A new social contract for open media

This longer piece looks at the history of social contracts and open content licenses as well, but here is an excerpt on how the debian social contract could inspire open media developments. The context is the Deptford TV project and the author is from the Department of Media and Communication, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Adnan Hadzi:

“The Debian Foundation, one of the biggest platforms for the Linux operating system, coined the ‘Debian Social Contract’ for the free and Open Source software community reflecting many of Rousseau’s thoughts:

Our priorities are our users and free software. We will be guided by the needs of our users and the free software community. We will place their interests first in our priorities. We will support the needs of our users for operation in many different kinds of computing environments. We will not object to non-free works that are intended to be used on Debian systems, or attempt to charge a fee to people who create or use such works. We will allow others to create distributions containing both the Debian system and other works, without any fee from us. In furtherance of these goals, we will provide an integrated system of high- quality materials with no legal restrictions that would prevent such uses of the system. (Debian, 2004)

In this paper I will extend the idea of the Debian Social Contract to media, suggesting similar principles that can be applied to free and open media and define these as a pre-condition for peer-to-peer database documentaries such as Deptford.TV. In the field of media, so-called Open Content licenses have been created over the last decade in response to how copyright laws have changed in favour of huge media conglomerates. A famous example is the copyright-term extension act of 1998 – often labeled the ‘Mickey Mouse Protection Act’, due to the extensive lobbying by the Walt Disney corporation that ensured that Mickey Mouse’s absence from the public domain.

Another, more recent example of the battle over social contracts and the sharing of rights – and its connected wealth – is the Writers Guild of America Strike which took place in Hollywood in 2007: more than 12,000 writers went on strike from November 2007 until February 2008. The strike was against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers which cares for the interests of the American film and television producers. The strike started because the two sides could not agree on how to handle the revenues from digital media sales such as DVDs and, more importantly, the increasing revenues from Internet-distributed media. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers refused to negotiate an increasing share for the digital media sales.

On the 8th of January 2008 the strikers had a symbolic victory with the shutting down of the Golden Globe TV gala and it looked likely that also the Oscar Award Ceremony would be cancelled for the first time in its history. The writers decided to compete with the studios by collaboratively producing and distributing their own shows online and The Independent went so far as to state that the strike could ‘potentially […] revolutionise the way television is made and consumed in the online area’ (Gumbel, 2008).

With social contracts such as the Debian Social Contract in place one can decide how to produce, distribute and share media. But these alternatives are quickly corrupted if the issues, especially in regards to author’s rights, are not looked at in a sincere way as once defined by Rousseau and rewritten by the Debian Software Foundation.

I ask: are FLOSS (Free / Libre / Open Source Software) and other, related open and free content licenses likely to develop further in the future providing a platform for alternative media practices? I argue that the development of computers and microchips with built-in copy control technology, and the current changes in the Intellectual Property legislation endanger the sustainability of such alternative practices and licensing schemes. Worryingly, the social contracts that relate to copyright and intellectual property tend to breach the current privacy protection of consumers: in order to enforce new copyright laws, control needs to be tightened by surveying the computers consumers use in their private sphere. Unfortunately these new control mechanisms can also be used to silence critical voices.”

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