices back, end load contacts and do everything to appear cheaper.
"But the real value with open source comes from giving users a new flexibility."
He said the widespread adoption of open source software in public services could also have a knock on effect to the ordinary consumer.
"It's already happening to significant extent in the UK. Lots of homes are using Firefox and OpenOffice.org.
"It is becoming acceptable and expected."
from the BBC web site
Sunday, 1 March 2009
Tuesday, 16 December 2008
Fourth National Creative Industries Conference
VIC was there...We participated in this conference and had a small stand.
The Fourth National Creative Industries Conference is taking place at the award-winning Foundation for Arts and Creative Technology (FACT) in Liverpool on Thursday 11th December.
Responding to a rapidly changing economy, the conference agenda will explore the concept of a ‘Creative City’ and what this means in practice today. Looking ahead to 2009 and beyond, delegates will consider the actions required to support diversity and growth, examining the role and impact of Government and the respective roles of property, education, funding and the public sector.
Responding to a rapidly changing economy, the conference agenda will explore the concept of a ‘Creative City’ and what this means in practice today. Looking ahead to 2009 and beyond, delegates will consider the actions required to support diversity and growth, examining the role and impact of Government and the respective roles of property, education, funding and the public sector.
Themes and Objectives
The day will review and the latest policy, strategy and best practice and will explore the following themes and objectives, including:
How has support for the Creative Sector changed during the past decade and what impact has this had on Cities?
How can the creative sector grow and be supported in the context of a rapidly changing global economy?
What is the impact of competing cultural and economic factors on a City’s creative economy? How do these affect funding available and opportunities available across the sector?
How can success in the creative economy be defined when so many companies and projects fall between conflicting aims of economic, community and cultural driven success?
When a City celebrates (Capital of Culture or Olympics) what is the impact on its creative economy?
What is the role of property developers, public and private landlords in relation to supporting wealth generation and property value growth from the creative sector?
How can Cities’ reach out to younger generations to foster creativity and innovation?
What is the impact of partnerships between universities, schools and colleges and a city’s creative economy?
How can cities best respond to the needs of smaller and start up businesses?
What role can ‘Creative Clusters' play and what is their relationship with each other in the context of a region and city?
What actions need to be taken by Government, the public and private sector to ensure better collaboration to ensure the ‘creative and cultural’ economy grows but also doesn’t lose the essence of why it exists?
Chaired by Jo Burns, Director of BOP Consulting, the day will bring together leading policymakers, practioners and opinion formers including:
Tuesday, 2 September 2008
Reminder of the definition of the creative industries
It seems that there is a difference across the wider Europe as to what constitutes the creative industries. It is obvious that even in the Brussels Leonardo office the breadth of disciplines is not fully understood. The DTI established the following definition:
CREATIVE INDUSTRIES - The definition of the creative industries as: “those industries which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property.”
This includes the following sectors: Advertising, Architecture, Crafts, Design, Designer Fashion, Film and Video, Interactive Leisure Software, Music, Performing Arts, Publishing,Television and Radio and in addition the cultural heritage, tourism and museum industries are identified as being closely related to the creative industries; particularly in the provision of services which often fall within the definition of creative industries.
from the UK Department of Trade and Industry
CREATIVE INDUSTRIES - The definition of the creative industries as: “those industries which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property.”
This includes the following sectors: Advertising, Architecture, Crafts, Design, Designer Fashion, Film and Video, Interactive Leisure Software, Music, Performing Arts, Publishing,Television and Radio and in addition the cultural heritage, tourism and museum industries are identified as being closely related to the creative industries; particularly in the provision of services which often fall within the definition of creative industries.
from the UK Department of Trade and Industry
Monday, 14 July 2008
Sketch it out
Could this be the way forward for developing business plans for creative people?
