But why can’t we copy homework?

Part Three of Lessig’s _Remix_ is titled “Enabling the Future,” an unfortunate title for those who would take issue with his ideas; for “enabling” has connotations of addiction and co-dependency—notions that are not addressed in this book (to my memory). What I think Lessig wants is a new polyamory between artists, art, consumers, and law. Strange bedfellows for sure. The problem lies deeper than copyright law, as Lessig points out in this last section of his book; deep enough that he resorts to his refrain of “children as criminals” and exaggerates it by saying he might agree with owning handguns, but not with giving them to children (e.g., children can’t understand the law so shouldn’t be expected to use it). Ultimately, he sets up a few suggestions for reform and ends the book with his refrain. Of course artists should be paid, Lessig pronounces, but, copyright should expire after fourteen years if the author does not seek to renew it.

Here is a question that Lessig does not answer about his call for reform: if an author dies, can his family or his estate seek to renew this copyright? Isn’t it great that we can have a Dylan Thomas House (or, Wales can), and Edith Wharton House, an Ernest Hemmingway house with all those polydactyl cats? (http://www.hemingwayhome.com/cats/) The Hemmingway House does not mention its funding on its website, but you can book your wedding there, and they do charge for tours. Still, it takes a certain amount of monetary capital to take care of our cultural capital, and I, for one, think that proceeds from Hemmingway’s books should go to his estate and to his heirs. It seems such a big part of the issue that Lessig is leaving out.

Lessig does seek to make the difference between commercial and non-commercial use clear, but in academia, we do not allow students to plagiarize. In elementary school, too much “help” from parents is frowned upon, and copying someone’s homework is a serious baddy. It is true that the U.S. government should not be tasked with tracking down and prosecuting file-sharers, but clearly, in the time since this book was published (five years ago), the government has not been so concerned with this. Youtube seems concerned with this, as other commercial enterprises do, but from what I understand, the worst that can happen is that the content is removed and then uploaded again under a different pseudonym—a veritable game of foot stomping.

In a quick internet search for Hemmingway House and funding, I came across this lawsuit that involves conversations and letters that quote Hemmingway and his wife: http://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/23_NY2d_341.htm. It’s a bit of a wandering away from Lessig, but I feel he is and we are done with the issue. As quoted from section 12 of this brief (?),

The indispensable right of the press to report on what people have done, or on what has happened to them or on what they have said in public. (see Time, Inc. v. Hill, 385 U.S. 374; Curtis Pub. Co. v. Butts, 388 U.S. 130; Associated Press v. Walker, 388 U.S. 130) does not necessarily imply an unbounded freedom to publish whatever they may have said in private conversation, any more than it implies a freedom to copy and publish what people may have put down in private writings.

But copyright law says we must ask to have these things removed, rather than the other way around. It does seem the least cumbersome way for the government to be involved in this complicated, perhaps dead relationship.

Amazon, Innovation, and Selling What's Free

Lessig names Amazon.com an internet success story for a few reasons. First, they brought the convenience of web-based shopping to consumers seemingly fed up with shopping in superstores (that internet companies displaced these big-box superstores is very interesting, by the way, and could be a whole blog post in itself, but I'll refrain...) via archiving, shipping to consumers' doorsteps, and offering competitive prices. Second, they host a pseudo-opensource interface, allowing consumers to develop on their platform, in many ways securing free/cheap labor while simultaneously making consumers feel empowered and a part of the opensource/hacking community. What Lessig doesn't mention (at least up until the point I stopped reading to post this) is something that Paul Heald recently discovered in his research. You can find the article on the Atlantic's website.













Heald's research reveals that Amazon.com sells more new books that have passed into the public domain than those that are still protected by copyright.

Yes, you read this correctly.

