nettime Fortune magazine on Soros
A good article on George Soros with extra details to help us Americans understand more about his history: Soros has just committed $10 million of his own money to an effort to drum up support for Democrats in key states, immediately becoming one of the biggest individual donors to next year's electoral race. In September he staged a fundraiser for former Vermont governor Howard Dean. And after years of writing moderate, carefully arguedand not very influentialtracts about the international economy, he is now almost ready to publish a very different kind of work, a book to be called The Bubble of American Supremacy. It's a no- holds- barred attack on what he sees as the hubris of American policy. I've come to the conclusion, Soros told FORTUNE, that one can do a lot more about the issues I care about by changing the government than by pushing the issues. In short, he has become the world's angriest billionaire. http://www.fortune.com/fortune/subs/article/0,15114,517653,00.html # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime WSJ: Can Copyright Be Saved?
[It's quite amazing, not too long ago, an outfit like the WSJ would have any questioning of the absolute enforcement of copyrights slandered the way Forbes slandered the FSF recently. Now, suddenly, even the WSJ admits that things are up for grabs and that there are valid several options. Now, you might not agree with their portraying of DRM as middle of the road solution, but just putting it out as one of several options, including a tax!, rather than the only one, is quite a significant change in itself. Felix] Can Copyright Be Saved? New ideas to make intellectual property work in the digital age By ETHAN SMITH Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL October 20, 2003 For some people, the future of copyright law is here, and it looks a lot like Gilberto Gil. The Brazilian singer-songwriter plans to release a groundbreaking CD this winter, which will include three of his biggest hits from the 1970s. It isn't the content of the disc that makes it so novel, though -- it's the copyright notice that will accompany it. Instead of the standard all rights reserved, the notice will explicitly allow users of the CD to work the music into their own material. You are free ... to make derivative works, the notice will state in part. That's a significant departure from the standard copyright notice, which forbids such use of creative material and requires a legal agreement to be worked out for any exceptions. Is this the future of copyright? Perhaps. But a better way to think of it is that it's one of the possible futures of copyright. Because right now, it's all pretty much up for grabs. Blame it all on the Digital Age. As any digital downloader can tell you, technology and the Internet have made it simple for almost anyone to make virtually unlimited copies of music, videos and other creative works. With so many people doing just that, artists and entertainment companies sometimes appear helpless to prevent illegal copying, and their halting legal efforts so far have antagonized customers while hardly putting a dent in piracy. The challenge is finding a way out of this mess. Efforts fall broadly into two camps. On one side, generally speaking, are those who revel in the freedom that technology has brought to the distribution of creative material, and who believe that copyright law should reflect this newfound freedom. On the other side are those who believe that the digital age hasn't changed anything in terms of the rights of artists and entertainment companies to control the distribution of their creations and to be paid for them -- the essence of copyright law. For them, the answer is to leave copyright law intact, and to use technology to make it harder for people to make digital copies. Here's a closer look at some of the competing visions. IN THIS TOGETHER The copyright notice for Mr. Gil's coming CD is being crafted by Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that seeks to redraw the copyright landscape. Believing traditional copyrights are too restrictive, it aims to create plain-language copyright notices that explicitly offer a greater degree of freedom to those who would reshape or redistribute the copyrighted material. Traditional copyright law gives owners of creative material -- and them alone -- the right to copy or distribute their works. Although they can waive all or part of those rights, the process isn't easy and usually occurs in response to a particular request. Those hurdles, critics say, can hinder the open and freewheeling sharing of material the digital age makes possible. Creative Commons seeks to make the system more flexible by spelling out which rights the copyright holder wishes to reserve and which are being waived without waiting for a request. Artists can mix and match from among four basic licensing agreements: They can decide whether they simply want attribution anytime their work is used by someone else; whether they want to deny others use of the work for profit without permission; whether they want to prevent others from altering the material; and whether they want to permit the use of material only if the new work is offered to the public under the same terms. An underlying layer of digital code enforces the rights laid out by the owner, telling computers how a given work can be used. A Creative Commons license isn't for everyone. It might appeal to independent artists for whom free samples, distributed online, might represent an attractive marketing option, or for someone like Mr. Gil, who believes that making it easier to share and reshape his music can be an important part of the creative process. But it's unlikely to appeal to the big media companies, for which copyrighted material is what they sell. Still, Mr. Gil, who is also Brazil's culture minister, sees Creative Commons as a way to unlock the creative potential of digital technology. I'm doing it as an artist, he says. But our ministry has been following the process and getting interested in
Re: nettime 'post electric' (age?)
