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Copyright Gone Wrong
At the beginning of this year, the head of the European Commission’s Internal Market and Services Directorate General Charlie McCreevy announced his plan to extend copyright terms for performers and phonogram producers from 50 years today to 95 years (1). The Commission advances the argument that many works from ageing musicians dating back to the 1950’s are about to fall into the public domain. As the Commission proposal explains:
The Freedom to Digitalize Revolutionary Powers
In On Liberty (1859), philosopher John Stuart Mill reflects on the potential coercion that could result from democracy and more especially from what Alexi De Tocqueville called the “tyranny of the majority”. In this work, Mill formulates a very convincing plea in favor of free speech. According to him, only by discussion can we test the validity of people’s beliefs and only by dialectic can we successfully undermine false and dangerous ones. And …
European Parliament Rejects France’s Graduated Response
The French legislative bill aimed at granting a public agency the right to suspend people’s internet connection if they are suspected of copyright infringement has been turned down by the European Parliament, which resumed session earlier this week. Voting on the telecom package – a piece of legislation that regulates the EU electronic communication sector – the Parliament adopted by an overwhelming majority (574 to 73) amendment 138 tabled by …
If We Could Free Our Culture
I just finished Lawrence Lessig’s book Free Culture (2004) and it has made me angry. A law professor specialized in intellectual property, Lessig demonstrates that we are caught in a dangerous, reactionary discourse about intellectual property in the Net era. His sincere advocacy for a freer society deconstructs the key elements of the debate on copyright and gives a desirable sense of perspective on this issue. Here a few elements worth …
Taylorism vs. Googlism
I talked about Nicholas Carr’s article a few days ago. According to his piece (Is Google Making Us Stupid?) the web is affecting our cognitive abilities. We are now fed with tons information but seldom sit and reflect about them; we google things but rarely research or memorize them anymore. Carr argues that this constant flipping through is dispossessing us from complex reasoning. He then draws a parallel between taylorism, where the human …
How the Web Is Changing Us
A few weeks ago, American writer Nicholas Carr wrote a controversial article in the Atlantic Monthly. In his piece “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” he elaborated on an interesting hypothesis regarding the cognitive consequences of the web. Carr, a well-known critic of technological utopianism asked whether it could be that using the web slowly rewired people’s neuronal circuitry. He explains: For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of …
Regulating Privacy in the Online World
Things are moving forward on the privacy front. In April, the so-called “Group 29”, an advisory body to the European Commission on privacy and public liberties matters, issued a memo in which it analyzed the activity of data-mining internet companies. More specifically, it sought to establish whether they respected the European regulatory framework which is composed of two directives: – the data protection directive, adopted in 1995, that ranks …
The Political Economy of Internet Search Engines
This article by Elizabeth Van Couvering, from the London School of Economics, is now four years old and thus allows to put in perspective the evolution of web search engines, which have become key players of the information society. She makes a few interesting points: The author classifies search engines a****s media, saying that their business model is very similar to that traditional media of mass communication such as television or newspapers. …
MySpace: A Revolutionary Link Between the People and the Cultural Industries (2/2)
What makes MySpace unique, along with other sites based on the same concept, such as Last.fm, is their unique and revolutionary service of popular culture broadcaster (so far, mainly music) relying on the technology of the Web 2.0. They link social networking and self-representation, and the prominent place of popular culture in identity formation and social interaction. However, these new services greatly destabilize the traditional grounds on …
MySpace: A Revolutionary Link Between the People and the Cultural Industries (1/2)
The following article is an excerpt from a research paper I wrote in June 07 at Middlebury College. Most online-social networks were developed with technical means in mind. In that respect, MySpace is first and foremost a commercial company that seeks to maximize its benefits through advertising. This commercial aspect has been proven even more central since the media multinational News Corporation, company of the Australian magnate Rupert …