Building knowledge in the digital age; the transition continues — science this time.

I have made the point on this blog that the digitization of information and the internet have made the old ways of doing business with information (be it entertainment, news, science, or art) obsolete and that efforts to force the new media into legal forms that evolved with the ways businesses had organized the old technologies are doomed to failure or to killing the innovation those laws are supposed to promote.

But the struggles inherent in the transition from old and established ways of doing business are ongoing and will continue to be. Today’s example comes from the world of science. As the New York Times reports, “For centuries, [scientific] research [was]cdone in private, then submitted to science and medical journals to be reviewed by peers and published for the benefit of other researchers and the public at large.  . . . Peer review can take months, journal subscriptions can be prohibitively costly, and a handful of gatekeepers limit the flow of information. It is an ideal system for sharing knowledge, said the quantum physicist Michael Nielsen, only ‘if you’re stuck with 17th-century technology.’”

But Dr. Nielsen and others argue that science can happen much more quickly and accurately using the new technologies, and reality is catching up to their ideals (even as established institutional players such as universities and grant-makers still depend on the “traditional published paper” as their exclusive criterion of judgment):

Open-access archives and journals like arXiv and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) have sprung up in recent years. GalaxyZoo, a citizen-science site, has classified millions of objects in space, discovering characteristics that have led to a raft of scientific papers.

On the collaborative blog MathOverflow, mathematicians earn reputation points for contributing to solutions; in another math experiment dubbed the Polymath Project, mathematicians commenting on the Fields medalist Timothy Gower’s blog in 2009 found a new proof for a particularly complicated theorem in just six weeks.

And a social networking site called ResearchGate — where scientists can answer one another’s questions, share papers and find collaborators — is rapidly gaining popularity.

Editors of traditional journals say open science sounds good, in theory. In practice, “the scientific community itself is quite conservative,” said Maxine Clarke, executive editor of the commercial journal Nature, who added that the traditional published paper is still viewed as “a unit to award grants or assess jobs and tenure.”

Off Book: The Evolution of Music Online (a/k/a progress SOPA would end)

Off Book: The Evolution of Music Online from PBS Arts on Vimeo.

Why would any musician give away his music for free?

Have you ever known a Dead Head? Do you know any other band with such a devoted following? Did you know that it has been said that the Dead “may be the most profitable rock band in history.” Do you think that’s possible for a band that never had a #1 song or a #1 album and had only 2 songs ever that cracked the Top 40?

Maybe the money involved will make you believe:

Despite the death of its leader Jerry Garcia in 1995, Grateful Dead Productions continues to generate about $60 million a year in sales and licensing fees. Pretty good for a group that no longer exists.

Surely making that kind of money requires a fierce protection of one’s intellectual property rights, right? Bono, after all, took to the pages of the New York Times to warn that without fierce protection of their copyrights the movie and television industries might suffer the fate of the music industry:

Caution! The only thing protecting the movie and TV industries from the fate that has befallen music and indeed the newspaper business is the size of the files. The immutable laws of bandwidth tell us we’re just a few years away from being able to download an entire season of “24” in 24 seconds. Many will expect to get it free.

A decade’s worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators — in this case, the young, fledgling songwriters who can’t live off ticket and T-shirt sales like the least sympathetic among us — and the people this reverse Robin Hooding benefits are rich service providers, whose swollen profits perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the music business.

We’re the post office, they tell us; who knows what’s in the brown-paper packages? But we know from America’s noble effort to stop child pornography, not to mention China’s ignoble effort to suppress online dissent, that it’s perfectly possible to track content. Perhaps movie moguls will succeed where musicians and their moguls have failed so far, and rally America to defend the most creative economy in the world, where music, film, TV and video games help to account for nearly 4 percent of gross domestic product. Note to self: Don’t get over-rewarded rock stars on this bully pulpit, or famous actors; find the next Cole Porter, if he/she hasn’t already left to write jingles.