Amazon sells twice as many books published in the 1850s than the 1950s, despite conventional beliefs and scare tactics perpetuated by media publishers worldwide. Heald's findings speak for themselves: copyright protection, at least in book sales, has no impact on sales. In fact, data seems to indicate that the opposite is true. I suspect a range of reasons exist for data, because surely we should not assume that copyright law has a direct and causal impact on consumers' choices. Yet we might be able to tease this apart, at least speculatively. Among a range of probable factors likely include a) the perceived importance or "classic" status of books before a certain point in time, and b) a reduced price to the consumer of works published from the public domain. The latter of these is most likely in my estimation, and echoes Lessig's observations regarding the "business of business," which in this case might remind us of the big-box superstores displaced by Amazon. That is, selling high volumes at "low, low prices" is a model that has put a Wal-Mart in most communities in the United States.

What is most interesting to me is that Amazon (and booksellers worldwide) has found a way to change the industry's business model significantly. Not only are they seemingly unplagued by piracy, but they have found a way to dupe consumers into paying for free information. I can just as easily go online and print my own legal copy of Shakespeare's work as order a costly volume on Amazon. It's quite fascinating, actually. They've really done an outstanding job of hiding the notion of the public domain from consumers.

What, then, are we left with? What questions might we ask as scholars concerned with copyright and intellectual property? Here are my questions:

1. How can we frame the "war on piracy" based on this new information from Heald?
2. Are Heald's findings more revealing of copyright law or simple economics?
3. How do you think this data would hold up across various media, especially music and film?

Lessig & Wikipedia

Lessig spent part of this section focusing on the somewhat taboo topic of Wikipedia. Lessig used Wikipedia as his “paradigm” example of a sharing economy, which is a relationship of give and take in which no money is involved, note this is a watered down, simplified version of what a sharing economy is. As we are all well aware of, Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia. Anyone can access and read pages on Wikipedia, the content of the pages range wide and far in subject matter and anyone can edit a page, as long as they have a Wikipedia account. Lessig uses the Virginia Tech massacre as an example showing how quickly information can be organized and uploaded on Wikipedia. Lessig explains that over 2,000 editors worked on the page and more than 750,000 people read it in the first couple of days (161). And this is an event that occurred 5 years ago, imagine what the numbers would be for a current event in 2012.  Lessig claims that the “contributors are motivated not by money, but by the fun and joy in what they do” (162).

However herein lays the problem that academic community has identified with Wikipedia. As I said earlier, anyone can be a contributor on Wikipedia, which is both a great innovation and has huge potential to be a real issue. People who dislike the topic or person that the Wikipedia page is about can go in and create false information. For example, a few years ago, around the time Barack Obama was elected president, someone edited his Wikipedia page so that all that was written on it was the “N” word several times. There have been some changes to the editing process on Wikipedia since this incident, I do not know the details, however I have noticed that when a breaking news event happens, for example, the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden, Wikipedia has a disclaimer at the top of the page saying that it is a current and breaking news story so content will be changing frequently. They also “lock” pages. For example, when there is a big movie premiering, the first few days that it has been in theaters, Wikipedia locks the page so that people cannot add content, to avoid spoiling the plot. I’m sure there are more formal rules and regulations, but these are the ones that I am aware of.

I think Lessig should have addressed this type of issue in the book, maybe even offered a way to remedy the situation. I do want to clarify that I do not think Wikipedia is devoid of any value. In fact, I love Wikipedia; I probably visit it almost every day. I think the concept of everyone creating a collective encyclopedia is amazing. I raised these issues because as English instructors, we tell our students time and again that Wikipedia is not a reliable source. The majority of the time I read a Wikipedia page it is correct information, but the fact remains that anyone can edit a page and apparently some of these editors have nothing better to do than mess with online encyclopedia pages. So this is where my questions for the week come in.

In what ways can we alter Wikipedia so that only reliable and true information appears on pages?

I’m struggling to form a question for this, but I feel that there is a good quality group assignment that could be assigned in an English 120 class (or others, adapting to the specific class’ needs) in creating a Wikipedia page. What guidelines would be included and what things would we want emphasized?

