Infonomia at Ars Electronica 2008. Intellectual property and copyright under scrutiny.

23 Sep Infonomia at Ars Electronica 2008. Intellectual property and copyright under scrutiny.

By Doris Obermair

During the first week of September the Upper Austrian town of Linz gets as global as it can ever get. It’s Ars Electronica time and an international, multidisciplinary crowd is drawn to the avant-garde festival for art, science and technology.

This year more than 480 cyberartists, scientists, legal experts, network nomads and Internet activists together with some 36,000 visitors participated in conferences, exhibitions, concerts, performances, discussions and happenings under the festival’s topic: «A New Cultural Economy: The Limits of Intellectual Property».

In his opening speech, festival curator and Creative Commons CEO Joichi Ito made clear that the current understanding and practise of copyright laws in art, science, education and business has become a systemic problem to cultural, social and economic innovation around the globe. In the 21st century we face a paradox situation: Internet has finally become a cheap network infrastructure to share information and distribute content. Nevertheless and due to too strict copyright interpretation and patent law enforcement which act as a constant barrier when it comes to transforming information and content into knowledge, society as a whole is still not benefiting from it.

Ars Electronica invited a multidisciplinary panel of creators and experts to exchange views and experiences and to discuss new intellectual property models that respect the complicated interplay of freedom of information, copyright protection, profit making and the vision of an open knowledge-based society. Part of the great line-up were: Harvard Law School faculty co-director Yochai Benkler and open-source advocate and Red Hat vice-president Michael Tiemann who kicked off the session on common-based peer production. In a second block about fans and copyright Paul Keller of Knowledgeland and media futurist Gerhard Leonhard discussed changing content distribution models and the role of fans, or the «people formally known as customers». Creative Commons board member and co-founder of Science Commons James Boyle and Internet philosopher David Weinberger talked about how the web has eroded centralised authority in education, science and religion replacing it by a more effective and bottom up movement «in search of the truth». Global internet activists like Elizabeth Stark of the student organization Free Culture, Chinese blogger and tech-entrepreneur Isaac Mao and Georgia Popplewell from the user-based news blog Global Voice closed the symposium sharing their experiences on internet activism, net-neutrality showing examples of how to by-pass copyright enforcement strategies used by the traditional mainstream media corporations in order to defend the freedom of speech on the web.

Besides the high-profile symposium, the festival is globally known for the «Prix Ars Electronica» which since 1987 has been awarding its «Golden Nicas», many refer to it as the Oscars of electronic arts, to innovative creators and scientists. Today there are 6 different categories: computer animation and film, digital music, hybrid art, interactive art, digital communities and freestyle computing. This year the Golden Nica for digital music went to the Music Technology Group at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona for inventing the reactable.

One of the many exhibitions at the festival was featured by the Institute of Technology of the University of Tokyo. Founded in 1877, this prestigious institute has been successfully demonstrating what the new creative economy means to them. In their view, teaching technology can’t be left over exclusively to engineers but needs a broader approach in order to create real innovation. Artists and social scientists teach Japan’s future engineers and bring an artistic perspective into the problem solving process. The interactive exhibition presented student 25 projects, showing a diverse range of research areas united by a kind of common theme «Hybrid Ego. Towards A New Horizon of Hybrid Art» as a kind of altered ego by the technologies.

All speeches of the symposium are available as podcasts at http://www.aec.at/en/festival2008/stream/podcasts.asp

To check out the all Golden Nicas winners of 2008 go to http://www.aec.at/en/festival2008/program/content_event_projects.asp?iParentID=14386

If you are interested in projects presented at the «Hybrid Ego» exhibition you can find them at http://www.aec.at/en/festival2008/program/content_event_projects.asp?iParentID=14386