[wos] Fwd: <nettime> "Content Flatrate" and the Social Democracy of the Digital Commons

[Volker Grassmuck]

Dear Rasmus,

I'm way late again but I do want to reply to your thoughtful article. 



On 15 Jul 2004 at 11:35, Florian Cramer wrote:

> ----- Forwarded message from rasmus fleischer 
<rasmus.fleischer at post.utfors.se> -----
> 
> Subject: <nettime> "Content Flatrate" and the Social Democracy of 
the Digital Commons
> To: nettime-l at bbs.thing.net
>
> "CONTENT FLATRATE" AND THE SOCIAL DEMOCRACY OF THE DIGITAL COMMONS

In copyright circles I get beaten for being a radical, then I come 
'home' and get beaten for being a social democrat, a counter-
revolutionary, in fact. Oh well, tough luck. Labels aside, let me say 
something about my motivation. 

To propose a plausible, viable alternative to DRM and mass-
criminalization is, as you correctly say, the main puropose. The 
second main purpose is to work towards a more equitable relation 
between authors, users and exploiters. The latter is expressed only 
between the lines in the Berlin Declaration and the German NGO 
statement. Felix and I will talk some more about this in an upcoming 
article. These two are strategic documents directed at two lawmaking 
bodies. They have to take into account the existing legal framework 
and the respective agendas. 

> Here I will discuss this new tendency, its premises, weaknesses and 
its  
> relation to anti-copyright-activism, polemically arguing that  
> "flatrateism" is a mistake. 

Fair enough. I‘m looking forward to your alternative to our 
alternative.

> Of all the different topics on the conference program for Wizards 
of OS  
> 3 (WOS3), held in Berlin 10-12 June, two things stood out as 
objects of  
> some hype. The first was the launch of Creative Commons in Germany, 
and  
> the other was the "Berlin Declaration on Collectively Managed 
Online  
> Rights". [1] Both these projects can be regarded as examples of 
what  
> one could term the "social democracy of the digital commons". But  
> despite their many similarities, they demarcate two clearly  
> incompatible strategies.

The incompatibilty topic reoccurs throughout your article, shifting 
from „clearly incompatible" via „seem like incompatible in the long 
run" to „different discourses that sometimes flow  together, but in a 
near future presumably more often will find themselves contradicting 
each other."

> Unfortunately, the tensions between two strategies "free  
> culture" and "flatrate" do not seem to have been discussed there at 
 
> depth, nor recognized in the scheduling.

Unfortunately, you don‘t discuss the tension either, you just 
stipulate it.

> The incompatibility may in fact be a reason for why we today have 
free  
> software, but almost no music that may be freely distributed and  
> legally sampled. One important reason is that we do not have a 
software  
> monopoly, but in practice a music monopoly.

I still don't see where any incompatibility comes in. And I don't 
agree on the monopolies. There's different kinds: the monopoly that 
copyright law grants to authors. Both Microsoft's power and the GPL 
are based on it. Then there's a market monopoly. MS holds more than 
90% of the desktop OS market. That's significantly more than any of 
the music majors has in their market. 

So why is there free software but no free music? My guess is this: 
software authors see the immediate advantage of building on other 
people's work and have them contribute to their own. Composers don't. 
Let's say Shakespeare had found the ultimate opening for a sonett. 
Then all poets after him, instead of reinventing the wheel would have 
cut and pasted his solution, like a programer would do with a sorting 
algorithm? That‘s obviously not how it works. From talking to fine 
but also media artists, I get the impression that the genius thing, 
my work, my name, is still dominant. Sampling culture is indeed 
different. And that's where you do find musicians sharing their 
samples. Maybe it‘s a question of generation change. Like with sys 
admins and free software, scientists and open access publishing, the 
whole cyber mind, for that matter.

> I am not trying to say that these are two distinct groups  
> of people. Rather two different discourses that sometimes flow  
> together, but in a near future presumably more often will find  
> themselves contradicting each other.

