permission culture

I’m not sure if people are able to comment yet. I’m working on that bug, which I believe has something to do with Edublogs’ need to counter a recent deluge of comment spam.

However, I am aware that I need to talk more about what “permission culture” is and why it matters.

It hinges on a discursive shift that has recently taken place in relation to copyright. Originally copyright was enacted to encourage the publication of creative works. However, copyright term has been repeatedly extended, and there is a real prospect that it may become effectively permanent. The US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998 has criminalised much of what once was cultural dialogue (this is one of the reasons I write this blog). So-called “Free Trade Agreements” are extending US intellectual property (IP) law to many other jurisdictions throughout the world - sometimes even without the protections the USA itself has (e.g. South Korea was recently forced to give up fair use).

The sum of these things has led to stifling of innovation, creating situations where for example “the lawyers decide what’s allowed in a film” (Lessig, 2001, p4) and “creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators of the past” (Lessig, 2004). I believe that it was in one of Lessig’s works that I first saw the term “permission culture”, describing this situation.

This is reminiscent of Derrida’s satirically imagined world (Striphas and McLeod, 2006, p128):

where every idea or nuanced turn of phrase is private property, where ownership of a cultural text is divided up and assigned to various stockholders.

The opposite of permission culture is free culture. Lessig has written a book about that. As in a free market, a free culture does not mean that nothing has a price, or that people shouldn’t get paid. As Richard Stallman famously said in relation to the development of the Free Software Foundation, “it is free as in freedom, not free as in beer”.

My hope is that the paranoid bureacratic resposes to The War Against Terror (TWAT) as described in the two previous posts will, by their bizarre impracticality and institutionalised absurdism, actually end up helping to counter permission culture rather than adding to it. But then again, they might not…

References:

Lessig, L. 2001. The Future of Ideas. New York: Random House.

Lessig, L. 2004. Free Culture – How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. Penguin Press.

Striphas, T. and McLeod, K. 2006. Strategic Improprieties: Cultural Studies, The Everyday, and the Politics of Intellectual properties. Cultural Studies Vol. 20, Nos 2/3 March/May 2006, pp. 119/144. can be downloaded via http://www.kembrew.com/academics/research.html

need for sunshine

So often lately I have encountered the issue of whether or not it is wrong, or even illegal, to photograph something. Sometimes there is a valid enough reason not to take a photograph. But at times prohibition acquires a surreal dimension, as in the true story of Keith McCammon who inadvertently photographed the wrong building - one that houses a high-security defence project. The full story is here.

Marc Fisher, who blogged the story at the Washington Post says:

The bottom line is that McCammon was caught in a classic logical trap. If he had only known the building was off-limits to photographers, he would have avoided it. But he was not allowed to know that fact. “Reasonable, law-abiding people tend to avoid these types of things when it can be helped,” McCammon wrote. “Thus, my request for a list of locations within Arlington County that are unmarked, but at which photography is either prohibited or discouraged according to some (public or private) policy. Of course, such a list does not exist. Catch-22.”

The only antidote to this security mania is sunshine. Only when more and more Americans do as McCammon has done and take the time and effort to chronicle these excesses and insist on answers from authorities will we stand a chance of restoring balance and sanity to the blend of liberty and security that we are madly remixing in these confused times.

I would change one word in that paragraph - “only when more Americans photographers do as McCammon has done…”  because  it is a  global  insanity.  The whole world needs that special kind of sunshine.

On Flickr there is a group You can’t take pictures here! which chronicles everyday prohibition excesses quite nicely.

The terror of censorship

I live in Australia, where the Attorney General Philip Ruddock wants to enact a law whereby the Office of Film and Literature Classification must identify in advance the books, films, symphonies, news broadcasts, sitcoms and sermons that “might lead a person (regardless of his or her age or any mental impairment) to engage in a terrorist act”. He bases that on the shooting of Ronald Reagan by a crazy guy who was obsessed with Jodie Foster.

That’s like knowing in advance that J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” would lead to the assassination of John Lennon - which it did, via the delusions of a paranoid schizophrenic reader obsessed with that book and with Lennon. People have raised practical objections, but he says the Board can seek the help of psychiatry professionals if they need to.

The point Ruddock is missing (if he is genuine) is that people with mental health problems such as paranoid schizophrenia will incorporate whatever cultural material is to hand into their complex delusional systems. And, arguably, the Bible is the one that is most frequently encountered there. So that should be the first to go, in his great book-burning spree.