A book about how to solve problems using pictures has become a surprise bestseller in the US. Author Dan Roam explains why drawing can be such a powerful work tool
In late 1987, the Irish airline leasing magnate Tony Ryan asked Michael O'Leary, his accountant, to help launch a new airline. One of the first jobs Ryan had for O'Leary was to go the US and study Southwest Airlines. The Texas-based carrier had for years been the world's most profitable airline, in spite of defying traditional airline logic in every aspect of operations.
O'Leary came back from his field trip a man possessed. He immediately went to work on turning Ryanair into Europe's first "low-cost" carrier, and in the process turned the entire European airline model on its head. We'll never know exactly what O'Leary saw at Southwest, but whatever it was, it inspired a vision in O'Leary that still burns.
I'm going to take a guess that he saw "the napkin".
American business lore tells us that one late night in 1967, Rollin King (another wannabe airline tycoon) asked his lawyer, Herb Kelleher, out for a drink. That evening, King told Kelleher about an idea he had for an airline. Picking up a pen, King wrote the names of Texas's three biggest cities on his cocktail napkin: Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio. Then he connected the three with a triangle. It was a bone-headedly simple drawing, illustrating a bone-headedly simple concept: forget the "hub-and-spoke" system; instead, just connect the secondary airports at the three places most businesspeople in Texas wanted to go.
It worked. Kelleher bought the idea, and Southwest took off using the napkin as its route map - it has never looked back.
I love that story. As an impassioned advocate of the use of simple pictures in business, I can't think of a better example of how a quick sketch on the back of a napkin can convey an idea.
I've always drawn; sketching things out is one of the clearest memories I have of childhood. When I started my working life, my first job was as a graphic designer, and it made sense that I drew all the time, because everyone in design draws. But when I moved into managing my own businesses and then into management consulting, the fact that I drew made me odd, because nobody in business draws.
Which I always thought was a shame, since I knew that every time I picked up a pen in a meeting and started sketching out my idea, magic would happen in the room. People would pay an extraordinary amount of attention to what I was saying, would actively look and listen, and most important of all, would quickly join in the development of the idea.
Twenty years of consulting for organisations such as Microsoft, Wal-Mart, Wells Fargo and the US Navy has left me convinced in the power of pictures as a business tool. I know that any business challenge - business strategy, resource allocation, project management, product development, you name it - can be clarified, if not outright solved, through the use of a picture. And I also know that the pictures that work are so simple that anybody can draw them.
I doubt if it will surprise anyone when I say that pictures can convey more specific and memorable information than words, that pictures - especially of complex concepts - "stick" better than bullet lists, that pictures can communicate many ideas simultaneously and immediately, and above all, that pictures can transcend language barriers. What may be surprising is that the pictures I'm talking about are something we can all create.
Thinking with pictures is not the exclusive domain of the artistically talented or trained. It's a talent we are all born with, yet few of us ever have the opportunity to improve - 75% of the neurons in our brains that are processing sensory information are processing vision, and sight is far-and-away the most important means for us to learn about the world around us. Think about this: walk into a class of primary school children and - with the teacher's permission, of course - ask the six-year-olds how many can draw. Every hand will go up. Now ask how many can read: perhaps two little hands will go up. Now walk into a secondary school and ask the 16-year-olds the same two questions. How many can draw? Maybe three hands. How many can read? Every hand.
Don't get me wrong: reading and writing are fundamental and essential. So is vision. The reason most businesspeople are uncertain about their ability to solve problems with pictures is that they are uncertain about their ability to draw. "I'm not visual; I can't draw," is the comment I hear from someone in every meeting I attend. My response is that if we're visual enough to walk into the room and find a place to sit down without falling down, we're visual enough to understand everything we are going to talk about, and to find value in it. I've never been let down.
To help people overcome this lack of confidence, I break the entire "visual thinking" process down into four discrete steps: looking, seeing, imagining, and showing. Each step makes demands on a different part of our innate visual abilities, and each step plays an important role in learning to take in the big picture.
Most important of all, once we realise how good we already are at visually processing the world around us, we realise that drawing itself is only a small part of visual thinking, and it comes at the very end of the process, not at the beginning.
