Independence of Mind without Resources

I come from a position of disadvantage. I had no family fortune (or hardly any help at all, for that matter) to get me going in life. I am doing trades that have nothing to do with my education (an education that, as the promised end result was a ('successful') 'being like everyone else') I did not understand or even see the point of at the time), so became entirely dependant on 'networking' for finding work (as there are few 'traditional' companies who would take my five-page-long multi-trade CV seriously). In fact, in all my 47 years, I have held two full-time salary jobs: the first convinced me to get the hell out of that 'jumping through hoops for rewards' rut and do something for myself, and the second... well, was so 'easy' that it temporarily corrupted my results-based work-ethic (and I doubt that I'll ever see an opportunity like that again).

So when one is without resources, they have only their willingness to work to count on, and intelligence (education, experience, imagination) comes into play, too. But when confronted with real-world situations, we run into a problem: (comfortable) humans with resources are, paradoxically, often those with the least will to work and imagination. So when I, seeking resources, show up with my ideas and willingness to work, the resource-provider has the option of just taking the former... and, if my situation of precarity (foreigner without resources) becomes too evident, they have the additional option of making me do all the work, then reneging on their side of the deal. It was often like this until I became less trusting of 'the better angels of our nature' (but I still fail there from time to time).

But my road to this understanding was a long one. I began from a place of utter naiveté (my childhood was fairly devoid of 'normal' human interaction), a (childhood) lack-of-affection-generated too-eagerness-to-please, and a total disability when it came to dealing with dishonesty (I tended to wax credulous in reaction to even outrageously dishonest claims or blame-responsibility displacing (on me)). All of this tended to lend value to the existence of others around me, and none to my own. And a childhood-instilled lack of confidence in myself added to the mix: I had a hard time demanding a decent wage for my work (because I (somehow) felt that I didn't 'deserve so much') until recently. Also figuring prominently was my (also childhood-instilled) credulty - and fear - of authority: only through direct work with such supposed 'adults' was I able to distill that misconception, because many 'authority figures', most all of them in places of comfort, are actually lesser beings (utility-and-survival-wise) than the average worker, with less imagination, too.

Am I laying blame for all that? It's hard to, because everyone involved was most likely convinced that they were doing the 'right thing' (at the time they were doing it). And humans with no value-judgement abilities (or desire or will to learn to or accept the responsibility for making the same) will repeat the same patterns as long as it 'works' for them (meaning: as long as it doesn't put their survival (comfort) in jeopardy). Some concerned actors probably still don't understand the error of their ways even today. When considering such things ('fault') it's hugely important to consider their motivation, and whether they were knowingly doing damage/taking advantage... and that's often hard to determine, as feigned indigation is a common 'defence' in situations of idea-reality discord/dishonesty, too.

The curse is triple when one considers that, with that understanding, not only will a resource(-or-safety-net)-free person be sure to be exploited, they will often be obliged to accept that exploitation with a full understanding of the imbalance of it all... or retire from society completely. But how can one do that without any resources of one's own and survive?

Revising Copyright: Quality Control + the Attribution System.

Already I'm dismayed at seeing those who have done no work benefit from the invention/work of others. Only the morally bankrupt (voir: a socio/psycho-path) could ever do this. Damn Edison creating the 'model' of the investor (they who have already profited from/exploited from the work of others) getting the credit and profit from an inventor's innovation and work, and not the inventor. Who actually invented the lightbulb? You probably still have no idea.

But with that little rant out of the way, how do we treat copyrighted material in this internet age?

The powers-that(-would)-be seem to be clinging 'all or nothing' desperately to an old-world copyright system, and it is failing them, as it is impossible to locate and control all points of data exchange. Not only do their vain attempts to locate remove, paywall or monetise copyrighted material fail, but their efforts can become an incentive to piracy.

It goes beyond there: especially annoying is the 'copyright paranoia' reigning on one of the world's principle sources of information, Wikipedia: magazine and album cover-image use is restricted to an article about that magazine or album, making it impossible to use such art for articles on a band member or book author. As a demonstration of this last point, I am at present working on the article about Camera magazine editor Allan Porter, and I cannot use any images of the books he is the author of or worked on. Even the portraits of himself (given to me by himself) are under strict control, and cannot be above a certain pixel dimension. I do understand the reasoning behind this, but this tongue-tied practice is only katowing to (thus enforcing) the existing 'system' without doing anything at all to change it.

It's about the quality, stupid.

I thought this even back in Napster days, when the music industry moguls were doing their all to track down and remove/paywall any instances of 'their' product. The irony is that the solution to their dilemma existed already in the quality standards of online music: 128kb/s, a quality comparable to a radio transmission, is palpably better in quality than the 96kb/s some 'sharers' used to save a still-slow-internet bandwidth. Yet who would want to listen to the latter in their hi-fi stereo system? It might be interesting to consider a system where only the free distribution of music above a certain bitrate is considered as piracy.

The same goes for images: even from my photographer point of view, I consider any image I 'put out there' as 'lost' (that it will be freely exchanged and used), and it is for that that I am very careful to only publish images below a certain pixel dimension online.

Automatic Attribution

It would even seem that a free distribution of low-quality media would benefit its authors from an advertising standpoint, but... it is still rare to see an attribution on any web-published media even today. So how can we easily attribute a work to its author?

I think the solution lies in something similar to the EXIF data attached to most modern digital images: were this sort of 'source' info be attached to all file-format data that circulated on the web, we would have no more need to add/reference (often ignored, and still-rudimentary) license data, and our website applications could read it and attribute a maybe link-accreditation (overlay for images, a notification for music, for example), automatically.... and this would demonstrably be a boon-benefit to media authors.

And it doesn't end there: this ties into the RDF 'claim attribution' system I am developing, as this add-on would allow the media itself to be perfectly integrated into the 'data-cloud' that would be any event at any given point in time... but, once again, I digress.