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[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
MALE SPEAKER: It's my pleasure to present to you Ekaterina
Chukovskaya, Russian Deputy Minister of Culture.
Thank you.
Let me occupy this seat.
I am just a moderator, and my position doesn't mean that I'm
going to impose my vision or the government's
vision in this area.
I'm happy to say that I will assist such experts as Artemi
Troitsky, who needs no introduction.
I have a few words, though--
a journalist, an arts critic, author of a number of books
about rock music, a music promoter and director of the
agency, and labels, delivers lectures on entertainment in
the University of Management, and he has a number of his own
music pieces.
Artemi?
He's a long way off.
Also we have a number of other Russian experts.
Alexander Dolgin, head of Department in the High School
of Economics, the main proponent of Creative Commons,
free use of intellectual property over the internet and
in other media.
He offers his books free of charge to save paper, perhaps.
Alexander?
We also have here Aram Sinnreich, professor of the
Communication and Information School from the University of
Rutgers, author of a number of articles about music and
entertainment, often invited as an expert to courts of law
where intellectual rights issues are disputed.
And finally Marc Sands, who represents the Tate Gallery.
He works as a media director there.
He promotes Tate in social media, online, and internet.
I believe that Marc Sands was one of the inspirations of the
Google Arts project that you can see in the lobby, and
recently, we were happy to say that a number of Russian
museums have joined the program, and now, thanks to
Google, people from remote areas can have access to the
inheritance of the Russian and non-Russian museums.
And we can start from this point.
What does internet give to culture?
Is it a new market, a new media, a
new creative platform?
Or is it just a tool for copying
existing pieces of art?
We have several questions, but to begin with, let us at first
talk about what is interesting to the panelists.
Google has organized a number of seminars about culture and
the internet.
I took part in a number of them, but basically, they
discussed legal issues.
Is internet a tool where pirates get together?
McLuhan, who died in 1980, before the internet, said that
Gutenberg made everyone a reader, and Xerox made
everyone a publisher.
Will internet make everyone authors or pirates?
These are the questions to discuss.
Today will have an opportunity to discuss this question.
What is the role of the internet from the
viewpoint of culture?
And I would like Alexander to begin, and then all the others
will have a chance to speak.
Thank you.
I will try to show you the framework in which I try to
analyze what is happening in our culture.
And in the framework, I shall highlight the key issues of
the internet, culture, digital era, and so on.
The first point is
deteriorating choice in culture.
What do I mean?
Large-scale generation of a bad quality product means that
bad quality products push out good products.
It's a problem of navigation of users in the content space.
How can we protect ourselves against spam, against
information noise?
It's not a cultural problem.
It existed in other markets, like insurance, education,
loans, and so on.
George Akerlof got a Nobel Prize in 2001 for that, and I
just extend this theory on culture.
The second issue, and an important area, and the
challenge--
the main trend that has to be tackled is new business models
in content industries.
How can a content producer earn his money in the
situation when his products are in open access and can be
used without payment?
There are two variants here--
how to monetize content by copyright, the traditional
institution, which imposes a monopoly on such an area.
But this institution is 300 years old,
starting from 1709, 1710.
This institution that was born in the area of paper loses its
relevance, and what can we invent to replace it?
Copyright, no matter whether you like it or not, cannot be
eliminated by law.
It has to lose its position gradually in competition with
something else, with an alternative approach.
Another subsection of the cultural business model is
monetization of crowdsourcing, or let's put it
in a different way--
when can social media users, or
crowdsourcers, if you like--
in which conditions they can start earning money.
Not just becoming a source of the content, but beneficiaries
of the process.
And the third global point, issue, problem, trend, is also
related to crowdsourcing.
It's professionalization of crowdsourcing.
How can we make crowdsourcing more efficient?
How can we raise its quality?
It is an important opportunity.
How can we stop discrediting it, stop
turning it into a nightmare?
How can we professionalize crowdsourcing?
Let's move to the clubsourcing.
Let's organize amateur activity, voluntary activity,
in the framework of communities operating under
certain rules.
Thank you, thank you Alexander.
Now, since we started with theory, let's ask Aram.
Can you say a few words on this subject or on any other
subjects related to our subject?
ARAM SINNREICH: Great, because I want to get to the
conversation part.
The very premise that there's such a thing as a copy, and
therefore that there must be a copyright, is actually a very
new premise.
And if you think about it, it's based in the industrial
model of cultural production.
Right?
Prior to the development of the printing press, prior to
movable type, all culture was authentic culture.
All culture was equally valuable, because it
originated within communities of practice.
