Remix is a deeply important work, but I feel in some aspects, it is also flawed. In the spirit of the “pros”, despite my being just an amateur, and in light of the current blogging over Lessig’s influence in the early days of Second Life, I’d prefer to write my original thoughts in response to this book rather than a boring review.

It works from the premise of some quotes of John Phillip Sousa.

“When I was a boy… in front of every house in the summer evenings you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or the old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cords will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of the man when he came from the ape.”

In todays digital culture, we don’t have “professionals” producing all the content. Some creators of original art are “pros”, yes.  Today’s world is no more short of singers or musicians than in Sousa’s day. They merely have gained access to a worldwide audience. Today we are better at recording our culture than ever before.

And all too often, those “pros” are trampled on by the big Middlemen, such as the record companies. It is getting harder and harder to tell the difference between a “professional” and an “amateur” in today’s market. A good deal of this has to do with the amateurs learning how to use the same tools as the pros, and the wide distribution of free software, giving inexpensive tools to creators.

We have these middlemen who claim to represent the interests of creators (they often, in fact frequently, don’t) and their legal organisations stomping their feet at the sharing communities, who are not all blameless either. Lessig is 100 percent correct to say that turning a child sharing art and music into a criminal is wrong. I think after that point, is where I stopped agreeing.

I think he missed the point that Sousa was trying to make. In Sousa’s world, people learned how to play musical instruments. Indeed, this revolution in music began before the invention of the record player. It started with the invention of the printing press. It gave us the book, and freed us from the tyranny of the scribe to pass our oral and written stories and histories down to us. Till we invented the publisher, anyway.

A second revolutionary invention in the arts was the invention of the camera, when artists started to believe that modernist dogma that there was no need to learn how to paint representational art anymore. The camera could do it all. How the 3d artist has turned that one on its head! We 3d artists use programs that simulate reality to create art. And these days, they are becoming affordable. We’ve turned the camera quite literally on its head and freed ourselves from the last restriction of the camera. Now we use cameras to create source material to feed into 3d programs. The real world is going into the digital paintbrush to become the paint. Not only that, mathematical algorithms can simulate much that is natural. Think fractals.

It is just as flawed to not teach your child how to play a musical instrument. It is just as flawed to not teach your child how to paint. It is terribly flawed to not teach your child how to sculpt. It matters not at all if your child never grows up to be another Leonardo da Vinci or a Michelangelo. What matters is that your child learned how to better use their senses to be more critically observant of the real world in all its un-Platonified messy fractal-patterned splendor. If that is the only lesson they came away with, that is enough.

I point out a most fantastic article about the arts and criticism on Ars Technica – Hypercritical. Read it. It’s important.

http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits/2009/05/hypercritical.ars

A very important quote from that article that struck me:

As far back as I can remember, I was told I would grow up to be an artist. By age six, my obsessively detailed renderings of Mechagodzilla, et al. were already drawing attention from adults. By the time I was eight years old, my parents had been persuaded by teachers and friends to enroll me in private art lessons.

I recall the informal “admissions test” with my first art instructor. A scale model of a bull was placed in front of me on a table and I was asked to draw it. The plastic bull was a faithful reproduction, full of muscles and knobby joints. It was an ugly, forlorn thing, far removed from my normal subject matter. After a few minutes, the resulting drawing was roughly in proportion, the details were well represented, and the perspective was pretty close. I was in.

Thus began eight years of regular art instruction. I progressed from pencils and pastels to watercolors and acrylics, and finally to oils. The content was mostly classical: lots of still lifes and landscapes. Meanwhile, back at home, I slowly covered my bedroom walls (and some of the ceiling) with colored-pencil and chalk-pastel recreations of Larry Elmore and Keith Parkinson book covers, fantasy calendar art, and as much imported Japanese animation as I could get my pre-Internet-suburban-child’s hands on.

I enjoyed both the process and the results. But long before my art lessons stopped around age sixteen, I knew I would never be a professional artist. Partly, this was just a milder incarnation of other children’s realizations that they would never be, say, Major League Baseball players. But the real turning point for me came with the onset of puberty and its accompanying compulsive self-analysis. I realized that I owed what success I had as an artist not to any specific art-related aptitude, but rather to a more general and completely orthogonal skill.

Drawing what you actually see—that is, drawing the plastic bull that’s in front of you rather than the simplified, idealized image of a bull that’s in your head—is something that does not come naturally to most people, let alone children. At its root, my gift was not the ability to draw what I saw. Rather, it was the ability to look at what I had drawn thus far and understand what was wrong with it.

Now I will start on the real boogeymen, the middlemen. After the cut…

The middlemen are the real problem, not the “professional” producers, who are all too often amateurs. In fact, every artist was an amateur once. I want a better middleman, because its middlemen standing between me and the consumer I sell to. I understand that creators often need a middleman to help me distribute my sales with a brand to attract buyers who may not know who I am, but I need them to provide some security to prevent coercion and protect the rights of the sellers and consumers through their establishment. Consumers need protection from the actions of rogue producers, who may sell them faulty products,who may trample upon copyright and trademark law willfully, putting both the other producers and customers at risk when they display unlicensed works, or use stolen works in creation of their own unknowingly. This is what happens in Second Life all too often in the texture trade, they are far too frequently ripped from the sharing communities of other graphics sites and Google images.

In the old “RO” culture that Lessig points out to, we had small shops but they weren’t any better than the Walmarts, they were just smaller, more limited in their capacity to provide choice. You couldn’t always buy what you wanted to buy, sometimes the shelves were empty, and they paid a middleman for the products, who then paid a producer only a fraction of the cost they charged the end stores. Big megamarts got better at providing variety, but usually a cheap mass-produced variety made by people working at slave wages in foreign countries, the money of the local communities going into the local shops drained away. The megamarts were just the middlemen going into business for themselves.

