December 1, 2024 • 53 mins
To learn more, please visit Frances Liddell's site.
Show Notes:
0:00 Frances Liddell on justice and technology
1:30 Liddell’s background
2:50 CryptoKitties
3:50 NFTs
5:20 ORAgen
& DECaDE research centre
7:20 C2PA
8:15 tokenized rights
9:45 ORA use cases
10:30 themes from ORA interviews
12:15 YouTube as a supportive platform v. TikTok
13:00 smart contracts and licensing
15:00 perspectives on attribution
16:30 Emily Gould question on attribution
24:50 animation sector with stronger preference for attribution not open source
26:45 interviews revealed uncertainty on data scraping
29:50 lack of awareness about the environmental impact of blockchain
31:50 repatriation and blockchain and her work as associate research fellow with
Art & Antiquities Blockchain Consortium
34:50 Balot NFT - Balot sculpture in Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
37:30 ORA project status
38:15 ORAgen Fables
39:00 recommendations for creatives: to review C2PA & Content Credentials
41:00 Gould: responses during interviews about copyright concerns
45:30 location of individuals interviewed
47:20 impact of tech on issues of injustice - benefits/concerns surrounding decentralization
50:40 current work with ORA
51:30 Oluwatobi Aluko
Please share your comments and/or questions at stephanie@warfareofartandlaw.com
Music by Toulme.
To hear more episodes, please visit Warfare of Art and Law podcast's website.
To leave questions or comments about this or other episodes of the podcast and/or for information about joining the 2ND Saturday discussion on art, culture and justice, please message me at stephanie@warfareofartandlaw.com.
Thanks so much for listening!
© Stephanie Drawdy [2025]
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
So I think when we think about injustice it kind of
all comes down to the idea oflike what does equity really
mean, and can we really usetechnology to address that?
When I think ultimately it'squite a societal problem and
that's not to say thattechnology can't kind of be part
of that solution, but it's kindof recognizing there's a kind
of social, technical kind oftension there kind of tension
(00:28):
there.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Welcome to Warfare of Art and Law, the podcast that
focuses on how justice does ordoesn't play out when art and
law overlap.
Hi everyone, it's Stephanie,and that was Frances Little,
researcher, writer, lecturer andadvisor who works at the
intersection of decentralizedand emerging tech and cultural
and creative practices.
What follows is a recordingfrom a recent Second Saturday
(00:54):
online gathering, during whichFrances shares about her work,
including her involvement withOrigin, an unfinished software
that addresses the potentialvalue of media tokenization to
assist professionals in thecreative and cultural industries
who deal with challengesregarding ownership rights and
attribution.
Frances Little, welcome toWarfare of Art and Law.
(01:20):
And Second Saturday.
Thank you so much for beinghere.
Thank you, yeah, thanks forbeing here.
Thank you, yeah, thanks forinviting me.
Perhaps we'll get started withyou giving, if you would, an
overview of your work and whatdrew you into technology and how
it overlaps with cultural andcreative industries.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
Yeah, sure, yeah, so I, yeah.
So my background is really artsmanagement and museum studies,
um, so I I finished my PhD backin 2022 now, uh, which uh was a
collaborative doctoral awardwith um National Museums
Liverpool, uh, to kind ofbasically do the first empirical
(02:01):
research study, uh, examiningblockchain technology in museum
practice, um, and I suppose thatwas kind of my first proper
foray into kind of emergingtechnologies and particularly
something that was so nascentand sort of unknown within the
sector.
But I fell into blockchain.
I would say I sort of fell intoit because I actually, yeah, I
(02:21):
it's I was actually kind ofresearching internet cultures
and open access policies doingmy master's um.
So, yeah, my, my dissertationwas all about kind of looking at
like what are kind of theopportunities and implications
of of an open access policy for,for cultural organizations, um,
and of course, within that youstart looking at kind of open
(02:41):
source movements and the kind ofpolitical undertones of all
that.
And of course, there wasblockchain and, in particular,
this thing called crypto, uh,crypto kitties, which
essentially is um, a kind ofblockchain game where people
kind of bought and sold todigital cats, and I remember
looking at being like what isthis?
Um, and it's all founded onthis idea of digital scarcity
(03:04):
and I was just like this isfascinating, um, and around that
same time, uh, so 2017, 2018,uh, christie's had been doing
quite a lot of work around thisand, and there was a lot of
discussion around usingblockchain as an
authenticational tool, uh, incultural organizations and the
art market in particular.
Um, and so that's where thekind of my idea for this, my phd
(03:24):
kind of, was born, reallythinking, like what happens when
you put blockchain in a museum?
Like how does these ideascollide?
Um, and yeah, from that, reallyit's just snowballed because,
um, you know, I was kind of myphd was so well timed.
It sort of started out of firsthype in 2018 with blockchain
technology and the culturalsector, and it kind of ended at
(03:47):
a time when suddenly there wasanother huge hype around
blockchain and, in particular,nfts, or non-fungible tokens,
which they are kind of thesetokens that represent digital
assets online.
Online and through thistechnology, blockchain, you can
basically exchange it and itallows you to basically build
(04:07):
economic or all kinds of valuesassociated with it into the
token.
So, yeah, there was this kindof huge market boom and suddenly
people were selling digital artusing NFTs in 2021, and then
there was a massive dive from it.
But suddenly the culturalsector kind of really woke up to
the technology and they seemedto be really interested and kind
(04:28):
of certainly interested inexploring and potentially
experimenting with it.
And so I sort of ended up kindof building this consultancy
business around that, basicallyadvising cultural institutions
through educational packagesdrawn directly from my research
and research since then, um,looking at kind of what, what
(04:48):
could blockchain do for culturalpractice?
What are the potential kind ofum implications of that and, um,
yeah, kind of where do we gowith it afterwards?
Um, so, yeah, my, when we talkabout emerging technologies,
yeah, my, my sort of main one isblockchain, but of course,
since then, there's kind of beenjust lots of kind of research
(05:08):
around AI and the kind ofemergence of that and also the
collision of blockchain and AIas well.
It's really interesting.
So, yeah, that's a kind of alittle bit about my background.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
I initially had heard you give a talk, I believe, for
the Turing Institute.
Since then we've done afollow-up interview around your
work with Origin.
So would you kind of describethat program and how you came
into it, your scope and allthese interviews that you've
been doing for it?
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Yeah, so.
Yes, so Origin is part of aproject, part of the research
centre called DECADE, whichstands for the digital,
decentralised digital economy,and so I'm the postdoc research
associate based up at Universityof Edinburgh part of that.
So I joined the team Octoberlast year and but DECADE itself
(06:03):
has been going on for since 2020, so, and their main aim as a
research centre is to look atkind of applications of
blockchain technology that arenot necessarily monetary focused
, so it's not aboutcryptocurrencies or any of that
platform.
It's really kind of looking atactually blockchain applications
within the different kinds ofsectors, and one of those being
(06:25):
the cultural and creativeindustries.
So Orogen is one iteration of aproject that explores the
themes of ownership rights andattribution.
So ORA, which is part of it,that's what it stands for, and
ORAgen is an online demo that wehave, uh, where you can
(06:47):
essentially create and remixdifferent, uh, digital collages,
um, the idea being that youkind of, as you do, that you can
embed kind of very specificmetadata and then you can kind
of tokenize that as well throughblockchain, um, so we created
the demo really as a probe,really for an interview study,
(07:08):
to present this technicalframework called Aura, so to
give a kind of quick backgroundof what Aura is and the
technology behind it.
Essentially it uses twotechnologies blockchain and then
this metadata standard known asC2pa, um.
So we've already kind ofbriefly explained what an nft is
.
But, yeah, blockchains are adistributed ledger technology
(07:32):
that essentially allows you toadd, append only information um
about exchanges or transactionsthat have happened in an
ecosystem, and those exchangesrefer to tokens, one of which
are NFTs.
So why this is interesting isthat, then, that allows you to
prove your ownership ofparticular media.
(07:52):
And in the Aura framework, whatit's doing is it's creating two
distinct NFTs, one to representan artwork.
So say, I'm a creator, I'vejust made something, I'm going
to tokenize it through Aura.
You then have one NFT.
You then have a second set ofNFTs which are licensed tokens,
(08:13):
so we call them tokenized rights.
But essentially, through theunderlying technology of NFTs,
you can create kind of specificconditions about kind of how you
would like others to use it.
So that's kind of the other keypart of what Aura does.
And then the other end of it,it combines the standards called
(08:36):
CTPA, which allows you toessentially embed particular
types of metadata, but mostimportantly, provenance data,
where provenance data is usedmore in the kind of computer
scientist term rather than theart historical term.
So it's not necessarily aboutthe exchange of ownership but
actually about when people editor reuse it.
It's basically building up allthis information over time so
(09:00):
that then that's completelystored in the file and then you
can present that.
So in Origin, for example,that's presented as a family
tree.
So that's basically what Auradoes and Origin kind of
essentially tries to presentthat in a really simplified way.
And we've been using that as akind of interview style.
(09:20):
And originally actually we didit as an exploratory study over
the course of sort of a fewmonths late last year and the
start of this year, where wewere using it really to kind of
reveal the tensions andchallenges people face around
attribution, ownership andlicensing online, and that
revealed some really interestingconversations.
And in particular we developedkind of what we call nine use
(09:42):
cases of Aura.
We divided, developed kind ofwhat we call nine use cases of
aura um.
I won't go into all of thosenow, but essentially what those
are is that they kind of aredivided into five interesting
themes, which are attribution,prevalence and tracking,
authentication, ownership andlicensing and automation um, and
then from that we um did a sortof neck.
(10:04):
It did another kind ofinterview study, which was where
you came in, stephanie, and wehad essentially to talk and kind
of to develop those use casesand in some ways to help
consolidate what we had foundand start to kind of really
think about actually, what couldAura do for cultural and
creative professionals?
Speaker 2 (10:22):
So yeah, that's essentially kind of where we've
been with the research well, Ido wonder, like are there any
takeaways that you can share, oris that kind of uh to be
revealed later?
Or if you could give us a sneakpeek into some of the the
themes that you've taken awayfrom from the interviews?
Speaker 1 (10:42):
yeah, I'm definitely can.
Yeah, so actually we've justbeen writing this up as a
academic paper.
So this is this is good for mybrain to to help consolidate it.
But yeah, I think, um, therewas perhaps to kind of bring out
a couple of interesting kind ofnuggets, we say, of the
research.
Um, one thing that kind of washighlighted around attribution,
(11:03):
for example, was the wayobviously it revealed obviously
a lot of gripes people hadaround the loss of attribution
as they share on their workonline, but also revealed some
interesting approaches thatindividual creators used in
maintaining that attribution.