It originated within ritual, within religion, within
marriage and birth and death, and the important things that
marked our lives.
Now this is true whether you talk about storytelling, or if
you talk about painting or sculpture or dance or music.
When movable type came along and culture became an
industrial process, an industry emerged to take
advantage of this industrial process and to incentivize us
economically to produce more.
Copyright, as a system of laws, was the
center of that process.
Now in order to believe that copyright is necessary, we
have to believe that there is a value distinction between
the original and the copy.
We have to believe that the novel is
better than the photocopy.
We have to believe that the painting is better than the
photographic image.
Walter Benjamin pointed all this out 80 years ago in this
great article that I always assign to my students called
"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."
The problem is that this was always a myth, right?
Culture is not something that loses value when it's spread
from a small community to a large group of people.
Culture is actually something the gains value, the more
people that do it.
The more people that are sharing and singing and
playing a song, the more valuable that song is to us.
The more people that see an image, the more that image
resonates with us as a culture.
That tension was invisible to us during the age of
copyright, because there was no technical alternative to
the system of reproduction and the system of monetization of
culture that existed at the time.
The most interesting thing that the internet has done is
to demonstrate to us beyond a shadow of a doubt that there's
no meaningful value distinction between
original and copy.
That was always a myth, and that myth has seen the end of
its value to us as a culture.
In so doing, in destroying that myth, the original versus
copy binary, it has also demonstrated to us that the
fundamental myth of capitalism, the myth of the
distinction between production and consumption, is equally
hollow and equally an artifact of the age of material
reproduction and the economy of mass production.
We've now moved beyond this economy.
It's already happened when it comes to media and
communications, where ones and zeros could be infinitely
reproduced, ad infinitum, anywhere in the world.
But it's beginning to happen with material
production, as well.
We're sequencing genomes.
We have 3D printers that are reaching consumer-grade
quality, where pretty soon you'll be able to reproduce
virtually any object in your house for very little money.
And as many of you may know, copyright does not exist for
objects the same way that it does for paintings and
pictures and songs and novels and things like that.
So that's going to be a very big
challenge for us as a society.
So this entire range of new cultural behaviors, what I
call mashup cultures or configurable culture, has
emerged, thanks to these new tools, where when you have a
mashup, when one person takes a song by Jay-Z and another
song by, let's say, Shostakovich, and mashes them
together, and makes something new that could never have been
done by either of the regional artists--
who is the author in that equation?
Is it Jay-Z, is it Shostakovich, or is it the
mashup artist?
What is the original and what is the copy?
And the answer, of course, is that there is no answer,
because the very premise of the binary is itself false.
And we've discovered all these wonderful, very culturally
enriching forms of practice over the last 10 years--
mashups and remixes and machinima and video game mods,
and the list goes on and on and on and on--
most of them are silly cats, but some of them, like, say,
the Grass Mud Horse in China, are very politically powerful
ideas, and actually can change the development of social and
political organization.
So in the interest of brevity, just let me point out that
even though as a culture--
and I have very interesting research that I've done with
both DJ communities and general audiences around the
world that demonstrate this to be the case--
as a culture, we've already adapted to this, and we've
developed a new set of ethical frameworks and a new set of
practices, and also a new set of emerging economic
practices, that enable us to recognize cultural and
political value from these forms, these post-capitalist
cultural forms.
The problem is that we are saddled with this terrible
copyright system that, rather than becoming more subtle, is
becoming more draconian, more binary in the
black-versus-white, good-versus-bad, and more
global and overreaching in its policing and enforcements.
So we see these terrible international treaties like
ACTA, these terrible efforts at new laws in the US like
SOPA and PIPA and CISPA, which they were talking about on the
previous panel, that criminalize the cultural
behaviors of the majority of human beings on the planet.
That is a severe problem, and there is no immediate solution
to it, although I look forward to discussing possible
solutions with my panelists.
MALE SPEAKER: Thank you, Aram.
It looks that internet is not just a tool which helps you to
spread pieces of art, but this is an environment which
generates new kinds of art in general.
Perhaps the task is to eliminate--
so internet should not contain only the noise which is louder
than Shostakovich.
It should have everything, including
Shostakovich and others.
It should have some portals or banks, something what Google
does, building some templates.
This is an important thing in the internet.
I would like Marc to continue, to join our discussion.
Let's work step by step.
MARC SANDS: [INAUDIBLE]
culture and the internet, and I think anyone who isn't is
mistaking the discussion.
The discussion is about engaging audiences with
culture, whatever that culture particularly is.
And the issue is, who pays and how do we pay?
