Discussion of all things related to Public Domain

[tom poe <tompoe AT amihost.com>]

OPEN STUDIOS: RUNNING BOARD 

Remember when cars sported running boards out of practical necessity? 
Most roads back then weren't paved like our roads, today. 

The Digital Age, still in its' infancy, requires the use of electronic
running boards.  People are out there that have never used a computer. 
Most people don't understand how computers work [I just raised my hand],
let alone how to make CD's, DVD's, MP3's, OGG, WAV, and the list goes
on. 

And, in the arts and sciences, from musicians to artists to authors, the
knowledge that recordings no longer requires an expensive recording
studio is restricted to just a few.  This newsletter intends to help
musicians, artists, and authors to step out and enter the Digital Age. 
We'll provide the running board to help you avoid the "mud".  If you're
involved in the arts, we hope you'll join us each month for: 
1]  Entertainment news 
2]  The Community Scene 
3]  How They Do It 
4]  Featured Artists, Musicians, and Authors 
5]  Columns 
         a] Anatoly Volynets - Culture vs. Copyright 
6]  Commons Gallery 
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"Trust everyone, but cut the cards"  -- Who said that? 
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Open Studios continues its registration process with states throughout
the country.  As a nonprofit organization, we seek donations and
contributions from the public.  Many states therefore, require that we
register with them.  Some five states permit registration without fees,
or don't require registration at all at this point.  The rest,
apparently, require fees of $10, $15, up to $80 USD or more.  We view
this process as an important and necessary, if not onerous, burden.  Can
you help?  The full story is at:
http://www.ibiblio.org/studioforrecording/statereg.html .  We call it
our SPONSOR A STATE PROJECT. 
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ENTERTAINMENT NEWS: 
Each month, we'll highlight a few of the previous month's news articles
(hopefully with active links).  Subscribers and supporters are encouragd
to email us with links you found to be interesting.  We'll add them
here.  It's a good way for collecting an archive you can refer to when
you need it as part of your Internet business strategies. 
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http://news.findlaw.com/entertainment/s/20031103/bizonlinepiracydc.html
Monday, Nov. 3, 2003 
Entertainment Firms Quietly Using Piracy Networks 
By Sue Zeidler 
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) 
" One company, called BigChampagne, is tracking music downloads for
radio giant Clear Channel. Another, Jun Group, is deliberately releasing
music to Web file sharers in order to generate buzz." 
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http://news.findlaw.com/ap/ht/1700/11-17-2003/20031117073004_06.html
Music Labels Tap Downloading Networks 
By ALEX VEIGA AP Business Writer 
Monday, Nov. 17, 2003 

"The record industry has always been more about vibe and hype," said
Jeremy Welt, head of new media for Maverick Records in Los Angeles. "For
the first time, we're making decisions based on what consumers are doing
and saying as opposed to just looking at radio charts." 
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http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,61282,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1
Record Label Sings New Tune 
By Katie Dean 
02:00 AM Nov. 20, 2003 PT 
"Loca Records licenses its music using Creative Commons. The
organization offers free copyright licenses to anyone who wants to share
his or her work with the public while reserving some rights. Using these
licenses, Loca Records permits anyone to copy and distribute the
content, make derivative works and sell it, as long as they attribute
the work to the original creator and distribute it under the same "share
alike" license." 
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THE COMMUNITY SCENE: 
Open Studios works with communities around the country and around the
world to build and operate community-based recording studios.  You can
keep up with the latest happenings by checking this section each month. 
Learn what others are doing, and get ideas for your community. 

Did you know that in the future, grandparents will have refrigerators
with computers on the side, the monitor stylishly displaying files from
the Internet?  Imagine the grandparents, each morning, walking over to
their refrigerator, loading up the day's drawing made by one of their
grandchildren?  Nice, eh? 

We've entered the holiday season.  Open Studios hopes your Thanksgiving
Day weekend (for those of you that are in the United States) was most
enjoyable.  We'll have a special newsletter edition for this year's
holidays, and Community Scenes will appear in Holiday Newsletter Issue
#5A.  Look for us then.  
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HOW THEY DO IT: 
This on-going series explores potential business strategies and ideas
for musicians, artists, and authors interested in pursuing careers
outside mainstream industry practices. 

[To be aired in our Holiday Newsletter #5A] 
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FEATURED ARTISTS: 
Got a story to tell?  Want to expand your audience?  Help the world
discover you.  Contact us, today, and we'll feature you here.  