> Flatrateism also is keener to demand political action from the 
state,  
> while the people believing more in juridically based licenses like  

> Creative Commons and GPL have more of a tendency to oppose every  
> political intervention in form of new legislation. 

Aha, finally there‘s an argument. Alas, I have to disagree. In the 
afterword of Free Culture ( http://free-culture.org/ ) Larry Lessig 
describes two strategies: „that which anyone can do now, and that 
which requires the help of lawmakers. If there is one lesson that we 
can draw from the history of remaking common sense, it is that it 
requires remaking how many people think about the very same issue." 
(p. 275)

They are not contradictory but complementary. They do different 
things. The CC licenses are on top of fair use / private copying, and 
allow authors to express various options of freedom. The basic 
provisons for all licenses are that „people can copy and distribute 
your work provided they give you credit." Being allowed to copy and 
having to credit the author is what continental copyright law 
provides for anyway. So the novel feature here is the freedom to 
distribute. In the Berlin Declaration model (signed by Larry) this 
would be taken over by the statutory or voluntary general license. 
This license will not allow commercial use or modification. So these 
would remain options that authors could choose for their works with 
the help of a CC licence on top of the general license. The main 
difference is that the CC licenses are not concerned about 
compensation at all. They give the freedom to copy, but they don‘t 
say anything about the levies paid (or not paid under fair use) for 
the CDs onto which the work is copied and received by the author if 
she is a member of the respective collecting society. Under the 
flatrate license, the author could simply not register her work with 
the collecting society, and she would not receive compensation. One 
could imagine a third option in the CC licenses saying „I have not 
registered this work with the online collecting society, therefore no 
levy should be collected for it." This would have two effects: if the 
number of works licensed in this way increases, the tariff on work-
unspecific payments on recorders, empty media, and Internet access 
should decrease proportionally. Where work-specific information is 
available (download & streaming servers, p2p, radio stations) and 
these are made to pay levies, it would decrease the amount of levies 
they have to pay. It would make possible a (even commercial) download 
or webcasting service using exclusively non-compensated works 
therefore not having to pay levies at all. 

So there would be a general set of statutory (possibly plus 
voluntary) provisions binding for all works, including those held by 
media industries. On top of which there are additional provisions 
that each author can choose for any of her works with the help of the 
CC licenses. And of course, if an author doesn‘t want any 
restrictions on commercial use or modification and doesn‘t want to 
receive compensation, she can alway put the work in the public 
domain.

Why not go for the non-compensated fair use / fair dealing provision 
of anglo-american copyright law? Because technically it would be 
difficult if not impossible to take one element from one legal 
tradition and implant it into the other one. And even if the 
practical outcome might be very similar, I still think that fair use 
as a defense for an infringement is a much weaker construction than a 
levied right. But that‘s sort of philosophical. 

> According to the Berlin Declaration, the "Primary goal of copyright 
 
> lawmaking must be a balance between the rights of creators and 
those of  
> the public." Well, the problem with such a premise is not only that 
one  
> will have to ignore the consequences of an evolution that Walter  
> Benjamin as early as 70 years ago described as that "the 
distinction  
> between author and public is about to lose its basic character",  
> becoming "merely functional; varying from case to case". [3] 

The distinction gets more complex but it doesn't go away. That every 
author is also a member of the public is a truism. So is the reverse. 
Everyone, except for those who never write more than a shopping list 
and never take photographs etc. is an author. You write a poem and 
put it in your drawer or send it to your girlfriend, you're an author 
and copyright law protects your work. The next distinction is whether 
your work remains private or is published. This is where the 
selecting and editing function of old media used to come in. PC and 
Internet have abolished this channel scarcity. Anyone with Internet 
access who wants to publish her works can now do so. Not everyone 
does, but that decision is purely up to everyone themselves. Yet 
another distinction is whether you want to make a living off your 
creative work, going pro. The decision is again up to you but your 
success depends on finding someone who pays you for your work. If you 
succeed, certain things follow from that which set you apart from non-
paid authors. Your tax status changes and you have to declare your 
income as an author. You're eligble to join professional 
organziations, unions, and collecting societies. These collective 
organizations of authors regulated membership. E.g. if you want to be 
a member of the journalist's union and get an official press card, 
you have to prove that you're earning a certain percentage of your 
livelihood through journalistic work. Being a journalist also has 
consequences in criminal law: like doctors and lawyers you have the 
right not to reveal your sources. If you are a member of a collecting 
society you have to declare each piece of music, article, photograph 
that you publish in order to get a share of the levies. 