And they should be completely separate.
Because in time, the issue of who pays and how do we pay
will be resolved.
We're right at the beginning of that phase.
No one quite knows.
We're holding onto legal issues and business models
that are increasingly out-of-date.
What's absolutely clear is that the desire to consume
culture online is huge.
And my answer to whether it should be
[? Shostakovich and ?]
everyone is of course it should be everyone, and people
will work their way through it, and we will work through
systems of ordering the good and the bad, whatever good and
bad actually mean.
Now I'm speaking as someone who spent 10 years working in
newspapers, where the consumption or newspapers
online is stratospheric.
However, peoples' desire or willingness to pay for it is
diminishing significantly.
Big problem, but don't mistake people's lack of demand for
lack of business model that works.
You can tell that newspapers are in a disastrous state,
because on the one hand, you've got some newspapers
saying, you're going to have to pay for everything, we're
going to put it behind a paywall.
Some are saying, well, you can have 20 articles for free, and
the rest you have to pay.
And then some are saying, it's all free.
You can be sure none of them know what they're doing, or
else there wouldn't be three business models.
Because for centuries, it was a based on a pure advertising
model, and a pure model of, how many people read this, and
they'll pay advertising and pay a price for the paper.
Very simple.
So we're clearly in a state of absolute chaos.
However, at the heart of this, you've got people who are
consuming this culture of newspapers voraciously, and
they continue to do so.
Currently, though, I work at the Tate Gallery in London,
and those of you who have been to London undoubtedly would
have been to the Tate.
Now coming from a newspaper organization that is at the
forefront of its relationship with the web, and an industry,
if you can call galleries an industry, which is basically
in the Dark Ages--
fearful, nervous, not knowing what to do.
And it's looking to people from outside to
say, do you know what?
It's going to be OK.
There are issues, there are problems, but don't forget
that there's an enormous consumer
appetite for this stuff.
There was a very interesting moment last-- it
was February, actually.
And I don't want to be too saying how wonderful Google
is, but they did a wonderful thing on
the Google Art project.
Google Art project came along last February, and they came
to us, and we were immediately saying, yeah, we think it's a
good idea, we'd love to get involved.
But incredibly, in the first wave of the Google Art
project, there was only 17 galleries from nine countries
around the world.
And some were more progressive galleries, others less
progressive.
Google Art project-- you have to ask why there were more
than 17 in 9 countries.
I know the answer, and so do those organizations.
Google Art project phase two launched last April.
I think there are hundreds of organizations now on the
Google Art project, and that's all to the good.
Now one of the fears that galleries have is, if we put
our stuff online, does that mean people won't come to the
exhibition, or come and see what we have?
Because there is a huge difference between seeing a
famous painting, a famous artwork in the flesh, and
seeing it online.
They're not comparable.
Now, that lack of comparison doesn't mean
that both have value.
Both have enormous value.
It's with immense pride that we launched the Tate website,
relaunched it two weeks ago, and central to the proposition
of the website is you can see everything.
Everything we have. Go and have a look.
I know that if you come to London, you'll go to Tate.
I also know that you now have the opportunity to view
everything here in Moscow.
I think that's a fantastic step forward.
There are very few galleries around the world doing that.
The second big change, which is a big issue, is the frankly
condescending way in which many cultural producers and
owners view their audience.
And this is a big problem.
What people think of artwork is entirely up to them.
Galleries and institutions have been very loath to open
the discussion and be part of the debate.
Our view is that we need to be central to that debate.
In London two weeks ago--
this is my only example for now-- we launched the Damien
Hirst exhibition, which is a huge retrospective of 25 years
of Damien's work.
And people are coming in the thousands.
At the same time, we said to one of the major broadcasters,
Channel Four television, we suggested, why don't they do a
360-degree walk through the show that you can now see
online for free?
And Damien's in it, and a very famous English celebrity, are
walking around the show.
And you are in total control over what you see.
People were slightly concerned.
People won't come to the show.
Maybe they won't like it.
Not interested.
This is exactly the way you have to move forward.
And in my view, you have to move forward in a very
progressive, quite aggressive way, bringing essentially a
conservative industry--
if one can call culture an industry, or certainly the
gallery aspect--
with you.
So we move forward.
Others will come with us or they won't.
But the debate is not, is it a good or a bad thing?
Of course it's a good thing.
The issue is, how do we protect the interest of the
artist, and how do we ensure, as was said earlier, the issue
of monetization?
But that will follow.
That will not be sorted before it happens.
Because by the way, it's happening already.
EKATERINA CHUKOVSKAYA: Well, thank you, Marc.
