Rowan and I were originally going to make something based on Last Clouds by Karolina Sobecka using data from the Olin Public drive. However, we realized that to make something intentionally (instead of out of necessity) would take far longer than we had, so we pivoted to making a piece based Autonomous Trap 001 by James Bridle.
We discussed briefly in class about what exactly Autonomous Trap’s relationship with data was, and we decided that the most interesting point it had to make was that an autonomous car doesn’t have the ability to change frameworks when interpreting data. It can only see lines on the road as laws to be obeyed, while a human driver would recognize the magic circle as some kind of a joke. This rigid way in which technology can interact with data was the crystallization point for License.
We thought briefly about what technology to examine, and arrived on copyright. Many people don’t think of legal structures like copyright as technologies, but they were invented and changed the world, so they fit the bill on some level. In 2018 we have artificial intelligence systems enforcing copyright, with YouTube’s content ID system painting a stark picture about what censorship on the internet will look like in the future, especially if article 13 of the new EU copyright directive makes it into law. As copyright moves from a vague technology to a specific one, its important to understand the assumptions it makes about data.
Copyright sees data only as a commodity, with an artist and an owner. We wanted to point out the absurdity of the idea of legally transferring ownership of a piece away from its author, by creating a piece of data that just doesn’t fit within that framework at all.
What we ended up with was this:
Which, up close looks like this:
And this:
We chose this image of the Eiffel Tower for a few reasons. It didn’t really matter what we made the ‘content’ portion of the project, since the novel part would be in the license. To that end, we actually acquired the photo from Evan New-Schmidt, and in the process he relinquished all creative ownership and copyright on the photo. Moreover, Evan was never really the owner of the photo. The lighting on the Eiffel Tower is copyrighted, so it’s technically illegal (although unenforced) to photograph it at night. The photograph, which was already in a legal gray area, entered a legal twilight zone when Evan released his creative rights to it.
The license is a heavily modified MIT license. It uses a lot of the same vocabulary of an official document, including a section on liabilities, which may actually help protect the photo’s new owner(s), since it is actually a crime to own. Tacked on the end is a massive red text box explaining that anyone who wants to become the owner(s) or author(s) of the piece need only sign below. We left both parts posted in the dining hall, with an erasable pencil and a flash drive containing the actual data hanging within reach, as if daring people to claim it. As of now I believe Charlie Weiss is the owner, and it may still have no author.
Our goal is to make this sound absurd. From the perspective of the law Rowan and I are but pirates, attempting to foist this stolen property that we ‘found’ onto unsuspecting bystanders. From a less pedantic view of copyright law it is clear that Evan is still the creator of the photo, and Rowan and I are the creators of the license and the pairing of the two, but since we don’t want it it’s free for the taking. Beyond that, we only created a small portion of the license, so to say it belongs to us is a bit generous. A person reading this can easily figure all of that out, but with the collective fiction of copyright as their framework this piece is just a complex maze riddled with piracy and plagiarism.