So, like, we had one person whokind of shared stuff on tiktok
(11:24):
and spoke about how actually thetimestamp for them was just
such an important part of theircontent.
Um, in part because peopleoften remix and reuse without
kind of clear attribution andthat's their kind of source of
being like well, that was mine,that's how I proved my ownership
of it, which I think is aninteresting relationship to the
way blockchain works.
Um, there was also kind ofinteresting point about how it's
(11:46):
it feels like attribution islike a very user-specific
problem when, actually, whenwe're thinking about how do we
design attribution it's really aplatform problem and thinking
about how do we allow platformsto create a better environment
for creators?
Um, so things like the youtuberemix button is quite a good
example of that.
Um, and actually one participantdid speak about how they felt
(12:09):
like youtube was a much betteror more supportive place for
creatives than, say, things liketiktok.
Uh, because it felt like thecontent was always put first and
tiktok was like there's a moresubscriber-based model on
youtube.
Um, but they spoke, you know,this idea of the remix button.
Actually, when you click onthat, what it's doing is
automatically embeddingattribution of the video that
(12:31):
you're choosing to remix fromYouTube, and whilst that could
also, you know, there are waysto kind of get around that quite
easily.
The idea is it's trying toencourage users to think about.
You know, actually there issomeone behind this content and
I should be recognizing them.
So, yeah, that's kind of just acouple of examples of the stuff
(12:51):
that we're finding at themoment.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
I was curious too were there any nuggets, as you
say, about the smart contractsand licensing and that kind of
angle of protecting andbroadening the agency for
artists?
Speaker 1 (13:09):
um, yeah, there was quite a few points.
I think the kind of overarching, um kind of sort of feeling
that's coming out of the kind ofdiscussion with licenses was
that licenses are so complicatedand like there is a desire for
a simplified version of that,both from the user, in terms of
(13:30):
being able to just discover andunderstand what those licenses
mean, um, but also from, forexample, a collection point of
view, trying to find ways toautomate.
That would be really beneficial.
Um, the reality is how smartcontracts solve that.
Well, it's that's reallydifficult to say.
Can you really reduce everykind of agreement into code?
(13:55):
It's not something that Itotally believe, and actually
there was a brilliant articlethat came out in 2017, actually
by karen nevy, who writes aboutum sort of smart contracts not
being street smart, and I Ireally love that idea because
it's the reminder that you knowcontracts have a kind of social
kind of background to it.
Um, and, of course, it's likecan you really allow?
(14:17):
You know it's only when anagreement has very specific
conditions that are not going tochange is when a smart contract
can really address those issues.
Um, and actually, when it comesto collections, you know things
change a lot, you know, justtake things like orphan works,
for example.
You know there's there's a niceidea to be like could aura
(14:39):
address some of those reallycomplex copyright issues?
But actually I don't.
I it's difficult to really kindof be able to say, because the
ultimate point of smartcontracts is their rigidness.
I was curious, too, about yourperceptions at the beginning of
(14:59):
the project and have certainideas that you had evolved or
shifted during your interviewand research process for this
yeah, I think, um, I think onething that's definitely um come
out from the interviews, um, andactually kind of stems a bit
from, uh, my work on open accesspolicies is is that assumption
(15:24):
that attribution is alwaysdesired and actually attribution
is quite there's a kind ofpolitical connection to it.
So, you know, for example, therewas one participant talked
about, you know, hacktivists andkind of the artist movements
represented in kind of net artand software arts from the early
(15:44):
90s, which is all part of thatkind of open source movement, uh
desire and the kind of idea ofcreating a digital comments
where no one owns or claimsauthorship.
Um, and that is interestingwhen you think about aura,
because at the very core of itis trying to be like this is the
individual author of this workand actually not everyone
(16:07):
necessarily has that desire forthat and actually by doing so
kind of actually feels perhapscounter to their principles and
their beliefs.
So that's been a reallyinteresting kind of revelation
and a real reminder as well thatactually these ideas are not
always universal we're joined byEmily Gould.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
Go right ahead.
Thank you very much.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
Hi everyone, it's really good to see you and thank
you, as ever, for your reallyfascinating comments.
It's so clear on all of yourresearch, which is very complex
in so many ways, and what youjust said, actually about
attribution and it not alwaysbeing necessarily a priority for
(16:50):
creatives and people havingkind of different thoughts about
it, just totally crystallizedsomething I was thinking as you
were speaking earlier, which isthat and forgive me, this is
going to be really wafflybecause I'm just sort of
formulating in my head as Ispeak.
This is going to be reallywaffly because I'm just sort of
formulating in my head as Ispeak, but there seems to me to
be a lot of sort of Conflictstrying to resolve themselves in
(17:13):
the way that these newtechnologies are being sort of
implemented and used bydifferent stakeholders.
Because, thinking exactly aboutattribution and I was thinking
about this sort of slightly inthe context of some comments I
heard from an artist recentlywho was talking about it was in
(17:40):
the context of sort of copyrightconsents and he was um, he's a
really interesting artistactually and he a lot of his
works take existing images and,uh, particularly bits of video
and film and cartoons and hecreates new works out of those.
And he was talking about thefact that when he started his
arm, uh, many years ago, henever really, um, he never
(18:04):
really considered that it mightbe an issue that he had to go
and get consent for use of thesefound works, because that's
just how everybody operates thisstuff's out there on the
internet.
You know, no artist knew art,that thought that.
You know everything is buildingon something else.
And you know, as obviously,sort of through his practice, um
, and as the years went on, herealized that actually there are
(18:25):
rules around this.
And he was talking about how hesort of views his own art and
when he feels like it's kind ofthe right thing to do that, he
knows that he has to go and getconsent from someone.
And so I was just thinking sortof generally about those
notions in the context of sortof attribution and the fact that
(18:46):
for some people, you know thatart is a kind of a collaborative
process and they don't it's notkind of that they don't
necessarily want to stampsomething with their name and
control something and kind ofown it as property, um, and you
know there's there's that sortof side of the coin versus well,
actually you know that I'vecreated something of value and I
(19:06):
want sort of that to berespected by people who interact
with it.
Um, so that was one kind ofissue where I think there are
those kind of competing almostcompeting sort of philosophies
and priorities and approachesthat somehow can kind of work
themselves out through throughthrough sort of technology like
blockchain and then smartcontracts.
(19:29):
Again, there's that sort oftension between um people.
Maybe we just sort of takecreative, say, digital artists
wanting some kind of automation,some kind of way of sort of
knowing that there is someprotection around their works
and they're always going to bedealt with in a certain way and
(19:50):
they maybe can collect a retailroyalty or whatever you know the
outcome might be.
There's some sort of automatedcontrol over that versus
actually wanting a flexibleapproach, wanting to be able to
deal with different stakeholdersin in different ways and not
wanting something kind of setout in stone and so yeah, so I
guess just some comments andwondering whether you kind of
(20:13):
you know, perceive those sort ofconflicting interests somehow
playing themselves out throughuse of these new technologies
thanks, emily, for your question.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
Yeah, and good to see you again.
Um, yeah, really, reallyinteresting one.
I think it kind of makes mestraight away think about that.
I think you get it a lot withinthe blockchain community.
Is this kind of desire thattechnology has to solve it?
You know, and feeling like, um,you know well, you know, surely
we'll all come together underthis like, and technology will
(20:48):
be able to cater for every need?
Um, I think, certainly.
Coming to the attributionquestion, I think there is a
kind of argument like thinkingabout from the interviews.
For example, um, one of thethings that kind of came out
which was like a really lovelyidea was, um, one artist spoke
about the provenance data thatwe present as a family tree in
(21:10):
origin.
Um, they were like, oh, itfeels a bit like kind of kind of
social media 3.0 or something,because it's kind of visualizing
all these different people, um,and actually that kind of
brings a different kind of valueto attribution, where it's not
just about like I'm going to beattributed because I want to
represent my contribution or Iwant want it to be kind of to
(21:30):
have the economic incentives.
It's kind of almost just a wayto connect artists together and
that is something that is reallyimportant.
For example, in roommates,cultures that kind of stem from
open source movements, is thatit's kind of about this idea of
being able to collaborate withanyone and sort of strangers and
peer to peer systems andthinking about kind of those
(21:52):
sorts of themes.
So there is a kind of argumentthat could could help to bring
those kind of competingphilosophies together in some
way.
The smart contract one, I think,is a bit harder, harder, um, I
(22:13):
think there is kind of to kindof bring a perhaps another kind
of kind of comment into this,and actually something that made
me think about when you weretalking was actually there is,
of course, the other issue ofkind of the ownership of that
smart contract and and what thatmeans as well.
So it's not only just aboutwhat the smart contract does,
it's about who kind of claimsownership of that.
Um, you know, as you're sayingnow, you sort of felt like you
know, if people just want it tobe automated, which really stems
from this desire, well, I justwant, I just want someone else
(22:35):
to deal with it.
I don't get licensing, I don'thave to deal with it.
I'm an artist, that's what myjob is.
But I have to do this in orderto create a business model, and
smart contracts perhaps givethat perception that they're
going to be able to address that, that perhaps, rather than
having to go through some otherkind of fund, some other kind of
licensing body, um, but thenit's kind of thinking well then,
how do you then manage andmaintain that smart contract?
(22:58):
How do you kind of yeah, Ithink there's kind of a
maintenance kind of question.
I think perhaps what is what I'mthinking of is of this sort of
you know, if you're going to usetechnology to address these
issues, how do you mentor, howdo you manage that?
How do you maintain that?
And how do you give people thekind of skills to do that?
Um, aura, you know, ultimatelyis a really complex technology
(23:19):
that, you know, even I don'treally like.
As a qualitative researcherwho's really an arts manager
coming into this world, I don'teven really have the skills to
be able to read and manage asmart contract.
So how can I expect artists todo that?
And then you have to then thinkabout well then you have to get
platforms back into vault andand how do you manage those
(23:39):
different relationships?
Um, so, yeah, just to add akind of another layer of
complexity to it all.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
I think yeah, no, it's really interesting.
As you were talking, I wasthinking of two more kind of
areas of, uh, sort of conflictsalmost, and um, one being sort
of inclusion and exclude, youknow, excluding people from that
community because, like you say, um sort of who is controlling
(24:06):
this.
And the other one was kind ofcontrol and lack of control,
because you, if you are sort ofbeholden to a smart contract and
a technology that you onlyunderstand to a certain level,
and you, you know, I can't writecode, I couldn't write, I
wouldn't have the first clue howto, how to actually set one of
(24:26):
these things up, and I wouldhave to trust someone else, and
again you get this kind oftrustless community and actually
we are trusting certain peopleto set things up in a certain
way that we think is going towork in our favor.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
And, yeah, really fascinating going back to the uh
open source view versus theattribution preference, were
there certain types of creativesor certain sectors where you
noticed that it was onepreference over the other?