**Just a side note - after reading this section in Lessig, I was curious, so I got on Wikipedia, clicked to a random page and then clicked on the “view history” tab. Here you can get statistics about the page as well as see who contributed to the page. You can also view the contributors’ pages, it sometimes provides a list of what pages they have contributed and sometimes they list their interests and little tidbits about them.**

           

Changing Attitudes and Sustaining Economies

Lessig's examination of economy types--commercial, sharing, and hybrid--offers an interesting starting point to discuss the potential of the digital culture market. He problematizes the popular notion that business models must function in the general ways that they have for decades--prosecuting “free-riders,” avoiding disclosure, essentially keeping the product and practices on lockdown. Lessig also identifies a few solutions--generally described as hybrid economies--to these current problems. In discussing the potential of these solutions, he notes how market incentives alone will not be enough to transform these economies, and he suggests that policy changes are necessary as well. However, in creating this binary, of the economic and the political, he overlooks the influential sociocultural sphere that is often resistant, or at least claims to be, to such transformations—and a good example of this exists in current debates over the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.

Of the many examples Lessig has cited as evidence for the possibility of new IP policy, generally of the willingness to share creative work freely among a community, he has thus far failed to acknowledge the intense opposition that this would elicit among many consumers in the U.S. (not just corporations). Whether or not this opposition is sincere in its condemnation of commons, collectives, or social services, as we’ve seen with recent health care legislature, there is a sizable portion of American culture intensely opposed to these types of things (though we know that media piracy knows no political boundaries). For some of these groups, the collective, common, and social are dirty words, too closely associated with Collectivism! Communism! Socialism!

The recent public discussions surrounding health care (no doubt heavily influenced by corporate interests, perhaps most by corporate media) show how nasty this opposition can be. During recent Republican debates, crowds applauded the idea of denying health care to dying citizens instead of sharing the burden of that cost. On principle. A recently proposed federal budget demonstrates this belief as well, cutting social services and the shared burden of those services seemingly out of respect for the principles of individual responsibility and economic freedom. Whether or not these protests acknowledge the idea of decades of corporate welfare is a moot point, because they are influential and they are used to dictate and defend government policy. In fact, many public figures on the left, most notably Van Jones, have argued that the failures of the first two years of President Obama's administration were the result of failures in motivating/activiting the people, and governing from above. For those seeking to change attitudes, popular beliefs and established cultural norms are major hurdles.

Furthermore, much of the popular culture consumed and shared (or stolen, given your perspective) contributes to this culture. Rap has become an avenue for many in the U.S. to wealth and leisurely living, or escape from poverty and menial labor, and not coincidentally, much popular rap glorifies these things (30 seconds or so should suffice):

                                               Fat Joe, feat. Lil Wayne "Make it Rain"

The same can be said about much of popular culture. Whether it glorifies the consumption of drugs, people (generally women), or everything, the appeals of popular culture often draw from the desires for easy living and conspicuous consumption. In a sense, much of the artistic output of our culture perpetuates notions of ownership, individualism, and consumption, and this creates something of a self-fulfilling prophecy concerning American attitudes toward culture and those who contribute to it. Many of them would and do say, do we really want to put Fat Joe and Lil Wayne in a position where they might not make it rain?

Add to this dilemma the extravagant culture that has become the norm among the culture industry—mansions, private jets, $25 million dollar salaries, $250 million dollar movie budgets, and so on—and current discussions of the American economy that ask “When will we return to pre-recession levels?” without considering for a moment that those pre-recession levels and practices were likely the very unsustainable cause of that recession--as many economists have noted...before being dismissed as socialists--and you can clearly see how much work needs to be done to reshape popular beliefs concerning IP in America.

So, to resist my inner Adorno and continue this rant, I’ll stop and ask my question:

What do you think is the most effective  way to go about enacting the types of changes in IP that Lessig seems poised to suggest (either in terms of influence, immediacy, or length of time)? In the legislature? In the courtrooms? In the classrooms? In the public commons, as a grassroots effort? All of them? Or something else?  

