“As a Brit living in America, every time I have to deal with a plug socket I feel ever so slightly like I’m about to electrocute myself.”

Jennie Lees

“In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power.”

Paul Valéry

“We must expect great innovation to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.”

Paul Valéry

The face value of art

Here’s a quick text on the face value of art that I put together for our Indiegogo campaign. What do you think? Is the analogy with the face value of fiat currencies sound, or does it need work?

What’s the relation between creative works and money? A bank note is generally valuable. Not because the paper it’s printed on is valuable (it’s not), nor because it’s unique. It’s valuable because it is backed by a government that guarantees your ability to pay taxes and other debts with its face value. If there’s some level of trust in the government and its central bank, people will generally that the value of a bank note or coin is its face value. Internationally, the reputation of a government and its people reflects the ability of a government to borrow money. When there’s a lack of trust in either direction, things tend to go from bad to worse.

Similarly, a work of art doesn’t have an intrinsic value in the digital world: the bits it’s composed of are not expensive, and every work can be easily replicated at the wink of an eye for practically no cost. Yet, a work of art has a face value, a value that’s separate from it’s physical form. It has a value to its’ creator because the work builds the creators reputation. It can lead to more people discovering the creators art, commissions, donations, grants, and other advantages.

That’s why attribution is important: it adds to the face value of a work of art and contributes to the global artistic reputation system. Thank you for your contribution to our activities encouraging attribution!

Making money with metadata

One of the advantages of being able to uniquely identify a work and its creator is that it make a number of mechanisms available that can be used to further support individual creators. One of those mechanisms is micropayments and other ways of also giving monetary rewards to the creators you like and whose work you use. Having an agreed upon standard for metadata formats and unique identifiers would make it significantly easier to use those formats to also convey information about payment options, as well as enable the tools that we use to create a virtual tipping jar which we can flip a coin into when we use digital works.

Hidden in the deepest corners of my hard drive, I stumbled upon this image from my old GNU-Friends project. It was part blog, part community, part aggregation of news, and part interviews. I wanted to interview the people who’d done significant good for the free software community in its earlier years. People like Aharon Robbins (maintained GNU Awk) and Chet Ramey (wrote GNU Bash) was high on the list, which was complemented with a range of people like Lawrence Lessig and Guido van Rossum, recipients of the FSF’s Free Software Award. You can see the list of interviews over on the FFKP web site (they were all done in 2002, so read them with that in mind).

Hidden in the deepest corners of my hard drive, I stumbled upon this image from my old GNU-Friends project. It was part blog, part community, part aggregation of news, and part interviews. I wanted to interview the people who’d done significant good for the free software community in its earlier years. People like Aharon Robbins (maintained GNU Awk) and Chet Ramey (wrote GNU Bash) was high on the list, which was complemented with a range of people like Lawrence Lessig and Guido van Rossum, recipients of the FSF’s Free Software Award. You can see the list of interviews over on the FFKP web site (they were all done in 2002, so read them with that in mind).

If you ever thought that copyright was simple, you might think differently after looking at this visualisation from Roberto Garcia at the Universitat de Lleida. It’s a striking display of how difficult copyright can be, and why licenses such as Creative Commons need not only deal with Copyright as such, but also a number of related rights. This is also something to be vary of for anyone wanting to implement Rights Expression Languages (REL) in their tools. High-res

If you ever thought that copyright was simple, you might think differently after looking at this visualisation from Roberto Garcia at the Universitat de Lleida. It’s a striking display of how difficult copyright can be, and why licenses such as Creative Commons need not only deal with Copyright as such, but also a number of related rights. This is also something to be vary of for anyone wanting to implement Rights Expression Languages (REL) in their tools.