Speaker 1 (25:03):
that's an interesting question.
Um, there was perhaps just onekind of standout sector and I
don't know.
Again, our interview study was.
You know, there was 21 peoplein total in the end, which is
quite a large.
Interview study, in the grandscheme of things, is not
necessarily be a representativeexample of of every view, um,
(25:25):
but we did have a couple ofparticipants from animation and
I certainly felt like there wasa stronger sense or desire for
attribution in that field.
Um, and me speculating on that,I wonder whether it's because
it's a, an industry that hasvery much become commercialized
in the last 10 years or has muchmore, has a stronger commercial
(25:46):
incentive or focus now.
Um, and I again like, becauseof the move in social media as
well, to more like reels andvideo and so forth, it does make
me think that maybe it's peoplein those industries that are
feeling a bit more protective oftheir stuff and feeling
uncertain about where they goand also they use I mean, one
(26:09):
participant spoke about how muchthey're so reliant on social
media to share their work and tobuild a reputation that they
then use to, for example, teachanimation.
Um, so there's this kind offear of being like well, I've
produced so much content.
It's just there on online andyou know now that we see the
likes of I mean to take AI, forexample it is this kind of thing
(26:32):
about well, what if thathappened like, what if that's
taken?
Where does that leave me?
Speaker 2 (26:36):
yeah, yeah and uh.
Another use case and it's kindof seems to be a bridge from
this concern is, uh, datascraping, and was there a
general consensus?
Had people already experiencedthat?
Speaker 1 (26:52):
I'm just curious, like what the range was there
was certainly a lot ofuncertainty about it.
There was no one that wasextremely one way or the other,
which I thought was quiteinteresting, again for the
amount of artists that we engagewith.
Um, you know, I had thoughtsurely there'll be someone who's
(27:13):
probably already using AI orcompletely, you know, shut down
the conversation.
You know I was sort of readyfor both sides, um, but yeah, I
think, and what's interesting?
Um, so DAX brought out a reallyinteresting survey from 2022
that was surveyed a thousandartists about how do they feel
(27:34):
about AI, essentially indifferent forms, and what we
found is quite reflective of thesurvey's findings no-transcript
(27:58):
, and you know, there was goingto be a really high percentage
again where they were like weneed a licensing model that
ensures that you can embed, youknow, things like a monetary
remuneration practice and soforth.
Um and the partners that wespoke to pretty much were saying
the same thing, which I thinkis um interesting that you know,
still, two years on, we'restill kind of in the stage of
(28:20):
perhaps fear and unsure about itand where to go.
Um, and yet the technologyitself has accelerated so
quickly in these two years, youknow, just in the way that, like
, I find it so frustrating nowthat you go on to google or
you're searching and it forcesyou to have an ai response.
You know, that sort of thing iskind of already like it's
(28:41):
forcing people to engage with it, whether they like it or not,
and yet there feels to be astagnation about actually where
we, where, how are we helpingcreatives in kind of addressing
these concerns, um, whether they, you know, whether it's just
simply engaging with it orhelping to protect themselves
from it as well?
Speaker 2 (29:01):
your response.
It kind of almost seems like aresponse to one of my next
questions, which was what areyour thoughts about overarching
misunderstandings or concerns,uh, about ai and its overlap
with the creative industries?
Speaker 1 (29:21):
yeah, I mean certainly.
I mean there is this, this kindof classic narrative around AI
and um, you know that there are.
I mean, what's what I find sofascinating about uh studying
emerging technologies?
They all have this kind ofnarrative and mythology around
them, that sort of sticks withthem, um, and despite the fact
(29:42):
the realities are often quitedifferent, um, but I would say
one kind of concern or likemisunderstanding.
Perhaps it's not amisunderstanding, but there's
perhaps a lack of criticaldiscussion with AI around the
environmental impact of it.
And I say this from the contextof you know someone that's
(30:03):
worked in blockchain technologyfor you know, six years now and
in 2021, that was kind of one ofthe big major implications of
blockchain.
People were really concernedabout the environmental impact
of it, as they should have been,because of the way the main
blockchain Ethereum used for theart market at the time was
(30:23):
using a particular way to mineor syndicate transactions using
proof of work.
In essence, that just requiresa huge amount of energy and
power to do that particular wayto mine or syndicate
transactions using uh calledproof of work.
In essence, that just requiresa huge amount of energy and
power to to do that.
Um, so they actually haveswitched to a much less energy
intensive approach called proofof stake, um, but at that time
that was kind of one of the bigconcerns, um and it.
(30:47):
I sort of had assumed that withthe emergence of ai, this kind
of discussion would come upagain, particularly as concerns
around or trying to push for amore green sector is still very
prevalent and yet people arestill much more open to
experimenting with ai um.
So I thought that was quite aninteresting kind of relationship
(31:07):
, and it's not to say that thereis no conversation about
environmental impact, but itdoesn't feel like people are as
aware that when you search anduse AI chatbots, for example,
that is very energy intensiveand actually is having a huge
environmental impact reallyunequally across the globe.
So there's kind of aninteresting kind of colonial
(31:31):
conversation to be had therewhich, yeah, I think needs to be
tapped into a bit more.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
Sort of on the flip side as a benefit not
necessarily less impact on theenvironment.
But this conversation aboutrepatriation and how blockchain
has been used with that you'veworked a bit on that.
Would you share your experience?
Speaker 1 (31:56):
yeah, sure, so, um, yeah, this is such a fascinating
um area, so, um, I would firstof all recommend people, if
they're interested in this, inthis topic, to go have a look at
the arts and antiquitiesblockchain consortium, or the
aabc, which is this initiativethat I'm associate research
fellow at um and I was awardedthat fellowship, uh, from my phd
(32:19):
project, um, and, in particular, this idea of shared
guardianship that I was tryingto develop in relation to nfts,
um, and trying to think aboutthe idea of what would digital
property mean if you take a morerelational approach to it, but
with the addition of blockchainadded into that, so this kind of
decentralized idea.
So, from that project, we hadessentially created a series of
(32:44):
NFTs from the collection, incollaboration with a group of
participants who had chosenthose objects and then they kind
of added their own personalstory about it and then we put
those into the metadata of theNFT and my argument, being based
on the findings of that, wasthat the NFT becomes a
(33:07):
representation of thesedifferent layers of ownership
where, on the one hand, you knowthe physical objects remain in
the museum and, in fact, thedigital, digitized version is
actually something that's openlyavailable.
So you know they don't have aclaim of copyright on it but
they own the token and they ownthat experience and that creates
this really interesting idea ofbeing like well, I need to care
(33:28):
for it and look after itbecause it's my experience, but
also it's something thatrepresents the museum.
So kind of build thatconnection with the, with
something that is also anational museum.
Um, so from that there's been,you know, that kind of was built
around um, kind of there's beensome such interesting research
over the last 10 years arounddigital repatriation or the idea
(33:51):
of kind of when you digitize,uh, cultural artifacts, who
claims ownership of the data?
Um, and kind of creatingindigenous data sovereignty and
what does that really mean?
Um, and the addition ofblockchain is kind of so
fascinating in that way because,as a decentralized technology
(34:14):
and to kind of go back to thenarrative thing again, you know
it is as a, it's got thisideology or something that is
kind of, you know, sort ofbreaking away from centralized
forces such as, say, centralizedculture institutions, and think
, actually, does it kind of addthat stronger layer of claim and
sort of authority and powerthat just simply owning kind of
(34:38):
the files and so forth doesn'tnecessarily do so.
There was actually a reallyinteresting project that took
place I think it was 2022 orpossibly 2021, called the Ballot
NFT.
That took place I think it was2022 or possibly 2021, called
the Ballot NFT.
So that was basically about thissculpture the Ballot sculpture
(35:01):
that is based at the VirginiaFine Arts Museum in the US and,
in essence, these Congoleseplantation workers decided to
take the digitized version ofthat from the website and make a
series of nfts from it, um, andthey did that with basically to
provoke the institution,because they had been in long
going conversation about, uh,trying to repatriate the
(35:21):
physical work, um, and in fact,had, like, not had very little
success.
So they basically were doingthis to fundraise, but really to
kind of create a provocation ofbeing like well, actually, if
you're not going to repatriateit, we're going to take the
digital version under fairdealings and make a stake in
kind of using blockchain, thisidea that, like the digital and
(35:44):
physical like, whilst we thinkabout the digitized version
being a kind of twin and theyrun parallel to each other, in
actual fact, what we see is thatthey continuously shape one
another, even though they mighthave very different lives.
They may exist in two separateworlds, but actually they have a
continuous effect on each otherand I think the ballot NFT is a
(36:07):
really nice example of thatabout how you could use
blockchain to bring a new forceto that, because they were using
this token not to claim thedigital version, but actually to
influence how they can reclaimthe physical objects.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
For the work you've done with this, with the aabc.
Have you had any feedback fromindividuals about this way of of
opening this conversation andand creating this investment, uh
, from individuals in theobjects?
Speaker 1 (36:41):
um, no, not directly.
Um, so a lot of the work, apartfrom the shared guardian
publication that I publishedback in 2021, I haven't directly
been able to publish myreflections on this yet, but it
is something that I'm sort ofhoping to do eventually.
(37:02):
I think it's a conversationthat is important to have, but
also one that is kind ofcontinuing on.
That is important to have, butalso one that is kind of
continuing on, and I think thereis a lot of potential with
thinking about blockchain as aforce to challenge institutions
when it comes to decolonization.
Speaker 2 (37:18):
And you mentioned that for the Aura project that
you guys are preparing anacademic paper.
Where is the project now andwhat should we be looking for
going forward?
Speaker 1 (37:33):
um.
So we've got um we'll have apublication out quite soon um,
openly available with um, ourpartners, digital catapult, uh,
which is actually based on aworkshop we did back in january.
So, um, if you want to learn abit more about the projects,
that should be available soon.
But at the moment what we'vedone is so.
(37:56):
Origin was always meant to beit's unfinished software and we
were always going to think abouthow do we develop this into
something that's much moreengaging and interesting,
because actually, when you goonto the website, you know the
idea really is that you're goingthrough and creating these
collages with someone like melike a facilitator there to kind
of talk you through and discussit.
So we have created a newinteractive called Origin Fables
(38:18):
and it's a collective storywriting sort of interactive
where the idea is that everyonehas to build a backstory about a
particular object, but in doingso, what you're doing is kind
of building a provenance graphand obviously you're being
attributed to it and eachcontribution represents an NFT.
So that has.
