Beside team communications, this blog features posts written by community members. If you have a Lift account you can also share your thoughts and ideas by clicking here. Here is a post by music producer and veteran Lifter Fabian Kalter about the recent Hadopi law voted in France.

Hello dear french,
I saw my french familiy today, they told me some law is being passed right now making it possible to
"take the internet away" from illegal downloaders. for what greater good again? Oh yes, copyright.
Damn, thats harsh. and idiotic. And it will probably happen in Germany, too.

Yet again some old men in legislature having their old man friends in media whine over their soupe au poisson that sales keep dropping, evil donwloaders destroy art and their income.
Yet again some old men having no idea whatsoever about the present (and future) state of things.

So, I wont get into details here, its another discussion, but Id like to inspire you thinking about what you can do for the future ( of art, media, monetization of copyrights etc.) not only what the future can do for you.

-make it clear that there is no alternative to embracing new technologies. ever.
-make it clear that old men who have no idea about things need to listen or they fall. always.
-annoy the hell out of every single part of the chain of monetization that annoys both the consumers and the artists, dont stop until it breaks.

simple action plans, make up more and make them work!

1.
-find out when the law actually is applicable.
-get a socialist party member of your parliament to open up a bank account (preferably at the bank that handles the money from the "le chtis" production firm - for media attention.
-get all the french internet users to listen, should be an easy task at this moment.
-get them to download bitttorents the hell out of piratebay for the week before the law is applicable
-make everybody wire 10cents for each illegal download to the aforementioned bank-account, preferrably one payment for each download
-make the sum public
-have it all withdrawn the day the law is applicable.

2.
-find out french artists single ( or album) (needs to be a physical release) that has chart potential
(means that it will be ordered by big cd retails)
-contact him (or dont)
-get him in the boat (or dont)
-get plenty of people to buy the release in big cd retails - have to be enough to make the thing enter the charts
(easy thing in a summer week slow in releases )
-dont unseal the purchased disks
-return in LESS than a WEEKS time
-buy another copy
-repeat.

3.
...

4.
....

have fun!

Web 2.0 meets Marxist (Foucaultian?) economic theory in the latest video from Austrian subversive art collective http://www.monochrom.at/english/

Sorry it is not possible to embed content, so you´ll have to leave the site
http://tv.boingboing.net/2008/02/15/monochroms-marxist-s.html

Go see for yourself. The are pretty good. And smart. And on-topic.
Enjoy!

something I can´t stop thinking about, I hope to find people in the lift comunity that I can discuss this with, learn, share, put in better words... thanks for reading!

1.threshhold of effort

making things hard <--> making things easy
valuate <--> devaluate

How is blogging, social networking and other web2.0 data/contact processing nothing more than the pre-internet communication and where lay the main differences?
I would say that the operations

uttering opinions / gathering opinions
giving information / getting information

have been drastically simplified and put on a larger scale. Looking at the availability of information, this is of great benefit. What about opinions.

I dare to say that most of the opinions uttered in the Internet are completely useless and an absolute waste of time, meaning: They don’t have any value in my personal opinion building. Just about the same as in the real world.

In real world: thanks to certain limitations to my receptors I wont be able to even process the reactions of 5 or more digit numbers of co-humans to stimulus of any kind AND will not reflect on how there might be a connection to me. Good, that’s how decision making and opinion building works as a human being.

Still, it seems that numbers give confidence... Again a thing that has always been there. But this is so dead. THATS the one and only difference. It’s a mass-phenomenon without the dynamics of masses.

My judgment is based on unmappable processes in my brain that happen in mine alone and cannot be translated into very primitive (in terms of complexity) operations of set theory (clicked it/didn´t). Nothing new so far, right?

funny coincidence, I just worked with an interaction design artist, comes out she attended Lift 06 !! If you happen to be in bologna this weekend, please check out the
"artofart´s shake_08" for me!! you can hear and mess with my music in an installation called "MixBox" by the interaction designer Elisa Canducci.
-if you happen NOT to be in bologna this weekend (me neither) , BUT in switzerland, more specific berne (I am) , more specific fri 25th, come party in the "dampfzentrale", the one:shot:orchestra will play and dj for you! Slowly I´m getting excited about Lift 08 !