This was one of the striking remarks of McKenzie Wark during a recent lecture in Amsterdam. His claim was that if Copyleft wins the debate (in stead of copyright), that the abundance of information will cause such an overload that only the algorithms, like Googles, can find you your stuff. I must be honost and did not see that one coming. Copyleft is about citizens rights to access, modify and copy as a basis need for sharing culture. Google is the icon of commercialized web and the monopolistic info giant. But is it true… will algorithms be able to make any sense out of info-overload or will social search have a better position. McKenzie’s solution to this debate is CopyGift, more a concept than a real solution: “Stick to copyright (so you are in control) and give free rights of usage away to non-commercial users. In that way the public has access and rights to manipulate etc. Meanwhile you use old-economy copyrights against the beast itself”. Any thoughts?
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by Bob Garfield (Isbn-13: 9780984065103)
What happens when the old world order collapses and the Brave New World is unprepared to replace it as an ad medium, as a news source, as a political soapbox, a channel for new episodes of Lost? Welcome to The Chaos Scenario. It's here, and Bob Garfield saw it coming. In his roles as Advertising Age editor-at-large and as co-host of NPR's On the Media, Bob Garfield long ago connected dots that many in media and marketing refused even to acknowledge. In this fascinating, terrifying, instructive and...
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Just to heat up the debate:
“SEARCH GIANT Google was fined €25,000 for breaking Belgian copyright law for every day since an initial ruling in September, amounting to a whopping €3.45 million.It published links to newspapers in Belgium without permission, a a Belgian court said. Google was sued by a group of Belgian publishers last September, charged with breaking copyright by listing stories and brief extracts on its news aggregation site.”
Source: INQUIRER Tuesday 13 February 2007
I believe the most important thing here, is exactly how you wrote it down: “Copyleft is about citizens rights to access, modify and copy as a basis need for sharing culture.” And ’sharing’ is the key word here. I doubt it whether Google will be able to find all the stuff that I am looking for. Sure, if I know what I want to find, they’ll help me along, but the will not be able to make the surprising or inspiring connections to content I would be looking for. I believe people will play an ever more important role in finding content for me.
For example: the inspiration for writing on this blog comes from my daily work and from the several blogs that I read regularly, because they are written by people that inspire me. I never, ever use Google when I’m writing something or when I’m looking for a subject.
The question then remains: should there be any Copyleft then. Before reading your post, I would have said yes: share everything. But McKenzie’s concept of Copygift is an interesting one, but not for the reasons he’s stating it. I think giving stuff away is a much more positive and active approach than protection or ‘copyleft’. By giving it away, you establish a relationship: you have to know who you give the stuff to, right? So it might even strengthen the relationships you build with like minded people: and because of that improve the quality of your “findability”. Heck, it might even improve the quality of your life.