These rules by collectives and, in the case of statutory privileges, 
society, can and must be reviewed, of course. But changing them has 
repercussions that are not easily swept away by a Benjamin quote. 

We could say: everyone's an author. So let's do away with all the 
privileges of traditional authors and the regulatory frameworks 
intended to allow them to make a living off of their works that have 
grown historically. In fact, let's abolish copyright law because its 
main point is to allow the author to sell what is in essence a public 
good, and which would not be salable without the monopoly that 
copyright law grants. The guys who write free software don't get 
paid, and they don't make use of the economic rights to their works 
that copyright law gives them. Novelists, composers, photographers 
should do the same. They should support themselves by working a day 
job, allowances from their parents, tips, scholarships, dole, public 
grants etc. and do what everyone can do in the same way that everyone 
does it: as a hobby in their spare time. 

Is that what we want? Or does society want to have a specialist group 
of authors who have the opportunity to focus their time and energy on 
cultural production? If it does it has to provide them with a way to 
make a living. The dole is clearly no the answer.

> Think about the situation for a while. What I am trying to say is 
that  
> the possibility to offer culture "free as in free beer" can 
sometimes  
> be a necessary prerequisite to achieve the "free as in freedom"  
> position.

So you're demanding from creatives that they work for free? That 
people with no or little money mustn't be excluded from information 
and culture is institutionalized in the form of public libraries, 
which BTW are also very much in need of fighting for. That publicly 
funded science and culture should be accessible to all is a different 
matter, but I don't see myself demanding that authors should be 
prohibited by law from making a living. I'd be be very happy about 
free as in not having to ask permission, and as in no DRM.


> More  
> problematic is that the authors of the Berlin Declaration do not 
stop  
> at trying to balance "the rights of creators and those of the 
public",  
> but also want to "compensate" the whole crowd of non-creative 
copyright  
> holders, from music publishers to heirs of dead creators. A  
> "compensation" system channeling money from Internet infrastructure 
to  
> dinosaurs from a past era ? isn't that exactly "to protect an 
outmoded  
> business model of a handful of players in a relatively small 
industry",  
> something that the same declaration text defines as "bad policy"?

This is another central re-occuring theme. Let‘s take another 
version:

> The record industry builds its power and its business model upon 
the  
> ability to control people's musical preferences, and it's damn  
> important for them not to loose their grip over that. It seems 
unsure  
> how long they could go on motivating their existence in a situation 
 
> where they do not themselves control how music is packaged and  
> presented, what kinds of collection albums and boxes are marketed, 
when  
> the different singles of an album is released in different parts of 
the  
> world etc. In fact, one could say that the music industry needs the 
 
> money that current copyright laws grant them precisely in order to  

> exercise control. Filesharing undermines the industry's control not 
 
> less than its source of income. If this loss of control would be  
> legalized under a flatrate, as the Berlin Declaration suggests, it  

> seems really strange why one should keep "compensating" the record  

> industry.

I doesn‘t seem strange when you think that it will not be the current 
record industry. I completely agree with Janko Roettgers‘ analysis 
that its days are counted. No doubt, the dinosaurs will go belly-up. 
But 1) on the way down, they can cause a lot of harm to individuals, 
to the basic infrastructure of PC and Internet, and to culture. Our 
proposal wants to prevent as much of that harm as possible. And 2) 
that doesn‘t mean that there won‘t be a music industry. 

In copyright theory, exploiters, as Thomas Hoeren has put it so 
pointedly, have the role of service providers to creatives and to 
users, bringing works to users. In copyright practice, it's the 
exploiters who call the tune. The digital revolution is about to 
change this discrepancy.