Nothing is more engaging to a live audience than seeing a picture created in real time. It really is pure magic. Partly that's because when we see the problem and solution drawn out for us, we mentally participate in the process and "get" what we're seeing. Even more importantly, a picture drawn by hand is not perfect, and its imperfections invite commentary and discussion, rather than the arguments about minute details that usually accompany a "finished" diagram. In fact, because a more polished picture looks "done", it is more likely to shut down discussion than stimulate it.
Like anything, becoming confident enough to start drawing in a business meeting or presentation takes practice. Next time you face a business problem, try this on your own:
1. Draw a small circle in the middle of a page and label it "my business" (or "me").
2. Now, off to one side, draw a larger second circle, and call it "my customers".
3. Draw an arrow between the circles, and label it "my sales channel".
4. Add a few words describing that channel: is it "good", "needs improvement", "solid", "stretched", etc.
5. On the other side of the "my customer" circle, draw a third circle and call it "my competitor".
6. Is this circle bigger than yours? Is it closer to your customers, or further away? Think about what you're starting to see here in the relationships of these circles, and note down any thoughts that occur.
7. Draw an arrow between "competitor" and "customer" and describe that channel.
We've just started, and already our minds are starting to seeing sizes, relationships, and interactions that would have been invisible if we hadn't started drawing. Keep going and see what emerges. Within seconds we'll begin to come up with ideas that we wouldn't have had if we'd just been talking. We can't help it: all we're doing is feeding our brains the chance to do what they love - solve problems with pictures.
· Dan Roam is author of "The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures"
A book about how to solve problems using pictures has become a surprise bestseller in the US. Author Dan Roam explains why drawing can be such a powerful work tool
In late 1987, the Irish airline leasing magnate Tony Ryan asked Michael O'Leary, his accountant, to help launch a new airline. One of the first jobs Ryan had for O'Leary was to go the US and study Southwest Airlines. The Texas-based carrier had for years been the world's most profitable airline, in spite of defying traditional airline logic in every aspect of operations.
O'Leary came back from his field trip a man possessed. He immediately went to work on turning Ryanair into Europe's first "low-cost" carrier, and in the process turned the entire European airline model on its head. We'll never know exactly what O'Leary saw at Southwest, but whatever it was, it inspired a vision in O'Leary that still burns.
I'm going to take a guess that he saw "the napkin".
American business lore tells us that one late night in 1967, Rollin King (another wannabe airline tycoon) asked his lawyer, Herb Kelleher, out for a drink. That evening, King told Kelleher about an idea he had for an airline. Picking up a pen, King wrote the names of Texas's three biggest cities on his cocktail napkin: Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio. Then he connected the three with a triangle. It was a bone-headedly simple drawing, illustrating a bone-headedly simple concept: forget the "hub-and-spoke" system; instead, just connect the secondary airports at the three places most businesspeople in Texas wanted to go.
It worked. Kelleher bought the idea, and Southwest took off using the napkin as its route map - it has never looked back.
I love that story. As an impassioned advocate of the use of simple pictures in business, I can't think of a better example of how a quick sketch on the back of a napkin can convey an idea.
I've always drawn; sketching things out is one of the clearest memories I have of childhood. When I started my working life, my first job was as a graphic designer, and it made sense that I drew all the time, because everyone in design draws. But when I moved into managing my own businesses and then into management consulting, the fact that I drew made me odd, because nobody in business draws.
Which I always thought was a shame, since I knew that every time I picked up a pen in a meeting and started sketching out my idea, magic would happen in the room. People would pay an extraordinary amount of attention to what I was saying, would actively look and listen, and most important of all, would quickly join in the development of the idea.
Twenty years of consulting for organisations such as Microsoft, Wal-Mart, Wells Fargo and the US Navy has left me convinced in the power of pictures as a business tool. I know that any business challenge - business strategy, resource allocation, project management, product development, you name it - can be clarified, if not outright solved, through the use of a picture. And I also know that the pictures that work are so simple that anybody can draw them.
