[-empyre-] Can you give us a little more insight?

[Renate Ferro]

Morgan and Sean,  I just read both links and am fascinated by your project.
Can you explain both the AAAARG and The Public School?  What's the
relationship between the two specifically.  And the AAARG site is static
right now?  Renate


On 6/2/10 6:49 PM, "Sean Dockray" <sean.patrick.dockray at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> 
> Morgan asked me to introduce myself and my experience with AAAARG as a
> distribution platform and give an update on what's happening now, so
> I'll follow her questions more or less to the letter.
> 
> I think there is enough background about the project in these two
> links and I'll try and avoid repeating it here.
> 
> * email interview with Julian Myers:
> http://blog.sfmoma.org/2009/08/four-dialogues-2-on-aaaarg/
> * chat interview with Morgan:
> http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/2010/01/05/small-is-beautiful-a-discussion-wi
> th-aaaarg-architect-sean-dockray/
> 
> There's a lot that I'm interested in discussing, but from the
> perspective of "distribution" there are a couple of things that stand
> out at the moment:
> 
> Now that digital reading devices like the Kindle or iPad are becoming
> popular and widespread, PDFs (and other digital text formats of
> course!) seem like a viable market. Obviously manufacturers are
> competing for students and trying to partner with academic publishers.
> The person who wrote the cease and desist letter from Macmillan (iPad
> partner?) describes himself as an expert from the music industry.
> AAAARG has been around for more than 5 years -- there are a lot of
> places around that host or index the same material, not to mention the
> totally common practice of people sending each other PDFs -- and it's
> been in this last 12 months that all of the cease & desist letters
> have come in.  What was once just a bad copy now becomes the product
> itself.
> 
> Another point in this constellation are non-profit services like
> JSTOR, which again makes partnerships with publishers and academic
> institutions. An individual is absolutely aware of being outside of
> the academy here - most material is not accessible at all and the
> material that is accessible costs a lot of money. And for those in
> institutions but outside of wealthier countries, it's often a similar
> situation.
> 
> Within these kinds of shifts, who has the right to build a library?
> We're technically and legally not allowed to share a PDF between
> Kindles (the way I might give you a book after I've finished reading
> it) so what does that mean for similar collective acts?  I'm thinking
> about the history of the public library, of little traveling
> libraries, of how collections were acquired, donated, redistributed,
> etc. about how one book might be read by hundreds of eyes. Now, of
> course, every individual is responsible for purchasing their
> individual file and sharing is reframed as unethical, illegal, naive,
> etc.
> 
> Maybe that's enough for now?
> 
> Oh, finally, for an update on what happened and what's happening now:
> see the very end of the interview with Morgan above! Before this week
> is through there will be more news, but for now I'll just say that
> some people will be unhappy and many more will be happy.
> 
> Sean
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