So, this little item from yesterday about how she’s been getting bombarded by folks with links to YouTube user Jaron Pitts‘s superbly fan-made Green Lantern and Technotise movie trailers caught my eye for a particularly noteworthy reason, in terms of copyright and infringement issues.  Before I dive in to that, though, first, the Technotise trailer he cut so you know what I’m talking about:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPu-PRHtCWE

Basically, Pitts has assembled a trailer almost entirely out of infringing content from all kinds of sources (just as he did for the Green Lantern fake).  Sure, he’s doing it as a fan and we could get in to issues of participatory culture and the work of Henry Jenkins and why this isn’t necessarily a bad thing (and we all know I’d be a hypocrite to call him out for it myself… ahem) but what is REALLY interesting isn’t so much that Pitts is doing the infringing, but rather for WHOM Pitts is doing it.  More after the jump.

Finke points out that both the Green Lantern fan trailer and the Technotise fan trailer are for Warner Bros. movies, which would otherwise be nothing more than mere coincidence.  However, Pitts openly admits that he cut the Technotise trailer at the behest of “Hollywood producers”.  From the video’s description on YouTube:

This is a trailer I made for some producers in hollywood who are making this into a live action. Its based on a great anime film from last year, Technotise.

He even goes on to post a link to a website, http://www.technotise-remake.com/, with a link to an email address for a guy named Scott Glassgold.  One can only assume that this website, which prominently features Pitts’ trailer, is something of an “official” endeavor on the part of the producers of this remake film.

Now, like I already alluded to and I constantly espouse – I really don’t have anything against the appropriation, co-option, or commodification of previously copyright-protected material, as that process helps create new cultural products, new narratological approaches, and, inherently, new speech.  Memesis naturally causes user-agents to create new forms from old, to tell new stories and convey new meanings.  We do live in a participatory culture, and fan fiction is a part of the dialogue that exists between content producers and their audiences.  The Information Commons and the concept of social production have changed the way we use and value creative works.  Infringement, like it or not, is the norm in today’s social media landscape.

So, all of that makes this fan trailer otherwise fairly insignificant, aside from it being expertly produced and interesting to watch. However, what does make this truly interesting is the fact Pitts has either been commissioned or otherwise encouraged to produce it by the actual Technotise filmmakers.  While Finke merely passes this off as another WB marketing gimmick, what she fails to recognize is that this Technotise trailer is loaded with intellectual property from rival studios.  In essence, the producers of the Technotise remake and/or Warner Bros are not only getting a free, soon to be viral slice of marketing material, something to track and test, helping them to gauge how well the real film may do, how they should target it, and a million other points of useful data, but they’re getting it off the backs of their competitors, too.  And they’re effectively getting away with stealing content from their competitors (if it wasn’t for Pitts’ admission) by laundering it through a “fan”.  That, to me, is truly remarkable – clever, no less.

Anyway, I think it’s fascinating to think about how appropriation and user-generated content is impacting marketing strategy for large media corporations.  On the one hand, they slap the hands of users who attempt to steal their content, yet they rely on those same users to spread word-of-mouth and help build buzz for their films.  Why do these companies “bite the hand that feeds” like that?  Moreover, it’s clear that the rule of thumb is “it’s only infringement when it happens to us”.  Well, it will be interesting to see how fan-made videos like this are utilized in marketing strategy down the line.

Moreover, a closer examination will reveal that The Wealth of Networks has a vengeful deity, too, one akin to the god found in the first thousand-odd pages of that most famous of Books.  Benkler’s jealous Being is seen in the fundamental message of, at least as I read it, Benkler’s text – that the social production of an information commons and the existence of an alternative to the industrial models of the twentieth century, a networked information economy, does not always have to be about the bottom line.  That, it would appear, is a scary message for some, indeed.  But for those small few of us who have joined with the covenant people and followed Benkler as our Moses in to the World Wide Wilderness of Sinai, there’s a message of freedom and a better world to be had in networks, the kind of wealth in networks that I feel inspires the greatest economic motivation: sharing knowledge, and lifting others thereby.

As Benkler defines it, the networked information economy is an economy that does not have a central hub; it uses inter-networked systems to decentralize production and dissemination.  Now, let’s back up a little.  Upon reflection, the juvenile rendition, or at least the foundation, of Benkler’s networked information economy really grew up in parallel to modern economic systems: those born of the industrial revolution.  An historical overview would show that the original networked information economy was perhaps really born to coincide with the industrial boom of the Western World in the late nineteenth century, not simply after it.  Mass media, as it would come to be known, would utilize the effects of the widespread adoption of communications technologies and services, the newspapers and radios and TVs sold and endlessly fed from their disseminating central origins, to sway society from within.  Benkler discusses the power of this centralization, that the powers that be have controlled information and have given it away only for a price.  But, I think one could pin the seed, or the beginnings of the networked information economy on the birth of the telegraph, insomuch as it represents a potential echo chamber for information otherwise coming from other one-way mediums – although it appears the telegraph’s uses were primarily contained by the mass media and the military.  Despite that, I think the networked information economy’s gestation (and its promise) began with such two-way mediums.  The restraints of time and geography began their erosion whilst modern industry churned out other mass produced one-way information commodities to assist in that erosion.  Yet, information is not a scarce resource in Benkler’s networked information economy, and, it can be controlled from the outside, not centrally.  Its reproduction would not forever need to happen on Henry Ford’s assembly line.  Many decades later the Internet would herald a new age of communicating that the innovators who laid a foundation for it, albeit in other forms (telegraphs and telephones), could not have conceived of, though through their invention made inevitable.