I doubt if it will surprise anyone when I say that pictures can convey more specific and memorable information than words, that pictures - especially of complex concepts - "stick" better than bullet lists, that pictures can communicate many ideas simultaneously and immediately, and above all, that pictures can transcend language barriers. What may be surprising is that the pictures I'm talking about are something we can all create.
Thinking with pictures is not the exclusive domain of the artistically talented or trained. It's a talent we are all born with, yet few of us ever have the opportunity to improve - 75% of the neurons in our brains that are processing sensory information are processing vision, and sight is far-and-away the most important means for us to learn about the world around us. Think about this: walk into a class of primary school children and - with the teacher's permission, of course - ask the six-year-olds how many can draw. Every hand will go up. Now ask how many can read: perhaps two little hands will go up. Now walk into a secondary school and ask the 16-year-olds the same two questions. How many can draw? Maybe three hands. How many can read? Every hand.
Don't get me wrong: reading and writing are fundamental and essential. So is vision. The reason most businesspeople are uncertain about their ability to solve problems with pictures is that they are uncertain about their ability to draw. "I'm not visual; I can't draw," is the comment I hear from someone in every meeting I attend. My response is that if we're visual enough to walk into the room and find a place to sit down without falling down, we're visual enough to understand everything we are going to talk about, and to find value in it. I've never been let down.
To help people overcome this lack of confidence, I break the entire "visual thinking" process down into four discrete steps: looking, seeing, imagining, and showing. Each step makes demands on a different part of our innate visual abilities, and each step plays an important role in learning to take in the big picture.
Most important of all, once we realise how good we already are at visually processing the world around us, we realise that drawing itself is only a small part of visual thinking, and it comes at the very end of the process, not at the beginning.
Nothing is more engaging to a live audience than seeing a picture created in real time. It really is pure magic. Partly that's because when we see the problem and solution drawn out for us, we mentally participate in the process and "get" what we're seeing. Even more importantly, a picture drawn by hand is not perfect, and its imperfections invite commentary and discussion, rather than the arguments about minute details that usually accompany a "finished" diagram. In fact, because a more polished picture looks "done", it is more likely to shut down discussion than stimulate it.
Like anything, becoming confident enough to start drawing in a business meeting or presentation takes practice. Next time you face a business problem, try this on your own:
1. Draw a small circle in the middle of a page and label it "my business" (or "me").
2. Now, off to one side, draw a larger second circle, and call it "my customers".
3. Draw an arrow between the circles, and label it "my sales channel".
4. Add a few words describing that channel: is it "good", "needs improvement", "solid", "stretched", etc.
5. On the other side of the "my customer" circle, draw a third circle and call it "my competitor".
6. Is this circle bigger than yours? Is it closer to your customers, or further away? Think about what you're starting to see here in the relationships of these circles, and note down any thoughts that occur.
7. Draw an arrow between "competitor" and "customer" and describe that channel.
We've just started, and already our minds are starting to seeing sizes, relationships, and interactions that would have been invisible if we hadn't started drawing. Keep going and see what emerges. Within seconds we'll begin to come up with ideas that we wouldn't have had if we'd just been talking. We can't help it: all we're doing is feeding our brains the chance to do what they love - solve problems with pictures.
· Dan Roam is author of "The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures"
Sunday, 29 June 2008
Design Show Liverpool
- Success
Design Show Liverpool took place in the city's Contemporary Urban Centre over four days: 19th - 22nd June. The show brought 173 exhibitors together with almost 7,000 design savvy visitors.
Feedback from the show has been overwhelmingly positive. One visitor commented that there was "a lot of creative design talent blended neatly under one roof. Liverpool Design Show is the new paradigmatic showcase for cutting edge, yet accessible design excellence."
