Q&A: Sunil Iyengar
Director of the Office of Research and Analysis, National Endowment for the Arts What’s the piece of news this week that is forefront on your mind when you think about technology, policy, and the arts? I haven’t been following this as closely as I would like, but there is of course the Google Books verdict. [...]
Speculating About Rebecca Black’s Money
To start, four takes on how much the Rebecca Black phenomenon might have made last week. Forbes: $1,000,000. “At 30,000,000 views, that lands Black and Ark Music Factory $20,000 – a 1000% return on investment …the song currently sits at #45 on the iTunes Top Singles chart. According to 101 Distribution, an independent music distributor, [...]
Niche To Mass
One of the ongoing stories about culture over the past decade has been the rise of niches. Mass culture has broken down and atomized as the digital revolution made niche interests more viable. As people had access to more choice, more of them stopped going for generic mass culture served through limited channels. Audiences for [...]
Fat Fingers and Due Process
(I really tried to come up with some awful pun for the title of this post… Something like “I.C.E. is Not So Cool”. But then I just couldn’t pull the trigger…) From a February 16th article on TorrentFreak: The US Government has yet again shuttered several domain names this week. The Department of Justice and [...]
A Fair Use Primer (links)
What is Fair Use? “under many conditions, fair use allows you to copy, display and publish copyrighted works without payment or permission. The doctrine — which complements the First Amendment — helps courts avoid rigid application of copyright law where rigid application would ‘stifle the very creativity which the law is designed to foster.’ Against [...]
The Google Books Decision (links)
The decision is in. “Google Inc.’s six-year struggle to bring all the world’s books to the Internet suffered another big setback at the hands of a federal judge. Judge Denny Chin, in a ruling filed in U.S. district court in Manhattan, rejected a 2008 settlement that Google forged with author and publisher groups to make [...]
The Fight for Public Broadcasting (links)
The latest attack: “Sens. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) introduced a bill Friday to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which doles out federal funds to radio and television stations. DeMint said it ‘should be an easy decision’ to halt taxpayer money for public broadcasting while the nation is ‘on the edge [...]
Turning Off the Internet: Protest Edition (links)
Egypt: ‘If you want to liberate a country, give them the internet’. “Wael Ghonim, the young Google executive who has became a symbol of Egypt’s pro-democracy uprising after he launched the original Facebook page credited with sparking the initial protest, called the Egyptian upheaval, ‘Revolution 2.0.’” (via Wired) Libya: ‘Shutting off the Internet seems to [...]
The Walled Garden Problem
Magazine publishers were excited when Apple introduced the iPad. There were all sorts of plans for i-publishing ventures – a new generation of digital magazines that would look better than the web and were more portable than laptops. Then the iPad launched and publishers were screwed. Sure you could sell a digital copy of a [...]
Q&A: Jeff Chang
author of the forthcoming “Who We Be: The Colorization of America“ What’s the piece of news this week that is forefront on your mind when you think about technology, policy, and the arts? Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about cultural change and political change, and the relationship between the two. The events of the [...]
Recent Posts
Five Links Looking at the Digital Divide
What is the Digital Divide? Depends on who you ask. The digital divide, like many other economic or social problems, is a global issue. "From the most switched on countries such as Sweden to the poorest nations in Africa there is a widening gap between those with access to technology and … [Read More...]
A Creative Commons Primer (in Links)
What is Creative Commons? " by definition is a non-profit organization, but the name is more widely associated with the concept of Creative Commons as a way to extend copyright to promote legal sharing and modification of original works." (via When I Have Time) Why does it exist? "It used to … [Read More...]
Q&A: Helen Brunner
artist advocate, media policy connector, social justice champion, and Director of the Media Democracy Fund. What's the piece of news this week that is forefront on your mind when you think about technology, policy, and the arts? It’s hard with what is going on internationally not to … [Read More...]
Supply and Demand (the economic force that dare not speak its name)
(Cross-posted on the Fractured Atlas blog.) So Rocco really stepped in it. The NEA Chairman is under siege because he dared to suggest that perhaps there's an oversupply of arts organizations relative to the (well-documented) dwindling demand. He's not the first to bring this up, but it surprised … [Read More...]
Why RWX
Today we launch a new blog on ArtsJournal. It grew out of discussions Jean Cook, Adam Huttler and I had after a week-long group blog conversation we had here last summer on artist rights and creativity. What are the animating ideas of our time? Certainly the revolution in the ways we get … [Read More...]
Technology is changing the ways creativity is employed, distributed and shared. The rules about how culture can be used are also changing. This blog is an attempt to look at some of the issues in this revolution and provoke discussion. The three founding members of rwx are Adam Huttler, Jean Cook and Douglas McLennan. We come together not out of some sense of a common view but from a shared recognition that technological change is challenging some of our basic assumptions about what culture is and how it works. rwx is a place we’ll try to make some sense of it.