This lack of vision is mirrored in the modern hopeless expressions we see on the faces of those who have reaped major profits and gained greater power from centralized communications in the past.  Incumbents feel the stultifying effects of this wrathful god that is the networked information economy, “weeping, wailing, and gnashing their teeth“, to employ our scriptural allegory once more, as they slowly lose control to the networked public sphere and its liberal commons.  The elite clamor for answers as the disruptive social production of information resources bypasses incumbent services entirely, and the new democratizing effects of the Web crash the old dogs’ party (see the election of our first digital President, for starters).  Benkler shoots down many critiques against the democratic effects of the ‘Net, for instance, that the Internet will just take on the same form as it mass media forefathers as incumbents pour more and more money in to it. Central forces, be they governments, mass media entities, or even educational institutions can try, but as long as there are disruptive players with alternative motivations, seeking social capital or otherwise, their efforts are totally m00t (to reference TIME’s 2009 Most Influential Person in the World, 21-year old Christopher Poole, aka 4chan.org founder “moot”).

I recommend “The Wealth of Networks” for anybody who has already converted to the newer social media gospels espoused by the Shirky’s, Li’s, and Anderson’s of the world.  These adherents will better understand the messages of such latter-day texts.  However, I don’t recommend Benkler to anyone who is looking for ways to reproduce the industrial economic model in the new age of communications.  If one does that, expect to be smited by the Old Testament-like wrath that is social production power.  Find ways to become an agent in the chaos, not a ruler, and join the tribe.

Reference

Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. New Haven [Conn.]: Yale University Press.

User Engagement

I believe in order to encourage user engagement, the content on the site obviously needs to be meaningful to a particular audience.  I think the audience for our project would be the same audience for much of the content coming out of the UW’s MCDM program; that is to say, an audience eager to tap into our knowledge base.  If the site is too generic, or too wide in scope, it might lose its audience, too.  Having said that, I propose we generate video clips that are highly topical and relevant to our program.  So, each clip from each student should answer the question: “What is social media?” Or, “How do I use social media?”

Accessibility to Course Students

I believe the content will drive itself once we get going.  Every student in this program is here to understand social media.  I do not think it will be a stretch for any of us to answer the theme’s central question.  At the same time, I believe we will receive a litany of responses.

Why this theme?

Because we are the experts.  We HAVE to be the experts.  The social media party is taking place right here, right now, and this program is certainly a key player in driving the academic pursuit of understanding it.

Prepared for Drew Keller’s Summer Quarter 2009 Web Strategies for Storytelling course, University of Washington Master of Communication in Digital Media program.

Benkler (2006) opined that a democratic state which does not implement social policy to protect and promote the free exchange of information is missing an opportunity to enrich its democracy (p. 28). In fact, the benefits of an open information commons could be numerous. For example, Benkler stated that the publication of scientific research to the public commons is helping poorer nations to develop improved agricultural production methods (Benkler, 2006, p. 14). Certainly, this information sharing empowers citizens of impoverished states with a means to rise above subsistence problems and thereafter tackle issues related to their greater good.

However, Benkler (2006) explained that incumbents in the marketplace, primarily led by cultural production bodies like Hollywood, have already actively worked to control information production to preserve their industrial interests (p. 23). Indeed, the market made its first major move to industrialize contemporary social patterns of information production with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 [DMCA]². Organizations representing market incumbents successfully lobbied government to enact the DMCA, which serves to protect incumbents’ ability to sell cultural products as packaged goods (Benkler, 2008, p. 25). To protect against the digital piracy of these packaged, copyright-protected works, the DMCA punishes persons who circumvent copyright protection systems³, the so-called “Digital Rights Management” [DRM] technologies implemented by cultural producers in throughout various hardware and software⁴. Such a move by the market indicates that, with government intervention, future social production could be subject to the controlling watchdog of industrial forces.

Furthermore, the communications infrastructure that permits social production is under the constant threat of protocol-specific interference from incumbents who physically own the infrastructure (“Test Your ISP”, retrieved 7 May 2009). Protocol-specific interference is the practice in which Internet Service Providers and other information carriers deliberately self-regulate which web services and content providers receive bandwidth priority. This practice is an upheaval of the time-honored principle of network neutrality⁵.