Let‘s look at what the music industry does:

* Discovering new talents. Without channel scarcity, anyone can 
publish. And anyone can go scouting and tell anyone else what great 
stuff they found. We are seeing this already with open contributory 
repositories incl. music by unsigned bands (e.g. archive.org + CC). 
Around these, self-organizing processes of selection, evaluation, 
amplification (users ratings, portals like tonspion.de) emerge. Not 
even the biggest major can employ millions of A&R people. They are 
aware of these valuable signals for ‚what the market wants,‘ and have 
started skimming this open process already.

* Production support: studio, admin (accounting etc.)

* Marketing: video clip, tour, ads. Strange enough, record companies 
see clip and concert as marketing measures for the actual product, 
the album. After revenue ratios have changed away from CD sales to 
concerts and mechandizing, they recently changed the contracts with 
recording artists in Germany and probably elsewhere so that they get 
a significant share from those as well. That seems a very weak 
proposition. Why should a record company get half the proceeds from 
concerts? They‘d probably say: ‚because we did the marketing that 
brought the people to the concert.‘ But then, a computer maker that 
hires an advertizing agency for a campaign doesn‘t pay half the 
revenues from selling its computers to the agency. They might also 
say that they did the...

* Funding. They give an advance of X00,000 Euros to the band from 
which it pays recording, clip, tour etc. and which, if the album 
flops, it doesn‘t have to pay back. The record company takes the 
financial risk for which it demands in return that the band signs 
over their souls (next 3-5 albums, revenues from concerts and 
merchandizing, and if the lead singer appears in a toothpaste 
commercial they probably want a share of that too, because it was 
them who made her a star.)

Now let‘s look how this might turn out.

* Production support: with current technology, musicians can do their 
recording and mixing themselves. And they can do their own books. If 
they don‘t want to that, they can also buy these services from what I 
would think is essentially a cottage industry. A high-end studio can 
be operated by a one-person company. What might be gained by economy 
of scale is lost in direct creative interaction with the artists. 

* Marketing: again, artists can do it themselves or hire an agency. 
But, again, there‘s no conceivable reason why a PR agency should 
receive IP rights in the product they advertize or a share from the 
revenues from its sale.

* Funding. The model today seems very similar to venture captial. The 
record company acts as a bank. If nine out of ten albums flop they 
cross-finance them with the one that becomes a hit. This is a 
function that could be taken over by actual banks or venture capital 
companies specializing in creative products.  Musicians could decide 
whether they want to take out a regular loan from a bank, and bear 
the risk themselves. Or they could get venture capital which would 
mean no risk in case of a flop but sharing of revenues in case of a 
success. And the could work without additional money, meaning no- to 
low-budget recording, clip, tour or none of these at all. 

There is no reason why all these different functions should all be 
provided under one roof. Separating them would mean, the controlling 
element you describe would be largely gone. Performing artists would 
be much more in control of their own work. The situation would be 
different for composers and lyricists. And it would be very different 
again for movies, texts, photographs. Each would have to be looked at 
separately. But anyway, the point is not to dictate that kind of 
decentralization by law but to change the legal framework in order 
that the potential for shifting control to the artists inherent in 
technology can fully develop.

There would still be an industry. And very likely there would be 
concentration. Oligopolies in the different segments (venture 
capital, marketing, accounting, tour organization) might re-emerge. 
But it will likely no be the same players from the old music 
industry. After all, it took a computer maker what the music industry 
hadn‘t managed to do in years: set up a decent music-on-demand 
system. 

Imagine an album release in the future. There‘s a big party for 
press, celebrities and paying guests who get a DVD including the 
video clip etc. in an exclusive case. A limited edition of these goes 
on sale for collectors via mail-order and in the few remaing record 
shops on the planet. Will there be collectors? People collect 
anything imaginable. And with CDs getting rarer they will get more 
precious (and likely much more expensive than today). After the 
release, circulation on the net starts, and the counter starts 
ticking. The same might happen with the clip if it is recognized as 
an art form in its own right. MTV etc. would be paying for airing 
them and they would be levy compensated as well. Album, clip, press 
would get people to go to concerts and buy basecaps, mugs etc. and a 
CD with the recording of the concert you just heard, like the 
Greatful Dead are doing today. 