Because I am a lawyer my speciality, I have a pleasure
to say one way or the other, in every discussion about
culture and the internet, or the contributions of the
internet to culture, everybody gets to legal issues.
Regarding the question of dissemination of artwork or
the niche that it can harm, let's say, analog consumption
of these values, I remember the phrase that "theater will
not die until ladies is have something to wear." So
whatever fears people may have about all the different media
killing theater--
but time has shown that it's never happened.
It's not something new.
It's just a new occupation.
Again, as anything new, it evokes a lot of interest, but
the pendulum can swing the other way around.
So therefore, maybe some changes in the legal
environment will also come next.
And so we're in a hurry.
Before passing the floor to Artemi, I'd like to remind you
that the format of today's event is interactive.
You can ask questions.
I already see one question.
And after all the speakers have made their points, well,
we'll start [UNINTELLIGIBLE], and you'll be able to end the
discussion whichever way you prefer.
Artemi is the last speaker here.
Yes, hello.
Well, I think that the situation in music is a great
illustration to all the previous three interventions.
In fact, the internet has absolutely revolutionized the
way music exists in the world.
In some sense, of the impact of the internet can be
compared to what happened in the world of music at the end
of the 19th century, when sound recording was invented
and music started being replicated, that allowed it to
reach out to the masses, and that allowed the music
industry to arise.
What's happened now, at the start of the 21st century, in
some ironic way, brings us back to prehistoric times--
that is, the start of the 19th century, the 18th century, and
all the Dark Ages before that, when the only way to
communicate between the creators of music and the
consumers of music was face-to-face.
Now of course it was happening at concerts, at city squares,
in salons, or in concert halls, and it was the only way
for people to access music.
Then sound recording emerged, replication of music on media,
and the musical products got a separate existence from all
the artists, composers, musicians, vocalists, and so
and so forth, that is, the people who were creating it.
In the process of this alienation, an entire industry
has emerged--
an industry of intermediaries between artists and listeners.
There's record labels, distributors, retailers, and
many other smaller institutions who altogether
stood up to become an intermediary, or sometimes a
barrier, between music creators and music consumers.
Now we're back in the prehistoric age.
Music has every chance, there's every opportunity to
move directly from those who created it, to those who
listen to it and love it.
And this the way it happens it happens with the help of the
internet, of course.
Of course this entire mammoth industry, that in the
beginning, as I believe, was very useful, and brought a lot
of value, and in recent years has become a real parasite,
and is now in absolute agony--
of course they cannot be happy about it at all, because this
whole industry is going to go away, because there's no more
need for it.
And this is the reason of all these copyright and right
ownership questions.
It's known that all these draconian acts that have been
lobbied, in the first place, by the US government, as I
understand, and the lobbies behind it--
from Hollywood, Tin Pan Alley, and so on and so forth--
all these acts or laws make no sense today.
They may absolutely adhere to the letter and spirit of the
law, but it's much more important--
they absolutely are not aligned with the current state
of human civilization.
It's obvious they stand at the way of the development of
culture, technology, and as I said, of such an overarching
concept of civilization.
They're in the way.
We just heard an example about the sampling theme.
Well, once music digitization arose, tools that are called
samplers came up, DJs appeared, and they started
making music in a different way, from pre-fab components.
So they basically started to build it from scrap, so what's
been recorded earlier, yielding original pieces.
This music can be absolutely talented, absolutely valuable.
But at the same time, there are all sorts of barriers
related to the copyright in its way.
In fact, my thinking, just like Sergei Kapertev, is that
intellectual property is oxymoron.
It's an absurd concept.
Of intellectual property must belong to everyone, as a
spirit, as culture, as art, as love, as air.
It's the work of a human mind, for human hearts
and of human talents.
This is not a chair or a table or something that you can
indeed buy and sell for money.
And naturally, we get into all those demogogical discussions
as to how the poor composers and singers will stay hungry.
Well, this is beside the point.
All the lobbying of all those archaic copyright laws is not
for the benefit of authors,
composers, singers, an artists.
It is all for the benefit of the so-called rightsholders.
And these are absolutely different people and
absolutely different organizations.
They don't write music.
They don't make music.
These are suits who are sitting at their publishing
companies, in recording companies, and
so on and so forth.
And I believe that if all of them become poor and lose
their jobs, humanity will not have a lot to lose.
So they can go out to the street or
to a milling machine.
It's all right.
It's a normal course of events.
And so that's basically all I wanted to say.
Yeah.
[UNINTELLIGIBLE]
like this there is an article 2(a)2 for extremism in the
Russian criminal code.
