Dead mens money (Or : Why I feel copyright should change)

So the idea of copyright is that if someone creates an idea that can be expressed in a form of media (speech, song, book, etc) then it will be protected by law, giving them a monopoly on it and allows them to make as much of a profit as possible.

It’s a fantastic idea in theory as I’m sure that each and every one of us would want to make as much of a profit as possible for our work.

However there are a few problems that I personally have with the system, which spread over the duration of protection, corporate control and ownership and methods of enforcing protection.

Firstly my biggest concern is the duration of protection that is afforded to the creator of works, which at the moment lasts for the life of the creator plus 70 years. This effectively puts a stranglehold on an idea or a concept for about three generations, placing it inside a protective bubble from which the world can view it, but never interact with it on their terms.

This may seem like a bit of an extreme way to state the obvious here but it should probably be mentioned anyway. The average lifespan of aperson in Australia is 81.5 years which means that if a work is created and you were over the age of 12, you statistically speaking will be dead before you can do anything with the work. That’s assuming the author died today as well. If the author was at age 20 when they made the work and lived to the average lifespan not only will you be dead, but your children will also be dead and your children’s children won’t be looking long for this world either. It effectively seals ideas away from the hands of at least one generation, with potentially up to four being affected.

I don’t know about you but to me that seems like madness. Sure, people want to protect their work but a three generation embargo on certain ideas is a touch excessive. After all you won’t be around for the last 70 years so who is actually profiting off of the content?

This leads me to the next issue that I had with copyright, who actually gets control over the work. I used to work in a fairly large company, which had some interesting terms in the contract I signed. One of the big things included was that any intellectual property that I created while at my place of work was the property of my employer. This was because we dealt in information and often there were better ways to perform certain tasks, such as programming a search of a system or so forth. All self explanatory really, as the systems between competitors were often similar and my employer didn’t want me to sell off anything that’d give the competitors an advantage.

However the contract wasn’t worded to specifically include the work that related to systems, nor was it only for work done in the office so there was potential for any idea I created at home on a weekend to end up as their IP, which could prevent me from working on it until I die plus 70 years.

I imagine the contracts are slightly worse in intellectual property generating industries such as the music industry or publishing industry but the idea remains much the same – Although they have free reign in the creation of an idea they are unable to edit it without permission from their employers. As mentioned before, this system is in place until the day the creators die, plus 70 years making it impossible for them to work with their ideas.

Lastly is the process of enforcement of the protection of copyright.

In gaming this is a ‘Big Thing’ under the title of DRM (digital restrictions rights management). It is often a process of not trusting people to do the right thing when it comes to purchasing games and instead put restrictions on the media that causes it to monitor what you are doing. The more benign form of DRM is that it just puts a copy restriction on the disc, preventing it from being copied. The more malignant form is where they create entire programs that scan your computer for any program that has a connection with software piracy, after which it prevents you from playing the game. There are more forms of DRM and it works across most media industries but it equates to the same thing.

Controlling how you use your media after you have paid for it.

Now we can go back once again to my favourite hypothetical example.

I’ve mentioned before that copyright lasts 70 years after the creators death,  and that the creator can actually lose access to copyright by working for a company. The idea of the above DRM added to it means that if a content creator is fired from a media production agency they can now be forced to pay to access their idea, and also be under constant surveillance while viewing it. Worse still is that this is 100% legal and will enforce this to the day of the creators death.

Thinking in terms of the amount of people that are restricted access for the 70+ years after content is generated I find it difficult to agree with the concept of copyright as it stands. Any idea that relates to after the death of the content creator is far too restrictive as it can easily prevent a generation from accessing an idea. I’m not sure what system best preserves the interest of everyone after this point, but all I can say with certainty is that the system needs to change to provide more access to everyone.

Trapped in a loop (Week 4 blog: work life permeating into home life)

One of the great things about office work is that there’s always a connection between you and the office, so if you ever want to get ahead on your work there’s always an option for you to do so – after all, if you get more work done now it means you don’t have to put as much effort in on the day right?