Remix, part two

In Part Two of Remix by Lessig, he discusses the hybrid economy and the positive effects such an economy could have on the internet in terms of copyright and remixing. He discusses three types: community spaces, with the most familiar probably being Craigslist; collaboration spaces, with Yahoo! Answers as an example; and finally communities, such as the Creative commons, which Lessig assisted in creating and popularizing.

One thing that Lessig discussed in this chapter, which I found interesting, was “sharecropping.” This refers to corporations forcing the remixer to give up all rights to his or her creativity since that person has only remixed the work and supposedly not created anything new. I think such an idea is detrimental to culture and harmful to creativity. If we encourage thinking such as this, we are still allowing the “experts” in RO culture to control cultural production by placing their stamps on anything that is created, even remixes.

Legitimizing the remix is an important step for us to take as a society and culture. First of all, we all do it on some level. I allow students to create remixes in class for final projects, if they are interested. When I taught 120 here and 101 at Mankato, I had many students create remixes for their final projects. Many of these were creative and I don’t see why those students should not have any rights to the work they accomplished.

In our society where the internet and its spaces are truly king, we must recognize the changing face of creativity. I also think remixes have been around for generations, as I think literature has had its share of remixed material. Collaboration itself has made up a large part of literary culture, though literary culture does not always like to admit to having a high level of collaboration. (Think of the writer’s workshop, for example, and how groups of writers have often worked together, just as how any other creative group networks and shares ideas.)

Questions:

·      Lessig at one point says one of the goals of his book is to inspire for more creativity (130). In what ways is he doing this besides through the obvious way of seeing remix as a form of creativity? 

Lessig's Distance from Remix

My first foray into remix culture actually occurred a couple years ago in Dr. Andrew Mara’s English 275 class. One unit required that we remix the Phaedrus. I’ll be honest and say that I am perhaps one of the most uncreative people when it comes to arts and entertainment stuff. I have neither created a mixed tape nor written, much less thought, of placing myself in a novel or movie. Needless to say, Doc’s assignment was difficult for me. Since that experience, remix culture has come front and center in the nation’s spotlight via the SOPA/PIPA debacle.

The widespread panning by internet lovers everywhere led to the shelving of the bills SOPA/PIPA, for now at least. Had those bills not gotten the attention they did, however, I don't think Lessig's Remix would have packed the punch it did when I read it. It is interesting to note, however, that Lessig was largely absent in the debate. He was called out by Jeff Roberts as to why on paidcontent.org: http://m.paidcontent.org/article/419-why-is-lawrence-lessig-mia-in-the-great-sopa-piracy-debate/ . Lessig responded via his blog: http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/13119510676/me-mia-on-the-sopa-soap-opera. Lessig’s response in essence stems from the fact that he feels there are deeper levels of corruption happening at the governmental level that require fixing before what he deems more surface level though still important things, like copyright and intellectual property, can be changed.

To go back to my English 275 class for a moment, part of the reason I think I had so much difficulty in Doc’s class is because I am too enveloped in the copyright culture of the West. My high school English teachers were sticklers about citation. I am an avid reader and vividly recall reading about the fallout of Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby" illegally sampling from Queen and Bowie's "Under Pressure." These and other experiences have stuck with me through my time in higher education. It is therefore difficult, prior to the SOPA/PIPA hullabaloo at least, to remove myself from my historical and geographic context, again not being the creative type, and consider how to make changes of the scale Lessig talks about.

Now that the impact of what these laws would have done to the internet if they had been passed into law has been made clear by way of the myriad websites that either blacked out or ran their content as if under SOPA/PIPA regulations, Lessig's argument that we are turning our children into criminals for what they naturally, and harmlessly, do anyway can be expanded to include people who run some of the most popular and useful derivative and apropriation websites on the internet.

Question for class: Do you think the SOPA/PIPA bills getting the (largely negative) exposure they did has made the vast swath of America more invested in changing Copyright/IP laws.

Remix presents a conflict between creative expression and copyright law.  The right to create and incorporate work that has already been produced is an issue that concerns both executives involved in receiving financial gains, and the artists who wish to protect their art. 