I wanted to ask you--
in some genres, in some areas of art, the internet provides
technology tools.
Well, maybe to become a director, but at least a
recording study of your own, that's for sure.
But this complete giving up on the intermediaries, as you
call them, those people that's have got used to play the role
of bringing the work of art to products--
will it not lead to
deprofitalization, would you believe?
Excellent question, by the way.
This, by the way, is the only thing where I didn't agree
with the previous speakers.
I absolutely don't agree with those who say that the
existence of the internet brings to a situation where a
bad project, bad work of art, replaces quality
art, quality products.
Of course the range of products is a growing by far,
and every child or teenager having a computer sitting in
their bedroom can record music, write a song, and post
it in the internet.
But firstly, a lot of these people are talented, have a
gift, and their work deserves being heard and seen.
You can give lots of examples, including in this country,
where people that had no chance at all to become known
to the wide public, who became known in narrow or even
broader circles, just because of the internet.
But the second set of this coin is in that the so-called
professional art--
and by the way, it has to do with music in first place--
they are not assured to give you good products.
They can be recorded well, but I go on record as to say that
[UNINTELLIGIBLE]
and Britney Spears are not quality products.
It would be better if they hadn't existed at all.
And if there are any internet freaks from remote areas could
substitute them, that wouldn't be bad at all.
Actually, [UNINTELLIGIBLE], whom I
respect, he analyzed that.
I don't know which tools he used, but he said that as the
appearance on the TV, such popular products as Circus
With Stars, Dancing With the Stars, or things like that,
the advent of such shows has devalued their skills in the
mass psyche.
So why would you spend decades learning the professional
skill if you can see how a girl from the streets takes 15
or 20 minutes to do some circus trick?
So actually, it's quite a strange thing.
We started with good questions.
The first is to Aram, and the request is to give examples of
how we've enriched culture.
ARAM SINNREICH: How we've enriched culture through
online configurable culture and mashup forms. Well, first
of all, let's go back to some of what my colleague was
saying, which I agree with 99.9%.
So hopefully, we can make it interesting anyway.
First of all, let me complicate it a little bit by
pointing out that it's not that copyright is good or bad.
And I do agree that music is clearly, and expression,
culture are clearly part of the human spirit.
But the reason that we have copyright--
fundamentally it's a policy decision.
There are some things that copyright were very good at.
One was getting people during the industrial era to increase
production and speed the economy.
Another very important function of copyright was to
create a class of communications and media
companies that was separate from, and therefore
independent, from the government.
Now, part of the reason that these new laws, likes SOPA and
PIPA and CISPA and ACTA, are so dangerous, is because the
government and the corporations are actually
teaming up against the rest of us in order to police this
very exclusive control over culture.
Now, that's exactly 180% degrees opposite of the reason
the reason that copyright exists in the first place.
So let me get to the question of internet culture and why
it's valuable.
First of all, to the point of Britney Spears--
there's a reason that Britney Spears and the stars of
Dancing With the Stars sing and dance the
way that they do.
We create aesthetics, we create styles, that privilege
lots of capital, lots of ownership over a culture, in
order to convince ourselves as a society that what is played
to us over the radio and shown to us on television is
superior to what we could produce for ourselves.
Now, this makes us very, very angry, even though we might
not realize it.
Because of course we all know people who are better singers
than the people you hear on "American Idol," or the people
that you hear on commercial radio.
Just like we all know people, women who are more beautiful
than the models on the cover of all the magazines, right?
So we feel, in our hearts and within our communities, that
we're getting the short end of the deal--
that these aesthetics--
So I can't make a recording that sounds like Britney
Spears, therefore I'm not as good as Britney Spears.
I can't make a movie that looks as slick as Avatar,
therefore I'm not a real filmmaker, and
James Cameron is, right?
So the industry has been stacking the deck against the
rest of us for over a century by virtue of these new
aesthetics.
One of the most important things that the internet does,
to get back to the question that you asked, is that it
shows us new aesthetic ways forward.
It shows us new styles that have beauty in them that is
independent of, and a rejection of, the corporate
styles and aesthetics that are promoted
through official channels.
Another thing that it does is it destroys the myth, which
dates back to the Romantic era, that art comes from a
single human being.
There's a lonely painter, alone in the garret, or a
lonely composer, scribbling by candlelight, to come up with
in the greatest opera of all time.
That's not actually how culture is made, right?
Beethoven stole from Mozart.
It's right there.
Don Giovanni goes right into "Moonlight Sonata." people
have been borrowing and stealing and adapting and
changing one another's ideas for the last 100,000 years, or
whenever modern humans first originated.
