Last night I was sitting in my living room pondering what to do with an old painting that used to belong to my Grandfather. The frame contains an elegant lighthouse landscape from a coastal New England town that may or may not actually exist, with a passage from the Psalms in a cheesy scripted font matted just below it. The reading didn’t fit the picture at all, as if the person who packaged the painting with the Psalm didn’t actually care what the passage said, but rather put it there to move units on QVC.
Now, I like the picture. I always have. But the biblical passage didn’t really match the motif of my living room, which otherwise is adorned with technical blueprints of engines, various concert posters, and the last piece of fake vomit sold from Jack’s Joke Shop. Trust me, this isn’t an attack on Christianity: it felt more sacrilegious to keep it than to remove it.
[Sacrilegious is a cool word. People who take the time to consider the etymology would probably guess the word takes "religion" and adds some sort of Latin-inspired "sac" beforehand as a negator. Not the case. The word actually is an Old French combination of "sacer" or "sacred" and "legere" or "to take possession of." So rather than negating a religious thought or action, you are stealing something that is sacred. Words are neat.]
Anyway, I went ahead and made my family proud. Rather than ditching the painting as junk, I got out my pocketknife and went to business. Carefully removing the glue and staples in the back, I liberated the misfit Psalm from the matting and replaced it with a passage from H.P. Lovecraft, taping it carefully back in place and putting the frame back. It looks great. I was left with a feeling of pride - I resourcefully changed something that I acquired to better suit my needs, and made a pretty clean product out of it.
This made me think of another experience I had recently.
I am proud to say that I am writing this post in my living room. This is significant because up until very recently our wireless signal did not extend into the living the room, confined to its hallway location a good ways away from this room. Frustrated, but succumbing to my greater sense of laziness towards affecting change in this minor situation, it has remained this way for some time.
This changed when I stumbled across an article in the wonderful blog LifeHacker, titled “Turn Your $60 Router Into a $600 Router.” Author Adam Pash describes a way to take any standard Linksys router, delete the hardware operating system inside it, and instead install DD-WRT, an open-source/GNU/Linux hardware system which allows you to tweak the specs of your router in ways the Linksys can’t even come close to replicating.
This was a tough undertaking. It involved getting in pretty deep into some software bios stuff that I hadn’t ever done before. I’m rather proud to say I pulled it off, and rather than having to spend more money on an alternative networking solution, I was able to resourcefully change something that I acquired to better suit my needs.
How are these different? Why is it that one of these is considered good ol’ arts & crafts, and the other is bordering on infringing the license a company puts on its digital hardware?
Another, shorter, example: This past weekend a very good friend of mine went to a rockabilly festival in Coney Island, and modified a dress her roommate gave her to better fit her. Around that same time I was making a mix disc, and circumvented the DRM on a track of a live show I bought and downloaded to cut of 30 seconds of ambient applause off the end. H&M probably doesn’t care that she modified her dress, but the record company whose track I used may very well find cause to pursue a claim against me using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
There are economic reasons, of course, to draw distinction between these scenarios that may be overlooked in these rough, allegorical, everyday narratives. It’s not very likely someone will reverse-engineer a dress or a painting in order to create competition in the marketplace for the original. It is much more believable copies can and will be made of audio which would replace that need for the original CD. But who would argue with someone taking a $60 dress and transforming it into a $600 dress by changing the cut or adding new fabric? How about taking a painting and modifying its context to better suit your needs?
[More astute readers may cry foul with the modifying of a painting, as cases have arisen in some courts both in the US and abroad where purchasers wishing to modify prolific paintings after purchase were prevented by the courts out of respect to the original artist. But I remind you, humble reader, that this was not the original of this lighthouse painting, but a reproduction.]
I suppose if I needed to come to a point, not as a conclusion so much as a muse for further discussion, it would be this: the tangible world around us provides us with the option of taking goods and transforming them to suit our needs. It does so without hostility or over-policing. It is plausible that I will buy a outfit from H&M, tear it up back to its original fabric, redesign it to something more “valuable,” and sell it for profit. Or, more realistically, maybe I’ll take my painting and sell it at an H.P. Lovecraft convention (and I hope such a thing exists) for a little commercial gain. Or, perhaps I’ll just take the lighthouse part and make high-resolution color copies of it to replace its need in the marketplace. These are all commercially questionable at best, and infringement or outright theft at worst. But the tangible world doesn’t waste its time worrying about that - they’ll let you tailor your dress or deconstruct your picture frame because it’s yours, and they’re o.k. with that. The same principle should extend into the technological and digital world. No, we should not infringe the reasonable rights of software developers and musicians, but I believe we as a society give too much privilege to technology in this aspect. We should be able to take our song file and truncate it without fear of a DMCA lawsuit. We should be able to install our own hardware operating system on the hardware we buy. It’s ours. Respect the power of the purchase.
To conclude for the night, there is hope in this battle. Companies seem to be on varying levels of agreeing with me (and the droves of others who feel the same way). Linksys deserves credit for allowing people to do exactly what I did to one of their routers. And why not? They’re buying Linksys routers in order to install DD-WST. Wal-Mart and EMI Records, two companies I would never feel the desire to give praise to otherwise, have opted to sell digital music without copy controls, so I won’t have to feel so much like a criminal for cutting off ambient applause to keep the pace of a mix CD. The cultural opinion feels like it is moving this way, as we become more adept at the “RipMixBurn” way of digital life, and I look forward to the day my grandkids can DigiTailor whatever software or hardware I leave behind to suit their needs without fear of legal hassle.