Does that sound like freedom of circulation and earning a living are 
reconcilable goals?


>  What is "content"? Music and film seem obvious. What about Oracle  

> software 

"Content" is in distinction to "software." 

> But, as Florian Cramer has pointed out  
> on the German WOS-list in some very critical posts about the Berlin 
 
> Declaration [5], all talk about "content" is really diffuse.

Talk may be diffuse, copyright law isn't really. Everywhere it starts 
with an enumeration of work categories that are included. And 
software has a special section in the law, which makes it plausible 
to give it special treatment in compensation as well, i.e. exclude 
it. But as for most concepts in law, the boundaries of 'conent' are 
indeed fuzzy. The real world rarely does us the favor of being either 
black or white. Generative digital artworks are certainly an 
interesting case. Without diving into the issue, I would like to 
refer to procedure again. If there are conflicts over rights or 
categorization, there will be law suits. And if the phenomenon grows 
to certain proportions, the law will have to deal with it. 


> The proposed collecting societies  
> must include an array of book publishers, magazines, picture 
bureaus,  
> music publishers, journalists, media conglomerates... Now it 
appears  
> that quite a high flatrate must be put on every Internet 
connection,  
> every CD burner and every iPod in order to please them all. 

Correct, all these parties are members of collecting societies today, 
in two groups: authors and publishers. The tariff on burners in 
Germany today is 6 Euro. Is that exorbitant?

> And the  
> economic question of how to weigh all those types of digital 
"content"  
> against each other ? the download quantity in kilobytes obviously 
would  
> not work as measure ? that question has not even been raised yet.

That‘s an important question that collecting societies not only raise 
but answer today. First there are different factors for different 
work categories (music, film, text, image). Text is measured in 
words, time-based media in run time (longer pieces of music are in a 
different rate category than shorter ones, empty media are levied 
according to run time). I‘m not sure how they do it for images.

> The present situation for "free culture" is tantamount to this  
> hypothetical scenario: Imagine if every time someone installed any 
kind  
> of free software on a computer, s/he would have to pay a special 
fee.  

No, that's exactly the DRM model that we want to avoid. We've taken 
software out. It's a CONTENT Flatrate. So let's replace it by 
'music.' Every time you download, listen to, copy, transfer a piece 
of music you have to pay. That's DRM. With the Content FLATrate you 
pay once (for devices and media, and per month for Internet access) 
and you can down- and upload as much as you like.
 

> According to Creative Commons international coordinator Christiane  

> Aschenfeldt, the collecting societies are the biggest obstacles for 
the  
> spread of freer licensing in Europe. [8] The Berlin Declaration, on 
the  
> other hand, praises the music monopolies as an ideal solution, 

If that's what you got out of it, then please go read it again. There 
is a section entitled "Collecting Societies Need to Become more 
Flexible, Transparent, and Democratic." We inserted that precisely to 
address the GEMA arguing against CC that they are too inflexible to 
manage works individually. BTW, no such problem arose with any of the 
other German collecting societies. And it links nicely to the 
European Commission's critique of collecting societies which alas is 
driven by the DRM faction. Reforming the collecting societies into 
more internally democratic, internally and externally transparent, 
accountable, efficient and flexible organizations is one of the two 
main purposes behind the upcoming EU Directive. So I'd say, things 
are looking good on that end. 

For the Content Flatrate, we are proposing to set up a new online 
collecting society with some ideas on how to structurally prevent it 
to turn into the same ugly beast as GEMA. 

> The surveillance part is just another really problematic part of 
the  

To my understanding, surveillance is watching a person's behaviour. 
That's DRM and precisely what we want to avoid. All that's needed is 
counting dowloads, without any connection to personal data.

