Ideas Are the Cheapest Things in the World

Ideas are the cheapest thing in the world.

Given that I work for an ad agency, and have always dreamed of becoming a writer, this might seem like an odd stance. I've mentioned this to a couple of friends and colleagues, both of whom pointed out that really great ideas are actually incredibly expensive. You have to give them the time and resources they deserve.

Yes and no.

After all, ideas are occurring to people all the time. Monkeys operating a coat-check, there's one for you. It might not be practical, people might not appreciate finding their pockets stuffed with banana skins and monkey dung, but you can't deny that monkey coat-check is an idea.

Of course, to shape that idea into something usable or worthwhile would take time and money. But that's not the point, the idea itself was extremely cheap.

Lemons genetically modified to have the flavour of limes, there's another one.

Today, there are 6.795 billion people on the planet. You know the room full of monkeys? Give them an infinite amount of time, and one of them will write Hamlet. Well, if the internet, our connected world, has given us anything it is a roomful of monkeys, chattering away in blissful inanity - most of the time - and very very occasionally (once an hour?) throwing up something worthwhile.

A vomit bib - for the rugby fan attending a formal dinner.

Because all those man hours, all those woman minutes, have been harnessed into a collective pool of information. And our systems of copyright, our approach to "intellectual property" (a phrase I despise more every day), are based on a very shallow pool. Copyright made sense when only a few people had the luxuries of time and money, and could devote endless hours to perfecting an artwork. But technology and modern life have brought us to a time in which ideas (which are cheap) can be brought to life quickly and easily.

The recording and mixing capabilities of an average laptop outstrip anything the Beatles ever worked with. Ablums, and decent ablums at that, can be made in the comfort of a bedroom. Movies too - Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow started out as a bedroom project.

So millions of copyrights, literally trillions of bytes of intellectual property, are being created every day. Third-world countries may not have the resources of developed nations, but with big enough populations, they now compete with the big boys - look at India's booming tech sector. Most of that is code, and what is code? Ideas and hours. But the salaries obviously don't compare to Silicon Valley.

This is something that will effect - that is affecting - every creative industry, every knowledge market, every art form, every area of technological innovation. This has massive implications for business and culture, and I'm starting to worry that Canute-like efforts to stem the tide of change will end up doing a lot of harm. Instead of adapting to our changing world, we're busy trying to prop up systems that can't cope, and that ultimately work against innovation and creativity.

A band that only plays gigs by telephone, kicking out the jams by conference call. (*FILM RIGHTS HAVE ALREADY BEEN SNAPPED UP FOR THIS IDEA*)

There are two other points that inform this that I'll come back to, and the first is this notion of "creativity", which strikes me as something of a misnomer. Secondly, the idea that we apply copyright in the personal sphere, when really it's much more useful, and much more sensible, to view it as a business thing.

This blogpost is copyrighted. It's certainly not more useful, insightful, or well-written than the memoirs of Hilaire Belloc. But it has the same protection. If you print it out, and stick it up on a school notice-board, my people could have words with your people. Does that make ANY sense?

An umbrella that doubles as a soup bowl.

Would love to know your thoughts.

Passion Pit @ Paradiso, Amsterdam

Just caught Passion Pit at Paradiso.

The band was hamstrung by a late arrival, the first song sounding especially disjointed until a late surge into a galloping sort of Jon Hughes soundtrack. Obviously missing the luxury of a soundcheck, the early numbers were a grating mess of treble, with cowbells clanging and singer Michael Angelakos's falsetto reduced to a piercing yelp.

They showed a solid grasp of the groove all night (an American Hot Chip?), but it all clicked with a surging run of euphoric and bassier, thank feck, synth-led anthems. There goes the ravey one; there's the disco one. The syncopated sampleadelic chants on Chunk of Change's Sleepyhead finally showed up the joy and intricate invention in what they do.

As they closed, Angelakos proved his commitment to the cause by bouncing off the drumkit and popping his shoulder out in the process, returning to stage to soldier on through a two-song encore.

Sold down the river?

Boing Boing brings the bad news today (well, technically yesterday). Excuse the rant.

*****
UPDATE: Make sure you read Howard Knopf on ACTA, "that's right. Copyright 'violations' (whatever that may mean) are right up there with terrorism and child pornography".
*****

So, on the grounds on national security, the Obama administration refused to disclose the contents of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Difficult to see what that really has to do with national security, but there you go.

The internet chapter of this treaty has now leaked, and it includes provisions for:

* ISPs actively policing copyrighted material on the networks. That means they DON'T have to routinely police for terrorist activity or child pornography, but they do have to continually police in order to help major record labels sue students.

* ISPs being forced to cut off internet access for accused copyright infringers. No trial, no jury, no appeal. Whole families cut off from essential civic information and services.

So once again, the lobbying power of copyright cabals means that the continued wealth of those corporations, and their shareholders, is held to be more important than the rights of the individual. In fact, the continued profitability of those companies is held to be more important than an individual's right to be considered innocent until proven guilty.

The copyright system is old and outmoded, and in its current form it has no relevance to how the majority of the world consumes media.

Rights owners are desperate to milk the general public for all they are worth, when what they really ought to be doing is focussing on BUSINESSES that use copyrights illegally. I'll post about this later, but there are millions and millions of dollars in lost revenues that copyright owners are missing out on - which should be paid by companies.

