Fahmian Lets make some profit: Cultural Profit that is

Across the globe, from New York to Japan to Sydney, a new cultural space is emerging— the digital commons. In it, users are creating culture and knowledge, be it by blogging, making videos, remixing songs or writing software. While it may manifest itself in different ways in different places, this movement, much like the nature of the internet itself, has become a truly global one, and is serving as a way to transcend barriers across cultures.

Many of these barriers are already breaking down— the lines between “amateur” and “professional”, “user and “Creator”, “writer and “reader” are becoming increasingly blurred. Within just the music industry alone artist’s have been able to jumpstart there careers right from their own personal computers. Musicians and new-media entrepreneurs have recognized that the web could have a profound effect on the business by giving artists the ability to circumvent the big record labels and market themselves directly to music fans. Independent artist Ingrid Michaelson was discovered on the social networking site Myspace. As a result, it was picked up by various other blogs, and tens of thousands of downloads later, it had made its way into the main stream. Her song “The Way I Am” has been sampled on an Old Navy commercial and “Breakable” and “Corner of Your Heart” were both featured in episodes of “Grey's Anatomy.” In many ways her story can be seen as a lesson in semiotic democracy and the grassroots, viral nature of the internet. She had merely published her work to MySpace and without any further effort on her part, people around the world started listening to her music. Her artistry has become a part of the Digital Cultural Revolution without even realizing it.

By posting ones work online and allowing others free access to it, it then enters a common space of cultural information that is available for the public at large to share, rework, and remix. This process, easily and readily available to anyone with a computer and the dedication to commit to it, can be seen as a method of opposing traditional copyright, which locks down and prevents such access and reworking of a particular artist (corporation, business etc.). Those who use this oppositional method of “self-publishing” their work, art, music, writing etc, then belong to a public domain and attribute a small part (or largely) to this growing pool of global information. Wikipedia is an example of this. The post-it-yourself information gathering website had become the world’s largest user-created encyclopedia. Those creators who use alternative methods of information dissemination by opting for various other licenses that is not as strict as copyright laws are adding to this knowledge space.

What the digital space recognizes is that creation is not produced out of a vacuum; we inevitably build upon the works of others, be it consciously or subconsciously. Thanks to advances in digital technology and communications networks, we are entering a new era of creative production. In the mid-to-late 1990s, the internet was viewed as having unlimited, even unrealistic potential as a medium for commerce. Now, it has increasingly become a platform for cultural communication, yet this new expansive space has produced a new battle—one that is being fought digitally between the “little guy” and big corporation.

“Anti-corporate Warriors” as they have been called, such as ® tmark, adbusters, and Negativland are all, in their own way fighting back in the name of intellectual property protection. These organizations, through various tactics, keep in balance the attacks made on small business and independent artists, attacks that restrict what information, art, or ideas they post which they have deemed “in violation of their own copyright laws”. The dissemination of intellectual property, or access to knowledge, is one of the key pillars of democracy. As information courses ever more rapidly through the internet, barriers to access are gradually reduced. This is what big business is fighting to take control over. It is this same idea of rapid information dispersal that IP Guerillas are also using it to try and keep the internet the last free space for cultural dividends.

Yet as we enter this era of democratic cultural production, the law is increasingly out of touch with reality. There's a complete lack of congruence between what is on the books and what is actually happening in the real (or digital) world. Because of this incongruence independent online users can be bullied by big business but at the same time this blurry boundary also provides for a method to fight back with. If the laws are not clear then neither are the violations. The internet resembles the “lawless Wild West”, and some have called for its regulation while others believe it to be a space for freedom in every sense of the word.