I’ve spent the last few days wrestling with various requests for text that describes my current master’s work and thought it would be a good idea to post some of it here to let people know what’s currently at the forefront of my mind. First of all, here’s my text for the show catalogue which had to be less than 100 words:

As we digitise more and more of our lives, from photography to letter writing, banking to ID cards, we invite the Internet closer and closer. But the Internet has a secret, it was designed by scientists that believed in sharing information for the advancement of human knowledge, an ideology that now seeps up through all we entrust to it. Attempting to protect copyright in this lawless frontier is futile, this space crosses international legal borders and can move more fluidly than even the most advanced of legal systems. Instead we must devise new modes of production, protection and revenue.

Then we move onto my dreaded ‘Statement of Intent’ which, thankfully, only had to be a draft. You’ll see the obvious similarities but this one is much more challenging of the reader:

Copyright is dead. At least it is in my field and it’s most definitely dying in yours. Everyday we take more steps towards the digitisation of everything possible. We’ve done music, TV is underway, film’s really just started and photography happened quicker than anyone could have imagined. E-mail and mobile phones silently replaced letter writing and slowly everything is moving towards using the Internet as its carrier. But the Internet has a secret, it was designed by scientists in the 1960s, scientists that believed in peer-review and sharing information for the advancement of human knowledge. It is this ideology that now seeps up through all that we entrust to the Internet. Attempting to protect copyright in this lawless frontier is futile, this space crosses international legal borders and can move more fluidly than even the most advanced of legal systems. Instead we must devise new modes of production, new means of protection and new sources of revenue.

So imagine my surprise as, just as I finished writing my Statement of Intent, this e-mail appeared from the Arts Council:

Dear colleague,
As you may be aware, the Department of Interdisciplinary Arts is currently supporting a UK survey into the development of new business models for creative artists, based on the use of ‘open content’ copyright licensing. The research is being conducted by Open Business, who are based at the Young Foundation in London.

For further information about Open Business and the artist’s survey, please go to http://www.openbusiness.cc/ or see the attachment.

Please forward this email as appropriate. Apologies for cross-postings.
Best wishes,
Nxxxxxxxx Nxx

All I could really say was “Wow!”. This is one serious move in the right direction and I’m really impressed. The site is obviously still quite young and can be a little confusing to navigate but it’s great to see spaces for the discussion of business models for the post-copyright era start to emerge. Once we’ve had a bit more time to analyse and dissect our current Chatsum model it’ll be great to compare it with other people doing similar things.

Here’s hoping to be equally as impressed after the Arts Council supported Westminster eForum on IPR & Digital Rights Management next week. More on that after the event!