Sarah Elderkin Development Director, Design Initiative says "we are delighted to have worked with Momentous Events to create an event of this scale and quality in Liverpool. We have been working to support the design industry in Liverpool and the region for 16 years; encouraging new businesses, promoting the best talent and helping them to find buyers. Design Show Liverpool has been a great platform for designers in Merseyside and beyond, with half of the exhibitors being from the North West region."
Design Show Liverpool took place in the city's Contemporary Urban Centre over four days: 19th - 22nd June. The show brought 173 exhibitors together with almost 7,000 design savvy visitors.
Feedback from the show has been overwhelmingly positive. One visitor commented that there was "a lot of creative design talent blended neatly under one roof. Liverpool Design Show is the new paradigmatic showcase for cutting edge, yet accessible design excellence."
Sarah Elderkin Development Director, Design Initiative says "we are delighted to have worked with Momentous Events to create an event of this scale and quality in Liverpool. We have been working to support the design industry in Liverpool and the region for 16 years; encouraging new businesses, promoting the best talent and helping them to find buyers. Design Show Liverpool has been a great platform for designers in Merseyside and beyond, with half of the exhibitors being from the North West region."
Monday, 23 June 2008
ERASMUS for young entrepreneurs
The Enterprise and Industry Directorate-General of the European Commission has published the call for proposals "ERASMUS for young entrepreneurs". The overall objective is to facilitate and assist nascent EU entrepreneurs to gain experience in an established entrepreneur’s company in another EU member state. The deadline for submission of project proposals is 20 August 2008.
from Margret
The full text of the call for proposals and the application forms are available on the following website: http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/funding/files/themes_2008/calls_prop.htm
from Margret
Thursday, 22 May 2008
Jolly Rogerings
Review from Saturday May 17, 2008
The Guardian
Steven Poole is intrigued by rich provocations and swaggering prose on the morality of cultural 'piracy' in Matt Mason's The Pirate's Dilemma
The Pirate's Dilemma: How Hackers, Punk Capitalists and Graffiti Millionaires Are Re-Mixing Our Culture and Changing the World
by Matt Mason
One couldn't wish for a more colourful circus of corporate stupidity and vindictiveness than the public actions of the major record labels over the past decade. They have secretly installed spyware on people's computers and sued American college students; last month, one label filed a US court claim that throwing their promotional CDs in the bin constituted a violation of copyright. At the same time, they have been demanding a tax on iPods, the proceeds from which would flow directly into their pockets, and firing the A&R staff upon whom their future depends. None of this, of course, is meant to protect the interests of musicians, only of their executive leeches.
It is a farcical ongoing case study in how not to respond to what former pirate-radio DJ Matt Mason calls "the pirate's dilemma". Despite some special pleading in the introduction, he really means "the pirate dilemma": the pirates themselves are not mulling much over ethical quandaries, but they are forcing everyone else to figure out how to live with them. Much of the book is focused on how large companies ought to respond to the fleet-footed challenge of copyists, mash-uppers and other rebels against "intellectual property". What, for example, did Nike do when a Japanese DJ called Nigo started ripping off its famous Air Force One trainer design and selling versions in crazy new materials and colours at a high-fashion premium? It didn't sue; instead, it started making similar far-out designs itself, and then invested in Nigo's company.
Mason offers this reassuring take-home message for corporations: that piracy often identifies gaps in the market, or new spaces that the market could expand to fill. Inspirational stories abound. Hollywood was founded by film-makers fleeing Edison's burdensome patents on cinema equipment in New York; American cable TV companies initially "refused to pay the networks for broadcasting their content"; the BBC's Radio 1 was inaugurated as a "pirate copy" of the pirate station Radio London, to try to stamp out once and for all the Jolly Rogers of the airwaves.
So far, so comfy. But Mason has a sly habit of suddenly wrenching the argument into a new context, arguing at one point, for instance, that the production of cheap generic anti-HIV drugs in India, fought bitterly by big pharma, is another form of contemporary (and heroic) "piracy", pointing up a way in which current laws and regulations are "broken". Later on, there is even an abrupt segue from hip-hop to the Post-Autistic Economics movement (which argues that neoclassical or "mainstream" economics is delusionary): cheeky, but it works.
