English subtitles for clip: File:Eben Moglen - From the birth of printing to industrial culture; the root of copyright.ogv

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Interview with [[w:Eben Moglen|Eben Moglen]]

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Well I think I would begin
by putting it this way

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The book, which is the first 
mass-produced article in Western culture,

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is really the beginning of 
the process of industrialization of information.

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The medieval artisan producing or consuming information, 
traveling long distances,

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confronted with the difficulty of searching out
people possessing specialised knowledge,

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becomes in the space of two generations only,

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the western european world of books, 
of printed mass produced artefacts,

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that spread knowledge widely,

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and make the process of accumulating
specialised knowledge about the world

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a process of memory 
rather than a process of travel.

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From that world we move,
over the course of the edisonian revolution,

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from the third quarter of the 19th Century
to the end of the Twentieth,

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into a world in which memory becomes instead
the omnipresent analogue articles of culture. 

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So the book an article present in a library,
consultable by a skilled audience,

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is largely replaced by the moving picture,
the sound recording,

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the available vernacular culture 
which puts an immense amount of information 

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not at the disposal of the skilled 
but at the doorstep of everyone.  

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Now this was intended for a purpose, 
it was intended, or at any rate it grew up right alongside

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Henry Ford's conscription of the workers of the world 
into the new army consumers.  

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people who saved capitalism from its rough spots 
by consuming its production

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who ended its crisis of overproduction 
by becoming a disciplined army of consumers.

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And to become a disciplined army of consumers

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the world's workers had to be provided a culture 
which explained consumption, 

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made them want,
told them what to want,

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gave them aspirations and concerns

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that were not the authentic product 
of their experience

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but were the transferred product 
of vicarious experience. 

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And as analogue forms this culture

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which required industrial processes to make,
to produce records,

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to produce celluloid, 
with the little holes cut in it,

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I was watching an old Mel Brookes interview, 
conducted by Dick Cavitt,

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now being presented by the New York Times 
as an act of museum conservateurship in film,

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in which Cavitt asks Mel Brookes:

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"What's the hardest part 
of making a motion picture?"

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And he says "oh...punching the little holes 
in the edges of the celluloid."

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Well if you think about it in a way that's correct,

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that is the hardest part 
of making a motion picture

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which is why in the world of digital computers 
it is so easy to make films,

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because you don't need to punch 
all the little holes in the celluloid any more.

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In other words culture 
contained in analogue artefacts,

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was culture whose control resulted from the difficulty 
of making it, moving it and selling it.

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Control came naturally as part of the process 
of the existence of the medium itself.  

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What happened when we moved, 
at the end of the twentieth century, to digital media

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was that the process by which memory became experience

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over the long history from the book 
to the edison motion picture

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became memory is now immediacy, it's the things we make ourselves, 
instead of remembering.

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We're sitting in a bar with our friends
and we have a camera in every cell phone

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a movie camera in every cell phone

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and everything we take 
goes straight to flickr and youtube

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and in fact memory is becoming 
the attribute of the network now.

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And experience is becoming 
an attribute of the network now.

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And the control, that used to reside in the 
very making of the artefact, is up for grabs.

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and that's what I think moves us

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from a world of the catholic church's 
control over ideas,

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threatened by the protestant artefact of the book

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to a world in which the Edisonian companies 
benefited from control,

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not over the book but over celluloid 
and how to punch the little holes,

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to a world in which the network made control, like production, 

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as easy as consumption and disciplined behaviour

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and that's the enormous threat, promise and wisdom 
of the technology for our time,

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that it challenges the very bases of control.

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Well both the copyright and patent laws,

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these principles of government
that control over information flow

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they are - as law often is -

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pieces of technology 
made in a period of material stratum A

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surviving into material Stratum B.

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So they mix a peculiar set of 
incentives and phenomena

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The patent laws and copyright laws are 
basically about 17th and 18th century conditions,

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implemented in 19th Century ways

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and then redeployed in 20th Century 
to meet 21st Century problems. 

