Lawrence Lessig's e-book Remix in the Mac app Preview (click to enlarge)

With all the fuss over the development of e-readers, I’ve been thinking about how Supraterranean content and my own writing might be read in the future. Apple has almost self-terminated with their overblown product announcements that seem to happen four times per year. Last decade my weariness over the iPod — which at first seemed to be more of a body decoration than a song-playing device — gave way to the fact that I really liked having thousands of songs in my pocket.

But every year Apple pisses off more and more people. With the iPod, it was a new model every frickin’ year… just to make sure they could extract more money from you. It also created the illusion that they were in a constant state of technological innovation (which they most definitely were not).

Then came the iPhone, and while dorky men in their ’30s and ’40s enjoyed lining up at the Apple store for each new model, the rest of us begrudgingly dealt with the proprietary control because of how much we liked the infinite number of apps. The element of control had been a problem with the iPod as well, but it didn’t affect the user experience to the point that I ever regretted buying it. I jailbreak my iPhone — but if I couldn’t, I’d still probably be able to justify owning the thing. Because of that device, I have mobile (and, sometimes, WIFI) access to Google Maps, email, social media, calendar, YouTube, Last.fm, Pandora, and more… not to mention a decent digital camera, an audio recorder, and a few dozen albums of MP3s.

In other words, this technology helps more than it hinders, and — in my opinion, at least — it took us a while to get to that point. Yet I am very skeptical about the advent of e-readers, since the only ones currently available (to my knowledge) are the Kindle and the iPad. Amazon’s Kindle is a best-selling device, but because of the proprietary hardware/software and DRM-protected media, Kindle books aren’t owned; they’re rented. And now I hear reports that the iPad could be the “anti-Internet” (see NPR’s article from 4/5/10) doesn’t really surprise me at all. The concern there isn’t just DRM content, but also that Apple has strict policies about which apps they’ll allow in there iTunes Store and, therefore, on their iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.

The book industry saw what happened to the major record labels last decade and they want to avoid the same demise. So naturally, Apple is following suit with their previous “maximum security prison” tactics in attempting to court not only book publishers, but really any mainstream media producers (i.e., newspapers, magazines, journals) who have been fretting over losses in subscription and advertising revenue. I’m still convinced that media conglomerates won’t get more than 15 or 20 percent of their customer population to pay for everyday content, especially when it comes to news. But I wonder if they’ll try to impose pay walls to view websites on a device like the iPad that don’t exist on the regular Internet.

My concerns are exacerbated because I just found a really cool feature on the Mac application Preview, which is essentially an image and PDF viewer. At some point in recent history, an update to the program built in an annotations feature. Now I can easily highlight, underline, box in, or make notes next to the text as I read PDFs. Since I am the type who likes to underline passages with pencil as I read, this makes it likelier that I will transition to e-books in less time. And that’s the main goal here, since we’re using far too much of Earth’s natural resources to create books in the first place.

But if I do read an entire e-book instead of obtaining a used paperback, that’s a big investment on my part — almost a nod of confidence towards whatever technology I use to read the e-book. If I take notes in Preview, I want to be able to reference those notes in the future on whatever platform or device I choose — not just for the foreseeable future; for the rest of my life. This may just be my heightened paranoia, but I wonder if Apple will let annotations from Preview be viewed on a device other than the iPad.

These are the civic and cultural issues that dominate my thoughts right now: content distribution, copyright law, and the threatened equality of the Internet. Just two days ago the New York Times reported that a federal appeals has ruled that the F.C.C. can’t legally force content providers (in this case it’s Comcast) to provide equal Internet access to all. The case was really about BitTorrent transfers, and the users who upload and download large files like movies.

Obviously the debate isn’t really about Comcast’s clogged networks; it’s about control. I know this because, as Google has been hinting at regarding their upcoming Fiber network (and as the news media covered at the end of March), people are now capable of providing Internet at “50 to 300 times faster than the DSL, cable and fiber-optic networks that connect most U.S. homes to the Internet today.”

Web 3.0 is going to be all about content and data, and we — the people — need ensured access to the Internet in order to continue the natural progression that come inherently with information and interconnectedness. Meanwhile current Internet providers (Comcast and AT&T are the biggest) will be under a lot of pressure from the content mega-bosses (News Corp, Viacom, etc) to control what we have access to, and how we access it.

What we’ll really need, in addition to Internet at higher, unregulated speeds, is an e-reader device with zero proprietary control. I’m sure plenty of devices are currently in design or production mode. I’ve already heard of Microsoft’s Courier, which features two screens that open like a real book. Sony’s PSP will be entering the race soon, and Nintendo’s DSi XL has already.

Call me an anti-establishment diehard, but I’m willing to predict that whichever of these devices has the least controls over usage will be most successful in the long run.