> flatrate concept. P2P filesharing has become much more diverse and  

> decentralized since the fall of Napster. Even if companies like  
> BigChampagne make statistics on what is downloaded through the 
dominant  
> protocols, the demands for accuracy would be much greater if the  
> surveillance provided the economic basis for the entire "content"  
> industry. 

Kazaa has already volunteered to report downloads. It might involve a 
mechanism in the servant that sends the work ID of every successful 
download to some Kazaa server. 

> Under a flatrate, it's quite sure that some people would like  
> to hide some of their transactions in "darknets", 

Why? What would they have to gain?

> and some would even  
> try to manipulate the statistics for profit, raising their own 
download  
> count. 

That is a danger, and a tricky problem to solve. We‘re collecting 
ideas on this. If you have any they‘d be very welcome.

> And then the industry probably would demand a ban on P2P  
> programs without state certification. (In such a hypothetical 
situation  
> we would have to ask ourselves how far from the current DRM 
discourse  
> the flatrate actually gets us.)

Unlikely that the state would certify or ban anything. But operators 
of p2p networks, download and streaming servers would be obliged to 
report downloads to the collecting society just as CD presses and 
radio stations are today. This would be fully automatized, and since 
these operators are not the ones who pay they wouldn't have an 
incentive to manipulate the numbers. How is this different from DRM? 
No personal data is collected and retained for centuries, and there 
is no mechanism enforcing compliance to the license on the devices of 
the users.

> According to Florian Cramer, the flatrate demands are based upon  
> outdated technical categories. It's getting harder to distinguish  
> between local transfers of data, e.g. in wireless environments, and 
 
> "filesharing" between different systems. [15] 

These are not categories relevant to copyright law. The limitation 
for private copying allows passing copies to friends and relatives, 
no matter whether they are on the other side of the planet or next 
door, no matter whether this happens by postal mail, wire or 
wirelessly. What it does not allow is passing copies to unkown third 
parties. This is what we want to achieve with the new limitation of 
the newly introduced right of making available. 

What is a problem is free Wlans reaching beyond the private sphere 
that Florian was talking about. If such a local data cloud is 
connected to the Internet, it runs into other problems as well 
(contract with ISP, criminal liability etc.), difficult issues that 
are being discussed in the movement. For the copyright flatrate it 
wouldn't be a problem because there is an ISP, and therefore a 
monthly payment to which the levy would be added. The local community 
has to find a way to share the ISP costs anyway. And their are other 
ISP clients with lots of users behind them, like libraries and 
universities for which special rates will have to be found. More 
tricky is a data cloud not connected to the Internet. Maybe we can 
get away with argueing that the members of this local community have 
to cooperate to set up the network, therefore we assume they are all 
friends, therefore this is private copying covererd by the existing 
limitation, and the levies for this are collected on burners, empty 
CDs etc. Really tricky are ad hoc meshes with anonymous access. I 
don't have a good answer to this. They're still experimental. As they 
get more widespread, maybe a solution emerges. 
 
> But flatrateism is not characterized by its interest for possible  
> advances of P2P technology. If anything it is a relatively resigned 
 
> position; 

If I had given up I wouldn't be doing this. But yes, I'm not 
satisfied with writing a paper on how the world should be ideally, 
and then sitting back and calling booh if it doesn't change 
accordingly. I do want to make a difference. The dinosaurs, other 
industry players, European and national lawmakers are moving 
constantly. The regulatory framework of copyright is still in the 
making. We can sit by and let it happen or we can intervene. If we do 
the latter, we move from principle to <ugly word>real-politics</ugly 
word>. (Ohooh, I can feel the club against social-democracy coming 
down on me again, even though the issue between Fundis and Realos is 
currently more connected with the Greens.) Meaning, figuring out the 
competition, finding allies, setting your goals realistically, and 
then aiming considerably higher, in other words, acting 
strategically.

> It seems implicit that other kinds of  
> anti-copyright-activism should be subsumed under the party line of  

> "content flatrate", and not mess too much with the music monopoly.

Well well, you did say that your critique was going to be polemical. 

