Tuesday, 12 October 2010

Property = Territory

If I remove the DRM from a BBC program on iPlayer have I broken the law?

I imagine the reason for the DRM is so that BBC programs remain in the control of the BBC and they can get money for the unlocked versions. Firstly don't the public already own BBC programs because it is a public service? This situation combines the worst aspects of the Public/Private paradigms - the state pays for something that the public doesn't own - not new in this age of bank bailouts and quantitive easing unfortunately.

Anyway the real point is about intellectual property. If I was to record the program on a DVD player then I would have a DRM free version, so what is the reason for putting DRM on internet downloads? Famously it is illegal actually to record media and keep them indefinitely - viz the old issue of recording music off the radio (and who doesn't have a collection of cassettes - digitised by now - of old 80's recordings?). So actually we were breaking the law long before the advent of the internet, p2p sharing, you-tube etc.

Now the difference between tuning into the radio and hearing a song and listening to a recording is that the recording company gets money for air play, while we don't pay for private play. You-tube I imagine gets money from advertising that it pays record companies - so it is a sort of air-play on demand.

Technically if we buy some mp3s and play them at a party without a license we are breaking the law. But what of my neighbours radio if I can hear that? It is a slightly grey area.

Worse however and the point of the blog is what of the tune we have running around our brain after hearing it? We replay it to ourselves again and again, whistle it, play it on an instrument from memory, sing along. Famously in 1771 the Allegri's Miserere was published in Britain, the score obtained from the boy Mozart who had illegally transcribed it from memory after hearing it only once. The Vatican apparently were not unimpressed by this and Mozart was praised for his version of the sacred protected piece. Now Mozart did this from memory - did his memory violate copywrite laws? Baudrillard much later formed the theory that actually all art is interconnected copied by Bono in the words from The Fly "every artist is a cannibal".

What has been a problem with intellectual copyright, and a headache for property lawyers especially since the advent of the internet, is this very concepty of property. What occurred to me at the weekend is that really this concept is a development of the much older practice (present as a strategy in many animals) of territory. It is easy to claim an object for oneself and control the use of it by other people, and punish them accordingly. It is also easy to fence up a land and punish those who trespass the boundary. These are both physical things which can take part in very simple games of behaviour, custom and practice. But the rules for games that non-physical things like music and ideas take part in are not easily described or particularly enforced. Ideas more than anything are brilliant at subverting the establishment because the establishment is nothing more than an idea itself. One minute the aristicracy think they are in power, the next the proletariat think they are in power - people only ever think they are in power, just as a football is only ever out-of-play because people think it is; change the rules and the same football in the same place can be in-play.

My thought here was that property is really exactly the same as territory and what we say for property is really what we say for territory. Territory is a simpler idea and reveals the primordial and primative undertones of the concept. So we would say of the BBC that it is seeking to establish a territory. Animals form territories in a number of ways - most usually by fighting off competitors for lands which will attract females. They rarely fight for a any piece of land and make it worth having afterwards. Likewise property can be viewed not as the protecting of what we have made, but rather the fighting off of competitors from valuable assests. The BBC doesn't actually make any programs what it does is try to attract program makers into its territory, or rather extend its territory to include valuable program makers and then fight off other people who would wish to take the products into their territory. Downloading a DRM free piece of music is considered encroaching our own territory onto BBC territory and they don't like it.

Of course territorial thinking is a paradigm because once we think like this then anything anyone does is viewed as either them expanding their territory or exapnding yours. The research that suggests that hostilities with American Indians first began over a squabble over a gold comb illustrates perfectly. An Amerindian squaw took a gold comb home to comb her hair. This was viewed within the property paradigm of the settlers as theft and a crime, while for the Amerindians it was simply the necessity that it must be at home for you to comb your hair. It was never "taken" because the "owner" could have had it anytime they wanted, and the squaw would never have protected her "ownership" of it because she didn't know what that was. Read that in the Telegraph newspaper about 20 years ago. More recent reserach shows that this applies to the plains indians only who followed the bison and so were nomadic. The settled agricultural indians of the north had a property system (noted in this blog).

Territory/Property is thus an emergent, conditional way of life and not something with logical necessity or even logical rigour. It may indeed be that the time comes (to the shock of the current economic hegemony) where it is simply inpractical to maintain the property system and we will need to rethink. I think that time came a long time ago and the insane idea of Bernanke's Helicopter is more the rule than the exception in these days of free production from oil driven machines.

Just spent luncj talking to some researchers in A.I. and robotics. The days of really useful robots are still 10 years ahead (always the same projected time in the future as the decades march on) but imagine the day when a robot is created that really can replace a human in the more complex roles of skilled judgement and walking. Having a robot A.I. system make a political decision or be a combat soldier with an A.I. algorythm to determine whether to terminate or not. Not unreasonable dreams. What is the meaning of property then... who owns what these robots do? This is the ultimate Godel problem of the property system (if it hasn't already crumbled by then).

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Territory versus Lek

it seems my understanding of territories needs to be updated. Watching "Autumn Watch" (on a DRM removed copy ;-) excellent Chris Packham was saying that indeed during times of food shortage (resource shortages in general, if the food is "patchy" i.e. available in rare patches) then female deer congregate at those feeding sites and the males then find that their resources - the females - becomes patchy. (Male deer don't eat during the rut so there is only one limiting resource for them.) Faced with such patchy females the males congregate and apparently according to CP they form a "lek" (after grouse leks) where males display to attract the attention of females. The normal behaviour of fighting for a territory seems to be resource independent as there is evidence of some traditional territory sites being hundreds of years old, older than the trees currently on the site and so older than the current food source. But I'm not sure.

Equally excellent Simon King (more the naturalist than scientist) in his reports from Rhum in previous years showed us traditional rutting for territories that encompassed the scarce feeding grounds. I don't think deer "lek" at all as their "displays" are designed not to impress females as much as exclude competition (altho those behaviours stimulate roes). That said there was the fascinating case of a roe in the 2006 Autumn Watch who didn't accept the territory owning male and preferred to sneak off to a subordinate male who had evidently pressed her buttons! This showed that female choice is much more complicated than just male territorial superiority and that maybe displays are more complex than just beating up opponents (shades of human behaviour there - weird crushes &c). Anyway it is watching these deer in Rhum that fixed my understanding of territorial behaviour on which the above blog is partly based.

So whether the BBC forms a territory and tries to attract people onto it, or seeks to gain territory over fixed scarce resources and exclude competitors from that territory is undecided but I'll keep an eye on the deer and see how they really do it! Either way we are talking territory and not property.

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