The best parts of the book, meanwhile, take the leisure to build vivid, detailed histories of countercultures that the author loves, tracing hip-hop, for example, back to the birth of MCing thanks to a studio oversight in Jamaica in 1967. There is a wonderful proof that disco was invented by a nun, Sister Alicia Donohoe, at an orphanage in the 1940s - she created a "party room" for the children equipped with a fridge, record player and multicoloured balloons. Subliminal memories of that space inspired a former resident, David Mancuso, to give his series of famous disco parties at the Loft in 1970s New York. There is also a history of graffiti as the civic reclaiming of public space, which includes the remarkable fact that, during the great subway "cleanup" of the 1980s, many painted carriages were just dumped in the ocean. Mason's prose style is a lovely, swaggering mash-up of the analytical and the street. I was happy to be told, of one hip-hop dandy, that his "fashion game was mighty healthy".
There is, though, a tension running through Mason's arguments, as to whether we should applaud those he calls "pirates" for their creative anti-corporate rebellion, or admire them insofar as they subsequently become corporate successes themselves. Here is a graffiti tagger who builds a T-shirt empire; and here is a soft-drinks company that makes a near-subliminal but highly successful marketing deal with 50 Cent. Is this really comparable to the spirit of anarchic creativity he celebrates? When big sportswear companies try "street advertising" through graffiti, he evidently disapproves. This tension is not resolved, but is in the end overtly framed in the following superbly wry sentence: "Hip-hop mastered the art of the sustainable sellout through the notion of keeping it real."
Mason's cultural view, meanwhile, remains impressively wide-angle. He also discusses authoritatively other aspects of "remix culture", such as the "modding" scene in videogames (where gamers build their own new environments and rule-sets from the open code provided); or the "phantom edit" of George Lucas's first new Star Wars film, in which fans removed all possible trace of the appalling Jar Jar Binks. He is consistently thoughtful, offering rich provocations about the British wave of "happy slapping", or a future in which self-replicating 3D printers become possible. In comparison with most other contemporary books that seek to educate corporate culture about what the kids are doing, Mason exudes the authority, and sheer joyful fascination, of someone who is saturated in what he talks about.
It is possible, though, that two concepts of "piracy" are being conflated. Rule-breaking creativity that opens up new cultural and economic possibilities is one thing; but that's not the same "piracy" as just downloading for free the music you used to pay for. The vast majority of MP3 "sharers" are not doing anything to creatively extend the material, as most of Mason's heroic "pirates" do. You can't actually remix a commercially produced track unless the artist deliberately gives out the original "stems" - separate tracks of drums, bass, vocals and so on. This is what Radiohead did last month with their song "Nude" for a remix competition - but in a deliciously cynical twist, anyone who wanted the stems had to pay for them as five separate "songs" on iTunes. In return for the four quid investment, remixers got to upload their versions to Radiohead's website - and, er, that's it. (By contrast, Nine Inch Nails were already giving away remixable stems for free a couple of years ago.)
Near the bottom of all this lies one very simple question. If the only answer to widespread piracy, as Mason argues, is to "compete like a pirate" yourself, how will the actual producers of "content" get paid in the future? This question recently generated a large public discussion on my website, where, as an experiment in the economics of free distribution with voluntary donations, I had given away an electronic version of one of my own books. It was downloaded by 30,000 people, of whom 17 contributed to the "tip jar". Needless to say, I'm not giving up the day job.
