Radical media has a long history in social movements, from The British Worker, launched during the 1926 TUC General Strike, via audio cassettes with subversive messages passed around during the Iranian revolution, the Zapatistas, Samizdat and Indymedia to blogs, Facebook and Twitter used during the recent revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia. Faced with a corporate media focused on maintaining the status quo, social movements have for years been concerned with creating their own media as a platform to express their ideas as well as to avoid, subvert and challenge dominant power structures.
The term ‘radical media’ itself also has a long history. For example, in 1983, media scholar John Downing published the first edition of his book Radical Media: Rebellious media and social movements, exploring the history of social movements’ use media – ranging from dance and graffiti, to video and the internet, culture-jamming, subversive art, performance theatre and underground radio. In the book he outlines ten criteria for what constitutes radical media. I won’t go through them all here, but one in particular sticks in my mind:
Radical, alternative media has one thing in common. It is that they break somebody’s rules.
I’d been planning to attend the Radical Media Conference, organised by Peacenews in October and was really surprised to see that the event title was recently changed to the ‘Rebellious Media Conference’. I thought it was strange given the well-known history of the term ‘radical media’.
Yesterday I found out why the conference title had been changed.
It turns out that a corporate advertising company calling themselves @Radical Media LLC has trademarked the term and has sent a threatening cease and desist letter to the organisers saying:
It has come to our attention that you are using the RADICAL MEDIA trademark to advertise a conference to be held in central London on 8th and 9th October 2011. This conference is not an event licensed by @radical and you will therefore appreciate that your use of the RADICAL MEDIA registered trademark constitutes an infringement and passing-off of @radical’s valuable intellectual property rights.
@radical does not take lightly any misuse of its intellectual property, unauthorised association with their programs of with itself and any possible damage to the reputation, goodwill and earnings of the same.
Accordingly, we therefore require that you immediately cease all use of the RADICAL MEDIA trademark to promote your conference, that you remove and destroy all offending materials from distribution and from all websites developed for your use (including Facebook and Twitter pages) and that you confirm to us in writing that this has been done.
Unsurprisingly, the organisers were shocked and surprised. This is what they write in a blog post:
Our collective jaws dropped, how could anyone own an adjective? Yet in the closed-source world where intellectual property is hard currency, it appears that virtually anything may be trade-marked. We didn’t know whether to rant or cry. Our instincts told us that anyone with a radical bone in their body should fight this corporate usurpation of language, but the prospect of facing legal costs in line with house prices tempered this instinct. Even if we won such a battle we could only expect to recover 75 percent of these costs, leaving us tens of thousands of pounds down, money which – even if we had it – should be spent on more useful, more radical things than legal fees.
A corporate company like @Radical Media LLC has nothing to do with radical media. It makes adverts for companies like Schweppes, IBM and Vodafone. It doesn’t break anybody’s rules. It’s not small-scale. It doesn’t aim to break down power structures. This is the extreme end of corporate globalisation and we must resist it.
On Tuesday 3 May (Word Press Freedom Day), at 5pm, a demonstration entitled ‘We make radical media, you make adverts’ has been called outside @Radical Media’s offices, London W1T 7AA. It would be great if we could get as many people to come down as possible. There’s a Facebook event to invite people to here. To show your support, please also blog, tweet, forward and link to the story. Also, why not let @radicalmedia know what you think on Twitter or by email? Or you could phone or email the person who sent the threatening letter, Joan C Aceste. Her number is +1 212 462 1500 and her email address is aceste@radicalmedia.com.
Campaign after campaign has shown that it is possible to shame companies into changing their policies. We need to tell @Radical Media LLC that groups that work on genuine radical media projects must be allowed to talk about what they do using a normal phrase.
Edit:
We emailed John Downing about it. This is what he had to say:
As the author of Radical Media (Boston, Mass., 1984), and the second revised edition by the same title in 2001 (Los Angeles, Calif., 2001), both multiply cited in a variety of nations across the planet ever since, it is patently ridiculous and, if persisted with, actionable, for this entity to attempt to hijack my title and exclude legitimate organizations from using it in the public realm. I will enjoy engaging in legal action to forestall their consummate arrogance.