John Philip Sousa argued that being an inactive listener would crush creative pursuits by individuals.  He believed that by simply listening, or becoming a part of the "Read-Only" (RO) culture, the practice of any art-form would dissipate.  Without closely studying the intricacies of musical technique, people would lose out of touch with creative expression.  Sousa's argument proclaims that in order to be creative, one must be active and not passive.  This statement remains to be true, but one can also participate in actively creating by first submerging oneself into the art of another.  Inspiration and influence must be triggered by some force, and it may come in the form of another work.  Many artists must first look to other sources for their creative ideas.  For example, Martin Cooper, the director of research and development at Motorola, credited the Star Trek communicator as his inspiration for the first cell-phone.  In another example, physicist Leo Szilard read H.G. Wells' The World Set Free, in which he first received the notion about atomic energy and to solve the problem of creating a nuclear chain reaction.  This eventually led him to push for arms control and the peaceful use of nuclear power after WWII.  These examples prove that listening/watching is not a passive act.  Lessig too argues the same point, and states that both being a listener and an actor involve acts of creativity. 

However, in order to add to an original work, the technologies of the 20th century prevented individuals from contributing in such a manner.  Individuals could only read,watch or listen to a work, but not add to it.  The Internet has stepped in and changed this model of creativity.  This can be seen through the work of Girl Talk.  Also, the work of Candice Breitz in which she had several of John Lennon's fans sing his songs is another example of how technology has changed the way creative ventures are pursued.  However, this work in particular was questioned by some, and required her to get special permission.  In a similar fashion, Eric Whitacre, the creator of the digital choir produced an original work in which he pulled in 185 different voices to sing an original piece that he wrote.  This required individuals to send in videos of themselves singing in various octaves of the song Whitacre wrote.  Whitacre then assembled these voices together and created the song.  The difference between Breitz and Whitacre is that Whitacre wrote an original piece, whereas Breitz used the work of an established artist.  Whitacre's practice of combining different voices to create a single song is an excellent example of inc operating technology and talent.  All of the participants were a part of one choir.  This example provides a stark contrast with the work of Girl Talk and other artists who use the content of other talent.  Whitacre put together various voices into one song, much like what mash-up artists do, but his own original work. 

Question:

Should amateurs who wish to participate in mash-up culture be held accountable if they choose to produce work of their own, even if they don't gain any financial benefits?       

   

Singing in the Reign of Copyright Law

The first part of Remix focuses on how we can regain today a culture of our past—amateur interactivity and creativity with expressive works, what Lessig characterizes as the Read-Write (“RW”) culture, meaning that the individual can do more than just read the content—the person can also “write” to it (28-29). Remix is one form of writing to content in which other people’s works are transformed in a new creation, but RW culture encompasses amateur or user interactivity with content more broadly.

Lessig uses the example of John Philip Sousa’s outcry against phonographs in 1906 as an example of our past culture that valued amateur engagement with creative works. Sousa believed that the ability of machines to play songs for people simply to listen to would dampen people’s singing of those songs and learning of music. As Sousa decried, “The child becomes indifferent to practice, for when music can be heard in the homes without the labor of study and close application, and without the slow process of acquiring a technique, it will be simply a question of time when the amateur disappears entirely” (26).

So what do kids singing songs have to do with remix today? According to Lessig, the connection is that, in both cases, “the RW creativity does not compete with or weaken the market for the creative work that gets remixed” or sung. Both activities of singing “the songs of the day” and remixing other people’s work involve acts of creativity for the person engaged in the endeavor that can complement the original work.

One might find it strange that the tech-savvy Lessig gives so much prominence to the old Sousa example throughout his book. To some, Sousa may sound like a Luddite, which Lessig is not. Lessig does not question the basic premise of Sousa’s attack against record players for allegedly dampening singing and the learning of music. The argument raises an empirical question that probably is unanswerable today for lack of data, but one might surmise that many people sang along with the record player (as they do today with the radio and karaoke machines) and with a greater number of songs at their disposal. And some people may have been inspired to become musicians or write music after listening to music played on the “infernal machines” that they might not have otherwise been able to hear. It is not so clear that Sousa himself would have embraced today’s remixing of music by DJs like Girl Talk.