(38:39):
We've just done a pilot of itand it went well, which is great
, and we're hopefully going tohave a web application for it
available soon.
So, yeah, I'll be shoutingabout it on LinkedIn before long
, so you can find a link then.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
Are there any recommendations that you might
share with creatives whenthey're approaching attempts to
share their work but alsoprotect it, or just different
anything that you might want toshare with them, or
recommendations you'd have?
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Yeah, definitely.
I think one thing to go have alook at is the CTPA metadata
standard.
It is kind of openly availablefor everyone to use and actually
there's a website calledContent Credentials and in
essence, that allows you toembed this standard into your
(39:33):
digital media and you canstraight away start to document
provenance data.
Uh, you know, into and intoyour work um.
So if you're interested inexploring it, you know it's
there ready and waiting and um.
I know there's been kind of acouple of key kind of platforms
and um.
You know people like the bbcare kind of engaging with it as
(39:54):
well.
So it's, it's one of thosethings I'm sort of I think in
the next couple of years it isgoing to be, you know, hugely
adopted um.
So I would recommend that umand yeah, I think you know it's
just sort of.
It's just one of those issueswith online and sharing is that
you just have to be ready totake those risks, you know.
(40:14):
But, like you know, there was alot of challenges raised in the
interviews about kind of.
But, like you know, there was alot of challenges raised in the
interviews about kind of andconcerns about sharing, but also
there was a lot of positive.
You know positivities about it.
You know people.
You know recognize howimportant it is to be discovered
and actually how so manypeople's business models are
built upon social media, and forgood reason.
(40:36):
You build a really strongcommunity that become your
cheerleaders, your supporters.
So whilst there are these kindof negative points, it's always
important to remember that thereare some real positives to
engaging with social media.
Speaker 3 (40:52):
Can I ask a quick question, frances?
A very boring lawyer's question.
But the people who you talk toin your interviews and generally
in your work, are theygenerally sort of worried about
the law copyright law mainly, Iguess?
Are they worried about it?
Are they?
Are they?
Is it a concern for them?
Is it something they thinkabout in the context of their
(41:13):
work?
And you know they worry aboutinfringing other people's work
and they worry about people youknow infringing their copyright,
stealing their work, and dothey generally kind of know the
rules and want to apply them?
Or it's just not of interestand they just want to do their
work and you know, and they hopethat the technology will help
them, they don't see the law askind of either a friend or a foe
(41:35):
, I guess yeah, it's a goodquestion, emily.
Speaker 1 (41:39):
I think there was a big mix because obviously I was
also spoke with, you know,people who worked at cult
institutions and are well awareof the kind of legal frameworks
that they have are subjected to.
I think, from an individual'sperspective, like it didn't
naturally come up that way.
Copyright law, you know, it wassomething that I quite often
(42:01):
kind of talked a bit more aboutin context of licensing, and
then we sort of spoke about it.
Um, there were obviously a fewkind of people who spoke about
the kind of the theft and thestealing kind of element and
that sense of like that's mine,but they didn't necessarily
directly talk about copyright orindeed no one necessarily like
(42:22):
identified the rights associatedwith that.
But I think is quiteinteresting.
Um, and you know, to bringanother example into this, you
know, coming from like in 2021,with the market boom of nfts, I
found it so fascinating thatthere was a real kind of or lack
of understanding about thedifference between owning an NFT
(42:44):
and copyright, and there was alot of people assuming that they
could do things with their NFTwhen they couldn't, and and
indeed the other end of it aswell creators putting NFTs out
there without any clear creativecommons licensing or so forth.
So I think there is definitely,you know, I think there is a
need for a kind of clearunderstanding of what the legal
(43:05):
frameworks are and what they do.
You know, even just things likewhen I search images on Google,
for example, I find itfascinating that you really have
to go into the search.
You have to be very specificabout, like I want creative
commons licensing.
It's not straight away there,and having that and just having
a bit more awareness for users,I think would just be hugely
beneficial in helping people tounderstand what you can and
(43:27):
cannot do with an image onlineyeah, that's really interesting
for us.
Speaker 3 (43:32):
It's in times very much with what I hear from um
creatives.
I was at a seminar recently andit was about um.
It was about copyright and theexceptions to copyright, so fair
dealing and fair use and whatyou can do with someone else's
copyright work, you know,without getting their consent,
really, and the differentmechanisms and frameworks for
that and how it differs indifferent countries and um, and
(43:53):
there was somebody from a verybig, well-known gallery, from
their legal team, and they saidif we tried to start telling our
artists what to do, we wouldquickly find that our gallery
would just shut down.
It doesn't work like that.
We have to try and find ways ofsort of you know, helping to
(44:18):
protect artists but letting them, you know, find ways to do
their work without sort of youknow always being the break and
saying you know being very sortof risk averse, I guess.
And the guy who was talkingabout a really interesting
artist who does this kind ofcartoon work and takes all these
found images, he said it'soften very surprising um, who
(44:45):
turns out to be, who turns outto be a party who is very, very
sort of protective of theirrights.
So he would use things by youknow massive companies like
warner brothers and um, andactually found out, you know,
just sort of discovered throughhis practice, that they weren't
necessarily the people to beworried about.
It would be somebody who youknow, a kind of a somebody who
(45:07):
had just, I don't know, done afew illustrations for a small
book, who happened to see theirwork used in this artist's work,
who he would get a letter fromand yeah so really really
surprising sort of results ofyou know the approach that he
takes in his art.
Speaker 2 (45:28):
I had a question before and it's kind of bringing
it back to the fore of the poolof people you talked to, where
they were located and, dependingon where you are, the laws that
govern all of what you're doingkind of highlights the need for
(45:49):
protecting yourselfindividually when you are
looking at the way there is noconsistency across the globe
with all of these standards.
Speaker 1 (46:02):
Yeah, completely yeah , and you know I should
emphasize you know a huge amountof portion, I would say, were
probably from the UK.
But what I always findfascinating when I read up on
kind of the latest kind of legalliterature around blockchain
and nfc's is it's so often usoriented.
I feel like I know so muchabout us copyright law, um, and
(46:25):
funny enough, there isn't likeas much about uk and I actually
don't know a great deal from theeuropean perspective.
And again that's changes againand, as you say, stephanie, like
there is, there needs to beperhaps a way to be able to
navigate this really complexlandscape in a way that's
manageable, and particularlywhen you think about at what
point are you searching for acopyright.
(46:46):
You're probably trying to findan image really quickly for a
presentation.
You don't have the time to be,you know finding, you know doing
that detailed research that'squite often required to find the
correct person to speak to,finding their contact details
and emailing them.
There are too many barriersthere for people to actually be
(47:06):
able to perhaps be bothered todo it properly, and I think
that's perhaps even just thebiggest concern that we have
immediately.
Speaker 2 (47:11):
Yeah, and then, taking it one step further, one
of the questions that I hadpresented to you and I would ask
your thoughts now is are thereinjustices that you see with the
emerging technologies or moreability to achieve justice
(47:31):
through emerging technologies?
Is there one or the other thatyou've experienced or see for
the future?
Speaker 1 (47:39):
Yeah, I think this is such an interesting question
and it made me stop and thinkfor a while.
Actually, I was kind of, yes,injustice, where does that fit?
Because, of course, you know, Ithink one of the fascinating
things about studying blockchain, for example, is the rhetoric
around it being democratisingand that it's going to change.
(48:00):
You know, this kind of unequallandscape, particularly from an
arts perspective.
But as you research more andthe kind of as I reflect more
around it, it's realising thatdecentralisation can mean so
many different things todifferent people, and yet they
all come and flock to this, thiskind of technology, and
(48:22):
thinking it's going to be thesolution to their problems, um,
so what I mean by that is like,for one end, um, you know,
blockchain stems from kind of acrypto anarchist and kind of
cyber libertarian kind ofpolitical, um kind of
reflections where people aretrying to use it to basically,
you know, break away fromgovernment bodies controlling
(48:44):
how they exchange with eachother, um, to maintain a sense
of privacy, um.
But then, on the other hand,you have people flocking to it
from a more socialist point ofview and taking on cooperative
principles and taking a moreparticipatory approach to
decentralization and thinkingactually this is going to help
us be more collaborative in howwe approach uh, kind of working
(49:05):
together, um.
And then you also getdecentralization from a creative
point of view, or kind ofthinking about their economic
models and thinking, well,actually I'm going to use this
decentralized tool to break awayfrom those intermediaries that
have been exploiting my recent,you know, or kind of my creative
work, but every kind ofsituation, idea that you know,
(49:39):
yes, you can decentralize, butactually what you gain are
pockets of power, because people, unless there's a structure to
it, people will always gain thesystem.
And then what's worse is thatthen you don't have a democratic
approach to take those peopleaway.
So we see that as a really goodexample of what's happened with
the blockchain art ecosystem.
What we see is just areplication of the winner takes
(50:02):
all approach.
You know people say therearen't any intermediaries, but
actually artists are not early,they're not winners in that
world.
Um, you know, there's justcertainly just new
monopolizations, uh, but in adifferent format.
Some things like art, open seaand so forth.
Speaker 2 (50:20):
Well, thank you so much.
I really appreciate you beinghere and sharing about what
you're doing and I am curious,going forward, are you
continuing with the Aura projectand what other projects might
you be doing, if there's anythat you want to share about,
and what other projects mightyou be doing, if there's any
that you want to share about?
Speaker 1 (50:38):
Yes, so we'll be continuing with the origin work.
So, yeah, the interactive thatI mentioned, we'll be doing
another sort of study aroundthat and sort of developing our
understanding around aura.
So yeah, that's kind of themain project on the horizon for
now.
And yeah, I'm looking forwardto having kind of a physical
interactive that people can kindof the main the main project on
the horizon for now, um, andyeah, I'm looking forward to
(50:58):
having kind of a physicalinteractive that people can kind
of play around with um and anddoing some sort of again just
being back in the field and andsort of speaking with people and
learning um.
It's one of my favorite thingsto do is just to watch people
kind of explore thesetechnologies are there any other
questions?
yeah, I have a question, hi.
Speaker 2 (51:20):
Stephanie um hi toby go right ahead yeah.
Speaker 1 (51:24):
So I just wanted to ask is, or just in the nft space
or is it just the nft space?
I just wanted to ask um, yeah,so actually, whilst it uses nfts
blockchain, we've been quitecareful about not engaging the
NFT space with it, so we've onlybeen in the interview study.
We only engaged artists andcreators who are kind of more I
(51:47):
mean, there were digital artistsbut who did some engaged with
blockchain, but generallyspeaking, they were what we
might see as more thetraditional cultural and
creative industries.
We might see as more thetraditional cultural and
creative industries.