The web has always been social to me. One of the first things I did when I first started using it around 1996 was set up an email account with a small email service which was later going to be bought by Microsoft – Hotmail. Why? Because I wanted to communicate online with my friends who were also, around this time, setting up email accounts.
One of our favourite pastimes in those days was to go to the computer room at school and login to Aftonbladet Chatt, an online chat rooom hosted by one of the largest tabloids in Sweden. We’d chat to each other and strangers, often
pretending to be someone else. Then we discovered MIRC, and used the schools internal network to talk to each other there.
Later on, I was active on more online music forums than I can count, had a
persona on the Swedish ’90s social networking site Lunarstorm, chatted on MSN Messenger, spoke to people on Skype, made friends with bands on Myspace, then moved on to Facebook and Twitter.
The whole history of the development of networked communication has been driven by the desire to be social – from scientists at MIT wanting to share data and developing ARPANET, to Tim Berners-Lee using the alt.hypertext
newsgroup to talk about the invention of the world wide web.
So what do we really mean when we talk about ‘social media’? Often I get the feeling that we’re just talking about ‘Facebook and Twitter’, perhaps with a bit of Youtube and Flickr thrown in. But how are these sites more social than the the social technologies – email, chat rooms, forums, listservs, newsgroups and so on - that have been around for 20 years or more?
If we do include these technologies as social media then they are part of the natural infrastructure of the web and nothing new. The only thing that is new is that more people are on Facebook.
Steve Bridger says that in ten years’ time we’ll be just as embarrassed about the term social media as we now are about words like cyberspace and informtion superhighway.
But I don’t think we need to wait ten years. Let’s stop using it now.
This morning I tweeted about listening to the Brian Jonestown Massacre and I wasn’t surprised when I recieved this tweet from psych-rock band Jenson Rhodes. A little annoyed about the spamminess of the tweet, I nevertheless decided to check out the band’s Myspace page. ‘Could be good’, I thought.
Once at their Myspace page I didn’t see what I expected. Instead of a band from Leeds trying to sound like Pink Floyd, or whatever, I got this:
Jenson Rhodes recorded this collection in Woodstock, NY in November 1969 @ 16 years of age. He was the precursor to 90′s alternative music. His music was never released until September 2007. (1953-1992)
Listening to the first song, I was immediately taken aback. It really sounded like Nirvana, but supposedly recorded in 1969! Very strange. For a split second, I thought that Kurt Cobain must’ve somehow heard this and been influenced by it.
The I listened a bit closer. No way this could’ve been recorded in 1969.
It’s a new band. And they’ve cleverly created a story about themselves that is perfect for social media.
Our latest campaign at WDM is to get the British government to introduce legislation that stops bankers from speculating in unregulated food markets, causing food volatility that is bad for both farmers and consumers, particularly in poor countries.
We had a lot of fun coming up with this animation. (The actual animating was done by my friend Matt)
Pretty much all media production in the World is owned by four companies: Times Warner, Disney, News Corp and Viacom. And pretty much all news comes from two sources: Reuters and Associated Press. Capitalism strikes again.
I’m really not interested in becoming a journalist.
I’m writing to you to express my concerns over the new Digital Economy Bill.
It’s my understanding that the role of the Bill is to help stimulate the digitial economy of Britain. However, as far as I can see, there isn’t anything in the Bill that does that. Nothing about cheap, fast and open broadband. Nothing about reform of copyright to help entrepeneurs. Nothing about giving people the right to use publicly funded media to create new media. Nothing about how to bridge the digital divide. Nothing about how young people are going to be encouraged to use digital technology and become the new tech-savvy entrepeneurs of the future.
Instead the Bill focuses almost solely on ways to punish people who get in the way of the powerful entertainment industry. Instead of following the lead of forward-thinking countries like Finland, who have just declared access to the internet a universal right, Britain is moving backwards, and considering restricting access to vital services.