Rather than prevent their audience from taping their concerts, as every other band did, the Dead set it free and encouraged tapers, hence sparking a revolution. You’d think giving their music away would have dampened their success; instead, the freebies propagated it. Even though people could get the Grateful Dead product for free, the band found itself playing in larger and larger stadiums as the fan base swelled and album sales accelerated: 19 gold albums, six platinum, and four multiplatinum.

And so on the official Grateful Dead web site you can listen to any of the weekly Grateful Dead Radio Hour, which, “[s]ince 1985, the show has featured exclusive interviews, music from the roots and branches of the band’s musical family tree, and of course a generous helping of unreleased live and studio recordings.” At the Internet Archive, you can listen to a seemingly endless number of those bootleg recordings the Grateful Dead encouraged, and you can download for free those that audience members made. And if that’s just too much to  begin to comprehend, don’t worry! The Grateful Dead Listening Guide is a series of podcasts you can download to hear an expert’s introduction into the Work.

Perhaps it is not such a surprise, therefore, that we have articles like  the one entitled “Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead.”

And you can even listen — right here below — to a recording of the Grateful Dead concert I attended 33 years ago this week, on January 18, 1979, at the Providence Civic Center

Creativity? YOU CAN’T HANDLE CREATIVITY!

In a study out of Cornell University, The Bias Against Creativity: The Reason People Desire But Reject Creative Ideas, the authors point out that creative responses to problems create uncertainty, and that people reject those creative ideas because they can’t handle the uncertainty:

Although the positive associations with creativity are typically the focus of attention both among scholars and practitioners, the negative associations may also be activated when people evaluate a creative idea. For example, research on associative thinking suggests that strong uncertainty feelings may make the negative attributes of creativity, particularly those related to uncertainty, more salient

The authors conclude:

Our results show that regardless of how open minded people are, when they feel motivated to reduce uncertainty either because they have an immediate goal of reducing uncertainty, or feel uncertain generally, this may bring negative associations with creativity to mind which result in lower evaluations of a creative idea.

I’ve always told students and colleagues that being genuinely creative requires courage and the ability to persevere in the face of rejection. There’s good reason for that. As much as “innovation” is the catchword of our age, very few people in decision-making positions are really brave enough to accept innovative ideas (whether they’re teachers, school administrators, politicians, lawyers, or corporate executives).

hat tip to Farnam Street

The film, music, and publishing industries have always cried, “Wolf!”

I’ve written before about how the film industry decried and fought the VCR. In 1982, Jack Valenti, in sworn testimony before Congress, stated that “the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.” Of course, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the VCR and the film industry not only prospered; it makes more money from home video sales than from from the theatrical box office.

Mike Masnick at techdirt does a far more thorough job, setting forth the long, continual, and continually misbegotten history of existing industries decrying the doom foretold by emerging technologies. He starts with John Philip Sousa, the conductor.

In 1906, he went to Congress to complain about the infernal technology industry and how it was going to ruin music:

These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. 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 old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.

It’s a long and hilarious history. Did you know that in the 1980s home taping was “killing” the music industry? That using your DVR is theft? That Thomas Edison argued that film projectors would kill the film industry?

The whole thing is worth reading and worth remembering next time you read a screed by Bono or Scott Turow.

Originality relies on a good deal of imitation and even a bit of theft — Picasso this time.

James Polchin, Cezanne, Michelangelo, and Greek sculpture in Picasso’s early drawings:

To look at Picasso’s drawings is to better understand his paintings as something greater than Picasso, an artistic vision based on imitation and purloined art. If we look beyond the artist, we might actually see his art and access his creative process without the shadow and burden of Picasso’s name getting in the way. We might call what Picasso created “invention” or “reinvention,” but it is hard to look at these drawings and not have a sense that so much of what we call originality relies on a good deal of imitation and even a bit of theft.

The principle of collage is the central principle of all art.

