I can understand where people come away with the idea that Newhoff and others haven’t the faintest idea what Google does and how it does it. It certainly reads that way.

It’s not so much that he doesn’t, I hope, but he has another point to make about what he sees as competing utopias with his being the correct one.

This is where I think the schism between technologists and creators becomes ideological and sociological. The serious artist is offended to have his work ground into mouse fodder, valued identically with the garbage; and the consumer should be offended, too. The paradigm Google wants to foster is one that asserts that the booty-shakin? college girl video has the same intrinsic value as the Emmy Award-winning TV show and that the value of either will only be determined by the number of hits each receives in cyberspace.

Now that certain Emmy award winners do have the cultural impact of MSM isn’t important to his argument either though he could have tried to come up with a parallel. Emmys, even more than Oscars, award shows with the largest audience for the major awards and quality, such as it is, is reserved for the lesser awards. In short the number of hits in “the real world”. There are worse ways of doing things nor does it mean that the general populace is arts ignorant it reflects that evening television and audiences for most movies is looking for entertainment after a long day. They want to escape, thank you, and if the Emmy winner does that then it ought to be rewarded. To that extent its done what it needs to do. PBS sneaking the odd “I, Claudius” into the mix doesn’t hurt either.

The reality is that should I query a drug I was recently prescibed, Epival, I wouldn’t expect to see a result for Newhoff’s short “Gone Elvis” nor do I. The most relevant items are returned long before college girls shaking booty. I don’t see that using the search term “Gone Elvis” either. In fact David Newhoff’s short is the first item returned. No MSM that I can see there.

If there is one related to the search term its too, too many pages into the results for me to bother looking for it.

As a Canadian army veteran I’d be offended to see the two linked terms linked on the first page or two of the returns but it doesn’t.

One point about Newhoff’s utopia’s is his dismissal of programmers and tech types as creative or creators. There has been a lot of creativity put into programs such as Photoshop, video editors, operating systems and the desktops they display.

In fact Newhoff’s definition of artists worked with the creators of picture and video editors very closely to get what we have today.

Equally the tech industry relies on copyright as much or, or more, than artists do even for “simple” things such as enforcing licensing terms. Even open source software is covered by copyright for exactly that purpose. I’d suggest Newhoff wade through the GPL license, for example.

Techies are every bit as creative as sculptors, writers, painters, photographers and others and their work enters our culture indirectly but as profoundly as do the artist classifications I’ve just used. By and large, though, the tech industry understands that it is built on what came before and that copyright protects a single expression of an idea not the idea itself. I’m not sure Newhoff does, though I’ll happily admit that I’m wrong if he says I am.

I’m also not as fearful of the ability of the general populace to identify quality in the artistic realm when it encounters it. There may be differences on the leading edge, avant guarde end but by and large we’re able to tell the difference between, say, “My Favorite Martian” and “I, Claudius”.

The dissonance between the tech world and Newhoff’s is less than he wants us to believe or that he seems to believe. Not in the need for some form of copyright, even if it’s not the corrupted version we have today. It’s more in the understanding that the tech world has that sharing is vital to progress even if it’s not line-by-line copying of code. Newhoff buys into the views of his patrons in the RIAA and MPAA that they must control who enters and what leaves the realms they “control”. And that only they know who can enter or leave those realms. That only the gatekeepers have the faintest idea of what “art” is. It certainly isn’t the general public.

So he focus’s his argument on that rather than on any merit that sites like Techdirt may have to their/own views and diverts it to a concern for art and culture.

The thing is that the diversion is transparent and does nothing but point blame rather than seeking a way out of what his patrons see as a problem.

David, I’m sorry to tell you this but recording and movie studios don’t give a damn about culture they want what sells the most. Bums in seats. The same thing Shakespeare wanted when he ran the Globe Theatre. The same applies to book and magazine publishers. If there’s a positive cultural result then fine. But that’s not what they’re in business for. That’s not what they pay you for.

Should you get bums in seats cranking out pink slime then you do that as far as they’re concerned. It isn’t why you went into the arts but that’s what your patrons want and they, ultimately, are the ones signing your cheques. After we great unwashed in the general public pay them.

As for piracy/infringement or whatever the discussion here has centred around the economics and market demand for certain things like singles, movies released quickly, and other things they paying public wants if they were given a chance to pay. Where there’s demand there will be supply. Legal or not. See: War on Drugs/Alcohol Prohibition should you need further explanation. No amount of enforcement is going to change that, I’m sorry to say.

More importantly the “content” industries need to start to understand that. And they need to stop our ability to do with our legal downloads what we would do with, say, a book. If it is, as you insist, property, then whether the property is in bits or bound and printed on paper we, as consumers, ought to be able to do the same things with them.

Phased releases of movies have pretty much had their day. Is it going to take people who really want the same thing bashing their heads on each other before that stops?

IF there’s the dissonance you say there is, David Newhoff, that’s where it is. What goes where and when. Not who should get paid. OF COURSE THE ARTIST OUGHT TO BE PAID if there are enough buyers. Economics, right?

(Different arguments apply to pharmaceuticals and software than to the arts for importantly different reasons.)

I’ll end my “screed” by heartily recommending the short movie Gone Elvis to everyone who got this far. I don’t like your opinions but, as a piece of work, this is great.
Not just because you’re offering it for free.
http://goneelvis.com/view/