In addition, it is my understanding that the Bill gives the Secretary of State power to do anything (without parliamentary debate) if it is in the name of protecting copyright, including:
1. The power to create new remedies for online infringements (for example jail terms for file-sharing, or a “three-strikes” plan that costs entire families their internet access if any member stands accused of infringement)
2. The power to create procedures to “confer rights” for the purposes of protecting rightsholders from online infringement. (for example, record labels and movie studios can be given investigative and enforcement powers that allow them to compel ISPs, libraries, companies and schools to turn over personal information about Internet users, and to order those companies to disconnect users, remove websites, block URLs, etc)
3. The power to “impose such duties, powers or functions on any person as may be specified in connection with facilitating online infringement” (for example, ISPs could be forced to spy on their users, or to have copyright lawyers examine every piece of user-generated content before it goes live; also, copyright “militias” can be formed with the power to police copyright on the web)
This sounds incredible. Surely the Bill must ensure that anyone accused of doing something illegal has access to legal protection, the right to a fair hearing, due process and so on? The current legislation allows people to be taken to court and fined. This is fine. Do we really need new legislation that takes away people’s legal rights?
Has the British Government not heard of the recent European Telecoms Reform Package? An agreement reached in the European Parliament just a couple of weeks ago, makes it very clear that measures such as these “may only be taken with due respect for the principle of presumption of innocence and the right to privacy.” Yesterday’s propsals do not seem to take this into consideration. Other European countries such as Spain and Norway have recently abandoned plans to restrict internet access. It would be ill-advised for Britain to go against the grain and implement these measures.
I hope that you share my concerns and share them with your colleagues. This Bill must not be passed.
Development Indicators. The notion brings me back to my undergraduate days and with it visions of stacks and stacks of heavy tomes filled with pages and pages of statistics.
Or even worse, the UNDP’s and World Bank’s online statistics databases that seem to have been developed by technology geeks with not even a remote interest in usability or design. One of which you even have to pay for.
The last time I had the misfortune of having to search one of them was when I used the Human Development Index to write a post on poverty in Guyana a couple of months ago. It was a slog.
But not anymore.
Google today announced that the World Bank has released an API for their data (who would’ve thought?) and that Google has conveniently indexed them. But not only that, they’ve created a nifty little applications that makes it easy to compare indicators between countries in a nice looking graph, and even embed it.
Google invites us to try searches like ‘gdp of indonesia’, ‘rwanda’s population growth’ and ‘energy use of Iceland’.
Last night the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers reached an agreement over the much talked about (or not so much talked about, depending on which country you live in), Europan ‘Telecoms Reform Package’. In short the Package is a number of proposed laws concerning competition, consumer rights and surveillance on the internet, including a controversial proposal that it should be legal to restrict access to the internet for file-sharers without a court order.
The agreement means that member countries will not be allowed to do this. A great success, according to Christian Engström, Swedish Pirate Party MEP:
“To be honest, I never thought this would happen. It is not everything that we would have wanted in the best of worlds, and this is not the end of the fight for a free and open internet. But it is a much bigger step in the right direction than I would have dared to hope for.”
This ruling is interesting because it means that France’s new law which allows it to turn of the internet for filesharers without due process will no longer be compatible with European law. It also has implications for Britain, which has included proposals to restrict access to the internet for filesharers as part of the Digital Britain report. And apparently Britain and France were last night trying, right until the end, to force the Council of Ministers to adopt their line. In the end Germany supposedly stepped in and stopped the stupidities.
How come none of this is reported in British newspapers today? I’ve been looking around, but can’t find anything. It’s really widely reported in the Swedish press.
Here is the agreement in full if you are interested, by the way (with my emphasis added):
Measures taken by Member States regarding end-users’ access to or use of services and applications through electronic communications networks shall respect the fundamental rights and freedoms of natural persons, as guaranteed by the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and general principles of Community law.
Any of these measures regarding end-users’ access to or use of services and applications through electronic communications networks liable to restrict those fundamental rights or freedoms may only be imposed if they are appropriate and necessary within a democratic society, and their implementation shall be subject to adequate procedural safeguards in conformity with the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and with general principles of Community law, including effective judicial protection and due process. Accordingly, these measures may only be taken with due respect for the principle of presumption of innocence and the right to privacy. A prior, fair and impartial procedure shall be guaranteed, including the right to be heard of the person or persons concerned, subject to the need for appropriate conditions and procedural arrangements in duly substantiated cases of urgency in conformity with the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. The right to an effective and timely judicial review shall be guaranteed.
Part time Global Media MA student and web officer at the World Development Movement. I very rarely have time to blog nowadays, you're much better off looking for me on Twitter.
