Marching in Imbaba, Cairo,
originally uploaded by RamyRaoof.

One overlooked media revelations from the Arab Revolutions of 2011 is the amount of material released with reusable copyright.

Ramy Raoof in Cairo is releasing his work with a CC Attribution license, meaning popular media, as well as outlets like Wikipedia, have access to images of these historic events.

Al Jazeera, whose coverage of the Egyptian rising has been praised as “what Baghdad 1991 was for CNN“, has released much of its coverage under a cc license. The collective around the “We are Khaled Said“, one of the prime social media instigators of the Egyptian diaspora has done the same.

This may seem a small thing. But remember that in most nations, corporate forces have been for the last three decades repeatedly extending, through force of law, ownership of writing and images far beyond the lives of their creators. The enforcement of such regimes has been strengthened, pushing past conventional understandings of free usage which existed beside copyright law. This has been a noticeable change even in my lifetime. The Xerox machine was first available to mass users in the 70s, articles and books were commonly copied and passed between readers. Such actions, even for out of print works by long dead creators, have been both criminalized and made taboo.

Most worryingly, these legal controls married to internal self censorship, are especially prevalent in academia. While academic books and journals, as well as newspapers, have been successfully digitized and shared across the internet, their diffusion has increasingly been restricted to institutions willing to pay exorbitant sums. JSTOR, the exclusive home of most humanities journals, charges as a subscriber as much as $2,450 per journal title (and there are hundreds) per year. Remember, these are are reprints of old journal articles, which had covered their costs at the time of production either by paper sales or institutional support.

We confront a world in which documents of our own history, especially the powerful medium of video, are owned by entities who punish their dissemination. Like much of the products of our society, most images made since the 1920s have been converted into commodities. Abstracted from their real value, they are mechanisms for making money, and their withholding is crucial to this status.

This, like the Arab oligarchies, is in dire need of a revolution.

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• On Al Jazeera, a Revolution Televised Despite Obstacles (nytimes.com)
• Arab media revolution spreading change (cnn.com)
• Al-Jazeera’s Revolution? Ctd (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)
• The Egyptian Revolution Will not Be Tweeted: A First-Hand Report from Cairo (alternet.org)
• Shadi Hamid for Democracy Journal: The Cairo Conundrum (democracyjournal.org)
• A woman’s ordeal in Cairo #jan25 – Blog – The Arabist (arabist.net)
• Vague thoughts on the Arab Winter Uprisings ” The Moor Next Door (themoornextdoor.wordpress.com)
• Mubarak’s Secret Police “Thugs” Try to Disrupt Revolution (firedoglake.com)

Shooting Victim, Tehran.,
originally uploaded by misterarasmus.

An endless sea of Iranian students joined by regular folks, outraged by an oppressive regime which appeals endlessly to some historical legitimacy, long ago lost. Militia’s and plainclothes storming Tehran’s campus and shooting random protesters before running away. Does this sound familiar? The leadership better hope they can get reservations at the Shah’s old hotel.

The BBC’s extraordinary dashboard of electronic resources, from Twitter channels to video sharing to message boards, shows just how powerful each of us can be. Tehran is using it: a warning to all governments.

According to a recent research project reported in New Scientist, ” Wikipedians are ‘closed’ and ‘disagreeable’.” Those carrying out the study were “surprised that contributors scored low for agreeableness and openness to new ideas, given that contributing to the website is based on sharing knowledge”.

Sadly, I could’ve told you this. Most Wikipedia “editors” don’t actually write or research articles (except maybe those about TV shows), but spend their time enforcing “rules”, deleting things, making up new rules, and generally living out some kind of twisted fantasy that involves being a middle manager who scolds people. The fact that a project nominally devoted to creating an encyclopedia of all the world’s knowledge is viewed my so many as “social life” should have been the first clue.

• Wikipedians are ‘closed’ and ‘disagreeable’. New Scientist no. 2689. 31 December 2008.

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• Wikipedia is Full of Disagreeable Sourpusses Closed to New Ideas (themoderatevoice.com)
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