Download - Medienwissenschaft

Bill Gates acquires the digital pictorial rights of the European museum culture: the
real museum keeps the right of ownership, but not the copyright. In Germany, the notion
of the art original is based on the privileged position of intellectual ownership above all
other fundamental rights and is therefore conservative. In continental Europe, the personal
copyright remains intact and irrevocable: the curse of the archive (since it expires only
after 50 years, or goes to the heirs). "Authorship is the foundation of culture", so composer
Wolfgang Rihm at the 41st CISAC World Congress in Berlin; 18 This foundation is not
yet seen in the context of media archaeology, but of the arts. In the USA, however, the
author's copyright terminates at the moment of publication; whilst the Anglo-Saxon copyright
(since 1710: introduced to the USA in 1790) is oriented on the exploitation interests
of the holder (transmitter) of intellectual property:
I hereby assign [...] with full title guarantee copyright in the Contribution and in any
abstract prepared by me to accompany the Contribution for the full legal term of copyright
and any renewals, extensions and revivals thereof [...] in all formats and through
any media of communication. 19
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has decided to apply the copyright
of literary works to software and mathematical formulae as well 20 - a victory for
old-world European morals over calculation? The copyright makes no difference between
analogue and digital, and remains wedded to the occidental concept of the work of art;
so the media culture is lacking in this respect, the awareness of the difference made by
the computer, e.g. for the notion of a picture: The fractal picture compression produces
again and again a new original or, rather: a digital? Beyond the legal definition, the copyright
thus turns into a function of the law of hardware. There remains the question of
interim storage: is it ruled by a latent copyright, or a virtual copyright?
Rosalind Krauss has described registration, cataloguing and the depot as the basic
parameters of 20th century art. At the end of this century, however, the trend is from storage
(back?) to transmission: instead of depot and storage there is the (seemingly) immediate
availability of music, text and image on demand. The standards MP3 for the fractal
compression of images, and MPG for audio data mean that the problem is no longer
with storage capacity but with transmission: what gets lost are nuances in colour and
sound that are outside the human perceptive faculty and can therefore be dispensed
with, but it is precisely these nuances that represent the signature, the mark of the original.
Who has the power to define the original in digital space: aesthetic, legal or technological
agencies? And can the musical product of random-generating programs - as in
the case of the Decca record Music from Mathematics - still be regarded as intellectual
property? "To the art enthusiast who is not conversant with the matter, it appears impossible
to express poetry, music and painting in figures." 21 ; once expressed in numbers,
however, the original turns into algorithms and becomes measurable in telecommunications
terms - for example in Max Bense's attempt at a cybernetic "aesthetics and programming"
in the IBM-Nachrichten.
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