Our questions are too hard-driving.  No takers this month.  Send me
innocent questions for your favorite artist, and we'll go that route for
awhile. 
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COLUMNS: 
A]  Anatoly Volynets - Culture vs. Copyright 

Synopsis of Previous Issues 

One of the basic points I stand for is that culture and  copyright clash
completely. To illustrate my  understanding of culture I took arts as an
example. A  piece of art proves to be the representation of a new 
virtual world: one that is strange and, at the same  time, important to 
us. As such, it is also a message  that invokes a new alter ego in its 
author as well as  its audience. 


6. Creation as Dialogue 

Yes, a talented author allows his creation to live according to its own 
laws. Now, let's recall that a piece of art, on the other hand, is a 
message. These two presuppositions translate into the following: the 
talent of a creator consists of allowing his creation to speak for 
itself. This illustrates and stresses another side of real logic and 
the psychology of the creative process. 

So, the author relates a message when creating. That means the author 
is talking to somebody while creating. Watching him from an outside 
perspective, one could say the author is talking to himself. But what 
is happening on the inside? The same thing that happens to all of us 
while we are thinking: we talk to someone else in our inner speech. 
This can be one's father, or mother, or teacher, or friend, or loved 
one, or enemy, or (attention!) hero of the book, or another author, 
etc. Of course, those interlocutors of ours may be more or less 
unrecognized, so we do not quite clearly realize who we are talking to, 
but this is on the matter of psychology and is not crucial for our 
subject. 

When do you talk? When you want to be heard, understood and responded 
to. Likewise, you write (paint, sing...) to be read, understood and 
responded to. This is what happens in the author's inner dialogue. He 
talks to his inner interlocutors about this new world, and thus, 
develops his own new understanding, his new alter ego. This is an 
amazing thing. Likewise, outside, where a new creation invokes new 
understandings in other people, the same happens in the creator's inner 
dialogue: all of the author's inner interlocutors develop an 
understanding of the new creation. This describes a bit more concretely 
what was meant when I said the author creates a new alter ego (or more 
precisely, a new face of the alter ego) with every single work. 

Freedom of inner speech is one of the main motives to create, working 
for the author. Even if an author creates for some surface reasons like 
money, fame, or fear of punishment, they work on the surface only. No 
outer reasons add talent to a work of art. Free inner speech, dialogue 
does. Thus, the freedom of the author's inner speech is crucial for the 
creative process. 

7. Culture = Sum of Works and Beyond 

Obviously, an artwork itself means nothing until somebody sees it, 
listens to it, etc. A work of art represents culture at the moment that 
it emerges as the subject of inner or outer dialogue. Remove dialogue 
and art loses its "artness," becomes a piece of canvas, some ink, a 
tape, et cetera. On the other hand, remove art, and thus the novelty 
and dialogue loses its subject, freedom, its very "dialogueness," and 
turns into templated, senseless, animal like communication. 

So, what is culture now? Let's explore some more phenomena. We were 
talking already of the most generic thought patterns representing it. 
They work as engines producing thoughts, new ideas, forms of their 
expression, and in the end - new human behavior. But how do they work? 
How can patterns of this kind be represented in society? How are they 
learned? 

Obviously, these patterns cannot be trained or instructed in their 
general form. They must be reflected, recognized, and discussed between 
thinkers in free common dialogue and in different works (art, 
philosophy, et cetera). 

Each of these two plays a specific role. Let's look into the works' 
role. 

All ideas become most refined and developed when they are fixed into a 
form, a work (art, philosophy, etc). After that they may play an 
"instructive" role either by staging examples to follow, or even by 
being taught. But, the most important role of a work of art is not to 
be an example to follow or learn. One of the most important roles of a 
work of art is to provoke another creator to create (which definitely 
addresses an audience in some respect as well). It could provoke and 
invoke a desire to understand, or to follow, to argue, to criticize, to 
go further... 

All that was said above about arts generally applies to all of culture. 
For example, let us talk about the culture of groups. Whatever their 
artforms are and on whatever level, novelty is always being produced 
there. Then, "added culture" spreads into vernacular, gets fixed in the 
language, perhaps into rituals, clothes, meals, et cetera... and fires 
back -- in works of art to reflect the new stage of the group and 
promote new forms of life. Novelty is a characteristic of culture -- 
and thus of the human way of life. 