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The basic difficulty that presents itself, 
that the law of copyright is meant to deal with,

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is that, as you say, 
it's expensive to make a printing press

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but once you've made it,

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you have to find a way to decide what to use it on

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and the real question is 
what should the printer spend his time printing.

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So you have to give the printer an incentive
to print the particular thing.

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It isn't, as has sometimes been suggested by the owners of culture 
in the late twentieth century,

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that if there weren't incentives 
they wouldn't print anything at all

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they are of course going to run the press,

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and the man builds a press 
because he can make money printing something

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the question is whether what he ought to print 
is somebody's business cards,

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somebody's wedding invitations,
or somebody's novel.

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In other words the question is 
how to determine what it is that gets made

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with the scarce industrial processes of making.

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Culture is profitable, 
if you can buy it cheap, and sell it dear.

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and it is to that extent profitable because 
it's special, different or unique.

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What floods into France,

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as Robert Darnton showed in thinking about 
eighteenth century french culture,

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What flows into france from the presses of Amsterdam

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is what the french aren't allowed to make for themselves,

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which is why pornography and politics are the stuff of 
printing for export in the 18th century.

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But what that does,

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that process of making for the market 
by making what is least obtainable does,

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is to threaten that you'll wind up 
with a press consisting entirely 

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of government periodicals and pornography

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What are you going to do to prevent that?

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You're going to try and give printers 
a stake in the progress of literature.

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- which is what the copyright law really is,
it's a grand jeffersonian sort of an idea.

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That we will turn democracy into a way 
for encouraging virtue among printers

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And we'll get everything to work 
in such a way as to speed 

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the diffusion of knowledge and the useful arts.

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So in that sense,
copyright law takes a rise

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from a noble experiment
intended to meet

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an appropriate 18th or 
early 19th century problem,

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and it by the edisonian period has evolved

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what is the necessary concomitant for its time,
which is the 'work for hire' doctrine.

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it has to become possible to use that
system for encouraging virtue amongst printers

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actually to encourage the success of 
larger commercial publishing enterprises.

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Where Manhattan is thought of as 
the centre of printing in the 19th century,

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it will be thought of as 
the centre of publishing in the twentieth century,

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and that's a very different meaning,

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it's not about the light industrial process 
of printing something on pieces of paper

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it's about the control of a large vertically
integrated system of cultural production

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and for that you need the 'work for hire' doctrine.

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As 18th century booksellers in London
needed Grub Street. 

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that is some content producer

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to meet the demand 
of the wide pipe of printing

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that their concentration of the machinery 
of printing and binding has set up.

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The Edisonian institutions 
needed content behind them,

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And they needed content 
they could claim to own.

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So in that sense copyright law comes, 
through the work for hire doctrine,

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and its relationship to the law of employment,

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copyright becomes the organizational 
organic document

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for these immense media enterprises.

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Once media enterprises 
have come into existence,

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once New York city is a 
centre of publishing rather than printing,

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Then any medium that comes along 
has to be co-opted in the same way.

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The principle of vertical integration 
has to be maintained.

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And as you move from publishing on paper 
to radio broadcasting,

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television broadcasting, news dissemination,
financial information dissemination,

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you apply the same model to it:
somebody makes it,

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that creates a property interest,

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that property interest is transferred 
through an employment contract,

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and becomes a disposable piece of property
in a market economy.

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That seems to meet the need 
for the industrial organizations of the time.

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Now if the technology makes another change,

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and control no longer inherently resides 
in the object of information itself,

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Then copyright has to become 
a law about control

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Not a law about these organizational dispositions

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and you begin to get, as in the DMCA, 
or the European Union copyright directive,

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you begin to get para-copyright law,

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law which is about control over use, 
not control over production,

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because that jointure between the user,

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the consumer, the producer and the distributor,
has become too tight.

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And the law has to get in there 
and force a differentiation of roles again.

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But that's nothing to do with 
where copyright started,

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it's nothing to do with 
what made copyright law effective 

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in the organization media of in the first place.