Reviews: piracy, bad movies, the quants, and David Foster Wallace
Adrian Johns, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Warns from Gutenberg to Gates: All of this has happened before, and if we’re lucky, all of it will happen again. Johns argues that piracy as a concept precedes and structures our definitions of intellectual property, focusing on England and then the U.S. and on copyright and trademark. Intellectual property and piracy debates have always invoked narratives of privacy, autonomy, and accountability.
If it’s happening in IP now, it happened then: There are echoes of Viacom’s shenanigans in planting supposedly “unauthorized” content on YouTube in 18th-century authors who occasionally connived to have unaturhoized editions published so as to be able to disavow responsibility for the sentiments expressed but still achieve fame; part of the process was to accuse the publishers of piracy. Also, prepublication copies were leaked by faithless employees, then to Dublin as now to the internet. Then as now, laws required publishers to identify themselves (today, many US states require CD/DVD pressers to identify themselves on the physical copy); then as now, pirates evaded the law.
Continuing on, antipatent agitation in the 19th century was founded in the belief that patents suppressed and distorted innate inventiveness in the masses and ignored the role of the intellectual commons; anti-patent folks also complained about patent trolls who didn’t practice their inventions and asserted their rights opportunistically.
Johns then offers a history of British radio broadcasting in which IP owners wanted to allow only sealed sets with predetermined frequencies; they called unlicensed listeners and listeners using unapproved equipment “pirates.” As with the DMCA, major players argued that experimenters’ licenses and the definition of acceptable experimentation had to be sharply limited so that not just anyone could experiment. In the 1950s, pirate record labels acted like anime fansubbers now, publishing otherwise unavailable jazz recordings in the name of preservation and proselytization, and agreeing to discontinue their activities whenever a licensed copy became available.
Here’s a presentist summary from Johns himself: “the situation confronting early Net users was reminiscent of that facing authors and booksellers in the eighteenth century itself. Claims about the scaredness of authorship and a new age of reason had been loud and legion then too. Pirates had been attacked for offenses that ranged beyond literal theft and impugned credit, fidelity, and authenticity. Practices comparable to what are now termed identity theft or phishing (the imitation of institutions) were rampant. Printed communication was hailed as emancipatory, rational, and enlightened in principle, but in practice seemed riddled with problems…. The reality, extent, and epistemic implications of piratical practices were held up as not only challenges to intellectual property-those those challenges were widely declared to be fundamental-but as threats to the possibility of a rational online public.”
Kay Dickinson, Off Key: When Film and Music Won’t Work Together: Very high jargon content, arguing that instances often identified as failures in film-Elvis in Harum Scarum, pop stars who are cast in movies but can’t act, “video nasties,” etc. are indicative of larger contradictions in capitalism centered around work, that is, around labor. The most interesting bit to me was finding out that, not only did people historically complain that the piano forte was destroying musicmaking because it required much less actual musical talent, they also complained when mechanical levers were added to flutes, making them easier to operate and facilitating more uniform and clearer tones. Basically, technological developments always are seen as replacing real talent with ersatz creativity, until the new forms of creativity they enable are better understood.
Scott Patterson, The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It: A lot of profiles of various math types who thought that they could profit by detecting inefficiencies in the market and arbitraging them, and for a while largely did, but also were essential in generating the skewed risk-taking that brought the whole thing down. While the personal stories are interesting portraits of hubris, and I understand Nassim Taleb much better now (no wonder he’s such a jerk if this is what he was up against), the focus on personality also means that the story jumps back and forth in time and ultimately is not a coherent account of what happened, which is why I at least read these books.