Culture relates to works of art, philosophy, et cetera, but is not the 
same as the sum of these works. Even if we add ideas, names, literary 
personages, genres, et cetera, this will not add up to the entirety of 
culture. It is so, simply because many different works may represent 
the same culture. For example, works of Aristotle and Plato belong to 
the culture of Antiquity. But what is the culture of Antiquity? It is 
one represented in works of Plato, Aristotle and many others. We can 
only analyze them to find out what some specifics of Antiquity are. On 
the other hand, we cannot find these specifics beyond the works. This 
is a paradox, but neither can we avoid, nor change it. Perhaps we can 
elucidate this paradox by looking at an analogous one: the paradox 
between speech and thought. Speech and thought are not one and the 
same: you may express the same thought in different ways. On the other 
hand, there is not a thought beyond speech: you have no means to 
comprehend the thought without verbalizing it. I like how both halves 
of the paradox are grasped by Russian poets: 

Osip Mandelshtam: 

I have forgotten the word, that I desired to say 

The fleshless thought returns to Shadow Palace 

Fedor Tyutchev: 

The thought that has been said, is false. 

The first one reads that there is no thought beyond the speech, the 
second insists that speech can never precisely express a thought and 
thus is false. 

Let us now note that the only mechanism, the most general mechanism in 
the development culture is free human communication or dialogue. 

Culture is a dialogue (yet another definition). Its very fabric is 
produced at that very moment when a writer is writing (is talking in 
his inner dialogue to other creators, potential readers), when a reader 
is reading (is talking in his inner dialogue to the author, friends, 
enemies), when a person is thinking (is talking in his inner dialogue 
to alter ego)... These can occur in the realm of ultimate freedom and 
only there. 

8. Culture and Humanity 

Enough has already been said on this, but I just want to stress this 
point. If a work of art represents a new world, and this new world 
speaks to us, then it invokes new feelings, new language to express 
ourselves, new views on our relations to each other, et cetera. Thus, 
generally speaking, an artwork creates new layers of the human way of 
life, or new insights on humanity itself. 

If we go farther back in time to those times when there was virtually 
no art, we will find that no human way of life had yet been created. 
Arts create humanity, amount to it, and vise versa: no humanity emerges 
beyond arts. It is important to stress, that humanity is measured here 
in all possible dimensions: ethics, aesthetics, feelings, thinking... 
everything that makes a human being specifically human. 

To be continued. 

Topics to be covered: How Culture  Grows? Culture and Freedom, Reality 
of Art and Civilization, Culture and  Creativity, Culture and 
Personality, Culture beyond  Arts, and others. 

Anatoly Volynets, Board member of Open Studios, and President of
Total-knowledge.com, will continue his thoughts next month about the
copyright implications on culture.  You can contact Anatoly at: 
av AT total-knowledge.com
*** 
This article licensed under Authoright: 
http://www.culturedialogue.org/ 
*** 
Literary editing by Alexandra Volynets 
*** 
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COMMONS GALLERY BEST OF THE BEST: 
The Creative Commons Project offers musicians, artists, and authors a
nifty way to meet their legal needs for licensing their works for
distribution across the Internet.  If readers discover interesting
material that sports the Creative Commons tag, let us know, and we'll
link it here.  Attach your photo with your suggested link, to be added
to the gallery.  Let's spread the word! 

NO ENTRY THIS MONTH 
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OPEN STUDIOS:SONG STORM is now in alpha mode, scheduled for January 15,
2004 Launch.  You can take a look at:
http://www.ibiblio.org/studioforrecording/php/testhomeplaylist.php  . 
Please visit soon, and comment on what features we should add.  SONG
STORM is a project designed to go straight at the RIAA.  Looking for a
fight?  Get on the winning side, OURS!  It's a playlist contest.  Submit
your favorite non-RIAA song sets, and win a prize.  Sound good?  Enjoy! 
- - - 
OPEN STUDIOS:RUNNING BOARD is available as a loose-leaf binder
subscription for your home or office.  Tastefully done, I might add, to
impress your friends and visitors, or to give as a lovely gift to
friends and relatives.  Help support Open Studios by ordering your
subscription, today.  Visit our online gift shop at:
http://www.ibiblio.org/studioforrecording/onlineshop.html
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NOTE:  Check our wish list for contributions we need:
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Licensed as Public Domain with the Creative Commons Project, August 1,
2003. 
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