Um, and we were careful of thatbecause we were really
interested to kind of learn moreabout, kind of how, people's
perceptions of the technology.
Um, you know, I think certainlythere's an argument that aura
(52:08):
probably would be readilyadopted within kind of the nft
community, because they alreadyunderstand what nfts do.
So then it's just simply kindof embedding this other, this
metadata standard.
So, yeah, no, it is somethingthat we're trying to engage kind
of the whole of the culture andcreative sector, not just the
NFT community.
Speaker 2 (52:28):
There will be links in the show notes to learn more.
If you were intrigued by thispodcast, it'd be much
appreciated if you could leave arating or review and tag
Warfare of Art and Law podcast.
Until next time, this isStephanie Draughty bringing you
Warfare of Art and Law.
Thank you so much for listeningand remember injustice anywhere
is a threat to justiceeverywhere.
So I think when we think about injustice it kind of
all comes down to the idea oflike what does equity really
mean, and can we really usetechnology to address that?
When I think ultimately it'squite a societal problem and
that's not to say thattechnology can't kind of be part
of that solution, but it's kindof recognizing there's a kind
of social, technical kind oftension there kind of tension
(00:28):
there.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Welcome to Warfare of Art and Law, the podcast that
focuses on how justice does ordoesn't play out when art and
law overlap.
Hi everyone, it's Stephanie,and that was Frances Little,
researcher, writer, lecturer andadvisor who works at the
intersection of decentralizedand emerging tech and cultural
and creative practices.
What follows is a recordingfrom a recent Second Saturday
(00:54):
online gathering, during whichFrances shares about her work,
including her involvement withOrigin, an unfinished software
that addresses the potentialvalue of media tokenization to
assist professionals in thecreative and cultural industries
who deal with challengesregarding ownership rights and
attribution.
Frances Little, welcome toWarfare of Art and Law.
(01:20):
And Second Saturday.
Thank you so much for beinghere.
Thank you, yeah, thanks forbeing here.
Thank you, yeah, thanks forinviting me.
Perhaps we'll get started withyou giving, if you would, an
overview of your work and whatdrew you into technology and how
it overlaps with cultural andcreative industries.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
Yeah, sure, yeah, so I, yeah.
So my background is really artsmanagement and museum studies,
um, so I I finished my PhD backin 2022 now, uh, which uh was a
collaborative doctoral awardwith um National Museums
Liverpool, uh, to kind ofbasically do the first empirical
(02:01):
research study, uh, examiningblockchain technology in museum
practice, um, and I suppose thatwas kind of my first proper
foray into kind of emergingtechnologies and particularly
something that was so nascentand sort of unknown within the
sector.
But I fell into blockchain.
I would say I sort of fell intoit because I actually, yeah, I
(02:21):
it's I was actually kind ofresearching internet cultures
and open access policies doingmy master's um.
So, yeah, my, my dissertationwas all about kind of looking at
like what are kind of theopportunities and implications
of of an open access policy for,for cultural organizations, um,
and of course, within that youstart looking at kind of open
(02:41):
source movements and the kind ofpolitical undertones of all
that.
And of course, there wasblockchain and, in particular,
this thing called crypto, uh,crypto kitties, which
essentially is um, a kind ofblockchain game where people
kind of bought and sold todigital cats, and I remember
looking at being like what isthis?
Um, and it's all founded onthis idea of digital scarcity
(03:04):
and I was just like this isfascinating, um, and around that
same time, uh, so 2017, 2018,uh, christie's had been doing
quite a lot of work around thisand, and there was a lot of
discussion around usingblockchain as an
authenticational tool, uh, incultural organizations and the
art market in particular.
Um, and so that's where thekind of my idea for this, my phd
(03:24):
kind of, was born, reallythinking, like what happens when
you put blockchain in a museum?
Like how does these ideascollide?
Um, and yeah, from that, reallyit's just snowballed because,
um, you know, I was kind of myphd was so well timed.
It sort of started out of firsthype in 2018 with blockchain
technology and the culturalsector, and it kind of ended at
(03:47):
a time when suddenly there wasanother huge hype around
blockchain and, in particular,nfts, or non-fungible tokens,
which they are kind of thesetokens that represent digital
assets online.
Online and through thistechnology, blockchain, you can
basically exchange it and itallows you to basically build
(04:07):
economic or all kinds of valuesassociated with it into the
token.
So, yeah, there was this kindof huge market boom and suddenly
people were selling digital artusing NFTs in 2021, and then
there was a massive dive from it.
But suddenly the culturalsector kind of really woke up to
the technology and they seemedto be really interested and kind
(04:28):
of certainly interested inexploring and potentially
experimenting with it.
And so I sort of ended up kindof building this consultancy
business around that, basicallyadvising cultural institutions
through educational packagesdrawn directly from my research
and research since then, um,looking at kind of what, what
(04:48):
could blockchain do for culturalpractice?
What are the potential kind ofum implications of that and, um,
yeah, kind of where do we gowith it afterwards?
Um, so, yeah, my, when we talkabout emerging technologies,
yeah, my, my sort of main one isblockchain, but of course,
since then, there's kind of beenjust lots of kind of research
(05:08):
around AI and the kind ofemergence of that and also the
collision of blockchain and AIas well.
It's really interesting.
So, yeah, that's a kind of alittle bit about my background.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
I initially had heard you give a talk, I believe, for
the Turing Institute.
Since then we've done afollow-up interview around your
work with Origin.
So would you kind of describethat program and how you came
into it, your scope and allthese interviews that you've
been doing for it?
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Yeah, so.
Yes, so Origin is part of aproject, part of the research
centre called DECADE, whichstands for the digital,
decentralised digital economy,and so I'm the postdoc research
associate based up at Universityof Edinburgh part of that.
So I joined the team Octoberlast year and but DECADE itself
(06:03):
has been going on for since 2020, so, and their main aim as a
research centre is to look atkind of applications of
blockchain technology that arenot necessarily monetary focused
, so it's not aboutcryptocurrencies or any of that
platform.
It's really kind of looking atactually blockchain applications
within the different kinds ofsectors, and one of those being
(06:25):
the cultural and creativeindustries.
So Orogen is one iteration of aproject that explores the
themes of ownership rights andattribution.
So ORA, which is part of it,that's what it stands for, and
ORAgen is an online demo that wehave, uh, where you can
(06:47):
essentially create and remixdifferent, uh, digital collages,
um, the idea being that youkind of, as you do, that you can
embed kind of very specificmetadata and then you can kind
of tokenize that as well throughblockchain, um, so we created
the demo really as a probe,really for an interview study,
(07:08):
to present this technicalframework called Aura, so to
give a kind of quick backgroundof what Aura is and the
technology behind it.
Essentially it uses twotechnologies blockchain and then
this metadata standard known asC2pa, um.
So we've already kind ofbriefly explained what an nft is
.
But, yeah, blockchains are adistributed ledger technology
(07:32):
that essentially allows you toadd, append only information um
about exchanges or transactionsthat have happened in an
ecosystem, and those exchangesrefer to tokens, one of which
are NFTs.
So why this is interesting isthat, then, that allows you to
prove your ownership ofparticular media.
(07:52):
And in the Aura framework, whatit's doing is it's creating two
distinct NFTs, one to representan artwork.
So say, I'm a creator, I'vejust made something, I'm going
to tokenize it through Aura.
You then have one NFT.
You then have a second set ofNFTs which are licensed tokens,
(08:13):
so we call them tokenized rights.
But essentially, through theunderlying technology of NFTs,
you can create kind of specificconditions about kind of how you
would like others to use it.
So that's kind of the other keypart of what Aura does.
And then the other end of it,it combines the standards called
(08:36):
CTPA, which allows you toessentially embed particular
types of metadata, but mostimportantly, provenance data,
where provenance data is usedmore in the kind of computer
scientist term rather than theart historical term.
So it's not necessarily aboutthe exchange of ownership but
actually about when people editor reuse it.
It's basically building up allthis information over time so
(09:00):
that then that's completelystored in the file and then you
can present that.
So in Origin, for example,that's presented as a family
tree.
So that's basically what Auradoes and Origin kind of
essentially tries to presentthat in a really simplified way.
And we've been using that as akind of interview style.
(09:20):
And originally actually we didit as an exploratory study over
the course of sort of a fewmonths late last year and the
start of this year, where wewere using it really to kind of
reveal the tensions andchallenges people face around
attribution, ownership andlicensing online, and that
revealed some really interestingconversations.
And in particular we developedkind of what we call nine use
(09:42):
cases of Aura.
We divided, developed kind ofwhat we call nine use cases of
aura um.
I won't go into all of thosenow, but essentially what those
are is that they kind of aredivided into five interesting
themes, which are attribution,prevalence and tracking,
authentication, ownership andlicensing and automation um, and
then from that we um did a sortof neck.
(10:04):
It did another kind ofinterview study, which was where
you came in, stephanie, and wehad essentially to talk and kind
of to develop those use casesand in some ways to help
consolidate what we had foundand start to kind of really
think about actually, what couldAura do for cultural and
creative professionals?
Speaker 2 (10:22):
So yeah, that's essentially kind of where we've
been with the research well, Ido wonder, like are there any
takeaways that you can share, oris that kind of uh to be
revealed later?
Or if you could give us a sneakpeek into some of the the
themes that you've taken awayfrom from the interviews?
Speaker 1 (10:42):
yeah, I'm definitely can.
Yeah, so actually we've justbeen writing this up as a
academic paper.
So this is this is good for mybrain to to help consolidate it.
But yeah, I think, um, therewas perhaps to kind of bring out
a couple of interesting kind ofnuggets, we say, of the
research.
Um, one thing that kind of washighlighted around attribution,
(11:03):
for example, was the wayobviously it revealed obviously
a lot of gripes people hadaround the loss of attribution
as they share on their workonline, but also revealed some
interesting approaches thatindividual creators used in
maintaining that attribution.
So, like, we had one person whokind of shared stuff on tiktok
(11:24):
and spoke about how actually thetimestamp for them was just
such an important part of theircontent.
Um, in part because peopleoften remix and reuse without
kind of clear attribution andthat's their kind of source of
being like well, that was mine,that's how I proved my ownership
of it, which I think is aninteresting relationship to the
way blockchain works.
Um, there was also kind ofinteresting point about how it's
(11:46):
it feels like attribution islike a very user-specific
problem when, actually, whenwe're thinking about how do we
design attribution it's really aplatform problem and thinking
about how do we allow platformsto create a better environment
for creators?
Um, so things like the youtuberemix button is quite a good
example of that.
Um, and actually one participantdid speak about how they felt
(12:09):
like youtube was a much betteror more supportive place for
creatives than, say, things liketiktok.
