2008:03:20
Selling Off the Public Domain for Cheap
From reclaiming the public domain, June 3, 2003 7:01 AM, http://lessig.org/blog/2003/06/reclaiming_the_public_domain.html:
We have launched a petition to build support for the Public Domain Enhancement Act. That act would require American copyright holders to pay $1 fifty years after a work was published. If they pay the $1, the copyright continues. If they don't, the work passes into the public domain. Historical estimates would suggest 98% of works would pass into the public domain after 50 years. The Act would do a great deal to reclaim a public domain.
This is so insanely wrong that I still wonder, five years later, if I'm just misreading it. For a buck I can maintain control? Look at the money IP holders spend on lobbying and litigating. Now all they'll have to do is pay a measly dollar for an extension? (Sound of head exploding).
I know my position is radical: IP is a fiction of the law who's time has passed. But if my position is radical and arguably impracticable given the realities of the modern corporatocracy, well, Lessig's, above, is more than a touch naive, it's plain wrong.
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Art, Form, and Identity
Comment on the previous post: "the first couple of times I didn't see the swastika at all". That was unintended and a bit of a surprise. Similarly, I recall the first time I saw a sand mandala up close (under plexiglass [can you say "Permanent Impermanence"?] at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art) and noticing that some of the intersecting patterns on the outer ring formed swastikas. In turn, that brought back childhood memories of the first time I saw a Buddha statue with a swastika on the chest. I was outraged (and only 12, so perhaps my ignorance is forgivable) to think the Nazis had defaced someone's holy symbol (the Buddha statue) that way. As I write that last sentence the irony spins back for another shot at me; I was right to be incensed at the Nazis defacing someone's holy symbol (the swastika.)
As for not seeing it at first, that's pretty interesting. The part that dragged me out of bed last Friday to do this piece was the pastels. You might have seen a few years ago a brand of baby toys that were "scientifically designed" to stimulate the visual field; simple patterns in black, white, and red. I remember thinking, first time I saw that product, that these guys were only about 50 years behind Nazi psychologists. The idea of putting pastels in against the basic red and white was the first part I wanted to explore. Then there was the idea of not having the white circle on the red background. Then there was the idea of adding secondary colors. Then I realized that what I had seen in my head was the three pastel-but-primary colors still forming a right angle but doing so with curved shapes, while the secondary colors really go for a curve. I was actually trying to get a sense of spiral from the outer form to the inner. And, invisible in the thumbnail posted last Friday, there's a tiny white speck in the black dot, with the idea of the dots in the larger bodies of the yin-yang symbol.
When I put the silly thing up on the page I had to decide, transparent or not? I went with "no transparency", so the white shows over the brown of the page. Now I'm not so sure that was the right choice. I'm also not sure whether I should consider this four works or versions of one work, and this notion of identity and boundary, of defining form, that's another part of the project that appeals to me.
Here's what I'm coming to think of as the canonical version, which includes the presentation on the web with a link to the wikipedia piece.
Tolerance Test,
full size, transparent background.
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