For the sake of ideas it is hoped reasonable to follow up on the ideas of this thread, which takes the form of a soliloquy, as clarification was in a private exchange and will be respected as such. Though at the same time a sense of what might be common in many threads now overlapping is of interest, if only an attempt to contribute. And to do so without the destruction of imaginations, different ways of thinking, still able to question... One interesting aspect that keeps coming back with using what, at times, and in ways, may be considered language machines, is the role of defining of ideas in words. Having a tangential encounter with Wittgenstein's 'language games' this is the idea that returns, as a first step, is it a kind of trap. A loop of words. To attempt to share ideas demonstrates many relations to their power in language, and to its ownership, of words, of concepts, ideas. Another recurring question is if there is a proprietary aspect, in which a type of private consensus can be achieved yet which leaves public, peer review of ideas in jeopardy. On Nettime in particular, flags have been thrown as seeming penalties when words which have a more public exposure are entered into various equations: it may be energy, 'matter', information, it may be electromagnetism. The difference when using such words, it would seem, tends to be that they are not of the same genre of thought, that it is of a different order or of ideas of different sublimity. In this I disagree in a fundamental sense, yet this is not against a person, it is in relation to words and their use and relation to one another, and their weight or value, their truth if need be said. It is not that these words are better, universally, at describing certain things. And, for example, a word like 'electromagnetism' is, indeed, still a contested word, as an idea of what it exactly is, as is electricity, it only achieves some kind of approximation of what is going on, and yet, these words are 'public' and even open in definition if their refinement is what experience will require. And so, over centuries, even millennia, some of these 'scientific' words and ideas have been in a process of refinement, and this is just to share a story of these not to place a judgment on this. That is to say, lightning meant something to the early civilizations, and was recorded in culture accordingly. Static electricity and sparks, too. A lot of this is 'unrecorded' in current experiences as it was never 'recorded' from a modern view, it was always in a chaos of development, and, hindsight never came- the Internet did, though. And that is what and where people talk from... This could be likened to Plato's cave, in trying to get at things outside this (electronic) cave, made of computers, wires, routers, physics, information and communications theories put into practice, programming, and a lot of old technology and empirical understanding of the foundation which built this online place, which at its base, few could argue, exists as a result of our collective knowledge and our experimentation with electromagnetism, the development of it and thought systems, and, in an indirect (not necessarily intended) sense, expressed in form, whether it is a wi-fi PDA, a William Gibson book, a classroom, or artworks. There are infinite ways to approach something, this thing, this experience, yet it seems online, it is primarily in language, still written (though maybe somewhat oral if considering mailing lists as closer to speech in discussion/debate). And so Marshall McLuhan's work with media, and others, has had a great impact in thinking about these places and processes, and it is a way to conceive of what is going on. Yet it is also a question if it is also an upper-limit to what can be described, and maybe it is to be asking such questions as 'post electric media' and such things, yet language and meaning is complex, maybe even impossible, though there is a sense of ownership in terms such as 'media' and 'new media' that is not found so much with 'electricity' besides those who developed it and were honored with units of standard measure named after them, or equations of discoveries. In this way, surely McLuhan and others are to be afforded much, and expert knowledge is in the realm of scholars, which will be deferred to instead of diluting areas of the ideas which are stronger than a limited understanding. Yet, may it also be called into question if, as Wired did, declaring secular Sainthood upon McLuhan, or whatever the exact story of the California Ideology may be, has become its own self- fulfillment, in making meaning standardized, it may thwart innovations by impeding growth of ideas that may differ, or challenge what is now the status quo centered around ideas
Re: nettime Fortune magazine on Soros
