Who owns the Company Store?

Viacom Asks YouTube to Remove Clips - New York Times

In a sign of the growing tension between old-line media and the new Internet behemoths, Viacom, the parent company of MTV and Comedy Central, demanded yesterday that YouTube, the video-sharing Web site owned by Google, remove more than 100,000 clips of its programming...

The dispute underscored the tense dance that major media companies are doing with Google, which bought YouTube for $1.65 billion last October. Google hopes to strike deals that will give it the rights to mainstream programming and also wipe away its potential liability for any violations of copyright law by YouTube so far...

YouTube is supported by advertising, but in most cases it does not share that revenue with copyright holders.

These developments are important to note, but the following comment jumped out at me and formed a synergy of thought about intellectual property and property rights in an age where the frontier no longer exists and natural resources of the world have become scarce.

"They choose not to filter out copyrighted content, " said the spokesman, Carl D. Folta. He added that the company apparently had the technology to filter out pornography and hateful material, which is rarely seen on YouTube.

It is no secret that totalitarian governments like the one in China use filtering software designed and sold by western companies, headquartered in liberal democracies. 

I am not suggesting that Google’s use of filtering software in the context of this New York Time’s article is totalitarian.  It’s not.  The thoughts that flowed within me after reading the article and which will follow do not directly relate to the content of the article itself.

NB I do know Google's relationship with the Chinese Communist Party is complicit when Google agreed to filter the Internet in order to secure their place in the oxymoronic "opening" of the Chinese market(s).  Who knows? I suspect they rationalize that their decision to do so is part of China's long term transition to liberal democracy brought about by the eventual increase in the economic and consequent political power or the Chinese middle class: in other words, a slow revolution or political evolution.  That model is certainly documented in human history.  I hope they are right.

In terms of any technology, for example, it is not the knowledge of how to split the atom that creates ill, it is the contextual use of technology that creates both good and evil. 

More to my ultimate point, I was more struck by the description of the filtering technology's application and the way in which its reference in the article further illuminated to me my own age and its philosophical dilemmas. 

Perhaps, the mention of filtering technology describe within reminded me of how its benign application for Google could be used in other contexts.  Certainly, Viacom has the right to protect its intellectual property however it wishes.  But what about this notion of intellectual property and ideas itself, the life blood our political and economic discourse?

The rise of fundamentalism and the changing post "Cold War" world order has been studied and described by others more accomplished than me, including Samuel P. Huntington in his "Foreign Affairs" essay and then book, The Clash of Civilizations. 

News, media and politics are interdependent organisms...and certainly many political scientists focus on their relationship to one another both in terms of the political cycle of nation states (elections), but also their political economy, in other worlds the market place.  The West increasingly depends on sectors like entertainment, research and development, and defense for its continued economic growth, and its overall political economy is direct responsibility for much of the West’s political stability and power.

We live in an age where entertainment and defense are curious bedfellows.  For example, entertainment software, as I have said elsewhere on this site, drives the technological development of the processors used by the defense sector. 

I have never heard anyone, however, flesh out the dilemma of Locke's notion of property rights in his "Second Treatise on Nature" (the philosophical underpinning of our own democratic republic is this notion of property rights) vis a vis intellectual or abstract property rights, central themselves to our creative economy, the underpinning of the West's continued economic growth. 

When intellectual property becomes the central driver of our economy, as it has, and the organs of information that distribute that property are consolidated (as they naturally are.  See Creatonomics), what does this mean for the average citizen?  For those who poo poo these ideas as too high brow for the mass, or somehow separate mass culture from the philosophical debates of our time, I say, “Forget the forest or the trees, you, my friend, are missing ecosystem of the forest.”  

Will our citizen own his plot of land in the media and entertainment landscape, or will he be forced to rent space from the company owned tenement, distribute his goods by the company owned railroad, and buy his supplies from the company owned store?  What does self-protection, natural to Locke’s notion of natural rights mean for the individual and social group within society? 

More importantly, the growing factionalism of our political discourse and the ceaseless polemics of extremist ideas are not simply a rehashing of polemics from times before.  These extreme polemics are manifest because of the underlying conflict and philosophical dilemmas of our time, the repercussions of which are experienced through every organ of society, including its central organs of information and ideas, mass media, entertainment, and art.

There is no save haven or neutral space for the tolerant in a world with less resources and no frontier to escape to.  This is the philosophical dilemma of our age and we must understand the dilemma as such.  Our liberal democracy depends upon it.  Our economic innovation, which drives our nation’s wealth, also depends upon that neutral and open space.   

The role of art, information, propaganda, and communication are the new frontier and the battleground in our ‘New World of Information’.  Is there an alternative to the increasing space that extremist polemics take up in our nation’s intellectual life? Any alternative must ultimately float the complex tensions of political correctness and fundamental secularism that is equally damaging, in my opinion, to the fabric of our society.  

Understanding these questions is the work of my generation and those living whose experience and wisdom can guide our society’s safe passage.  There are always consequences, even to inaction, so the focus of those who are interested need not be filled with petitions for the lazy. 

When the pilgrims came to North America, they were escaping religious persecution in the Old World.  A war of ideas is not new to human history, the epoch that we are in, however, is critical to the very existence of those organisms that we take for granted in the West. 

I continue to look to the former dissidents of eastern bloc countries, like the former Czechoslovakian, Vaclav Havel, 'playwright and antipolitican' later president of the democratic Czech Republic, for insight into the post-modern world order. 

For example, Havel wrote in the 1981 in his famous essay the "Power of the Powerless” about the post totalitarian state: where ideology is the tyrant (not the Politburo) and how the line of complicity runs through each citizen, including the grocer who puts up his seemingly benign poster which states, "Workers of the World Unite".   

All of us live in interesting times, but those of us involved in media have a tremendous responsibility for those who come after us.  I look forward to investigating and understanding these questions myself and in the timely work of my generation and others more capable and experienced than me.    More on these ideas later.