Uh, because it felt like thecontent was always put first and
tiktok was like there's a moresubscriber-based model on
youtube.
Um, but they spoke, you know,this idea of the remix button.
Actually, when you click onthat, what it's doing is
automatically embeddingattribution of the video that
(12:31):
you're choosing to remix fromYouTube, and whilst that could
also, you know, there are waysto kind of get around that quite
easily.
The idea is it's trying toencourage users to think about.
You know, actually there issomeone behind this content and
I should be recognizing them.
So, yeah, that's kind of just acouple of examples of the stuff
(12:51):
that we're finding at themoment.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
I was curious too were there any nuggets, as you
say, about the smart contractsand licensing and that kind of
angle of protecting andbroadening the agency for
artists?
Speaker 1 (13:09):
um, yeah, there was quite a few points.
I think the kind of overarching, um kind of sort of feeling
that's coming out of the kind ofdiscussion with licenses was
that licenses are so complicatedand like there is a desire for
a simplified version of that,both from the user, in terms of
(13:30):
being able to just discover andunderstand what those licenses
mean, um, but also from, forexample, a collection point of
view, trying to find ways toautomate.
That would be really beneficial.
Um, the reality is how smartcontracts solve that.
Well, it's that's reallydifficult to say.
Can you really reduce everykind of agreement into code?
(13:55):
It's not something that Itotally believe, and actually
there was a brilliant articlethat came out in 2017, actually
by karen nevy, who writes aboutum sort of smart contracts not
being street smart, and I Ireally love that idea because
it's the reminder that you knowcontracts have a kind of social
kind of background to it.
Um, and, of course, it's likecan you really allow?
(14:17):
You know it's only when anagreement has very specific
conditions that are not going tochange is when a smart contract
can really address those issues.
Um, and actually, when it comesto collections, you know things
change a lot, you know, justtake things like orphan works,
for example.
You know there's there's a niceidea to be like could aura
(14:39):
address some of those reallycomplex copyright issues?
But actually I don't.
I it's difficult to really kindof be able to say, because the
ultimate point of smartcontracts is their rigidness.
I was curious, too, about yourperceptions at the beginning of
(14:59):
the project and have certainideas that you had evolved or
shifted during your interviewand research process for this
yeah, I think, um, I think onething that's definitely um come
out from the interviews, um, andactually kind of stems a bit
from, uh, my work on open accesspolicies is is that assumption
(15:24):
that attribution is alwaysdesired and actually attribution
is quite there's a kind ofpolitical connection to it.
So, you know, for example, therewas one participant talked
about, you know, hacktivists andkind of the artist movements
represented in kind of net artand software arts from the early
(15:44):
90s, which is all part of thatkind of open source movement, uh
desire and the kind of idea ofcreating a digital comments
where no one owns or claimsauthorship.
Um, and that is interestingwhen you think about aura,
because at the very core of itis trying to be like this is the
individual author of this workand actually not everyone
(16:07):
necessarily has that desire forthat and actually by doing so
kind of actually feels perhapscounter to their principles and
their beliefs.
So that's been a reallyinteresting kind of revelation
and a real reminder as well thatactually these ideas are not
always universal we're joined byEmily Gould.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
Go right ahead.
Thank you very much.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
Hi everyone, it's really good to see you and thank
you, as ever, for your reallyfascinating comments.
It's so clear on all of yourresearch, which is very complex
in so many ways, and what youjust said, actually about
attribution and it not alwaysbeing necessarily a priority for
(16:50):
creatives and people havingkind of different thoughts about
it, just totally crystallizedsomething I was thinking as you
were speaking earlier, which isthat and forgive me, this is
going to be really wafflybecause I'm just sort of
formulating in my head as Ispeak.
This is going to be reallywaffly because I'm just sort of
formulating in my head as Ispeak, but there seems to me to
be a lot of sort of Conflictstrying to resolve themselves in
(17:13):
the way that these newtechnologies are being sort of
implemented and used bydifferent stakeholders.
Because, thinking exactly aboutattribution and I was thinking
about this sort of slightly inthe context of some comments I
heard from an artist recentlywho was talking about it was in
(17:40):
the context of sort of copyrightconsents and he was um, he's a
really interesting artistactually and he a lot of his
works take existing images and,uh, particularly bits of video
and film and cartoons and hecreates new works out of those.
And he was talking about thefact that when he started his
arm, uh, many years ago, henever really, um, he never
(18:04):
really considered that it mightbe an issue that he had to go
and get consent for use of thesefound works, because that's
just how everybody operates thisstuff's out there on the
internet.
You know, no artist knew art,that thought that.
You know everything is buildingon something else.
And you know, as obviously,sort of through his practice, um
, and as the years went on, herealized that actually there are
(18:25):
rules around this.
And he was talking about how hesort of views his own art and
when he feels like it's kind ofthe right thing to do that, he
knows that he has to go and getconsent from someone.
And so I was just thinking sortof generally about those
notions in the context of sortof attribution and the fact that
(18:46):
for some people, you know thatart is a kind of a collaborative
process and they don't it's notkind of that they don't
necessarily want to stampsomething with their name and
control something and kind ofown it as property, um, and you
know there's there's that sortof side of the coin versus well,
actually you know that I'vecreated something of value and I
(19:06):
want sort of that to berespected by people who interact
with it.
Um, so that was one kind ofissue where I think there are
those kind of competing almostcompeting sort of philosophies
and priorities and approachesthat somehow can kind of work
themselves out through throughthrough sort of technology like
blockchain and then smartcontracts.
(19:29):
Again, there's that sort oftension between um people.
Maybe we just sort of takecreative, say, digital artists
wanting some kind of automation,some kind of way of sort of
knowing that there is someprotection around their works
and they're always going to bedealt with in a certain way and
(19:50):
they maybe can collect a retailroyalty or whatever you know the
outcome might be.
There's some sort of automatedcontrol over that versus
actually wanting a flexibleapproach, wanting to be able to
deal with different stakeholdersin in different ways and not
wanting something kind of setout in stone and so yeah, so I
guess just some comments andwondering whether you kind of
(20:13):
you know, perceive those sort ofconflicting interests somehow
playing themselves out throughuse of these new technologies
thanks, emily, for your question.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
Yeah, and good to see you again.
Um, yeah, really, reallyinteresting one.
I think it kind of makes mestraight away think about that.
I think you get it a lot withinthe blockchain community.
Is this kind of desire thattechnology has to solve it?
You know, and feeling like, um,you know well, you know, surely
we'll all come together underthis like, and technology will
(20:48):
be able to cater for every need?
Um, I think, certainly.
Coming to the attributionquestion, I think there is a
kind of argument like thinkingabout from the interviews.
For example, um, one of thethings that kind of came out
which was like a really lovelyidea was, um, one artist spoke
about the provenance data thatwe present as a family tree in
(21:10):
origin.
Um, they were like, oh, itfeels a bit like kind of kind of
social media 3.0 or something,because it's kind of visualizing
all these different people, um,and actually that kind of
brings a different kind of valueto attribution, where it's not
just about like I'm going to beattributed because I want to
represent my contribution or Iwant want it to be kind of to
(21:30):
have the economic incentives.
It's kind of almost just a wayto connect artists together and
that is something that is reallyimportant.
For example, in roommates,cultures that kind of stem from
open source movements, is thatit's kind of about this idea of
being able to collaborate withanyone and sort of strangers and
peer to peer systems andthinking about kind of those
(21:52):
sorts of themes.
So there is a kind of argumentthat could could help to bring
those kind of competingphilosophies together in some
way.
The smart contract one, I think,is a bit harder, harder, um, I
(22:13):
think there is kind of to kindof bring a perhaps another kind
of kind of comment into this,and actually something that made
me think about when you weretalking was actually there is,
of course, the other issue ofkind of the ownership of that
smart contract and and what thatmeans as well.
So it's not only just aboutwhat the smart contract does,
it's about who kind of claimsownership of that.
Um, you know, as you're sayingnow, you sort of felt like you
know, if people just want it tobe automated, which really stems
from this desire, well, I justwant, I just want someone else
(22:35):
to deal with it.
I don't get licensing, I don'thave to deal with it.
I'm an artist, that's what myjob is.
But I have to do this in orderto create a business model, and
smart contracts perhaps givethat perception that they're
going to be able to address that, that perhaps, rather than
having to go through some otherkind of fund, some other kind of
licensing body, um, but thenit's kind of thinking well then,
how do you then manage andmaintain that smart contract?
(22:58):
How do you kind of yeah, Ithink there's kind of a
maintenance kind of question.
I think perhaps what is what I'mthinking of is of this sort of
you know, if you're going to usetechnology to address these
issues, how do you mentor, howdo you manage that?
How do you maintain that?
And how do you give people thekind of skills to do that?
Um, aura, you know, ultimatelyis a really complex technology
(23:19):
that, you know, even I don'treally like.
As a qualitative researcherwho's really an arts manager
coming into this world, I don'teven really have the skills to
be able to read and manage asmart contract.
So how can I expect artists todo that?
And then you have to then thinkabout well then you have to get
platforms back into vault andand how do you manage those
(23:39):
different relationships?
Um, so, yeah, just to add akind of another layer of
complexity to it all.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
I think yeah, no, it's really interesting.
As you were talking, I wasthinking of two more kind of
areas of, uh, sort of conflictsalmost, and um, one being sort
of inclusion and exclude, youknow, excluding people from that
community because, like you say, um sort of who is controlling
(24:06):
this.
And the other one was kind ofcontrol and lack of control,
because you, if you are sort ofbeholden to a smart contract and
a technology that you onlyunderstand to a certain level,
and you, you know, I can't writecode, I couldn't write, I
wouldn't have the first clue howto, how to actually set one of
(24:26):
these things up, and I wouldhave to trust someone else, and
again you get this kind oftrustless community and actually
we are trusting certain peopleto set things up in a certain
way that we think is going towork in our favor.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
And, yeah, really fascinating going back to the uh
open source view versus theattribution preference, were
there certain types of creativesor certain sectors where you
noticed that it was onepreference over the other?
Speaker 1 (25:03):
that's an interesting question.
Um, there was perhaps just onekind of standout sector and I
don't know.
Again, our interview study was.
You know, there was 21 peoplein total in the end, which is
quite a large.
Interview study, in the grandscheme of things, is not
necessarily be a representativeexample of of every view, um,
(25:25):
but we did have a couple ofparticipants from animation and
I certainly felt like there wasa stronger sense or desire for
attribution in that field.
Um, and me speculating on that,I wonder whether it's because
it's a, an industry that hasvery much become commercialized
in the last 10 years or has muchmore, has a stronger commercial
(25:46):
incentive or focus now.