But suing students is easier than suing companies.

Despite all their rhetoric, you must understand that copyright owners are not pursuing this course of action because they want to support songwriters or moviemakers. And they will continue to lay off staff, left right and centre.

In fact, the ideal solution for them would be a system that enables them to rake in cash on demand. This is what they are pushing for. Just one guy, sat in a room, clicking addresses at random to sue or disconnect people. No overheads, unbelievably indulgent protection from the world's governments.

And what will suffer? Art and innovation.

Rhetoric of the Copyright Wars, pt.2: "3 strikes"

Lawks, but this is a wrong-headed policy. You know the one, the one where the copyright lobby suggests that the way to deal with filesharers is to give them 3 warnings - then to disconnect them.

In New Zealand it seemed to be passing into law, but for a last-minute attack of the sensibles. But the policy is being put into action in France. Now Lord Mandelson has unilaterally decided that it's the way forward for the UK.

70% of Brits polled about this disagreed. Even MI5 warned that it could promote the far more worrying use of 'dark nets' by filesharers.

So why would a representative of the British people, albeit an unelected one, proceed with such a plan?


Yes, Mandy went to dinner with David Geffen of Geffen Records. He went to dinner, and a few days later, he recommended the 3 strikes policy. We'll come back to the lobbying aspect, because it's infuriating enough on its own.

So what's the fundamental problem with 3 strikes? Where to start...

1. The entertainment industry would decide, all by itself, whether someone was a filesharer or not. Making the process wholly biased. And what about right of appeal? And what's with punishing a whole family if only one member is filesharing illegally?

2. The methods used to inspect data, and determine whether someone is filesharing, are often in themselves illegal. Not a civil matter (as with unauthorised copying), but a criminal matter. This is information that only the police and the government should be able to access and use.

3. Internet access is increasingly being viewed as a human right. Think of all the services and government initiatives that are moving to online-only access. So how can you disconnect them because a multinational company decides they are a "pirate"?

4. The ISPs would bear the cost of policing and enforcing this ridiculous measure. Bizarre, given that they are not held responsible for anything else that occurs on their networks. Should we also prosecute them as accessories to every stalker out there, or every football hooligan that used the web to arrange a fight?

Once again, instead of developing a viable alternative to their old business model, the copyright lobby is just trying to prop up a fundamentally unworkable system.

But this is just a delaying tactic. According to this I-can't-link-to-it-enough TechCrunch article, the labels know that recorded music will eventually be free. They're just suing people because they like the money.

Rhetoric of the Copyright Wars, pt.1: "copying is theft"

There's an awful lot of misinformation in the debate on copyright. While some of it is down to a lack of understanding, much of it is propagated by copyright enforcing lobbies with the aim of muddying our perception of the issues involved.

Let's start with one of the most widely used bit of rhetoric: unauthorised copying is THEFT. aka filesharing is PIRACY, aka illegal downloading is STEALING.

None of those things are any of these things. By which I mean, whatever you think of P2P filesharing (say), it is not theft.

Theft, or stealing, is the act of removing something from someone else's possession, without permission. For an act to be stealing, you have to deprive someone of the use of their own possession.

So it's obvious that unauthorised copying does not deprive the copyright owner of the use of their intellectual property. Whether or how much it affects their further exploitation of that copyright is a separate question, but the important thing is that saying "copying is theft" is fundamentally incorrect.

But of course, the entertainment industries love to use this terminology. Because "stealing" is a much more emotive concept. Few people want to think of themselves as thieves.

So you really oughta question any message framed in this way. Because if such a core point has been skewed so deliberately, it's only reasonable to view the rest of the argument with suspicion. The IT Crowd skewered this supposed moral hysteria perfectly:

Anti-Piracy Ad from The IT Crowd

Quotes are just words, they don't MEAN anything

"I'm not here to win a popularity contest."

O rilly? Is that why you took a part in edgy arthouse drama GI Joe?

Sienna Miller, in this month's GQ, clearly bamboozled as to why the world finds her vapid and irritating, rather than the big lovely she clearly feels she is.

Here's another: "It's tough to be judged all the time. It takes a very strong person to withstand that scrutiny."

Naturally, this heart-rending confessional is followed by a contradictory bit of token self-deprecation: "It's so laughable, all this talking about myself. It's so little and the world feels so big and the universe feels enormous."

Isis - Wavering Radiant (Ipecac, 2009)

Now I've been nevah been one for metal, having always preferred my loud gittarrrrrrock either more spikily chaotic (Pixies, Jon Spencer) or more cerebral (Sonic Youth). But the genre's been enjoying a revival in the nook of Amsterdam where I work, so in honour of our hairy, moshing brethren, here's the acclaimed Isis.

This *is* metal: searing guitars, check; pummeling drums, check; demonic growling, check. But as metal it's less of an iron and more of a molybdenum or a vanadium.

This is metal with the same expansive, genre-bending spirit as System of a Down. It's complex, melodic stuff, and songs like Ghost Key burst out into the kind of searching organic sprawl that calls to mind stoner-rock crusaders like The Secret Machines.

Buyable from the likes of iTunes or 7 Digital.

Four Iseses out of five: