Some points about FC-Forum 2010 (2/2)

Following the FC-Forum from the outside, I’m reviving debates that, at least to me, were past and settled. Leaving apart those “democratic”, “democratizing” or “democraterising” (or whatever) aspects of voting and bringing technologies to the mainstream audience, I’m strongly following some of the lines marked by Peter Sunde and Felix Stalder in their posts.

As I had not participated on the Forum, my points are somewhat long.

How to be seen (and try to make a living of it)

If by “book” we know any device full of sheets printed with letters, we could agree that there should be no difference if the support changes from “paper” to “digital” sheets. But “paper” has some added value. Some people like and prefers “paper” over “digital”. Smells different, feels different when touching it… And a printed book requires extra-work to exist. Requires extra stuff: paper, ink, cardboard, a printing press… proofreaders, graphic designers… so here it is rational to charge a bit more for the added-value paper-copy.
Now change “book” for “song” or “photography”, and “paper” for ‘CD/vinyl’.

So, every one likes to do something and get somewhat in reward, and now I speak as a co-author in a book published under the Public Domain, be it money, a mere “thank you” or being socially recognized.

Eons ago, due to physical scarcity of items (being it books, vinyl discs, tapes, portraits, et cetera), the author could charge a fee to anyone who wanted one of them. Stamping their name by hand (or scratching a bit of it), they could charge double. And this was the only way to get money for their work. Then came publishers, editors and other intermediaries, who started “buying” publication rights from authors, sometimes paying them a part in advance, well before the final work was finished. And those editors were taking the final decision of publishing the work, or decide that it was not relevant and keep it on the dustbin.
And with physical scarcity of items, one could talk of “theft”. If there are only 1 item, and I take it from you, we have a zero-sum lose game.

But time passed, technology advanced and copy/reproduction cost went down progressively until nowadays (and Walter Benjamin wrote a lot of good stuff about it. By the way, his works enter PD next year).
Now, copies costs 0. Well, very near to 0. Almost 0. In books, the pre-paper-edition step is to have the book in a digital format. Same in music and photography. Not in paintings, sculpture or any plastic arts (the name says it), where you can buy a cheap reproduction but requires extra work.

Digital copies are exactly the same. You want one? CTRL+C and then CTRL+V. You have two identical items now. Select those two, repeat the process and you have four of them. Do it again, now there are eight! There can not be theft here. Not in the classical context.
This is why the pretended “war on copying” is absurd by nature, and copyright moguls will lose: even the most ‘basic’ internet/computer user knows how to do a “copy&paste”. One does not need any special skill or software, but two fingers on a computer. And converting every Internet user, somewhat 18% of people in the world, in criminals is not a good idea.

But as I said, now we have (at least) two different supports, one of them is a pre-requisite for the other one, thus its cost is 0. And we have that years ago, the only way for a book author to get money for the work was to sell copies, the more the better.
But now there is a rainbow of possibilities: Book launch tours, audio-books, reading tours, conferences, forums, talks and many more for writers. Concerts, festivals and thousands of merchandising items for musicians…

Business models are changing and final copies are no more the moneymakers. They are vehicles… tools to help authors earn their money. If authors give away free digital copies, at cost 0 as we’ve seen, sales of added-value paper books rise up. It has been proven many times: giving away works. I can attest. Cory Doctorow explains his experience in the chapter Give it away of his book Content, and many more examples can be found.
Giving free digital copies enables the work to be known by more people. The ones who like it will have, at least, the same willingness to buy an added-value paper copy than before. The ones who don’t like it, will simply save their money.

The more people reading your books, the more your ideas are spreading along, and the more chances you have to be booked for a lecture, conference, congress or to give a talk somewhere. Further, you can lower your fees, and use part of the money to buy paper copies to the public…
And if we talk about musicians, it is crystal clear that album selling is sinking, the contrary of song-by-bong selling, as Spotify, iTunes, Beatport and the great pile of digital music websites prove day after day, and with concerts and live acts booming all over the world.

The fact is, first you have to be seen, and there is nothing better to be seen than to give away your work for free, in order to get bookings to explain your ideas to your audience, live, in person. Peer to peer. Direct contact. It is a win-win scheme and it works, believe it or not. It is sustainable.

Licensing, licensing, licensing

For this, we have a full rainbow of licenses. From traditional copyright notes to the Public Domain, going through all the Creative Commons, GNU Licenses and alike. But neither licenses nor licensing, or how to choose the right license for every item, is the problem. The more options we have, the more complicated will be the decision making.

The problem is authoring rights laws. They must be changed and set to a reasonable time period for copyright holding. If copyright laws are not changed back to what it was before, the problem will stand. And having free licenses will not help almost anything.

