Rasmus Fleischer
Encyclopedia
Sweden
Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....
historian
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...
, musician
Musician
A musician is an artist who plays a musical instrument. It may or may not be the person's profession. Musicians can be classified by their roles in performing music and writing music.Also....* A person who makes music a profession....
, freelance journalist
Journalist
A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...
and debater. He is currently working as a Ph.D. student at the department of contemporary history at Södertörn University College
Södertörn University College
Södertörn University College is a public university college located in Flemingsberg, which is located in Huddinge Municipality, and the larger area called Södertörn, in Stockholm County, Sweden. In 2009, it had 6,300 full-time-students...
in southern Stockholm.
In 2003, he was one of the founders of Piratbyrån
Piratbyrån
Piratbyrån was a Swedish organization established to support people opposed to current ideas about intellectual property — by freely sharing information and culture...
, the anti-copyright organization that, in turn, once founded BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay
The Pirate Bay
The Pirate Bay is a Swedish website which hosts magnet links and .torrent files, which allow users to share electronic files, including multimedia, computer games and software via BitTorrent...
. Since then he has been lecturing extensively, on subjects related to "the collapse of copyright" and the future of music, at various European conferences addressing art
Art
Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....
and/or new media
New media
New media is a broad term in media studies that emerged in the latter part of the 20th century. For example, new media holds out a possibility of on-demand access to content any time, anywhere, on any digital device, as well as interactive user feedback, creative participation and community...
.
Fleischer's political background is leftist, without any known party affiliation. For some time (before 2004) he worked as a journalist for Arbetaren
Arbetaren
Arbetaren is a Swedish weekly newspaper, founded in 1922. It is published by the anarcho-syndicalist union SAC, Central Organisation of the Workers of Sweden....
, the weekly newspaper of the Central Organisation of the Workers of Sweden
Central Organisation of the Workers of Sweden
Central Organisation of the Workers of Sweden is an anarcho-syndicalist trade union federation in Sweden. Unlike other Swedish unions, SAC organizes people from all occupations, including the unemployed, students, and the retired...
, a syndicalist union. Both then and later, he has demonstrated that he is an independent mind, less conflict avoiding than the average Swede. He has criticized parts of the Swedish political left for tendencies of nationalism and during the 2006 Lebanon War, he criticized Swedish anti-war demonstrators for siding up with Hezbollah supporters, These are controversial ideas among the Swedish political left, and have likely given Fleischer some enemies.
Parts of an interview with Fleischer commenting on copyright
Copyright
Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...
are featured in Steal This Film
Steal This Film
Steal This Film is a film series documenting the movement against intellectual property produced by The League of Noble Peers and released via the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol....
(2006).
During January and February 2008, he stayed as an artist in residence
Artist in residence
Artist-in-residence programs and other residency opportunities allow visiting artists to stay and work so that they may apply singular focus to their art practice....
in Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
, invited by Transforming Freedom, an audio archiving platform based in the Viennese Museumsquartier
Museumsquartier
The Museumsquartier is a 60,000 m² large area in the 7th district of the city of Vienna, Austria; it is the eighth largest cultural area in the world. The Museumsquartier contains Baroque buildings as well as Modern architecture by the architects Laurids and Manfred Ortner . The renovation of the...
to live there while doing mainly theoretical and conceptual work.
When the Swedish engineering weekly Ny Teknik in September 2006 ranked the fifty most influential persons in Swedish IT-industry, he ended up as seventh on the list.
Rasmus Fleischer has also studied at the Royal College of Music
Royal College of Music, Stockholm
The Royal College of Music, Stockholm is the oldest institution of higher education in music in Sweden, founded in 1771 as the conservatory of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music...
and, amongst other musical activities, interpreted medieval music
Medieval music
Medieval music is Western music written during the Middle Ages. This era begins with the fall of the Roman Empire and ends sometime in the early fifteenth century...
in the ensemble Vox Vulgaris.
His essay Det postdigitala manifestet (2009, in Swedish) analyzes how the contemporary culture of digital abundance produces a reevaluation of physical presence, inspired by philosophers like Spinoza and taking examples mainly from the area of music.
His second book, the double volume Boken & Biblioteket", was published in October 2011, also in Swedish. The first book is about books, including discussions about the political economy of publishing, the history of print on demand
Print on demand
Print on demand , sometimes called, in error, publish on demand, is a printing technology and business process in which new copies of a book are not printed until an order has been received...
, the durability of e-books, the aesthetics of audiobooks and robot publishing. The second book discusses the library both in terms of a selective institution, a digital interface and a post-digital space.
Writings
- The future of copyright, essay published by the Cato InstituteCato InstituteThe Cato Institute is a libertarian think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C. It was founded in 1977 by Edward H. Crane, who remains president and CEO, and Charles Koch, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of the conglomerate Koch Industries, Inc., the largest privately held...
in June 2008 - Det postdigitala manifestet (September 2009), an essay in Swedish, available for free download and also sold as a printed book, 82 pages, ISBN 91-973586-9-X
- "Boken & Biblioteket" (2011).