No one who has spent more than a few days reading this blog in its 3+ years can have missed the fact that I have been strongly persuaded that the common notion of authorship — that true artists are solitary originating geniuses — is a myth. Kenneth Smith, in “It’s Not Plagiarism. In the Digital Age, It’s ‘Repurposing,’” adresses the same issues and covers much of the same ground, but he brings up a a few very interesting things that I had not previously encountered. The first is the prominent literary critic Marjorie Perloff’s use of the term “unoriginal genius” to describe someone with skill at making his or her way through the contemporary flood of “information.”  A “genius” in this sense is not someone who — as convention has it — comes up with a creation that no one has ever dreamt of before, but, rather, someone with an extraordinary ability to manage available information, parse it, organize it, and distribute it. Perloff believes that in the end it is this type of genius, not the mythical conventional sort, that distinguishes your writing from mine:

Her idea is that, because of changes brought on by technology and the Internet, our notion of the genius—a romantic, isolated figure—is outdated. An updated notion of genius would have to center around one’s mastery of information and its dissemination. Perloff has coined another term, “moving information,” to signify both the act of pushing language around as well as the act of being emotionally moved by that process. She posits that today’s writer resembles more a programmer than a tortured genius, brilliantly conceptualizing, constructing, executing, and maintaining a writing machine.

Perloff’s notion of unoriginal genius should not be seen merely as a theoretical conceit but rather as a realized writing practice, one that dates back to the early part of the 20th century, embodying an ethos in which the construction or conception of a text is as important as what the text says or does. Think, for example, of the collated, note-taking practice of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project or the mathematically driven constraint-based works by Oulipo, a group of writers and mathematicians. (hyperlinks added)

Even more interesting, however, is what Smith did. He’s taught a class at the University of Pennsylvania he calls “Uncreative Writing.”

In it, students are penalized for showing any shred of originality and creativity. Instead they are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, and stealing. Not surprisingly, they thrive. Suddenly what they’ve surreptitiously become expert at is brought out into the open and explored in a safe environment, reframed in terms of responsibility instead of recklessness.

We retype documents and transcribe audio clips. We make small changes to Wikipedia pages (changing an “a” to “an” or inserting an extra space between words). We hold classes in chat rooms, and entire semesters are spent exclusively in Second Life. Each semester, for their final paper, I have them purchase a term paper from an online paper mill and sign their name to it, surely the most forbidden action in all of academia. Students then must get up and present the paper to the class as if they wrote it themselves, defending it from attacks by the other students. What paper did they choose? Is it possible to defend something you didn’t write? Something, perhaps, you don’t agree with? Convince us.

All this, of course, is technology-driven. When the students arrive in class, they are told that they must have their laptops open and connected. And so we have a glimpse into the future. And after seeing what the spectacular results of this are, how completely engaged and democratic the classroom is, I am more convinced that I can never go back to a traditional classroom pedagogy. I learn more from the students than they can ever learn from me. The role of the professor now is part party host, part traffic cop, full-time enabler.

The secret: the suppression of self-expression is impossible. Even when we do something as seemingly “uncreative” as retyping a few pages, we express ourselves in a variety of ways. The act of choosing and reframing tells us as much about ourselves as our story about our mother’s cancer operation. It’s just that we’ve never been taught to value such choices.

After a semester of my forcibly suppressing a student’s “creativity” by making her plagiarize and transcribe, she will tell me how disappointed she was because, in fact, what we had accomplished was not uncreative at all; by not being “creative,” she had produced the most creative body of work in her life. By taking an opposite approach to creativity—the most trite, overused, and ill-defined concept in a writer’s training—she had emerged renewed and rejuvenated, on fire and in love again with writing.

Smith has thus provided another instance of what I already know in a different context — there are more and less original legal writers even though legal writing is one vast collaborative writing enterprise consisting primarily of texts cobbled together from pieces of other legal texts.

Finally, Smith suggests that the insights he provides (which he would no more claim are original to him than I would claim them mine) have been largely resisted in one profoundly important world of writing: literature:

I’m sensing that literature—infinite in its potential of ranges and expressions—is in a rut, tending to hit the same note again and again, confining itself to the narrowest of spectrums, resulting in a practice that has fallen out of step and is unable to take part in arguably the most vital and exciting cultural discourses of our time. I find this to be a profoundly sad moment—and a great lost opportunity for literary creativity to revitalize itself in ways it hasn’t imagined.