Um, and I again like, becauseof the move in social media as
well, to more like reels andvideo and so forth, it does make
me think that maybe it's peoplein those industries that are
feeling a bit more protective oftheir stuff and feeling
uncertain about where they goand also they use I mean, one
(26:09):
participant spoke about how muchthey're so reliant on social
media to share their work and tobuild a reputation that they
then use to, for example, teachanimation.
Um, so there's this kind offear of being like well, I've
produced so much content.
It's just there on online andyou know now that we see the
likes of I mean to take AI, forexample it is this kind of thing
(26:32):
about well, what if thathappened like, what if that's
taken?
Where does that leave me?
Speaker 2 (26:36):
yeah, yeah and uh.
Another use case and it's kindof seems to be a bridge from
this concern is, uh, datascraping, and was there a
general consensus?
Had people already experiencedthat?
Speaker 1 (26:52):
I'm just curious, like what the range was there
was certainly a lot ofuncertainty about it.
There was no one that wasextremely one way or the other,
which I thought was quiteinteresting, again for the
amount of artists that we engagewith.
Um, you know, I had thoughtsurely there'll be someone who's
(27:13):
probably already using AI orcompletely, you know, shut down
the conversation.
You know I was sort of readyfor both sides, um, but yeah, I
think, and what's interesting?
Um, so DAX brought out a reallyinteresting survey from 2022
that was surveyed a thousandartists about how do they feel
(27:34):
about AI, essentially indifferent forms, and what we
found is quite reflective of thesurvey's findings no-transcript
(27:58):
, and you know, there was goingto be a really high percentage
again where they were like weneed a licensing model that
ensures that you can embed, youknow, things like a monetary
remuneration practice and soforth.
Um and the partners that wespoke to pretty much were saying
the same thing, which I thinkis um interesting that you know,
still, two years on, we'restill kind of in the stage of
(28:20):
perhaps fear and unsure about itand where to go.
Um, and yet the technologyitself has accelerated so
quickly in these two years, youknow, just in the way that, like
, I find it so frustrating nowthat you go on to google or
you're searching and it forcesyou to have an ai response.
You know, that sort of thing iskind of already like it's
(28:41):
forcing people to engage with it, whether they like it or not,
and yet there feels to be astagnation about actually where
we, where, how are we helpingcreatives in kind of addressing
these concerns, um, whether they, you know, whether it's just
simply engaging with it orhelping to protect themselves
from it as well?
Speaker 2 (29:01):
your response.
It kind of almost seems like aresponse to one of my next
questions, which was what areyour thoughts about overarching
misunderstandings or concerns,uh, about ai and its overlap
with the creative industries?
Speaker 1 (29:21):
yeah, I mean certainly.
I mean there is this, this kindof classic narrative around AI
and um, you know that there are.
I mean, what's what I find sofascinating about uh studying
emerging technologies?
They all have this kind ofnarrative and mythology around
them, that sort of sticks withthem, um, and despite the fact
(29:42):
the realities are often quitedifferent, um, but I would say
one kind of concern or likemisunderstanding.
Perhaps it's not amisunderstanding, but there's
perhaps a lack of criticaldiscussion with AI around the
environmental impact of it.
And I say this from the contextof you know someone that's
(30:03):
worked in blockchain technologyfor you know, six years now and
in 2021, that was kind of one ofthe big major implications of
blockchain.
People were really concernedabout the environmental impact
of it, as they should have been,because of the way the main
blockchain Ethereum used for theart market at the time was
(30:23):
using a particular way to mineor syndicate transactions using
proof of work.
In essence, that just requiresa huge amount of energy and
power to do that particular wayto mine or syndicate
transactions using uh calledproof of work.
In essence, that just requiresa huge amount of energy and
power to to do that.
Um, so they actually haveswitched to a much less energy
intensive approach called proofof stake, um, but at that time
that was kind of one of the bigconcerns, um and it.
(30:47):
I sort of had assumed that withthe emergence of ai, this kind
of discussion would come upagain, particularly as concerns
around or trying to push for amore green sector is still very
prevalent and yet people arestill much more open to
experimenting with ai um.
So I thought that was quite aninteresting kind of relationship
(31:07):
, and it's not to say that thereis no conversation about
environmental impact, but itdoesn't feel like people are as
aware that when you search anduse AI chatbots, for example,
that is very energy intensiveand actually is having a huge
environmental impact reallyunequally across the globe.
So there's kind of aninteresting kind of colonial
(31:31):
conversation to be had therewhich, yeah, I think needs to be
tapped into a bit more.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
Sort of on the flip side as a benefit not
necessarily less impact on theenvironment.
But this conversation aboutrepatriation and how blockchain
has been used with that you'veworked a bit on that.
Would you share your experience?
Speaker 1 (31:56):
yeah, sure, so, um, yeah, this is such a fascinating
um area, so, um, I would firstof all recommend people, if
they're interested in this, inthis topic, to go have a look at
the arts and antiquitiesblockchain consortium, or the
aabc, which is this initiativethat I'm associate research
fellow at um and I was awardedthat fellowship, uh, from my phd
(32:19):
project, um, and, in particular, this idea of shared
guardianship that I was tryingto develop in relation to nfts,
um, and trying to think aboutthe idea of what would digital
property mean if you take a morerelational approach to it, but
with the addition of blockchainadded into that, so this kind of
decentralized idea.
So, from that project, we hadessentially created a series of
(32:44):
NFTs from the collection, incollaboration with a group of
participants who had chosenthose objects and then they kind
of added their own personalstory about it and then we put
those into the metadata of theNFT and my argument, being based
on the findings of that, wasthat the NFT becomes a
(33:07):
representation of thesedifferent layers of ownership
where, on the one hand, you knowthe physical objects remain in
the museum and, in fact, thedigital, digitized version is
actually something that's openlyavailable.
So you know they don't have aclaim of copyright on it but
they own the token and they ownthat experience and that creates
this really interesting idea ofbeing like well, I need to care
(33:28):
for it and look after itbecause it's my experience, but
also it's something thatrepresents the museum.
So kind of build thatconnection with the, with
something that is also anational museum.
Um, so from that there's been,you know, that kind of was built
around um, kind of there's beensome such interesting research
over the last 10 years arounddigital repatriation or the idea
(33:51):
of kind of when you digitize,uh, cultural artifacts, who
claims ownership of the data?
Um, and kind of creatingindigenous data sovereignty and
what does that really mean?
Um, and the addition ofblockchain is kind of so
fascinating in that way because,as a decentralized technology
(34:14):
and to kind of go back to thenarrative thing again, you know
it is as a, it's got thisideology or something that is
kind of, you know, sort ofbreaking away from centralized
forces such as, say, centralizedculture institutions, and think
, actually, does it kind of addthat stronger layer of claim and
sort of authority and powerthat just simply owning kind of
(34:38):
the files and so forth doesn'tnecessarily do so.
There was actually a reallyinteresting project that took
place I think it was 2022 orpossibly 2021, called the Ballot
NFT.
That took place I think it was2022 or possibly 2021, called
the Ballot NFT.
So that was basically about thissculpture the Ballot sculpture
(35:01):
that is based at the VirginiaFine Arts Museum in the US and,
in essence, these Congoleseplantation workers decided to
take the digitized version ofthat from the website and make a
series of nfts from it, um, andthey did that with basically to
provoke the institution,because they had been in long
going conversation about, uh,trying to repatriate the
(35:21):
physical work, um, and in fact,had, like, not had very little
success.
So they basically were doingthis to fundraise, but really to
kind of create a provocation ofbeing like well, actually, if
you're not going to repatriateit, we're going to take the
digital version under fairdealings and make a stake in
kind of using blockchain, thisidea that, like the digital and
(35:44):
physical like, whilst we thinkabout the digitized version
being a kind of twin and theyrun parallel to each other, in
actual fact, what we see is thatthey continuously shape one
another, even though they mighthave very different lives.
They may exist in two separateworlds, but actually they have a
continuous effect on each otherand I think the ballot NFT is a
(36:07):
really nice example of thatabout how you could use
blockchain to bring a new forceto that, because they were using
this token not to claim thedigital version, but actually to
influence how they can reclaimthe physical objects.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
For the work you've done with this, with the aabc.
Have you had any feedback fromindividuals about this way of of
opening this conversation andand creating this investment, uh
, from individuals in theobjects?
Speaker 1 (36:41):
um, no, not directly.
Um, so a lot of the work, apartfrom the shared guardian
publication that I publishedback in 2021, I haven't directly
been able to publish myreflections on this yet, but it
is something that I'm sort ofhoping to do eventually.
(37:02):
I think it's a conversationthat is important to have, but
also one that is kind ofcontinuing on.
That is important to have, butalso one that is kind of
continuing on, and I think thereis a lot of potential with
thinking about blockchain as aforce to challenge institutions
when it comes to decolonization.
Speaker 2 (37:18):
And you mentioned that for the Aura project that
you guys are preparing anacademic paper.
Where is the project now andwhat should we be looking for
going forward?
Speaker 1 (37:33):
um.
So we've got um we'll have apublication out quite soon um,
openly available with um, ourpartners, digital catapult, uh,
which is actually based on aworkshop we did back in january.
So, um, if you want to learn abit more about the projects,
that should be available soon.
But at the moment what we'vedone is so.
(37:56):
Origin was always meant to beit's unfinished software and we
were always going to think abouthow do we develop this into
something that's much moreengaging and interesting,
because actually, when you goonto the website, you know the
idea really is that you're goingthrough and creating these
collages with someone like melike a facilitator there to kind
of talk you through and discussit.
So we have created a newinteractive called Origin Fables
(38:18):
and it's a collective storywriting sort of interactive
where the idea is that everyonehas to build a backstory about a
particular object, but in doingso, what you're doing is kind
of building a provenance graphand obviously you're being
attributed to it and eachcontribution represents an NFT.
So that has.
(38:39):
We've just done a pilot of itand it went well, which is great
, and we're hopefully going tohave a web application for it
available soon.
So, yeah, I'll be shoutingabout it on LinkedIn before long
, so you can find a link then.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
Are there any recommendations that you might
share with creatives whenthey're approaching attempts to
share their work but alsoprotect it, or just different
anything that you might want toshare with them, or
recommendations you'd have?
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Yeah, definitely.
I think one thing to go have alook at is the CTPA metadata
standard.
It is kind of openly availablefor everyone to use and actually
there's a website calledContent Credentials and in
essence, that allows you toembed this standard into your
(39:33):
digital media and you canstraight away start to document
provenance data.
Uh, you know, into and intoyour work um.
So if you're interested inexploring it, you know it's
there ready and waiting and um.
I know there's been kind of acouple of key kind of platforms
and um.