So let’s have those abusive copyright laws changed, and the problem will be almost solved. Redistributing the economic flow will come shortly and easily. Everyone can be an author nowadays. And everyone likes to be paid and recognized for its work, but due to the creative nature of it, one has to do things other people like, so they will be willing to buy it. Some will succeed, some won’t.
And as any other work, this needs lots of time and commitment.

Some points about FC-Forum 2010 (1/2)

Following the FC-Forum from the outside, I’m reviving debates that, at least to me, were past and settled. Leaving apart those “democratic”, “democratizing” or “democraterising” (or whatever) aspects of voting and bringing technologies to the mainstream audience, I’m strongly following some of the lines marked by Peter Sunde and Felix Stalder in their posts.

As I had not participated on the Forum, my points are somewhat long.

Flatrates, flatwages and any other subsidies

Just a week ago, the European Court of Justice ruled the application of the digital levy, at least in Spain, is not in line with European legislation. Arbitrary taxes should be, some are, illegal. There is no way in taxing anything “just in case of” anyone misuses it. To put it really simple, terrorists use cars, bicycles, phones and even backpacks to build their bombs. Does it means that governments should tax, ban, or impose hard ID schemes to use them (as in mobile phones in EU), on those items “just in case” any terrorists decides to use them, to help the police do their work? If you think they should, then terrorism wins game, set, match, and we all are screwed.

Here in Spain, we have another funny flatrate/levy, much less known than SGAE’s digital-levy I was talking about. Since 1992, an European Directive dictates that libraries must apply author-rights rates on lending books. Spain passed the Reading, books and libraries bill back in 2007, and the Ministry of Culture assumed payments until 2007, then passed the burden on the Autonomous Regions and town-halls. That was half a million euros (500.000€!) which passed from the hands of tax-payers to the Ministry of Culture to CEDRO, a private collecting society that, as SGAE with musicians, does not represent all the writers, but collects and manages all the money, without any guarantee that it goes to the right hands, proportionally with lendings or readings of a specific book/author.

Flat-rates, or “cultural levies” in this context, designed to get money from users with a ‘blind’ basis (meaning everyone pays, without being asked, even if they don’t use it), to distribute it later amongst ‘partners’, ‘associates’, ‘members’ or ‘guild license holders’ of any club, are a fawlty and defective concept. What if I don’t use public libraries? Why I must pay for a service I don’t use? What if I, as an author/maker/producer/whatsoever do not want to be member of the clubs appointed to distribute the monies? Who controls those clubs? Who decides to give those “license cards”? To whom? And which basis is used to do it?
It is the very same problem some people have all around the world with collecting societies! We should go beyond this and solve problems, not repeating mistakes or adding more and more layers.

Another thing would be ‘control opt-in clubs’, a producers/makers/authors/etc union-style, or a supra-management association, to put it somehow, whose function would be to make sure every associate gets paid for their work, but without touching a single penny. How to get paid? That I leave for later in this post.
But if there is to be a flatrate, be sure that tere will be people demanding all they want, at once, and they will not be paying a single cent more to anyone. If you want flat-working, up to you, but be ready to the consequences: you will be watched and controlled by those who pay you.

And this leads me to the flat-wages: if I’m getting a basic wage every month in order to “let me do my work”, why should anyone want to work? I’m being paid already, so what’s the point?! Social subsidies are not the solution: they undermine incentives and willingness to work, build and make anything. More over: I don’t want to pay in advance to anything. I don’t want to pay anyone for an “artist license”, nor a “letter of marque”. If I pay, it is to get something in return.
And by the way, have a look at subsidised societies all the way back in history. They are not sustainable. They sink. Period.
Medieval monks were getting somewhat social subsidies in order to copy books and keep culture safe. And we all know how much the society improved and how much culture developed in the middle ages. Keepers of culture is another flawed concept.
Another thing would be talking about “maintainers”, or “contributors”, but this would be another post. In any case, cultural workers, if they exist, or the creative class, if we are going to talk about classes again, are no different than any other one, so they should not have different privileges.

On Internet access flat-rates, Spain has one of the most expensive (price/quality) in Europe. It is slow, it is faulty, it is scarce: I live about 50 km from Barcelona, and only have 2 ISP options charging me 40€ for a pseudo ’10MB’ landline (60€ for the triple pay), and other friends have just one option…
To extrapolate the issue worldwide, if we are saying that, in a not-so-far future, access to the Internet will be basic for citizenship, there is no way anyone could tax this access, creating different citizenship classes, thus perpetuating the same flaws we encounter nowadays in societies: the digital divide.

To be continued…