Perhaps one reason writing is stuck might be the way creative writing is taught. In regard to the many sophisticated ideas concerning media, identity, and sampling developed over the past century, books about how to be a creative writer have relied on clichéd notions of what it means to be “creative.” These books are peppered with advice like: “A creative writer is an explorer, a groundbreaker. Creative writing allows you to chart your own course and boldly go where no one has gone before.” Or, ignoring giants like de Certeau, Cage, and Warhol, they suggest that “creative writing is liberation from the constraints of everyday life.”

As John Pareles wrote in “Plagiarism in Dylan, or a Cultural Collage?”, Bob Dylan is another one of those giants leading the way:

The absolutely original artist is an extremely rare and possibly imaginary creature, living in some isolated habitat where no previous works or traditions have left any impression. Like virtually every artist, Mr. Dylan carries on a continuing conversation with the past. He’s reacting to all that culture and history offer, not pretending they don’t exist. Admiration and iconoclasm, argument and extension, emulation and mockery — that’s how individual artists and the arts themselves evolve. It’s a process that is neatly summed up in Mr. Dylan’s album title ” ‘Love and Theft,’ ” which itself is a quotation from a book on minstrelsy by Eric Lott.

Of course, literature has not completely ignored these artistic trends. The group of authors comprising Oulipo were exemplars of what Smith might call “writers as programmers,” and Donald Barthelme wrote:

The principle of collage is the central principle of all art in the Twentieth Century.

And, believe me: if you’ve never read Georges Perec or Barthelme, you’ve never read anything like what they’ve written. Or maybe you have.

You convince people by confirming that what they believe about the world is true.

One of the most difficult things to convince law students of is that law is not merely the application of law to facts. Students start out believing that learning law is learning the rules that will answer whatever questions arise. Some students never get past that idea. The ones who become good lawyers do.

There are instances in which there are clear rules that are easy to apply. But if that were the whole of the law, we wouldn’t need lawyers, and law students certainly wouldn’t have to pay $45,000 a year for three years to earn a law degree.

Instead, convincing someone that your view of the law is the correct one requires not only finding and applying the correct rule but also in convincing whomever you are trying to convince that the rule and your interpretation of it make sense, are just, are convincing at a gut level. If you can’t do that, you’ll never become a good lawyer.

An inability to get over the stumbling block posed by the desire for a legal system consisting of clear rules that answer every conceivable question, of course, is not confined to some law students. As Jon Krakauer explains in Under the Banner of Heaven, “literalism” — the conviction that there are rules set forth in hallowed texts (which need not be religious, as strains of constitutional “originalism” demonstrate) that answer all the important questions one encounters makes people resistant to the idea that answering the tough questions requires a considerable amount of creativity, acknowledgement of ambiguity, and sensitivity to situational specifics:

For people . . . who view existence through the narrow lens of literalism, the language in certain select documents is assumed to possess extraordinary power. Such language is to be taken assiduously at face value, according to a single incontrovertible interpretation that makes no allowance for nuance, ambiguity, or situational contingencies. As Vincent Crapanzano observes in his book Serving the Word, [this] brand of literalism encourages a closed, usually (though not necessarily) politically conservative view of the world: one with a stop-time notion of history and a we-and-they approach to people, in which we are possessed of truth, virtue, and goodness and they of falsehood, depravity, and evil. It looks askance at figurative language, which, so long as its symbols and metaphors are vital, can open—promiscuously in the eyes of the strict literalist—the world and its imaginative possibilities.

Perhaps this is why literalism rarely carries long-term appeal in a functioning democracy. The majority cannot be convinced for very long without the use of force that there is good reason for elevating the particular hallowed text (much less the literalists particular reading of that text) above all other “reasons.”