The question comes up in Mason's book, but you'll miss it if you blink. "Artists not getting paid for their work is a problem," he says. Moving swiftly on: "But the fact remains that file-sharing sites such as Napster make an abundance of music available that we otherwise would not have access to." That's true, but on its own it's not a persuasive argument. Robbing a bank would make an abundance of money available to me that I otherwise would not have access to. I may firmly believe that this would be an excellent thing for everyone, but I'd have to make a second argument to show why: maybe I would promise to give the money to the poor, or become a discerning patron of struggling nerdcore musicians, or just buy myself lots of gadgets and nice meals, since at least I would be reinvesting the cash in the economy in a more efficient manner than banks have recently shown themselves able to do.
So it's worth noticing, finally, that Mason is not distributing his own ideas "pirate"-fashion, which presumably would mean slapping this text up for free on an internet wiki to which anyone could contribute edits and additions. Instead, he has published it as an old-fashioned book with a copyright notice and assertion of "moral right", which makes a nice calling card for the speaking engagements detailed on his blog. The publishing industry might soon face the same problems as the music industry currently does; but until then, cash in while you can. Steven Poole's website is at stevenpoole.net
The Guardian
Steven Poole is intrigued by rich provocations and swaggering prose on the morality of cultural 'piracy' in Matt Mason's The Pirate's Dilemma
The Pirate's Dilemma: How Hackers, Punk Capitalists and Graffiti Millionaires Are Re-Mixing Our Culture and Changing the World
by Matt Mason
One couldn't wish for a more colourful circus of corporate stupidity and vindictiveness than the public actions of the major record labels over the past decade. They have secretly installed spyware on people's computers and sued American college students; last month, one label filed a US court claim that throwing their promotional CDs in the bin constituted a violation of copyright. At the same time, they have been demanding a tax on iPods, the proceeds from which would flow directly into their pockets, and firing the A&R staff upon whom their future depends. None of this, of course, is meant to protect the interests of musicians, only of their executive leeches.
It is a farcical ongoing case study in how not to respond to what former pirate-radio DJ Matt Mason calls "the pirate's dilemma". Despite some special pleading in the introduction, he really means "the pirate dilemma": the pirates themselves are not mulling much over ethical quandaries, but they are forcing everyone else to figure out how to live with them. Much of the book is focused on how large companies ought to respond to the fleet-footed challenge of copyists, mash-uppers and other rebels against "intellectual property". What, for example, did Nike do when a Japanese DJ called Nigo started ripping off its famous Air Force One trainer design and selling versions in crazy new materials and colours at a high-fashion premium? It didn't sue; instead, it started making similar far-out designs itself, and then invested in Nigo's company.
Mason offers this reassuring take-home message for corporations: that piracy often identifies gaps in the market, or new spaces that the market could expand to fill. Inspirational stories abound. Hollywood was founded by film-makers fleeing Edison's burdensome patents on cinema equipment in New York; American cable TV companies initially "refused to pay the networks for broadcasting their content"; the BBC's Radio 1 was inaugurated as a "pirate copy" of the pirate station Radio London, to try to stamp out once and for all the Jolly Rogers of the airwaves.
So far, so comfy. But Mason has a sly habit of suddenly wrenching the argument into a new context, arguing at one point, for instance, that the production of cheap generic anti-HIV drugs in India, fought bitterly by big pharma, is another form of contemporary (and heroic) "piracy", pointing up a way in which current laws and regulations are "broken". Later on, there is even an abrupt segue from hip-hop to the Post-Autistic Economics movement (which argues that neoclassical or "mainstream" economics is delusionary): cheeky, but it works.
The best parts of the book, meanwhile, take the leisure to build vivid, detailed histories of countercultures that the author loves, tracing hip-hop, for example, back to the birth of MCing thanks to a studio oversight in Jamaica in 1967. There is a wonderful proof that disco was invented by a nun, Sister Alicia Donohoe, at an orphanage in the 1940s - she created a "party room" for the children equipped with a fridge, record player and multicoloured balloons. Subliminal memories of that space inspired a former resident, David Mancuso, to give his series of famous disco parties at the Loft in 1970s New York. There is also a history of graffiti as the civic reclaiming of public space, which includes the remarkable fact that, during the great subway "cleanup" of the 1980s, many painted carriages were just dumped in the ocean. Mason's prose style is a lovely, swaggering mash-up of the analytical and the street. I was happy to be told, of one hip-hop dandy, that his "fashion game was mighty healthy".