> It is characteristic of many flatrateists to downplay the 
revolutionary  
> aspects of digital reproduction, placing P2P on a par with older,  
> analogue copying techniques like the cassette recorder.

I‘ve explicated some of the potentials I see in the digital 
revolution above. As for the other one, the revolution overthrowing 
capitalism, you can count me in when it happens even though I 
probably get strung up at the next tree by someone exposing me as a 
counter-revolutionary social-democrat. For now I have a more 
immediate short-term goal. The copyright reform is ongoing. We can do 
nothing about it and later complain that the capitalists did it 
again. Or we can propose an alternative and build pressure for it. 
Success is highly unlikely but not impossible. We have only two kinds 
of weapons: the better arguments and numbers. And this is what our 
discussion here is about, working on the arguments, testing them time 
and again, making them stronger, more plausible. And if they seem 
solid, building as large a base behind them as possible, europe-wide. 
We don‘t have money, but if we are many we‘ll be able to make a 
difference. 

 
> While the "free culture/free software" wing, has rapidly gained  
> strength in countries like India and Brazil (whose minister of 
culture  
> is an outspoken supporter of Creative Commons), I have never heard  

> about any demands for "flatrate" raised outside Europe and North  
> America. That's not strange at all, as Europe and the US would 
remain  
> net exporters of musical "intellectual property" also under a 
flatrate  
> system. 

While this is an issue for developing countries in general, India and 
Brazil are exceptionally bad examples. India has a huge film 
industry, Brazil a huge music production, both internationally 
successful. So both would get a significant share of the levies 
collected at home and abroad. And even if you haven't heard about it 
(you could have at WOS), the flaterate is being discussed in Brazil. 
The music database that Ronaldo Lemos introduced on the CC panel is 
working on one for the near future. William Fisher was there right 
before WOS. In fact, with Gilberto Gil at the helm, much hope of the 
international ACS debate rests on Brazil. If one country could start 
something on its own, is my impression, it will be Brazil. 
 
> But I'm afraid that this talk about "compensation" obscures the 
truth  
> about the social production of culture, and replaces it with the  
> already all-to-common myth that copyright money is functioning (or 
at  
> least functioned, until P2P came into play) as a "wage" for today's 
 
> artists. In fact, nothing could be more wrong. The payments from 
the  
> collecting societies are huge for people holding rights to several  

> radio hits made some years ago, but they are insignificant for most 
of  
> the living people involved in "innovative production" of culture 
right  
> now. Nothing of this would be changed by a flatrate.

See above. I‘m pretty sure that there still would be stars, but I‘m 
also pretty sure that the peak would be much lower because the 
diversity of what people will listen to will be much greater. And the 
peak could further be flattened by a degressive payout scale. While 
degressive taxation favors the rich, degressive payout would still 
leave the stars with a large pile of money, but give everyone else a 
chance as well.

> Cultural producers are making their living in a true multitude of 
ways.  
> The sale of reproductions is just one. People have other jobs part- 
or  
> full-time, they have subsidies of different kinds, some are 
students,  
> many get money by performing live and giving lessons. In general,  
> "workfare"-type political measures on the labor market [22] is a 
far  
> bigger threat against most artists than any new reproduction 
technique.  

You‘re right. We pay tax money to people who are out of work so they 
are free to do creative work for which we, more or less voluntarily, 
again pay huge amounts only that it doesn‘t reach those whose work we 
appreciate. A completely absurd situation. So let‘s do something 
about it.

> That is the far from perfect situation of today, but one has to 
make  
> some conclusions from that: The problems with copyright can't be  
> "solved" inside the copyright system. The problems of how to 
support  
> innovative production of culture can't be solved just through 
reforming  
> the distribution of culture.

Sounds good, tell me more.

> Other workshops at Wizards of OS probably succeeded better than the 
 
> flatrate workshop in promoting economic support of "innovative  
> production and distribution". E.g. the free networks movement,  
> represented at WOS3 with workshops on how to set-up wireless  
> mesh-routed networks, exemplified with projects already connected 
to  
> Berlin independent art institutions. A possibility for some free  
> culture producers to get the necessary Internet connection cheap or 
 
> without cost, eliminating some of those monthly bills that are the  

> greatest enemy of all culture. The Berlin Declaration, in contrast, 
 
> demands more expensive Internet connections, so that money can be  
> re-distributed to a smaller group of culture producers who has 
already  
> succeeded in making their living.