And that's not going to change.
And one of the other great things about internet culture
is that it demonstrates to us, factually, visibly, in the
very architecture of participation, how culture is
a collective action rather than an individual action.
Now last of all, I would say in terms of innovation, we
have come up with more cultural ideas, just the sheer
volume of them, in the last 10 years, than we did during the
entirety of the 20th century.
Look at the major art forms of the 20th century.
You have Cubism, you have Dadaism, you have
Expressionism, you have Minimalism, and then it kind
of peters out.
You get a couple of very high-concepty kind of art
forms-- maybe you would disagree with me.
But I would argue that we've been through that many
revolutions in internet aesthetics since
the year 2000 alone.
And again, it's not LOLcats, right?
I mean, there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of
video game machinima and mods where people have taken video
games, created their own films out of them, reproduced the
environment of a first-person shooter like Quake to try to
show what life is like on the ground for fighters in
Afghanistan, or what life was like for the first responders
to the 9/11 attacks, right?
These are generated by individuals outside of a
corporate environment, technically in violation of
the copyright of the owners of these video games, and yet
they've produced these beautiful, moving, and most
importantly, innovative cultural experiences that
could not have originated elsewhere.
I could go on all day, but I'll stop there.
MALE SPEAKER: Thank you, Amar.
Regarding the fact that new arts or new art forms can only
be created based on the existing arts, well, I would
put it to question why, then, copyright doesn't protect
ideas as such, as stories, in dramaturgy theory.
It is believed that there are only 36 classic stories or
classical plots, and Italo Calvino said that classic art
has two stories--
continuous life and impending death.
So one way or the other, maybe subconsciously, we always use
what's being created before us.
But we've got new questions.
This is a general speaker, so any speaker can take it.
So Russians perceive piracy as a way to struggle capitalism.
Is it a norm or is it a sickness, illness?
I've seen results of several sociological studies that also
speak to that.
So 75% of people are prepared to pay for the content on the
internet if they are sure that this money
will go to the author.
So the clarity of the rules of the game, the relationship
definition, also requires some thinking so that maybe laws
can be changed as well.
So an Italian writer, Lapidoza, he wrote a novel,
Young Bonaparte, about [UNINTELLIGIBLE], and then the
young protagonist, he says to his uncle,
who's an older person--
he says, in order to retain what we have, we have to
completely change.
So this rings very true with what Marx said.
So there are a lot of things around us that impel us to
think again about these things.
But still, I would like to bring you back to this
question about capitalism.
Because it's not really a fight against the author.
It's really a war on all those millions of intermediaries
that have helped the product to get
away from their authors.
So I've already spoken about the subjects, naturally.
I just think that the very concept of piracy, in the form
and shape that it exists in the 20th century, makes no
sense anymore.
That is, piracy--
including music piracy--
was all about the illegal production
and sales for money.
What's happening on the internet has no
manufacturing behind it.
Most importantly, nobody is making a fortune of it.
What kind of piracy can there be without greed, without
making money?
Well, [UNINTELLIGIBLE]
would argue that--
last week, we had a workshop with TV companies, and they
showed examples of pirated internet resources--
for instance, sports broadcasting.
And they do have advertising there.
And funny thing, some banners were from Peugeot--
so basically, the question arises, why wouldn't
advertisers think about which size they use for their ads?
Well I think in any event, the consumer of all this content
is not really a pirate here.
So you can put claims against websites or advertisers, but
in no way should the consumers be held responsible, as is
proposed by all those draconian laws.
Regarding the question about this being a protest against
capitalism--
well, if it is so, then I suppose that this protest is
really subconscious.
I think it's just about common sense.
I think everybody perfectly understands that real artists,
real creators, will always find an opportunity to earn on
their creation.
Of course this system has not yet taken any final shape in
the internet.
The first steps are being made through advertising, through
subscription, through donations, other things.
But I concur that it will happen very soon, that it will
get established in one way or the other.
But you shouldn't forget that all real creators, all
talented people who indeed can make and perform music--
they have all sorts of opportunity beyond the
internet to earn on their art.
In the first place, it's about live concerts, and by the way,
live concerts only work better for the quality of music.
Yes, Aram?
You wanted to say something?
MALE SPEAKER: I'd like to add that I actually have done
quantitative research on this.
Since 2006, I've fielded a number of surveys of adults
around the world, thousands of people, asking them about
their practices with configurable culture.
Have you ever watched a mashup?
Have you ever made a mashup?
Have you ever downloaded this?
