Autumn talk, part 3: Greyzone communities

• Autumn talk, part 1: Why copyright is now about tools, not works
  
• Autumn talk, part 2: Bass and place, meaning and abundance
  
• Autumn talk, part 3: Greyzone communities
  
• Autumn talk, part 4: The method of Kopimi
  
• Autumn talk, part 5: Afterthoughts

The digital poses questions whose answers can’t remain restricted to the exclusively digital. Stuff that can be copied tend to become superabundant, which means that it is only valuable by virtue of its interconnection to stuff that can not be copied, like space and time.

When you sit there with all music ever recorded in you pocked, what do you do? Do you just press “shuffle”? And as anyone knows who have been sitting paralyzed in front of a too big MP3 archive, it is not simply to reconsider “what one likes”. Automatical recommendation systems (which are still at a rather primitive level, defining taste just in terms of listening frequency), are a necessary help but can never suffice. For the contemporary music fan in the climate of abundance, there is not even such a thing as a unitary individual taste, independent of a particular context in time and space.

To find out what we want to hear in a given moment, to create meaning out of musical abundance, we clearly need some software and indexing tools, but we also need community. Only reference collective contexts can save us from the terror of the shuffle button.

The shuffle button is telling you that you could always skip to the next song. The awareness of that possibility is constant. Traditional radio listening, on the other hand, leaves you with no choice but to listen to what they play.
Both these poles are OK, sometimes. But really good musical experiences usually happen somewhere in between, when you have a choice within certain limits. This goes for all musical activites, “passive listening” as well as “active playing”. Pure freedom could never be musical. Any musical instrument has certain limits, as has the body when one dances. The very presence of other people with other expectations is in itself a limit.

Absolutely crucial is the forming of provisional communities, that can engage in a common selection, indexing, resituation and actualization. Many times, such communities thrive best in the greyzone between the private sphere and the public sphere, often also in between the purely commercial and the purely non-commercial.
Size does matter a lot. Some recent experiments demonstrate how groups of 17 or 23 participants further dynamics that are probably not possible in either a big stadium-size or a small kitchen-size event.

And here we get back to copyright. Because such greyzones are not recognized by copyright law, copyright licenses or copyright collecting societies. Copyright is dichotomizing. It always recognizes some kind of private sphere: Within the family you may copy without restrictions, even invite friends to your home to watch a movie without paying extra for it. Copyright theoretically limits itself to public distribution and public performance. But where to draw the line is never certain, but a matter of modulation.

Any informal activity emerging from the middle of the spectrum will sooner or later be pressured by copyright law to choose on of two paths: Either to keep small-scale and hidden from the public, or to commercialize completely and pay licenses.
Copyright is not just a repressive power, but a productive. It shapes the contexts in which people can get together to create meaning out of abundance. Copyright materializes in the city, as well as in the architecture of digital networks.
Because computers operate by copying information all the time, and doesn’t seem to care about physical distance, copyright law has quite serious problems with drawing a credible line between private use and public distribution through computer networks.

The question about copyright is not how artworks are best distributed within networks. It is about the very meaning of terms like “artworks” and “networks”. In the rhetoric about so-called Creative Industries, especially at an European policy level, “creativity” is defined as the production of ever more content, irrespective of context. Pure information. It adheres to an idea of the digital as a substitute for place-specific activities, which was once popular utopian net discourse. Today it is used by the copyright industry to push their agenda of criminalizing tools.
It should however be obvious that the digital is no substitute. Rather, digital communications creates a stronger desire for those things which they cannot communicate. The digital is not, as people used to think in the 1990’s, a separate world. It is always a complement to something, but we don’t always know what. exploring that questions is an adventure, and it takes time. All we know is that there can not be one single solution for everything — and that anything valuable will be emerging from the in-between.