The DMCA and the movement to cease network neutrality are just two examples of the market pushing to industrialize social production; they represent the market’s attempt to remove some of the “existing information and cultural resources out of which new statements must be made”⁶. Naturally, these new statements surface from user co-modification of readily accessed content from the public information commons. Thus, removing access to the information commons is the only way the market can control content. Of course, removing access is financial suicide for all parties involved; access to the network is inherent to their business models.

Moreover, and unfortunately enough for incumbents, Benkler’s concern that the market could control cultural production in any real way is contravened by John Fiske’s (1987) notion of the semiotic democracy⁷ and Henry Jenkins’ (2006) thoughts on participatory culture. Additionally, Eric von Hippel (2005) contends that “user-innovators” in the information space will continue to freely reveal their works. Plus, the establishment of the “Creative Commons”⁸ (“About”, retrieved 7 May 2009) licensing project further disposes of Benkler’s claim.

Fiske’s (1987) Television Culture, raised the observation that television viewers independently attribute their own meanings and relationships to the televisual content they consume, regardless of the producers’ intent. By extension, it is clear that cultural content consumers continuously craft new meanings from diverse cultural products, meanings that exist separate from the market’s creative intentions. This, as Fiske would label it, is “semiotic democracy” in action.

Jenkins (2006) elaborated on notions of semiotic democracy further, describing the concept of participatory culture in his book Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers. Communities develop a “collective intelligence” through the breakdown of communication constraints. (Lévy, 1997, as cited in Jenkins, 2006). In the absence of constraint, subcultures then emerge from these communities that promote the appropriation of copyright-protected content and the production of “home-brew” works which utilize this content (Jenkins, 2006). Subsequently, this new material promotes new meanings. Applying Clay Shirky’s (2008) “sharing, collaborating, and collective action” principles, new social production tools invariably enable users to create communities and generate new content with prior market productions, irrespective of copyright claims.

Eric von Hippel (2005) stated that user-innovators, or consumers who adopt and re-engineer market commodities to suit their specific needs, tend to freely reveal how they innovated their acquired goods (p. 9). This freely revealed information is distributed to the information commons. Thus, Hippel (2005) contended that the free publication of innovations would continue in the cultural space – that cultural ideas would also undergo user innovation and be freely shared (p. 17). In summary, with the combined influences of semiotic democracy, participatory culture, collective intelligence, and user innovation, social production will go on, uninhibited by market forces.

To buoy social production, new creations in the social production space can be ably licensed with “Creative Commons”⁹ licenses. Creative Commons licenses make it easy to openly share and build upon the works of others while remaining consistent with existing copyright laws (“About”, retrieved 7 May 2009). The market can do little to contend with legally generated, socially produced content that passes from user to user under such licenses.

In conclusion, Benkler (2006) was correct to assert that the market could still move to control social production. Indeed, it has already made significant efforts to do so, such as the DMCA and the abrogation of network neutrality. However, Benkler’s (2006) fear of market control is easily waylaid by various theories about social production and user interaction with content, including such concepts as the semiotic democracy (Fiske, 1987), a participatory culture (Jenkins, 2006), and user innovation (Hippel, 2005). Shirky’s (2008) social media principles of sharing, collaborating, and collective action are, in this author’s opinion, ultimately immutable. This is because new social patterns of information production will continue unmitigated by market forces. How? As actors in the information commons continue to produce new works, whether they be comprised of copyrighted materials or original creations, these works will freely fill the information commons for ages to come – works that will be sought after by consumers who generate their own cultural meanings and who apply their own important societal applications, regardless of copyright law, state intervention, or the preventative strategies of market incumbents.

References

About. (2009). On Creative Commons. Retrieved 7 May 2009, from http://creativecommons.org/about/

Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. New Haven [Conn.]: Yale University Press.

Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, 17 U.S.C. §1201, §1204 (2006).

Digital Rights Management – Digital Millennium Copyright Act. (2009, May 2). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 6 May 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management#Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act

Fiske, J. (1987). Television culture. London: Methuen.

Hippel, E. v. (2005). Democratizing innovation. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Jenkins, H. (2006). Fans, bloggers, and gamers: Exploring participatory culture. New York: New York University Press.

Lévy, P. (1997). Collective intelligence: Mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace. New York: Plenum Trade.

Network Neutrality. (2009, May 6). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 7 May 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_neutrality

Shirky, C. (2008). Here comes everybody: The power of organizing without organizations. New York: Penguin Press.

Stark, E. (2007, January 18). Semiotic democracy and cultural transformation (or) the transformative power of semiotic democracy. Re-public: re-imagining democracy. Retrieved 7 May 2009, from http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=102

Test Your ISP. (2009). In Electronic Frontier Foundation – Home – Our Work – Transparency. Retrieved 7 May 2009, from http://www.eff.org/testyourisp

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Footnotes