Have you ever looked at that?
And obviously, from 2006 to the present, the numbers
overall have grown very significantly.
But the most interesting part of the survey is a
non-quantitative part.
It's a write-in response.
The question is, what do you think of mashups and remixes
in general?
And then people can write whatever they want.
And then my colleagues and I analyzed their responses, and
we found several specific frameworks by which people
judge, OK, this is legitimate, this is illegitimate.
This is right, this is wrong.
And law was only one of those seven frameworks.
The interesting thing is that in 2006, none of those people
consciously said anything about copyright.
There was not a single mention--
people said, well, if you get permission, then it's OK, but
if you don't, then it's not.
That's as close as they got.
The most recent time that we fielded this survey, about a
year ago, all around the world, there were hundreds of
people who wrote in, the copyright system doesn't work.
I can't believe that I'm not allowed to do this stuff.
There was a very conscious resistance against the
barriers that copyright erects to our daily digital online
activities.
And that has appeared from nothing in
the last five years.
Same methodologies, same survey, same questions.
On the point of capitalism really briefly, I would say
that even though I before was saying that copyright is
essentially an instrument of capitalism, it's an instrument
of a very specific, very dated kind of
industrial capitalism, right?
And right now we actually see new kinds of monetization, new
kinds of capitalism emerging around online culture.
Companies like kickstarter.com, where you can
use your money proactively to pledge towards a creative
endeavor, and if enough other people agree that it's
valuable, then the money goes to them, and they can make
their film or build their sculpture or whatever.
And if people don't agree that it's valuable, then you get
your money back.
That is a great example of how capitalism can be adapted for
cultural production in a networked economy.
EKATERINA CHUKOVSKAYA: Thank you, [UNINTELLIGIBLE].
ARAM SINNREICH: To the Tate Gallery, yeah.
MARC SANDS: Well, no, it sounds
hideous, the notion that--
I mean, sorry.
But the issue of whether people are downloading or
taking whatever as a protest against capitalism-- no.
They're taking it because it's free, and there's a way of
getting it for free.
I find that remarkable--
ARAM SINNREICH: You've got to take a look at my data.
MARC SANDS: Well, I'd love to see that.
As an ideological statement seems--
well, for some art, but I'd be surprised if the majority are.
Your data may say one thing, but I don't--
ARAM SINNREICH: OK, it's a significant strain.
It's not the majority.
MARC SANDS: But the other issue that you touched on,
which is essentially crowdsourcing culture with a
certain amount of money--
again, maybe it's because I come from Tate, where the
value property, the value of the art we have is not the
primary motivation--
again, that feels like one--
I think what you're saying is maybe to a mixed economy,
rather than a single economy, which is a bit-- and the idea
that we're going to have multiple forms is very, very
exciting, rather than a single form.
If what you describe became the sole way, that would be
terrifying.
As a way for a particular type, I think very, very
interesting.
Very interesting.
MALE SPEAKER: Thank you.
Ideology of piracy--
well, we have some piracy parties who try to elect their
representatives to parliament.
Something like Robin Hood.
So this country has a long history of fighting against
entrepreneurs.
Well, who is going to influence the developmental of
user tastes?
I cannot cope with the choice I have--
one more good quote.
"Internet is the largest library, but all the books are
in great havoc." How can we orient ourselves?
How can we navigate there?
If I want to get a certain data, can I search it, and how
can I be sure that this resource is secure?
The big Russian encyclopedia has a pilot project, a big
project to build an educational portal.
Because all our schools in Russia are connected, the
encyclopedia go wants to give children an opportunity to get
access to appropriate information.
Because often we call for freedom of access to data, but
the information can be different.
Some information can be not very
good for a large audience.
For example, what Jack Nicholson said, an actor, 75
years old--
"I disconnected from the internet because there is so
much *** that I don't have the time to do anything
else."
So I'm not calling for censorship.
But who has to deal with such issues?
So the panelists--
Alexander, you are silent all the time.
Well, the general answer could be very strong.
No one should affect this kind of situation.
Community will find and has already found the mechanisms
that would help us to distribute information where
everyone will get what he or she needs.
Stratification, or division of society by tastes, is an
important issue.
It looks like a money division, by wealth.
Many of the things we do is defined by the desire to raise
up along this letter.
Take, for example, an evolution in terms of style,
clothes in Russia in the last 10 years.
Before everything was unified and uniform, but today, the
Russians are very well-dressed.
If you want to find a Russian in Europe, just look at the
best-dressed people.
One more important point, I believe.
I would like to give you the following advice.