I’m reminded of these things by the TED talk embedded below, in which Simon Sinek explains that success in realms as diverse as commerce, invention, and social change depend on making the why of what you do your principle focus.

Thus, in the commercial world, for example, people don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. Nevertheless, companies and people typically sell their product or services by explaining what they do and how they do it. They don’t typically even know why they do what they do, and they certainly don’t explain it well.

But the most successful people sell first and foremost why they do what they do. Apple, for example, explains they do what they do to challenge authority. They explain what they do as designing beautiful products that are easy to use. What do they do? They happen to sell computers. That message convinces buyers in ways the typical computer seller’s approach — (1) we sell computers, (2) we make them user friendly — does not.

Simek explains the phenomenon in market terms: the only way to get the majority of consumers to buy a new product or service is to first convince innovators and early adopters, and those people are only persuaded by the conviction they share the seller’s convictions.

But his message about the market is one applicable in all contexts in which one is trying to convince an audience:

People buy what they buy to confirm what they believe about the world.

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Audacity: fundamental to the practice of art and of law

I tend more often on this blog to write about the impact of law on creative endeavors, but it has always been my intent to address as well the ways creativity informs the practice of law.

In fact, the first major “breakthrough” moment in any good legal education is that one when the student realizes law is not what she thought it is — the learning of rules that she then applies to facts — but is instead that legal reasoning involves the enormously creative and imaginative ability to relate legal rules, earlier applications of those rules, and the myriad of other considerations that go into our conceptions of justice. As importantly, legal practice is also a matter of being able to communicate that complex reasoning, and the ability to communicate it well is inextricably intertwined with the ability to imagine it in the first place. Creativity and imagination, of course, are required to find the law as well.

These are not controversial views. They are central, however, to my fascination with the interplay between law and art.

One enormous component of genuinely creative work is audacity, which, in an article entitled Audacity in Contemporary Art, Diogenes March 1969 vol. 17 no. 65 1-19, Eduardo Gonzalez Lanuza defines very aptly in this way:

Audacity is “an attitude which consists of ignoring what is expected of you and daring to do what no one else dares to do.”

And yet most everyone believes law is authority that determines what is expected of you and requires you do what everyone else does.

So it is with enormous pleasure that I note that Corporate Counsel magazine has awarded Google its “Best Legal Department” award because of, as the magazine’s editor explained, the group’s audacity:

Past years’ winners were often defined by sedate virtues like superior systems and organization, but this year I’d have to say the key quality was audacity.

I’ve long been a fan of Google (though not an unqualified one), and there’s no doubt that its daring has been no small part of my admiration. I can think of few things I would want more as a lawyer than to represent Google in connection with the Google Library Project. So here’s to Google, and if anyone there in the legal department is reading this, I’d love to become your colleague.

Addendum: Speaking of Google’s audacity, not more than a few minutes after posting the above, I came across this, via Plagiarism Today:

Google has signaled that the company is prepared to oppose the major film and music companies as well as Congress and the president of the United States on a controversial bill designed to thwart online piracy.

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said today in London that the company is prepared to go on fighting the bill should it become law, according to published reports. U.K. publication the Guardian is reporting that in a discussion with reporters during a London business conference, Schmidt said: “If there is a law that requires DNS [domain name systems, the protocol that allows users to connect to Web sites], to do x, and it’s passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the president of the United States, and we disagree with it, then we would still fight it…If it’s a request, the answer is we wouldn’t do it; if it’s a discussion, we wouldn’t do it.”

Is the NY Times new paywall a platypus?

Will the new New York Times paywall survive longer than its last one? The Times sent me an e-mail explaining the plan, but Felix Salmon explains it more succinctly and clearly:

[T]he website is free, so long as you read fewer than 20 items per month, and so are the apps, so long as you confine yourself to the “Top News” section. You can also read articles for free by going in through a side door. Following links from Twitter or Facebook or Reuters.com should never be a problem, unless and until you try to navigate away from the item that was linked to.