I could barely type that with a straight face after having worked in a job with information technology for the past 3 or so years and always being on call, but I remember when I first started how this was exactly the thought process amongst all the new employees. What we didn’t realise is that if we responded to emails after hours, it would become an expectation and subsequently a demand of the boss to make sure that we were always up to date with emails and work. This meant that our first few weeks of lazing back eventually came to bite us hard as our workloads were increased, with extra work being assigned by email (which had an auto respond when read, so the boss knew you’d viewed it) that couldn’t be easily avoided.

Get it? It's Office Space and enough people have done this topic its beating a dead horse. Ah bugger it...

In a tutorial today this was the point of the discussion – While communications technologies have allowed people to be ever more connected with the internet it now has the added side effect of connecting them with their place of work, allowing them to check emails at whatever time in the morning, never really giving them a chance to take a break. If my above example isn’t proof of this occuring I’m not sure what else I can include to demonstrate it.

But the other point that no one seemed able to address was how anyone can create a strict demarcation between work life and home life in an ever connecting world. Some students in the class pointed out that manual labour jobs often had a strict clock on and clock off time, but I remember working as a manager in retail we were often encouraged to get employees to do as much work after they clock off as we possibly can (ie empty a trash can on the way out, move some stock, etc…), and I can’t help but think of the old days where information workers would just stay in the office until late in the evening to get work done, so I don’t think that’s an option.

The other alternatives I can think of and have tried with varying degrees of success were A) don’t do the extra work. Meant I had to do more work on the day but at least I got more time off. B) be unethical in your work. This means employ every trick possible to get out of work such as re-allocating it, creating a fictitious report you have to work on and convincing the boss its real and finally setting up an auto reply for your email that says it failed to deliver to your address. C) Work harder and have the backlog cleared by the end of the day. This one isn’t even viable all the time, due to the sheer number of hours it takes to do anything even when working to the best of your ability

These three options that I saw were always something that I felt weren’t quite as productive for the business as possible, however there’s just too much of an ingrained culture in most businesses of working outside of work hours for me to see any alternative solutions other than to quit your job and try and find one with better conditions.

It’s something that I feel is going to be an increasing problem in the workforce as we grow ever more connected it means that employers gain an ever increasing control over what they can see in our lives and how they can interact with it, not just through the ideas of emails and Smartphone communication but even things such as social networking websites where they can position themselves as your friends.

Shiny stuff on the internet (or why cyber libertarianism hasn't been achieved)

In the tutorial for the class a discussion arose on the idea of why the internet had not reached the utopian ideals envisioned by the early cyber libertarians, to which some people made a comment that it was a new technology or that it there was too much control being exerted by the government in an attempt to reign it in under their power.

This reminded me of an image that I found online a while backthat is far too long to be contained in this post. I’d recommend reading it before carrying on.

In order to attempt to try and understand what could have caused the cyber libertarian ideals to fall short I consider my browsing habits, what I use the internet for and the information that I tend to consume on a regular basis. When I’m bored I have access to millions of articles that I can read to further educate myself, I have methods of exposing myself to hundreds of new viewpoints and grow as an individual. But I don’t. Instead I go to reddit, click everything from imgur and spend the next two hours looking at pictures of funny cats or political commentary. Ironically this is how the above image was discovered – by chance as I was looking for something to entertain me until it was time for sleep, the next tutorial or whatever. I honestly don’t think that this is something that would be too uncommon to hear from other people except replacing reddit with facebook, myspace, or any other website.

What makes the issue complex here isn’t that there’s an antagonistic force at hand trying to remain in control that’s creating these distractions for me, but my love of distractions and indifference to bettering myself that restrict it, along with other people’s desire to be ‘internet famous’ through raising of karma (or whatever equivalent exists for your preferred time killing website) that does it. I tend to think that any government body secretly trying to control us could only do a worse job.

It is this love of distraction that I find so easily in myself and suspect many others have that leads me to the slightly pessimistic belief that the entire reason that the cyber libertarianism movement failed isn’t because of some limitation to the technology or restriction placed on the individuals by the government, but instead the limitations of humanity with the lack of desire in the majority people to see it through. Although this could very well be seen as an optimistic viewpoint, as if the restriction is entirely within our heads at the moment then there is the opportunity for change.