As you can see, the film starts with the controversy surrounding the mash-up artist Girl Talk — real name Greg Gillis — who has been growing in popularity (or notoriety) since the release of his 2006 album Night Ripper. His albums feature hundreds of samples of copyrighted music that Gillis never got permission to use.

Audio: “No Pause” by Girl Talk, from the 2008 album Feed the Animals.

What’s not seen in the trailer is the four-point manifesto which provides a basic outline for the film. Gaylor calls this “A Remixer’s Manifesto”:

1) Culture always builds on the past.
2) The past always tries to control the future.
3) Our future is becoming less free.
4) To build free societies you must limit the control of the past.

The moment I saw this manifesto, I knew it must have been directly inspired by 1984. (Sorry to sound like a skipping record, but clearly Orwell is an important figure in all these issues.) The quote in Orwell’s book: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” It’s such a simple statement, yet it encapsulates so much about the world. You may need to see the film to completely understand what I mean. Another resource I’d suggest is a website I made in grad school called Connected to Creativity. It’s still hosted on my personal website, and it contains a lot of valuable information about how the Internet is fostering incredible creativity, while the current application of copyright law is dangerously stifling it.

To illustrate the problem, I’ll use an example that relates to the duration of copyright protection. When copyright was first made a law in 1790, it lasted 14 years from the date of creation. This was changed many times over the next 200 years, and the most recent alteration came in 1998. Now copyrighted works are protected for the author’s lifetime plus 70 years. But the term “author” is a slippery one here, because copyright law has been transformed to benefit corporations much more than any individual creators. Copyright law was instated to protect the economic rights of the creator and the fair use rights of the public (fair use says it’s okay to use copyrighted works for certain purposes). But now the vast majority of copyrighted content in the world is controlled by a handful of media conglomerates: Disney, News Corporation, Viacom, Time Warner, and CBS.

Many topics in the film were inspired and informed by the Creative Commons movement and Lawrence Lessig’s 2004 book Free Culture (which I covered here in July ’08). In both that book and this documentary, Walt Disney is discussed at length. Disney himself was a sort of remixer, because many of the first animated films produced by his company were based on stories in the public domain. In other words, they were adapting stories that weren’t protected by copyright anymore or never had been protected. Think Snow White, Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, Fantasia, and on, and on, and on. But when Walt died, the Walt Disney Corporation took a turn for the worse, and they’ve now become a force of evil in this war.

Creative Commons, on the other hand, are the foremost source of good, and over the past two years I’ve supported them however possible. One way I do that is by licensing all content on Supraterranean.com with a Creative Commons license. Like the founders say in one of the informational videos on their site, they’re laying the framework for an entirely new world culture based on sharing, collaboration, and progress.

As I left Michigan Theater when the film ended, I said to my special lady friend that it was the first time I felt proud to live in Ann Arbor (hey…give me a break…I’m a Spartan to the core). I felt surrounded by people who understood the importance of remixing, free culture, and net neutrality. It became clear that these ideas are at the core of all my work, even if I’m still figuring out how to express my thoughts and feelings. I felt a surge of emotion while watching footage of children in Brazil’s poorest neighborhoods remixing music and art, or dancing together instead of getting mixed up in gang violence. I couldn’t help but imagine what the world could be like if we continue down this brave path.

It seems like a new philosophy is shaping itself, a living philosophy that cannot be invented by any one person. Gone are the days of the dogma; we have no use for that anymore. Now there is only life — how to understand it, build upon it, make it better. Copyright law has prevented humans from being what they should: emergent and symbiotic. Our culture has become stale and rotten, but technology is setting us loose. We’re figuring out new creative ways to expend our life energy, and realizing that this is a far better option than the destruction that human history has seen thus far.

I see a future coming that will belong to no individual; instead, it will belong to all individuals. As time goes on in this new digital culture, we will all own an equal share in the past. And like Orwell wrote, “who controls the past controls the future.” Now we just need to take over the present. Lessig is working on that, too, through efforts to reform Congress and the American lawmaking process. Furthermore, most literary and philosophical genius I’ve encountered (especially surrounding Existentialism) has suggested turning attention to self-discovery, the creative struggle, and free expression. As emphasized in A Remix Manifesto, the creative process has now become more important than the finished product.

Remember this saying? “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Well, Gaylor has taken that advice literally. As announced at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, he has already twice invited other filmmakers to remix this documentary, and some of that material has been worked into the final version of A Remix Manifesto. We were reportedly the first audience to see this third cut. Gaylor also started a website called Open Source Cinema, where anyone can further remix the film. He’s hoping to build it into a platform where filmmakers can remix and collaborate using their own material. Even if you’re not ready to start remixing, you can currently view all chapters of the documentary on the site.

For more information on Creative Commons, here is an intro video from their site.