Beyond that, $15 per four-week period gives you access to the website and also its smartphone app, while $20 gives you access to the website also its iPad app. But if you want to read the NYT on both your smartphone and your iPad, you’ll need to buy both digital subscriptions separately, and pay an eye-popping $35 every four weeks. That’s $455 a year.

I can’t say I disagree with Salmon’s take: “The message being sent here is weird: that access to the website is worth nothing. Mathematically, if A+B=$15, A+C=$20, and A+B+C=$35, then A=$0.” And I suspect Mike Masnick’s is correct in his belief this plan was spawned by a committee that either lacked or utterly ignored any member who suggested the idea was stupid:

It feels like something that was completely developed by committee group-think. It’s one of those things where they’re sitting around and someone timidly suggests a dumb idea (“I know, for $5 more we take away their smartphone access”) and, because they have to come up with something, someone else says “sure” and then they think there’s validation of a good idea. But there’s no one brave enough in the room to say: “Guys, the newspaper is digital. Charging different amounts based on the hardware is like charging people different prices for listening to the same music on headphones vs. speakers.” But no one did that. And because they had a committee, who kept making bad suggestions like this, and 14-months to keep upping the stupid, they spent over $40 million on it.

The result for me will be that I’ll read the New York Times less than I do now. Whether the newspaper will in fact be hurt by losing page views by readers like me or will make more money than it does now with its content online for free remains to be seen, but something tells me this isn’t the best solution to the world we live in now, one in which newspapers no longer control the means of producing and distributing journalism.

Stay tuned. We’ll see what the New York Times is doing online in a year or two.

Welcome to the future of publishing.

Amanda Hocking lives in Minnesota, and writes young adult paranormal romance and urban fantasy. Her My Blood Approves series is about vampires in Minneapolis. She also wrote the Trylle Trilogy, which is a paranormal romance without vampires, shifters, mermaids, fae, angels, dragons, ghosts, or ninjas.

But what’s remarkable about Ms. Hocking is that she’s experienced enormous success by self-publishing her works exclusively as electronic texts, as the Huffington Post reports:

Unknown, living paycheck to paycheck in Austin, Minnesota, rejected by publishers all over New York, Amanda Hocking decided to self-publish on ebook platforms only. She sold 100,000 of her works in December, and over 10 months she’s had more than 900,000 in sales. She’s 26 and is now making enough money to quit her day job and become a full time writer, in fact she’s a millionaire.

Paranormal romance is not precisely to my taste, but no one interested in culture can ignore the economics of popular culture. And at least this comment from the Huffington Post article, while acknowledging the fear provoked by the ongoing revolution in publishing, acknowledges what I’ve long seen as the need to embrace the inevitable:

As a long-time author it frightens me somewhat to see the industry change so much so quickly. Yet it’s also exciting to witness this kind of people power in the making. The Internet is the great equalizer. I firmly believe that those of us in the industry need to embrace the change or we will eventually go down in flames. You can’t stop progress, only delay it.

A National Public Library? There’s nothing to stop it other than a lack of political will to do anything useful.

Robert Darnton calls for a National Digital Library — “a digital library composed of virtually all the books in our greatest research libraries available free of charge to the entire citizenry, in fact, to everyone in the world.” I agree with him that the project is neither naive nor utopian. Several countries have already committed themselves to the creation of their own national digital libraries:

In December 2009 President Nicolas Sarkozy of France announced that he would make €750 million available for digitizing the French cultural “patrimony.” The National Library of the Netherlands aims to digitize within ten years every Dutch book, newspaper, and periodical produced from 1470 to the present. National libraries in Japan, Australia, Norway, and Finland are digitizing virtually all of their holdings; and Europeana, an effort to coordinate digital collections on an international scale, will have made over ten million objects—from libraries, archives, museums, and audiovisual holdings—freely accessible online by the end of 2010.

Darnton concludes that the U.S. “should be possible to digitize everything in the Library of Congress for less than Sarkozy’s €750 million—and the cost could be spread out over a decade.” And he therefore sees the legal issues — particularly dealing with “orphan works” – as the principal barrier to a U.S. National Digital Library.