Good point. Reducing costs is certainly an important strategy, but 
if, for the question how to pay these reduced costs we‘re back to the 
dole, it‘s clear that it can‘t be the full and only answer.

> Bifo, asking "What is the Meaning of Autonomy Today??, puts some 
light  
> on this whole problematic. The ongoing process of strengthening the 
 
> conditions for a "self-organization of cognitive work" is, 
according to  
> Bifo, "so complex that it cannot be governed by human reason ... We 
 
> cannot know, we cannot control, we cannot govern the entire force 
of  
> the global mind." [23]

So phrased, who would disagree?

> This argument is not only based on a radical refusal of 
cybernetics,  
> but also (reminding of Walter Benjamin) on the premise that we are 
not  
> facing a problem to be "solved", but an expression of a social 
conflict  
> encompassing all of society, all kinds of production, reproduction 
and  
> distribution. The authors of the Berlin Declaration, on the other 
hand,  
> seem to suggest the opposite: That human reason can and should 
propose  
> economic "solutions", based on re-organizing the "content"-
producing  
> sector. The result is a strategy that has a totalizing character,  
> proposing a strengthening of the music monopoly rather than its  
> elimination.

I don‘t have to repeat that we are not proposing a strengthening of 
the music monopoly. I do agree that this is part of a social conflict 
 encompassing all of society. And I do agree that human reason can 
and should propose solutions. That‘s what it‘s there for, isn‘t it? 
Human reason tells us that wanting to cybernetically „govern the 
entire force of  the global mind" would be a bit presumptuous, to say 
the least. What we want is rather more modest. We want to save 
cyberspace, i.e. the open architecture that it is pre-DRM. And we 
want to work towards a system that gives authors a fairer share of 
the media pie. Mh, maybe not so modest after all. And getting there 
is indeed a messy bit of social conflict.

Ok, so if "flatrateism" is a mistake, I still haven‘t gotten what you 
are proposing we should be doing instead. 

Is it Bifo‘s message? 

„I have no answer. All we can do is what we are actually doing 
already: the self-organisation of cognitive work is the only way to 
go beyond the psychopathic present. I don't believe that the world 
can be governed by Reason. The Utopia of Enlightenment has failed. 
But I think that the dissemination of self-organised knowledge can 
create a social framework containing infinite autonomous and self-
reliant worlds." 

And you call us resigned. But yes, I‘m all for autonomous zones. I 
only don‘t think that they exclude or contradict strategies like 
working on WSIS or copyright law or any other point in the emerging 
global framework that will effect all our daily lives.

Or is it the fatalistic, eschatological idea that escalation is good? 
If things get worse the revolution is near? You write as a paraphrase 
on our proposal:

> let's  
> cool the whole thing down and try to make a compromise that 
prevents  
> full-scale confrontation between filesharers and the copyright  
> industry.

So you would prefer a full-scale confrontation? If enough people, not 
thousands but tens of thousands are suffering from the backlash and 
our digital landscape is full of barbed wire, then filesharers will 
rise and storm the headquarters of the copyright industry and topple 
them?

> Like always, social democracy  
> is about preventing capital from committing suicide in the pursuit 
of  
> short-term profit.

So if we wouldn‘t be pushing this counter-revolutionary flatrate 
thing, we could all just sit back and watch capital commit suicide on 
TV?

Monty Python in „The Meaning of Life" seem to support the first 
option. In the very first chapter, „The Crimson Permanent Assurance," 
out of unbearable slavish oppression, the pirates arise. And after 
they had finished their bloody business, „once proud financial giants 
lay in ruins." So maybe you‘re right and copyright slavery [1] will 
bring the revolution?

Volker



[1]  http://www.derplan.com/videocopyrightslavery.html





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