Ethics of online gaming spaces

How to describe the MMORPG? The easiest way to describe this would be to say that it’s a social game, with several gameplay elements around killing monsters, aliens and whatnot. People build strong friendships online and in the event of a player’s death in the real world have been known to hold funerals to honour them. However, one of the gameplay elements of World of Warcraft was the ability for different groups of players being able to fight and kill eachother. While it should be obvious to see how these two could mix in a bad way, during a funeral a raid group came along and slaughtered everyone.

Many of the players who were involved said that it was disrespectful and demanded the agressors should have been punished, but Blizzard did not act. One of the things that I noticed from events such as this were that there was a general theory of ‘code is law’ that existed in the attacking group, or rather a theory among gamers that if the game world allows you to do something then it is not illegal to do so.

To further explain this. Imagine you see something that you want but could never afford. You know that society has laws in place that prevent you from stealing, but you are still able to. In a sense the law acts as a deterrent and avenue for punishment. In the game world it doesn’t quite work like that, as rather than having punishments for theft of objects they just make it impossible to do as all your possible actions are coded into the game. As you can’t steal anything, what would be the point of making any law or threat of punishment?

To this sense World of Warcraft doesn’t have many laws at all restricting what players can do (most of these are related to either external program use, chat harassment and gold selling) so in this sense, there is a belief that if your player can do something then no matter how unethical it is there will be no punishment for it. Lessig (2006) argues that this is one of the main features of the virtual world, in that it relies more on the social graces of players to make a good society rather than any real world laws.

Another example would be in the game of EVE online (famous for its politics and back stabbing) where a player created a banking system that functioned like a real world bank (IGN, 2003). Players could make deposits, withdrawals, get loans at variable rates and all the other things a bank does. The CEO of this virtual bank, Ricdic, one day decided he had enough money and ran. The most interesting thing about this is that the developers of EVE couldn’t ban him for that, as it wasn’t against the code of the game.

There are of course more examples (EVE online would provide a massive backlog of these), but each of these raise interesting points. Although the actions of disrespecting the dead and embezzlement are crimes in the real world, in gaming worlds they are only unethical. Is this something that should be addressed by real world standards of laws and judgements, or should they instead be relying on the ethical considerations of the game designers to limit the actions of the player?

References
IGN, 2003, 'EVE online bank scandal'
Lessig, L 2006, 'Four puzzles from cyber space', Code Version 2.0 pp 9-30

Introduction

Hey everyone, just managed to get back from a combined adventure of sisters wedding and then a snowboarding trip which is why I've been pretty much as silent as a ghost for the past week and a bit.

I'm somewhat hesitant in introducing myself through blogspot as I find that I tend to write out a four paragraph introduction only to delete it after staring at it for 20 seconds, so I guess I'll go with my usual introduction on these blogs.

My name is Owen Godfrey, I'm an ex Computer Science student who majored in game design where I quit uni after realising that I didn't want to be stuck behind a desk doing whatever some guy in a suit told me to do for the rest of my life. My solution to this was to go work in a bank behind a desk for two years before realising I completely screwed that up and thought that I should probably go back to uni and at least get a degree, even if it was a useless piece of paper after graduation. Deciding on the bachelor of Arts as the most useless degree I enrolled in a major that was immediately cancelled after its creation, leaving me with a lot of free time to pick up interesting subjects. My academic interests are based mostly around IT, gaming and electronic cultures.

Outside of my academic life I'm generally laid back in what I do, which is one of the requirements for the hobby that has fulfilled the majority of my time - gaming. As you probably got from the upper paragraphs I'm fairly into gaming, where if I'm not playing games then I'm meeting with friends in a small indie group trying to create something. To keep this thing as short as possible without going into my gaming history - both my parents are gamers from the days of pen and pencil gaming (d&d for example) and they kind of just passed the interest on to me. I'm pretty sure I was raised with a controller or joystick of some form in my hands and its lead me to where I am today.

So again - Sorry for the huge delay in presenting this introductory blog and I look forward to seeing you all in class.