Unfortunately, I disagree with Darnton regarding the main impediment. As I’ve explained “orphan works” are “works whose copyright holders cannot be identified, a common problem because there is no registry of copyrights and the authors of the books are not necessarily the copyright holders. Rather, the copyright holders might include unidentifiable heirs or even corporate entities that have gone through mergers, dissolutions, or other forms of corporate reorganization that make it difficult or impossible to identify the entity that currently owns the copyright.” I’m not sure I see any particular problem with Congress enacting legislation amending the Copyright Act to authorize a National Public Library to use works whose copyright owners cannot be identified under terms that provide for reasonable compensation when and if owners make and establish their claims.

I think, however, the cost is a real impediment in the current economic climate. €750 million is almost $1 billion. While the U.S. military budget for 2010 totals approximately 685 times this amount, the current political climate hardly seems ripe for Congress to take the initiative on a project that would strike much of the citizenry — and certainly most U.S. politicians — as intellectual frivolity. It isn’t, of course, but one can be sure that massive confusion over the rights of authors (as I’ve touched on here, among other places) could be used to demagogue to death a billion dollar project longed for by a bunch of professors.

Steinski talks about the origins of musical mashups

Innovation comes from remixing what we already have.

I’ve written frequently about the myth that creative genius is the product of solitary inspiration and the ways that myth reinforces notions of intellectual property that, under the pretense of rewarding innovation, in fact stifle innovation by preventing the re-use and remixing of existing ideas, creations, and inventions. In reviewing Steven Johnson‘s Where New Ideas Come From, Paul Crowe makes the point that

Greek philosophers said nothing comes from nothing, a new idea, actually a new anything, is simply a rearrangement or unique new combination of things that already exist. When you think of it that way, coming up with new ideas isn’t about having that mysterious “creative” ability, it might be more about a willingness to try lots of new combinations to see what might work, and, hey, anyone can do that, you just need desire and effort.

Wind of Change? It seems we’re becalmed.

In May of 2009 I asked whether there would be a wind farm on Lake Erie off of Cleveland soon. But it seems we’re stuck between environmental roadblocks on one side and free-market enthusiasts who oppose any governmental subsidies on the other. So far, all we have is repeated “news” that a Lake Erie wind farm “is in the works.” And, inevitably, opposition to Lake Erie wind farms has arisen. So it shouldn’t be a huge surprise that Salon reports today:

You could not ask for a more drastic demonstration of the contrast between how the United States and China are rolling out renewable energy technologies than the current state of offshore windmill deployment in the two countries.

The U.S. does not have a single offshore windmill currently in operation.

China, of course, is “charging ahead.” And while the Chinese don’t bother with things like environmental and economic regulations that otherwise would limit what they are doing, Salon emphasizes that the important point to notice is that “[s]lowly but surely, the West is losing its long-held domination of the technological high ground.” In short, “[w]hen research and development migrates from one country to another, so does innovation.” I can’t help but second Salon’s conclusion:

The strategic imperative is simply overwhelming. The struggle over energy policy shouldn’t be seen as a culture war between environmentalists and free-market fundamentalists. It should be a matter of basic common sense — do we want to be involved with making the future, or just buy it from China?

Artists learn to cobble together successful careers.

QuestionCopyright.org describes an emerging new paradigm for artists in The Cobbler: A New Career Model for Artists and Entertainers:

“Filmmakers, musicians, and writers now have the opportunity to work in a more stable, less risky way — with an economic model like a corner shoe cobbler, with a skill and a loyal clientele. While it may not have the glamour of red carpets and stadium shows, it can be a life in which one’s vocation is sustainable, at a level that pays a living wage and allows one to be one’s own boss. One trades a small chance of making a lot of money quickly for a greatly improved chance of making some money steadily. For many artists, that’s a good trade-off.”

