This may seem like a Fake Jeff Jarvis post, but it’s real-life Jeff Jarvis:
Creators don’t need protection from copying. That’s futile. Copying can’t be stopped. Thus copying is no longer a way to exploit the value of creation.
People don’t need protection from stealing. That’s futile. Stealing can’t be stopped.
So what do creators need protected? What are their interests?
I’m thinking they need credit for their creations so they can build reputation or relationships they can exploit through many means: speaking for money, for example, or gaining social credit.
Funny enough, that’s how Jarvis makes his money, which might explain why he thinks it’s possible to have “a right to be credited” but not to have “the right not to be copied.”
For the vast majority of writers who make their money selling their writing instead of getting to paid to blab about their writing, Jarvis’s idea of turning copyright into “creditright” is silly and dangerous.
Last word to Fake Jeff Jarvis, who was kind enough to turn out a gem on this:
Creditright is a cornerstone of Journalism 3.0. Klout score is the new salary.
— The Financial Times’s Martin Wolf harshly reviews Paul Ryan’s budget plan:
Representative Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney’s new vice-presidential running mate, is, we are told, the man with the deficit-cutting plan. Not for this conservative policy wonk are the phoney figures and evasions of cowardly politicians. He is a man whose integrity his opponents have to respect. Yet this story has one drawback: it is false.
For instance:
Indeed, the “starve the beast” theory explicitly aims at cutting taxes, in order to increase deficits and so justify cuts in spending. From this point of view, the financial crisis has been a boon. The crisis, which occurred on George W. Bush’s watch, is far and away the most important explanation for today’s huge deficits. But it came after unfunded tax cuts, unfunded wars and the unfunded prescription drug benefit (Medicare D).
Paul Ryan voted for them all, and “the Congressional Budget Office’s meticulous analysis of the initial Ryan plan demonstrated that it is smoke and mirrors,” as Wolf writes, so that “deficit hawk” portrayal in a good chunk of the press is hard to justify.
— Read John Markoff’s excellent New York Times piece on how advances in robotics are continuing apace, and increasingly replacing low-skill labor.
This is the future. A new wave of robots, far more adept than those now commonly used by automakers and other heavy manufacturers, are replacing workers around the world in both manufacturing and distribution. Factories like the one here in the Netherlands are a striking counterpoint to those used by Apple and other consumer electronics giants, which employ hundreds of thousands of low-skilled workers.
Here’s a snapshot of the new workforce:
The Tesla assembly line is a stark contrast, brilliantly lighted. Its fast-moving robots, bright Tesla red, each has a single arm with multiple joints. Most of them are imposing, 8 to 10 feet tall, giving them a slightly menacing “Terminator” quality.
But the arms seem eerily human when they reach over to a stand and change their “hand” to perform a different task. While the many robots in auto factories typically perform only one function, in the new Tesla factory a robot might do up to four: welding, riveting, bonding and installing a component.
As many as eight robots perform a ballet around each vehicle as it stops at each station along the line for just five minutes. Ultimately as many as 83 cars a day — roughly 20,000 are planned for the first year — will be produced at the factory. When the company adds a sport utility vehicle next year, it will be built on the same assembly line, once the robots are reprogrammed.
"Indeed, the “starve the beast” theory explicitly aims at cutting taxes, in order to increase deficits and so justify cuts in spending. "
More on that here.
http://flaglerlive.com/8577/david-stockman-reagan-nixon-bush-trickledown/
This is a very old strategy.
#1 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 21 Aug 2012 at 12:00 PM
"Dangerous"? How? You might want to actually say something once you're done with your punchlines.
See also considerable discussion here: https://plus.google.com/u/1/105076678694475690385/posts/dqHcCVocJEe
And see more examples and new companies being built around making content embeddable and monetizing it along the path here:
http://buzzmachine.com/2012/08/17/copyright-v-creditright/
See also an exploration of the link economy: http://www.scribd.com/doc/58551432/Link-Economy-Treatise
I'd have expected more of CJR. Should I?
#2 Posted by Jeff Jarvis, CJR on Tue 21 Aug 2012 at 01:13 PM
Does the danger in giving up the ability to protect (own) really need to be spelled out, Jeff?
#3 Posted by Ryan Chittum, CJR on Tue 21 Aug 2012 at 07:01 PM
Ryan,
Did you read the links above?
I'm not against copyright. I will happily sell you a book. Two, actually. Plus an e-book.
I am arguing that we may be protecting the wrong thing -- the notion of property -- now that value can also be exploited in other ways, which I list. In that case, we need to protect credit. And in my blog post, I propose some ways to do that: to help pay for writers.
You went for the cheap hatchet punchline. You didn't address the ideas I brought up. You summed up your entire thinking in one word -- "dangerous" -- and now you *still* refuse to say what that means. Does it mean anything, Ryan? Or was this just a punchline?
I do hope for more from CJR.
Sadly, I get it from NiemanLab.
#4 Posted by Jeff Jarvis, CJR on Tue 21 Aug 2012 at 07:41 PM
Name-calling and generalization are standard operating procedure in Chittumland.
There's never any defense or explanation.
Just assertion and ridicule.
For example, somehow it is just and natural in Chittumland for writers to maintain title to their words, but investors aren't entitled to their profits.
There is no basis for these silly and contradictory assertions. That's just how it is here.
Ride the wave, Jeff!
I
#5 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Tue 21 Aug 2012 at 07:54 PM
Ryan wrote: "For the vast majority of writers who make their money selling their writing instead of getting to paid to blab about their writing, Jarvis’s idea of turning copyright into “creditright” is silly and dangerous."
padikiller responds: WHOA THERE!
Look, Ryan.. If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a piece of intellectual property -- you didn’t create that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the journalists like you who publish electronically could thrive.
So what makes you think YOU own your work? HUH?
What makes you think that YOU are entitle to PROFIT from your work?
And what about the publishers? The printers? The network guys who keep the website up?
You are making BANK at their expense?
#6 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Tue 21 Aug 2012 at 08:08 PM
Jeff, "Creators don’t need protection from copying" sure sounds like you're against copyright. And if you're not, you might as well be.
Which is where the obvious danger is in not enforcing copyright. If it's effectively free, far fewer are going to pay for it.
#7 Posted by Ryan Chittum, CJR on Wed 22 Aug 2012 at 12:05 PM
I don't see the difference between how 'creditright' should work and how things currently work. In writing, people excerpt stuff all the time and, so long as it is well established in the piece who the original author is, it's accepted. If not, it's plagiarism and it's harshly punished.
In music, royalties are assigned based on the value of an original work, so that the plagiarism of someone's background may give people credit, but that's not going to pay the bills. Permission is required and with that permission usually comes a percentage of the gross.
Otherwise you get groups like the Black Eyed Peas mining your stuff and plastering their brand on it:
http://www.cracked.com/article_18500_the-5-most-famous-musicians-who-are-thieving-bastards.html
And that's not right. In particular, I would hope Supertramp was well compensated for what was done to their song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd2zhRrG0u4
Who would even want the credit for that blasphemy?
#8 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 22 Aug 2012 at 02:16 PM