Enter the computer revolution. Never before, has it been so easy to make the virtual fishing rods that catch the virtual fish. Never before, was it so easy for the fisherman to set up his own shop, minus the middlemen who only wanted to spend pennies for his virtual fish. Never before was it so easy for the maker of the fishing rod to set up shop and sell or distribute his wares directly to buyers.

I consider it a Revolution, and this time from the bottom. How Lessig managed to believe this was bad, is absolutely beyond me. Who wouldn’t want an infinite supply of fish or an unlimited supply of fishing rods? Of course I know the fish is not quite infinite, it is limited by the time it took to produce it, the diskspace it takes to store it, the computing and bandwidth it takes to display it. But the fish and the fishing rod is truly infinitely copiable. And this is really a good thing, we just need to be better at dealing with people who exploit other people’s fish, while continuing to trade those fish in a fair manner.

Something really empowering has happened for the producer. I can tell the middlemen to take pennies as a percentage of my sales. I can sell straight to the consumers through those middlemen, the products of my labor. I can even do it directly. This has flattened part of the distribution chain, the elimination of the corner shop in real life, and it was only to be expected with digital works sold over the internet. However, the corner shop still exists on the internet: it’s the website, or in Second Life, it’s the sims that people buy, or buy parcels on. Or a combination thereof.

But not all the demand for these digital products online is from consumers who want to pay. Some of them see an easy profit opportunity without any effort. I’ll call them bootleggers. Others just don’t have the money for buying your stuff right now. I’ll call them sharers. Bootleggers are not sharers. We want to get rid of bootleggers.

Bootleggers are pure pirates and are part of the rip-n-resale culture. They give no percentage of their sales to the original creators at all. They are not remixing for fun, they do not acquire their art for remixing from people who have said it’s ok to use them. Some pretend they have made the work of others and take credit for it, to make themselves look more talented than they are. Others go a step further and simply remix the work of others and then resell it. Even more lazy are the kind that just rip and resell the items without trying to change anything.

This isn’t right, especially as all too often, its the middlemen who are profiting from it. This is happening on Second Life, when they do LindeX cashouts and sell over XStreetSL.

I want to convert sharers into consumers where possible, and keep sharing limited to their local sphere, like those people singing in their homes in the old days that Lessig quoted from Sousa. A sharer is a person who has interest in the product but for whatever reason, cannot buy it. Very frequently these people turn into consumers.

Not all middlemen are honest, and some think they have a right to resell the products of my labor, when I haven’t agreed to it. That is what a lot of the pirate orgs are actually doing, with advertising supported sites. The argument can be made that YouTube or Google is no better than Pirate Bay, when they make no payment back to the original authors of these works.

This is what Xstreet NEEDS to combat. The resale efforts of pirates, just little versions of the big Pirate Bay and Google, but really should be viewed middlemen, exploitative of labor like those big chains such as Walmart. Indeed they set up large Walmart selections of ripped off goods inworld and pay for whole sims this way. This is stealing not only money from the content creators, it is stealing money honest folks would have paid for land in Second Life. This is piracy folks, and it needs to end.

Unfortunately, what the toleration of the rip-n-resale culture in its various guises does, is to cause some prices to go high on some items of high investment by the creator. Others try to cut their prices astronomically and put less effort in them. So the world ends up with even more crap. The little guy gets squeezed out, the big guys win it all, and the big guys go on war against “freebies and pirates”. People just share their stuff or they pay for it. That’s setting ourselves up to becoming a culture of people exploited by pirates and a few big producers, with only a few winning it all. And your kids turn into criminals.

It’s how we end up paying 3000 dollars for 3d Studio Max, putting the independent’s tools far lower than the tools of the professional. It turns more people into sharers and bootleggers. More people turn into remixers and never understand that the process of learning traditional arts is far more important than the artistic creation. I believe we should resist this trend, while not criminalising the sharers. Send your child to a music lesson, buy her a guitar. Buy her a set of pencils and a cheap pad of paper. It’s not expensive to start.

Enter Amazon. Amazon asks everyone to pay for the content for sale, but totally free to use the sites. Amazon makes it easy for you to search for what content you want, Amazon makes it cheap to buy it. And if you want to pay for the use of Amazon’s huge computer and storage network – you can. And they make you pay a reasonable fee for their network – none of that is for free. Plus Amazon is tyrannical about the content they allow their flagship sites to carry.

Xstreet and Linden Lab need to learn a few Amazon lessons, while trying to avoid a few Amazon mistakes. Maybe they could end up becoming better than Amazon, or they could die one day at the feet of the Big A as Opensim folks migrate to using their network and Amazon gets a clue about their potential as a virtual world goods seller.

Linden Lab can become better than Amazon. Amazon doesn’t always cater to the individual content creator, they mainly deal with those small publishers who often rip authors off. They don’t really deal much with the little guy. Yet. I’m quite certain that’s why the Kindle has become important in their sales strategy, to leverage user generated content – to let independent authors create books on their home computer, cutting out the middlemen publishers, giving them access to the Long Tail of niche sales and better find that next big blockbuster.

I proposed a ratings system for Second Life, its a start to try to address the imbalances, so we can try to save our online communities. To put back the right of the town to control what comes in, while keeping what’s local to their community in. To not criminalise the sharers, but to make sharing outside your local sphere obsolete. To deal with the problem of bootlegging. To trade fairly with other communities and grids. Xstreet needs to get cleaned up so courts, judges and lawyers don’t do it for them.

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-4181

Please think about it.