TIPS TO USE IN A CONVERSATION ABOUT "ILLEGAL" DOWNLOADING

Sometimes it can happen to discuss with people the legitimacy of downloading movies from the internet. This is not an article about what to think about illegal downloading. Its a retranscription of several conversations about illegal downloading mixed into one. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. 

A : One striking thing about this illegal thing compare to others illegal things, its the easyness and the facility with which you can do it. Respectable and powerful professional firms provide you all the means you need to do this illegal action, offering internet deals with which you can download unlimited amount of megabytes....That's why music industry people tried to get some money back from the internet providers, cos their responsability in this new way to consume music and movies is very obvious. 

B : yeah, but people sell you cars that can go very fast, and there's a speed limit. You can go over it with your car if you want, but you don't cos its forbidden. And if you do, you get a fee.

A : True. Going at 230 km is forbidden but its forbidden because its also dangerous. When should a state legiferate and interfere with individual's daily life and private activities ? When something its dangerous for them or others, its written on the Universal Declaration of the Human Rights. Downloading never killed anybody, so this exemple is not relevant.

B : but... what ? ppf grrmm  

A : Im just saying there are better exemples to use as there are actually lots of  things that are forbidden by society without being  life threats.

Its forbidden to build a house without a permit,  to break a contract,  or to rob a bank for exemple.

B : Then, like for those things, downloading should be forbidden on the base that it is prejudiciable to society and its economy.

A : Except its not. First, internet connexion deals generate billions. Second, its not bad in any way on a social level, on a contrary, its excellent on a social and cultural level. Anywhere in the world, even in the smallest village where nothing happens, you can download all kinds of movies, rare ones, easy ones, all the seasons of any TV series, that you could never buy, either cos they don't even think about selling it in your village or because it would cost 65 euros the DVD package. 

Downloading is close to a model of dynamic universal educative system, and the industry of internet infrastructures that goes with it just switches where all the money goes to. Its hard to take for some people precisely the ones from which the money switches....

C : Personnaly I think that in the case where peer-to-peer downloading would be forbidden on the base that it is prejudiciable to society and its economy, then the legal weight should be put on the companies that allows you to download, not their clients. 

We can not find a company that offers you a rob-a-bank kit, the codes to the safe and a helicopter to get away.... they wouldn't be allowed. So why 100 Mb deals are allowed to be sold ? 

What is this organized set up ?

B : Again, its not because something is displayed in front of you and easy to take that you have to steal it. For exemple, if you're at a friend's place and there's a painting on the wall, you're not gonna take it right ? 

A : ????

C : ?? what does this has to do with aynthing ? which friend ? which painting ? 

A : ok, let's go with your exemple. This exemple, as weird as  it can sound,  is actualy useful to introduce an other essential distinction : free downloading can not be compared to stealing BECAUSE you can not steal a thing that doesn't disappear.

If you steal the painting at your friend's place it doesnt come back infinitely after you took it. Its gone. There's only one. But a dematerialized file,  you can take it and it comes back just as it was, for ever after. So, since its still there, nobody stole anything. Nothing changed.

The people trying to disqualify downloading have to think about that to :  the consequences that dematerialization bring to the world, the concept of unlimited copies. You don't have to stock, you don't have to reprint or rebuild Cd or DVD, its there for ever, it regenerates, as a source of itself.

B : You're so full of shit its amazing.

C : yeah but this is a complex problem, and I think there's one very important thing we should keep in mind in order to choose what to do : this phenomenon that allows people to share their files around the world can not be a bad thing, its great. It won't kill culture, on the contrary, it will make it huge.  So we need to keep it and adapt to it, not try to erase it.

A : Exactly. And artists will be safe, they will still exist, they will just change the names of their bosses, from Universal to internet providers. Internet providers will have producers and artistic departments. This is gonna happen soon.  

Its just a lobbying war right now. The people who are dismissing free downloading on the internet (ie labels and editors) are mad to see the money going in an other direction than theirs. They're not concerned about culture and artists, they're just concerned about their own asses. 

 B : May be. 

C : Let's get the bill. 


AP

LES FRANCAIS, QUI SONT-ILS VRAIMENT ?

