Fighting for our right to inquiry, creativity and dissent

I don't care how much of star journalist is Scott Hansell (whom I've met before when he has covered Net Art events here in New York City). Scott ought to know better than to publish something like this :

The A.P.’s effort to impose some guidelines on the free-wheeling blogosphere, where extensive quoting and even copying of entire news articles is common, may offer a prominent definition of the important but vague doctrine of “fair use,” which holds that copyright owners cannot ban others from using small bits of their works under some circumstances. For example, a book reviewer is allowed to quote passages from the work without permission from the publisher.

I think this is part of the reason why he never seemed to get Net Art : He really doesn't understand that quoting, re-mixing and mashups are intrinsic to the vernacular of the digital age. That quoting is an essential part of showing "the real deal", of presenting things unadulterated and unfiltered so that when a blogger or an net.artist creates their own interpretation of that source, it allows for the readers, commenter and art audience to parse the quote from the interpretation and, in their own way, to render their judgement and interpretation.

Having a piece of the original is absolutely imperative in the age of reproduction. In the blogosphere for some, quoting is the version of a courtroom's witness box. Nobody was better at that than Steve Gilliard. Steve would present, if possible, the entire article before proceeding to fisk the writer's thesis and shred their logic to pieces. Yet the quote and link back to the source without alteration allowed for Steve's readers to have access the source's words right there and at that moment, giving them the opportunity to render as fair a judgement as possible.

The other way of quoting is more akin to cooking.

Imagine if all of a sudden the makers of Prego pasta sauce made you sign an agreement that would have you use their sauce in only the ways they see you using their sauce.

Imagine Prego claiming that using their sauce in a recipe of yours is an infringement of their copyright to the recipe they use for their sauce.

Imagine Prego saying that now you have to license their sauce because you're not buying from them an ingredient anymore but what you're doing is paying for permission to use their product as is.

Imagine then Prego saying that using their pasta sauce any other way from the way they market it is a breach of their Terms of Use and they have cause to sue you.

Imagine having to pay extra for the right to add hot pepper flakes to the Roasted Garlic Prego sauce. Imagine having Prego lawyers come down to you with a "cease and desist" letter because you use their Mushroom sauce for a sloppy joe recipe instead of heating it up and serving it on past and pasta alone.

Intellectual work of any kind, whether copyrightable or patentable, are mere ingredients to the larger intellectual buffet of Humanity. It is not the end all of end alls. Humanity's intellectual and technological advancement has happened because new minds have been able to imagine new possibilities with the work and legacy of others.

Imagine then, what would happen if greedy copyright holding companies would force intellectuals, scientists and technologist to pay for every single work or phrase or repetition of their "intellectual property".

We already have that situation. It's what has put "Eye On The Prize" out of circulation and robbed our country of one of the most important documentations of the Civil Rights Movement.

The bigger issue here though is not just being able to document a source by quoting them directly. The issue here is that in recent years AP has become a source of "wholesale new outlet".

Associate Press is a company that offers nothing but what it can conveniently record through press conferences, the occasional natural disaster and the green zones of never-ending wars. When you look at the offerings of AFP, AP and Reuters, they are pretty much the same. Rare is the instance when you can say, "I haven't read this elsewhere" with a piece by AP.

So while for some they may be a source, for others they are part of the BushCo propaganda machine. It's why to say that bloggers have to ask permission to dissect and criticize their news and maybe even analyze and rebuke them, is in effect not only an infringement of free speech, but also of freedom of the press. If we can't take their words and find the lies in them and publish that on our blogs, then we don't have the freedom to dissent.

That's what's at stake here. Not careless freewheeling, leeching or squandering of other people's resources. As bloggers and members of a larger network of distributed creativity, we are fighting for our right to inquiry and dissent.

Is it free wheeling to want to fight for the integrity of our rights as framed under the United States' Constitution?

That's what's at stake.

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