David Foster Wallace, Oblivion: Stories: I’ve decided that Wallace’s extraordinarily complex sentences and paragraphs, digressive to the point of parody and out the other side, are best in nonfiction, though I’m still going to try Infinite Jest because so many people I respect love it. In short fiction, though, Wallace’s loopy, recursive stream of consciousness-often revealing very bizarre and possibly even compelling circumstances that are quickly lost behind his narrators’ self-obsession-seems pointless. I learned something about cruise ships by reading his essay on the subject, but when you make your characters/situations too ridiculous in fiction, it’s hard for me to care.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
If it’s happening in IP now, it happened then: There are echoes of Viacom’s shenanigans in planting supposedly “unauthorized” content on YouTube in 18th-century authors who occasionally connived to have unaturhoized editions published so as to be able to disavow responsibility for the sentiments expressed but still achieve fame; part of the process was to accuse the publishers of piracy. Also, prepublication copies were leaked by faithless employees, then to Dublin as now to the internet. Then as now, laws required publishers to identify themselves (today, many US states require CD/DVD pressers to identify themselves on the physical copy); then as now, pirates evaded the law.
Continuing on, antipatent agitation in the 19th century was founded in the belief that patents suppressed and distorted innate inventiveness in the masses and ignored the role of the intellectual commons; anti-patent folks also complained about patent trolls who didn’t practice their inventions and asserted their rights opportunistically.
Johns then offers a history of British radio broadcasting in which IP owners wanted to allow only sealed sets with predetermined frequencies; they called unlicensed listeners and listeners using unapproved equipment “pirates.” As with the DMCA, major players argued that experimenters’ licenses and the definition of acceptable experimentation had to be sharply limited so that not just anyone could experiment. In the 1950s, pirate record labels acted like anime fansubbers now, publishing otherwise unavailable jazz recordings in the name of preservation and proselytization, and agreeing to discontinue their activities whenever a licensed copy became available.
Here’s a presentist summary from Johns himself: “the situation confronting early Net users was reminiscent of that facing authors and booksellers in the eighteenth century itself. Claims about the scaredness of authorship and a new age of reason had been loud and legion then too. Pirates had been attacked for offenses that ranged beyond literal theft and impugned credit, fidelity, and authenticity. Practices comparable to what are now termed identity theft or phishing (the imitation of institutions) were rampant. Printed communication was hailed as emancipatory, rational, and enlightened in principle, but in practice seemed riddled with problems…. The reality, extent, and epistemic implications of piratical practices were held up as not only challenges to intellectual property-those those challenges were widely declared to be fundamental-but as threats to the possibility of a rational online public.”
Kay Dickinson, Off Key: When Film and Music Won’t Work Together: Very high jargon content, arguing that instances often identified as failures in film-Elvis in Harum Scarum, pop stars who are cast in movies but can’t act, “video nasties,” etc. are indicative of larger contradictions in capitalism centered around work, that is, around labor. The most interesting bit to me was finding out that, not only did people historically complain that the piano forte was destroying musicmaking because it required much less actual musical talent, they also complained when mechanical levers were added to flutes, making them easier to operate and facilitating more uniform and clearer tones. Basically, technological developments always are seen as replacing real talent with ersatz creativity, until the new forms of creativity they enable are better understood.
Scott Patterson, The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It: A lot of profiles of various math types who thought that they could profit by detecting inefficiencies in the market and arbitraging them, and for a while largely did, but also were essential in generating the skewed risk-taking that brought the whole thing down. While the personal stories are interesting portraits of hubris, and I understand Nassim Taleb much better now (no wonder he’s such a jerk if this is what he was up against), the focus on personality also means that the story jumps back and forth in time and ultimately is not a coherent account of what happened, which is why I at least read these books.
David Foster Wallace, Oblivion: Stories: I’ve decided that Wallace’s extraordinarily complex sentences and paragraphs, digressive to the point of parody and out the other side, are best in nonfiction, though I’m still going to try Infinite Jest because so many people I respect love it. In short fiction, though, Wallace’s loopy, recursive stream of consciousness-often revealing very bizarre and possibly even compelling circumstances that are quickly lost behind his narrators’ self-obsession-seems pointless. I learned something about cruise ships by reading his essay on the subject, but when you make your characters/situations too ridiculous in fiction, it’s hard for me to care.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.