You know people like the bbcare kind of engaging with it as
(39:54):
well.
So it's, it's one of thosethings I'm sort of I think in
the next couple of years it isgoing to be, you know, hugely
adopted um.
So I would recommend that umand yeah, I think you know it's
just sort of.
It's just one of those issueswith online and sharing is that
you just have to be ready totake those risks, you know.
(40:14):
But, like you know, there was alot of challenges raised in the
interviews about kind of.
But, like you know, there was alot of challenges raised in the
interviews about kind of andconcerns about sharing, but also
there was a lot of positive.
You know positivities about it.
You know people.
You know recognize howimportant it is to be discovered
and actually how so manypeople's business models are
built upon social media, and forgood reason.
(40:36):
You build a really strongcommunity that become your
cheerleaders, your supporters.
So whilst there are these kindof negative points, it's always
important to remember that thereare some real positives to
engaging with social media.
Speaker 3 (40:52):
Can I ask a quick question, frances?
A very boring lawyer's question.
But the people who you talk toin your interviews and generally
in your work, are theygenerally sort of worried about
the law copyright law mainly, Iguess?
Are they worried about it?
Are they?
Are they?
Is it a concern for them?
Is it something they thinkabout in the context of their
(41:13):
work?
And you know they worry aboutinfringing other people's work
and they worry about people youknow infringing their copyright,
stealing their work, and dothey generally kind of know the
rules and want to apply them?
Or it's just not of interestand they just want to do their
work and you know, and they hopethat the technology will help
them, they don't see the law askind of either a friend or a foe
(41:35):
, I guess yeah, it's a goodquestion, emily.
Speaker 1 (41:39):
I think there was a big mix because obviously I was
also spoke with, you know,people who worked at cult
institutions and are well awareof the kind of legal frameworks
that they have are subjected to.
I think, from an individual'sperspective, like it didn't
naturally come up that way.
Copyright law, you know, it wassomething that I quite often
(42:01):
kind of talked a bit more aboutin context of licensing, and
then we sort of spoke about it.
Um, there were obviously a fewkind of people who spoke about
the kind of the theft and thestealing kind of element and
that sense of like that's mine,but they didn't necessarily
directly talk about copyright orindeed no one necessarily like
(42:22):
identified the rights associatedwith that.
But I think is quiteinteresting.
Um, and you know, to bringanother example into this, you
know, coming from like in 2021,with the market boom of nfts, I
found it so fascinating thatthere was a real kind of or lack
of understanding about thedifference between owning an NFT
(42:44):
and copyright, and there was alot of people assuming that they
could do things with their NFTwhen they couldn't, and and
indeed the other end of it aswell creators putting NFTs out
there without any clear creativecommons licensing or so forth.
So I think there is definitely,you know, I think there is a
need for a kind of clearunderstanding of what the legal
(43:05):
frameworks are and what they do.
You know, even just things likewhen I search images on Google,
for example, I find itfascinating that you really have
to go into the search.
You have to be very specificabout, like I want creative
commons licensing.
It's not straight away there,and having that and just having
a bit more awareness for users,I think would just be hugely
beneficial in helping people tounderstand what you can and
(43:27):
cannot do with an image onlineyeah, that's really interesting
for us.
Speaker 3 (43:32):
It's in times very much with what I hear from um
creatives.
I was at a seminar recently andit was about um.
It was about copyright and theexceptions to copyright, so fair
dealing and fair use and whatyou can do with someone else's
copyright work, you know,without getting their consent,
really, and the differentmechanisms and frameworks for
that and how it differs indifferent countries and um, and
(43:53):
there was somebody from a verybig, well-known gallery, from
their legal team, and they saidif we tried to start telling our
artists what to do, we wouldquickly find that our gallery
would just shut down.
It doesn't work like that.
We have to try and find ways ofsort of you know, helping to
(44:18):
protect artists but letting them, you know, find ways to do
their work without sort of youknow always being the break and
saying you know being very sortof risk averse, I guess.
And the guy who was talkingabout a really interesting
artist who does this kind ofcartoon work and takes all these
found images, he said it'soften very surprising um, who
(44:45):
turns out to be, who turns outto be a party who is very, very
sort of protective of theirrights.
So he would use things by youknow massive companies like
warner brothers and um, andactually found out, you know,
just sort of discovered throughhis practice, that they weren't
necessarily the people to beworried about.
It would be somebody who youknow, a kind of a somebody who
(45:07):
had just, I don't know, done afew illustrations for a small
book, who happened to see theirwork used in this artist's work,
who he would get a letter fromand yeah so really really
surprising sort of results ofyou know the approach that he
takes in his art.
Speaker 2 (45:28):
I had a question before and it's kind of bringing
it back to the fore of the poolof people you talked to, where
they were located and, dependingon where you are, the laws that
govern all of what you're doingkind of highlights the need for
(45:49):
protecting yourselfindividually when you are
looking at the way there is noconsistency across the globe
with all of these standards.
Speaker 1 (46:02):
Yeah, completely yeah , and you know I should
emphasize you know a huge amountof portion, I would say, were
probably from the UK.
But what I always findfascinating when I read up on
kind of the latest kind of legalliterature around blockchain
and nfc's is it's so often usoriented.
I feel like I know so muchabout us copyright law, um, and
(46:25):
funny enough, there isn't likeas much about uk and I actually
don't know a great deal from theeuropean perspective.
And again that's changes againand, as you say, stephanie, like
there is, there needs to beperhaps a way to be able to
navigate this really complexlandscape in a way that's
manageable, and particularlywhen you think about at what
point are you searching for acopyright.
(46:46):
You're probably trying to findan image really quickly for a
presentation.
You don't have the time to be,you know finding, you know doing
that detailed research that'squite often required to find the
correct person to speak to,finding their contact details
and emailing them.
There are too many barriersthere for people to actually be
(47:06):
able to perhaps be bothered todo it properly, and I think
that's perhaps even just thebiggest concern that we have
immediately.
Speaker 2 (47:11):
Yeah, and then, taking it one step further, one
of the questions that I hadpresented to you and I would ask
your thoughts now is are thereinjustices that you see with the
emerging technologies or moreability to achieve justice
(47:31):
through emerging technologies?
Is there one or the other thatyou've experienced or see for
the future?
Speaker 1 (47:39):
Yeah, I think this is such an interesting question
and it made me stop and thinkfor a while.
Actually, I was kind of, yes,injustice, where does that fit?
Because, of course, you know, Ithink one of the fascinating
things about studying blockchain, for example, is the rhetoric
around it being democratisingand that it's going to change.
(48:00):
You know, this kind of unequallandscape, particularly from an
arts perspective.
But as you research more andthe kind of as I reflect more
around it, it's realising thatdecentralisation can mean so
many different things todifferent people, and yet they
all come and flock to this, thiskind of technology, and
(48:22):
thinking it's going to be thesolution to their problems, um,
so what I mean by that is like,for one end, um, you know,
blockchain stems from kind of acrypto anarchist and kind of
cyber libertarian kind ofpolitical, um kind of
reflections where people aretrying to use it to basically,
you know, break away fromgovernment bodies controlling
(48:44):
how they exchange with eachother, um, to maintain a sense
of privacy, um.
But then, on the other hand,you have people flocking to it
from a more socialist point ofview and taking on cooperative
principles and taking a moreparticipatory approach to
decentralization and thinkingactually this is going to help
us be more collaborative in howwe approach uh, kind of working
(49:05):
together, um.
And then you also getdecentralization from a creative
point of view, or kind ofthinking about their economic
models and thinking, well,actually I'm going to use this
decentralized tool to break awayfrom those intermediaries that
have been exploiting my recent,you know, or kind of my creative
work, but every kind ofsituation, idea that you know,
(49:39):
yes, you can decentralize, butactually what you gain are
pockets of power, because people, unless there's a structure to
it, people will always gain thesystem.
And then what's worse is thatthen you don't have a democratic
approach to take those peopleaway.
So we see that as a really goodexample of what's happened with
the blockchain art ecosystem.
What we see is just areplication of the winner takes
(50:02):
all approach.
You know people say therearen't any intermediaries, but
actually artists are not early,they're not winners in that
world.
Um, you know, there's justcertainly just new
monopolizations, uh, but in adifferent format.
Some things like art, open seaand so forth.
Speaker 2 (50:20):
Well, thank you so much.
I really appreciate you beinghere and sharing about what
you're doing and I am curious,going forward, are you
continuing with the Aura projectand what other projects might
you be doing, if there's anythat you want to share about,
and what other projects mightyou be doing, if there's any
that you want to share about?
Speaker 1 (50:38):
Yes, so we'll be continuing with the origin work.
So, yeah, the interactive thatI mentioned, we'll be doing
another sort of study aroundthat and sort of developing our
understanding around aura.
So yeah, that's kind of themain project on the horizon for
now.
And yeah, I'm looking forwardto having kind of a physical
interactive that people can kindof the main the main project on
the horizon for now, um, andyeah, I'm looking forward to
(50:58):
having kind of a physicalinteractive that people can kind
of play around with um and anddoing some sort of again just
being back in the field and andsort of speaking with people and
learning um.
It's one of my favorite thingsto do is just to watch people
kind of explore thesetechnologies are there any other
questions?
yeah, I have a question, hi.
Speaker 2 (51:20):
Stephanie um hi toby go right ahead yeah.
Speaker 1 (51:24):
So I just wanted to ask is, or just in the nft space
or is it just the nft space?
I just wanted to ask um, yeah,so actually, whilst it uses nfts
blockchain, we've been quitecareful about not engaging the
NFT space with it, so we've onlybeen in the interview study.
We only engaged artists andcreators who are kind of more I
(51:47):
mean, there were digital artistsbut who did some engaged with
blockchain, but generallyspeaking, they were what we
might see as more thetraditional cultural and
creative industries.
We might see as more thetraditional cultural and
creative industries.
Um, and we were careful of thatbecause we were really
interested to kind of learn moreabout, kind of how, people's
perceptions of the technology.
Um, you know, I think certainlythere's an argument that aura
(52:08):
probably would be readilyadopted within kind of the nft
community, because they alreadyunderstand what nfts do.
So then it's just simply kindof embedding this other, this
metadata standard.
So, yeah, no, it is somethingthat we're trying to engage kind
of the whole of the culture andcreative sector, not just the
NFT community.
Speaker 2 (52:28):
There will be links in the show notes to learn more.
If you were intrigued by thispodcast, it'd be much
appreciated if you could leave arating or review and tag
Warfare of Art and Law podcast.
Until next time, this isStephanie Draughty bringing you
Warfare of Art and Law.
Thank you so much for listeningand remember injustice anywhere
is a threat to justiceeverywhere.
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