<nettime> [oil21] Fri 26 Oct - Sun 28 Oct: The Oil of the 21st Century, Conference, Berlin

[The Oil of the 21st Century <sebastian@rolux.org>]

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Conference
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The Oil of the 21st Century
Perspectives on Intellectual Property
Friday, October 26 - Sunday, October 28, 2007
Telegrafenamt, Tucholskystr. 6, 10117 Berlin-Mitte
S Oranienburger Str., U Oranienburger Tor

Detailed Conference Program: www.oil21.org/conference

Friday, October 26
5 pm - 7 pm: Introductions - General Rights Management
7 pm - 9 pm: Panel - File-Sharing as Culture Industry
9 pm - late: Drinks & Discussion

Saturday, October 27
3 pm - 5 pm: Presentations - Keep Up Your Rights, Case by Case
5 pm - 7 pm: Conversation - The Poverty of the Small Author
7 pm - 9 pm: Screening and Debate - Steal This Film Part 2
9 pm - late: A Party in the Bureau at the Bay

Sunday, October 28
1 pm - 7 pm: Internal Workgroups - Agencies, Protocols, Infrastructure
9 pm - late: Closing Ceremony

Agency, Daniela Alba, Christian von Borries, Rasmus Fleischer, Volker  
Grassmuck,
Jamie King, The League of Noble Peers, Sebastian Lütgert, Mininova,  
Ariane
Müller, Piratbyran, The Pirate Bay, Cornelia Sollfrank, Felix  
Stalder, Alan
Toner, Torrentfreak, Palle Torsson and others

Conference Ticket (Friday and Saturday): EUR 5
Single Day Ticket (Friday or Saturday): EUR 3
Reservations: reservations@oil21.org
Evening Program (Friday, Saturday and Sunday after 9 pm): Free entry
Internal Workgroups (Sunday): Guest are welcome by prior arrangement

The conference will be followed by a series of events in November and  
December.
For more details, please see www.oil21.org/events



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Program
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The Oil of the 21st Century
Perspectives on Intellectual Property

"Intellectual Property is the oil of the 21st century" - this quote  
by Mark
Getty, chairman of Getty Images, one of the world's largest Intellectual
Proprietors, offers a unique perspective on the current conflicts around
copyrights, patents and trademarks. Not only does it open up the  
complete
panorama of conceptual confusion that surrounds this relatively new  
and rather
hallucinatory form of property - it must also be understood as a direct
declaration of war.

The "War Against Piracy" - a preventive, permanent and increasingly  
panic-driven
battle that defies the traditional logic of warfare - is only one of  
the many
strange and contradictory crusades that currently take place at the  
new frontier
of Intellectual Property. Under the banner of the "Information  
Society", a
cartel of corporate knowledge distributors struggle to maintain their  
exclusive
right to the exploitation and commodification of the informational  
resources of
the world. With their campaign for "Digital Rights Management", the  
copyright
industries attempt to simultaneously outlaw the Universal Computer,  
revoke the
Internet and suspend the fundamental laws of information. Under the  
pretext of
the "Creative Commons", an emerging middle class of Intellectual  
Proprietors
fights an uphill battle against the new and increasingly popular  
forms of
networked production that threaten the regimes of individual  
authorship and
legal control. And as it envisions itself drilling for "the oil of  
the 21st
century", the venture capital that fuels the quest for properties yet
undiscovered has no choice but to extend the battlefield even  
further, far
beyond the realm of the immaterial, deep into the world of machines,  
the human
body, and the biosphere.

But while Intellectual Property struggles to conquer our hearts and  
minds, ideas
still improve, and technology participates in the improvement. On all  
fronts,
the enormous effort towards expropriation and privatization of public  
property
is met with a strange kind of almost automatic resistance. If piracy  
- the
spontaneously organized, massively distributed and not necessarily noble
reappropriation and redistribution of the Commons - seems necessary  
today, then
because technological progress implies it.

Technological progress - from the Printing Press to the BitTorrent  
protocol - is
what essentially drives cultural development and social change, what  
makes it
possible to share ideas, embrace expressions, improve inventions and  
correct the
works of the past. Human history is the history of copying, and the  
entirely
defensive and desperate attempt to stall its advancement by the means of
Intellectual Property - the proposition to ressurect the dead as  
rights holders
and turn the living into their licensees - only indicates how  
profoundly recent
advancements in copying technology, the adaptability and scalability  
they have
attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, are about to change  
the order
of things. What lies at the core of the conflict is the emergence of  
new modes
of subjectivation that escape the globally dominant mode of  
production. The
spectre that is haunting Intellectual Proprietors world-wide is no  
longer just
the much-lamented "death of the author", but the becoming-producer and
becoming-distributor of the capitalist consumer.

The world has irrevocably entered the age of digital reproduction,  
and it is
time to revisit the questions that Walter Benjamin raised in the  
light of
photography and film: how to reaffirm the positive potential and  
promise that
lies in today’s means of reproduction, how to refuse the artificial  
scarcity
that is being created as an attempt to contain the uncontrolled  
circulation of
cultural commodities, how to resist the rhetoric of warfare that only
articulates the discrepancy between the wealth of technical  
possibilites and the
poverty of their use, and how to renew the people's legitimate claim  
to copy, to
be copied, and to change property relations.

In order to deconstruct - and to develop radically different  
perspectives on -
the "oil of the 21st century", there is an urgent need for approaches  
that
provide fewer answers and more questions, produce less opinion and more
curiosity. The coils of the serpent are even more complex than the  
burrows of
the molehill, and the task is to trace, with the same bewilderement  
that befell
Franz Kafka at the advent of the modern juridical bureaucracies, the  
monstruous,
absurd and often outright hilarious legal procedures and protocols of  
the
Intellectual Property Era.



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The Oil of the 21st Century
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www.oil21.org oil21@oil21.org

The Oil of the 21st Century is a project by Bootlab,
based on a concept by Partner gegen Berlin, produced
in cooperation with Sarai, The Thing and Waag Society,
and funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation.



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