En hommage au titre d'une anthologique, bien que méconnue,  émission radio d'Armel Hemme sur Radio Nova intitulée "Les Français, qui sont-ils vraiment?", ce post vous permet aujourd'hui de sonder les profondeurs de l'esprit citoyen, en publiant quelques unes des nombreuses lettres reçues  par le centre de la redevance audiovisuelle du Trésor Public de Toulouse en l'an 1997.

Merci d'avance

AP

Patrimonialization as a symptom of society lack of trust in the future

Yesterday an old industrial mining landscape in north of France (Pas-de-calais) became a UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE SITE. It joined the rest of the 953 others sites sharing an exceptionnal and universal cultural value, like the Versailles palace or the Statue of liberty.
check the list


This choice is very interesting as it is very symptomatic of our time and our worrying infatuation for patrimonialization (953 sites ?).

It also shows the drift in the patrimonial object's nature. They're not spectacular natural or architectural pieces anymore, they can be ugly and depressing flat landscapes because we now try to put value into somethingelse, something new we're scared of loosing and therefore choose to cherish in our past : the structuring power of industry, the strong feeling of identity it manages to give to a whole region, the number of jobs and the social community it creates, the ingenieering perfomances it achieves.

It is in a way hard to understand the UNESCO decision, as it had already saved for posterity the english mining landscapes in Cornwall and in the west of Devon, also the one in Blaenavon, etc. Does humanity need to remember all the mining sites of every country ?    

Of course this industrial french site has a lot of historical value, old machines, underground galleries, deep mine shafts, specific landscapes, and strong social community. But it feels a bit extreme to bring it to the world level, and not just keep it on a local scale. 

Morever, this mining area in north of France is the national reference for the most terrible environnement and working conditions since Emile Zola wrote Germinal  in 1885, telling the story of Etienne Lantier, young man travelling to the northen mines to find a job (12 hours work in the dark, bad food, bad housing, bad weather, mean bosses).  Mining industry doesn't feel like a successful exemple of an industry, but more something you want to avoid to reproduce. 

Where does this urge for patrimonialization come from ? (it started in the 70's)

Françoise Choay (acclaimed historian of urban forms), wrote in 1996* that never before in the history public authorities had been concerned with keeping traces of the past. On the contrary, civilizations and kingdoms have always destroyed and rebuilt  through the ages, feeling confident in the superiority of what they had to propose. 


We don't.

This is a new thing about us since the 70's, witnessing all the damages we've done so fast and still not convinced we can stop ourselves from doing more, we protect what we can, we save it from ourselves, because we're scared otherwise we will continue to mess everything up.

In other words, this disproportionate interest in heritage feels like a symptom, among others, of a deeper  pathological condition : a profound lack of confidence in the present and the future, a  lack of projects and visions, which makes us turn into world heritage even the french northen mining site....

Check it out : 

Ville de Oignies - Pas-de-Calais, France

My first reaction was "wow, is that world heritage level ? Is the  situation that bad ?"

Its not about how it looks obviously. Somehow I think we miss those hard working times where workers were happy to be part of a team, because something important was there, solidarity, team work, action, going down in the mine shaft, manipulating machines. 

So this new entry in the UNESCO best shots is both worrying as it means that our civilisation is very insecure about its own capacities, otherwise we wouldn't care about praising this (bad) exemple, but at the same time this new patrimonial choice is good. It shows that the world institutions decided to value the capacity of industry to socialy organize cities. 


As the research worker Alain Bourdin wrote almost 20 years ago**..."we select in the past the symbols we need to build a speech on what we want to promote in the present". 

We obviously want to promote the good sides of industry (not environnemental damage and exploitation of workers).


I agree. Industry is the key. We can not just sell and insure things. We need to build something big, do something big, that takes place, and need machines.

AP

* ”De la démolition”, Françoise Choay, extrait de Métamorphoses parisiennes, ouvrage collectif, Liège, 1996.

** Article : "Sur quoi fonder les politiques du patrimoine urbain? - Professionnels et citoyens face aux témoins du passé", Alain Bourdin, Les Annales de la recherche urbaine, n°72, septembre 1996, p6-13.