Confab #1: Seni Rupa, Hak Cipta, Utopia iCAN (Indonesia Contemporary Art Network) 18 Oktober 2011

Nicola Morton talks about copyright and presents a utopic scenario of anticopyright
If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas. Phi Kappa Phi Journal Copyright and Economy Nicola will take you back in time to the development of copyright and authorship, discussing the principles of the scarcity economy and the monopoly copyrighting provides. Basically copyrighting was invented to scrape more money off the emerging intellectual production and labour class. It promotes individual knowledge over community knowledge. It allows publishing companies to monopolize, in reality the author hardly gets any money for royalties but is paid by commission or in advance by the publishing company. It is a way for the big money to keep on making money just because they have it. Its premise (which is untrue) is that it motivates artists to be more productive so they can earn more money. Then a quick trip to the future through some sci-fi books to the idea of a postscarcity economy where physical and intellectual commodities are in abundance and free. Ian M Banks "The Culture" where there is a civilisation who found freedom from need and freedom from greed by utilising artificial intelligence for production and traverse space trying to share their developments. and the intermediary step - which could be seen as present in Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" where fabricator technology allows the growth of any tie that one has design plans for however the poor receive a lesser amount of energy and resources per day to use and thus have to wait longer for items to be fabricated. Also their items tend to be smaller, as they have no access to large-scale fabricators. however the centrally distributed power to the fabricators is cut off

when a protean seed is developed which allows the fabricators direct access to raw materials. And then back to the present to the developing peer to peer economy, gifting economy where digital content can be copied and distributed at little cost, however its still being built on top of this scarcity economy. What is Sharing or Stealing in a P2P economy? - share: only take if the person wants it to be shared, people can share movies etc. No money for big media companies anymore? good, rise of DIY films and innovative business strategies. Problems running parallel with a scarcity economy = lawsuits A small note on Asia and piracy. In some instances Asia is ahead of the Western world in the sharing of ideas and intellectual property ie. Kunci's cheap books from India and the new bribe reporting website, where viewers can see how much was paid to who for what job (its bringing the prices of bribes down). China steals industrial secrets for the forwarding of their own nation so still enforcing the market force of competition and not openness. Copyright and contemporary Art Appropriation of the image in Art - the importance of appropriation in the post modern - copyright law inhibits and causes problems for artists - rather than inspires creativity which it is supposed to do. The critical faculty of Art where it is antagonistic and critical of media, needs to appropriate symbols of collective identity. The importance of changing the meaning of the significant. and the DIY art economy - producing works for own satisfaction and recognition of peers, not for $$ destroys premise of copyright. Copyright and (d)evolution The collective intelligence - mass collaboration could be the next step in evolotuion - openness, peer 2 peer, sharing, globalisation (overcoming group think and individual cognitive bias) in order to allow a collective to cooperate on one process-while achieving enhanced intellectual performance. Teilhard points to the societal problems and tactics of capitalism such as isolation and marginalization as huge inhibitors of evolotuion. since evolution requires a unification of consciousness. He states that "no evolutionalry future awaits anyone except in association with everyone else" and from the Bardo. "The One Mind, as Reality, is the Heart which pulsates for ever, sending forth purified the blood-streams of existence, and taking them back again; the Great Breath, the Inscrutable Brahman, the Eternally Unveiled Mystery of the Mysteries of Antiquity, the Goal of all Pilgrimages, the End of all Existence." Tentatively Collective Intelligence could help us build civilisation similar to Ian Banks "The Culture" where we are free from greed and material need.

Role play Scenario: Participants are invited to play themselves or another agent (MNC, Labor, Media) while the evolution of a post-scarcity utopia is aimed for and moderated by Nicola Morton