Thanks to those who pointed out the Fortune article is available to subscribers only. Herewith for your interest . . . fred - George Soros Is Mad as Hell He made billions anticipating blowups. Now he thinks George Bush is creating one. FORTUNE Monday, October 13, 2003 By Mark Gimein George Soros owns no private plane, no Caribbean island, no yacht, no ranch in the West, no collection of Old Masters. When he travels to Budapest, the city where he was born and survived the Nazi occupation, he stays in an unfashionable hotel that happens to be nestled in the middle of a beautiful park where he can go for vigorous walks. He travels solo, his wife preferring to stay in the U.S. while he tours his international philanthropic empire. Walking onto a stage in Europe, he is illuminated by the flashes of little pocket cameras that audience members hold over their heads. But offstage he waits in line at the bar for his Campari like everybody else, looking a little lost. He is naturally reserved, and that is somehow accented by his precise Central European inflections. In a public setting he can appear strikingly alone, even lonely, a private man who has found himself living a very public life. His demeanor belies his influence. George Soros is one of the most successful investors of all time. Even now, though he manages little or no money besides his own, he can move markets with a ten-minute appearance on cable television. Detractors have accused him of destabilizing world currencies and wrecking the economies of entire nations. He is appealing a French conviction for insider trading. He has received humanitarian awards too numerous to count. Soros has always been a polarizing figure, and over the next few months he is sure to become even more of one, especially in the U.S., where his name has never had the totemic power it does in Europe. At the age of 73, George Soros has found new purpose: He has recast himself as a fierce, angry, partisan critic of the Bush administration and American policy. In what amounts to a barnstorming tour that has taken him from town halls in Seattle to a school of international relations in Baltimore to the World Economic Forum in Athens, Soros has argued that the U.S. right now is in the midst of a crisis. He believes that both at home and abroad, the American government has put in jeopardy the values of openness and democracy in a search for invisible enemies. A careful observer of the international political scene, with contacts ranging all the way from UN chief Kofi Annan to Brazilian President Luiz Lula da Silva to Bush foreign- policy eminence Paul Wolfowitz, Soros attacks Bush in the most direct and dramatic terms. I lived through both German and Soviet occupation, Soros told me as we walked through a park on Budapest's Margaret Island. When I hear President Bush say that those who are not with us are against us, I hear alarm bells. He calls Bush's speeches Orwellian and compares the Bush vision of international democracyYou can have freedom as long as you do what we tell you to doto Soviet rhetoric about people's democracies. Soros has just committed $10 million of his own money to an effort to drum up support for Democrats in key states, immediately becoming one of the biggest individual donors to next year's electoral race. In September he staged a fundraiser for former Vermont governor Howard Dean. And after years of writing moderate, carefully arguedand not very influentialtracts about the international economy, he is now almost ready to publish a very different kind of work, a book to be called The Bubble of American Supremacy. It's a no-holds- barred attack on what he sees as the hubris of American policy. I've come to the conclusion, Soros told FORTUNE, that one can do a lot more about the issues I care about by changing the government than by pushing the issues. In short, he has become the world's angriest billionaire. It would be polite to call Soros's crusade something like the debate about America's place in the world, but it is simpler to call it a fight against the Bush administration. I was very comfortable with what this country stood for, Soros says. But with the Bush administration coming into power, and the way it has exploited the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, I feel very uncomfortable about the direction in which the U.S. is taking the world, and to me it is not business as usual. Last summer Soros holed up with half a dozen top Democratic political strategists at a house he owns on Long Island to try to figure out how he could help bring down Bush, getting an education from some of the Democratic Party's most prominent fundraisers and consultants. In August he agreed to lead several other major donors in what Democrats hope will be $75 million in spending on a grass-roots get-out-the-vote effort in 17 battleground states. Called America Coming Together, it's directed by top Democratic fundraisers