There is, though, a tension running through Mason's arguments, as to whether we should applaud those he calls "pirates" for their creative anti-corporate rebellion, or admire them insofar as they subsequently become corporate successes themselves. Here is a graffiti tagger who builds a T-shirt empire; and here is a soft-drinks company that makes a near-subliminal but highly successful marketing deal with 50 Cent. Is this really comparable to the spirit of anarchic creativity he celebrates? When big sportswear companies try "street advertising" through graffiti, he evidently disapproves. This tension is not resolved, but is in the end overtly framed in the following superbly wry sentence: "Hip-hop mastered the art of the sustainable sellout through the notion of keeping it real."
Mason's cultural view, meanwhile, remains impressively wide-angle. He also discusses authoritatively other aspects of "remix culture", such as the "modding" scene in videogames (where gamers build their own new environments and rule-sets from the open code provided); or the "phantom edit" of George Lucas's first new Star Wars film, in which fans removed all possible trace of the appalling Jar Jar Binks. He is consistently thoughtful, offering rich provocations about the British wave of "happy slapping", or a future in which self-replicating 3D printers become possible. In comparison with most other contemporary books that seek to educate corporate culture about what the kids are doing, Mason exudes the authority, and sheer joyful fascination, of someone who is saturated in what he talks about.
It is possible, though, that two concepts of "piracy" are being conflated. Rule-breaking creativity that opens up new cultural and economic possibilities is one thing; but that's not the same "piracy" as just downloading for free the music you used to pay for. The vast majority of MP3 "sharers" are not doing anything to creatively extend the material, as most of Mason's heroic "pirates" do. You can't actually remix a commercially produced track unless the artist deliberately gives out the original "stems" - separate tracks of drums, bass, vocals and so on. This is what Radiohead did last month with their song "Nude" for a remix competition - but in a deliciously cynical twist, anyone who wanted the stems had to pay for them as five separate "songs" on iTunes. In return for the four quid investment, remixers got to upload their versions to Radiohead's website - and, er, that's it. (By contrast, Nine Inch Nails were already giving away remixable stems for free a couple of years ago.)
Near the bottom of all this lies one very simple question. If the only answer to widespread piracy, as Mason argues, is to "compete like a pirate" yourself, how will the actual producers of "content" get paid in the future? This question recently generated a large public discussion on my website, where, as an experiment in the economics of free distribution with voluntary donations, I had given away an electronic version of one of my own books. It was downloaded by 30,000 people, of whom 17 contributed to the "tip jar". Needless to say, I'm not giving up the day job.
The question comes up in Mason's book, but you'll miss it if you blink. "Artists not getting paid for their work is a problem," he says. Moving swiftly on: "But the fact remains that file-sharing sites such as Napster make an abundance of music available that we otherwise would not have access to." That's true, but on its own it's not a persuasive argument. Robbing a bank would make an abundance of money available to me that I otherwise would not have access to. I may firmly believe that this would be an excellent thing for everyone, but I'd have to make a second argument to show why: maybe I would promise to give the money to the poor, or become a discerning patron of struggling nerdcore musicians, or just buy myself lots of gadgets and nice meals, since at least I would be reinvesting the cash in the economy in a more efficient manner than banks have recently shown themselves able to do.
So it's worth noticing, finally, that Mason is not distributing his own ideas "pirate"-fashion, which presumably would mean slapping this text up for free on an internet wiki to which anyone could contribute edits and additions. Instead, he has published it as an old-fashioned book with a copyright notice and assertion of "moral right", which makes a nice calling card for the speaking engagements detailed on his blog. The publishing industry might soon face the same problems as the music industry currently does; but until then, cash in while you can. Steven Poole's website is at stevenpoole.net
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