In short, artists are using the new means of production and distribution to control the creation, marketing, and sale of their work. It’s the inevitable outcome of what I described last January at Critical Mass regarding the future of books — the loss by the publishing, recording, and entertainment industries of control over the means of production and distribution of their products. As I wrote then, “[t]he entire publishing industry as we’ve known it is a walking corpse. You can almost imagine it as a zombie — composed of parts of Sarah Palin, Oprah, Dan Brown, and Tiger Woods — lumbering down Manhattan’s avenues.”

This new paradigm is no hypothetical. My sister, Amy Friedman, has written over 1000 stories over the past 20 years for Universal Press Syndicate (UPS) under the title Tell Me a Story. Since UPS was doing nothing to further develop the content, Amy managed to persuade them to sign back over to her the copyright for a handful of the stories. She, herself, put together musicians, actors, and recording engineers to produce three CD compilations of the stories. The first is 14th on Amazon’s list of audio books today. The third won a 2010 Audie Award, the equivalent of an Oscar in the world of audio books and spoken word entertainment. The second is pretty great too.

Amy is not alone. Matthew Rose is a dear friend, an artist who lives in Paris, and the inspiration that, through the resources of the online world has produced A Book About Death, a phenomenal exhibition that is ever evolving and ever-appearing in new incarnations in the physical world,

I could go on among just my acquaintances. The long and the short of it is this: don’t wait for the publisher, the recording company, the agent, the gallery, the production company.

Khan Academy: an invaluable new resource in your effort to learn everything

As I’ve written before,  good lawyers need to know everything. In other words, your professional life is  a constant and endless process of learning. One of the foremost skills you bring to your clients is an ability to become fluent in their affairs and to be able to communicate your understanding of those affairs clearly, concisely, and persuasively to audiences who may never have encountered those things.

Libraries, of course, are therefore invaluable. And the internet is a miracle. But still, finding the right resources to learn a particular topic is difficult. I came out of college and law school knowing Latin and Ancient Greek and a lot of history and literature, but I needed to learn an awful lot very quickly about things like finance, insurance, economics, and business, and the effort to educate myself was an adventure. The internet has, of course, only multiplied the tedious, obscure, and downright erroneous “authorities.” So I am always thrilled to find a source that speaks to me and genuinely teaches me. And I am thrilled to have found Khan Academy. As the home page explains:

The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization with the mission of providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere.

We have 1400+ videos on YouTube covering everything from basic arithmetic and algebra to differential equations, physics, chemistry, biology and finance which have been recorded by Salman Khan. . . .

The Khan Academy and Salman Khan have received a 2009 Tech Award in Education. The Tech Awards is an international awards program that honors innovators from around the world who are applying technology to benefit humanity.

Here is Mr. Khan’s introductory video:

EMI goes Zombie: its business is now owning and exploiting its copyrights.

I’ve written before that the publishing industry is a “walking corpse” because the virtual monopoly the industry once had over the production and distribution of texts is gone:

The ways we produce, copy, and disseminate information have entirely changed. Anyone sitting in a coffee shop can produce a document that looks as if it’s been typeset. (And I’m sure my students have no clue what typesetting is.) That document can be copied at virtually no cost, and disseminated world-wide at virtually no cost.

The same, of course, goes for the music industry. And now EMI is proving that it is no more than a zombie preying off of the vitality of living art rather than producing life. As The Economist reports, EMI is abandoning the business of producing music and instead converting to a business that exploits intellectual property rights:

In recent days EMI’s owner, Terra Firma, a private-equity firm, has had to pump in fresh capital because it had breached its banking covenants. On June 18th it announced drastic management changes and an important strategic shift. Two of its bosses, Charles Allen and John Birt, will leave, and the head of EMI’s music-publishing division, Roger Faxon, will become chief executive of the whole company. EMI also announced that it would “reposition itself as a comprehensive rights-management company serving artists and songwriters worldwide”. Rough translation: owning and exploiting the copyright to songs, rather than selling recordings of songs, is where the money’s going to be from now on.