Please, don't listen to any abuses, to any claims that you
listen to the wrong music, that you listen
to the wrong singers.
People do what they like.
As soon as they are sick and tired of doing this, they will
go to another level of data consumption within their
personal development cycle.
But you cannot draw them by force.
You can, but they will be reluctant to follow you.
The key tool here is not to apply any manual methods.
Community will differentiate by taste by
itself, all by itself.
Of course we can have things like
collaborative filtration, filtering.
I do it professionally.
Such instruments only enhance and support natural
differentiation of communities.
Thank you.
One of the questions offered by the organizers before the
panel was as follows.
Now the search is done in social media, basically.
Does it narrow my choice?
Does it narrow my scope?
Will it lead to the situation that I will choose only within
the framework of my community and miss something interesting
that happens beyond the community limits?
The internet offers tremendous choice, but will the community
narrow my choice, narrow my attempts?
MARC SANDS: What's interesting about the question is that we
keep veering towards the issue of control, which worries me.
Because actually what we've got is this scenario, whether
it's social media or beyond social media, where we have to
trust audiences, and we have to trust the decisions of the
people who are making the decisions, rather than those
who are necessarily trying to order it on our behalf.
And so I think the question is, the power to segment, and
to be many different things, and to be a cultural maven, is
like it's never been before.
So I don't actually see that the preponderance in
development of social media--
it will limit those who see it as a limitation, but they will
also learn that they can develop and go beyond that.
So I don't see it as a limitation at all.
It is if you're lazy and it is if you're not that interested.
But if you are, you will step out of that.
You will engage far wider, or not, depending on the choice
that you make.
And that is what is quite extraordinary about the period
at the moment, is the power of the audience to make those
choices, rather than the intermediaries
or indeed the producers.
And that is a remarkable place to be.
And we shouldn't be scared of that.
ARAM SINNREICH: So this is actually one of the biggest
issues that's being debated in my field of Media Studies
right now, what's known as the "echo chamber hypothesis."
That you get stuck only being friends with people who share
your values and share your tastes, and therefore you
never get exposed to different stuff.
I would encourage you to look back 15 years at the way the
media landscape was here or in the US in the mid-1990s,
before the internet took off.
In the US, you had commercial radio stations that newly
deregulated.
One company, Clear Channel, owned 1,200 stations, and
played the same 30 songs on all of those 1,200 stations.
You had a handful of mainstream television networks
that all played the same very safe, very identical kinds of
television shows.
And unless you lived in a giant metropolis like New York
City, you maybe had two newspapers, and one of them
was the national news organ, right, which is USA Today.
So there was not really any diversity at all in the media
landscape prior to the internet.
Therefore there was only one direction to go, which was up.
Now, that being said, the architecture of an environment
like Facebook or Twitter has a lot to do with how exposed
people are to not their network, but the network of
their network.
Right?
And what social media research shows is that while you may
make friends with a relatively constrained and similar group
of people, the more layers of the onion you go out, the more
diverse it gets.
And one of the smart things that Facebook has done in
recent years, very aggressively, to the chagrin
of some of their users, is to bring those networks of
networks into the interface so that you can no longer avoid
finding out what people who are not your
closest friends are doing.
And I think that's a good move, and I think it's
benefiting society.
MALE SPEAKER: Thank you.
Artemi?
Actually, Aram has already said what I wanted to mention.
He used American examples, though.
But I wanted to stress the same point.
We have to trust people, trust audience.
If the audience is confined within their narrow internet
sects, there is nothing good in it.
But they have every opportunity, technical and
mental and any other, to expand their horizon, to
expand their search, to move from one area to another, from
one level to another.
And now we have much better opportunities for that.
Which is much better than in the Russian television, for
example, where we have millions of people who book
the same, [SPEAKING RUSSIAN,]
without any alternatives.
They either see this [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
or nothing else at all.
Of course, internet culture, internet community has a lot
of issues and challenges and drawbacks, but nevertheless,
it's a gigantic step forward in comparison with
totalitarian media culture, which was formed in Russia and
elsewhere in the 20th century.
Thank you very much.
We have a minute and a half.
One question, and I would like to answer it myself.
The question is, after digitizing all cultural
objects, how will museums and libraries earn their money?
But the person who asked the question has an illusion that
libraries or museums earn the money.
I know that they never earned the money.
This is a luxury that the government can support.
Libraries offer social services, and they will learn
as little as they earn now.
They get some money by offering some parallel
services, but mainly they take budget money.
Thank you all.
I would like to thank the panel.
We had an interesting discussion about copyright.
I liked it.
Thank you very much indeed.