Yet Lessig remixes the Sousa example. What Sousa feared was the amateur’s loss of active engagement with musical works: instead of singing or performing them, amateurs can just listen to them. That passive state of receiving content like an inert receptacle (read: couch potato) is what Lessig calls the Read-Only (“RO”) culture. People can only read the work, but not add to it. For much of the twentieth century, the technologies of content dissemination (phonograph, radio, tape recorder, TV, CD) really only allowed RO culture. In other words, the machines made people passive. But the Internet changed everything. It makes being passive passé.

Thus, the lesson of Sousa is still relevant today. As Lessig notes, “ironically for Mr. Sousa, [the] new infernal machines . . . will enable an RW culture again” and foster the kind of amateur interactivity with culture that Sousa lauded (33). Lessig picks up on a key part of Sousa’s testimony before Congress in which he said, “I have never known that it was unlawful to get together and sing” (32). The testimony was a not- so subtle rebuke of expansive views of the public performance right to reach even “singing in the streets” by the public (32). Even Sousa, a famous composer of copyrighted works, recognized the need for limits to copyright, so as not to stop such amateur activity and engagement.

In reading this section, I could not help but be reminded of the somewhat recent example of the  chorus of fifth graders from PS22 in Staten Island. Although the story of the PS22 chorus became famous after Lessig’s book, it is exactly what Lessig’s talking about.

The PS22 kids are led by Gregg Breinberg. Breinberg started teaching the kids pop songs, both oldies and recent hits. In 2006, he began posting on YouTube a few videos of the chorus’s rehearsals at school. He also blogged about the chorus on his own blog, with videos of the kids embedded. Then, at the end of 2008, the PS22 chorus had its “YouTube moment.” Gossip blogger Perez Hilton saw videos of the kids’ performances of Tori Amos’ songs and liked them so much he started blogging about them. Soon, Amos herself heard about them, and arranged to hear the chorus in person. Upon hearing the kids perform one of her songs live, Amos was so moved that she was brought to tears. Said Amos, “The fact that the children are so versatile—I didn’t expect this level of ability from a children’s choir and was really blown away, touched, thrilled and inspired all at once.” Stevie Nicks, of Fleetwood Mac, had a similar emotional experience hearing the kids perform her “Landslide” on video, as did Suzanne Vega in watching the chorus perform her “Language.” The accolades from the artists soon brought the kids huge media attention, appearances on Nightline and Good Morning America, and performances for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and U.S. Senator Charles Schumer. If you recall, this phenomenon by the end of September 2009, the PS22 chorus videos generated over 9 million views on YouTube.

The sheer joy the kids’ singing has brought to people and even to the artists of the music themselves would lead one to believe that the kids’ activity is all legal under copyright law. The only problem: it’s not, or at least it’s not clear it is legal. Technically, the playing of the music video on YouTube and any performances to the public or at a public place would constitute public performances of the song, which would require permission (whether express or implied) from the copyright holders unless it is fair use. Creating copies of the video would also implicate the right to copy. Although there is a clear exemption for singing “in a classroom or similar place devoted to instruction” for learning’s sake, the publicly available videos of the kids’ singing on YouTube fall outside this classroom exemption.

My question for the class is: So is it fair use? How would Lessig have used this example if the book were written after these events?

The story of the hurricane

History repeats itself. That’s the one thing I remember from high school history (that and “Et, tu, Brute?”). In RIP: a remix manifesto, filmmaker Bret Gaylor puts his authorial spin on the ethics of sampling in music. It’s a little hard from the get-go for me to accept what I’m fed: when he asks who the author of a song is, and it’s clearly Michael Jackson’s voice I hear, and he says “it’s not the Jackson Five,” I feel a little bit of resentment. But then, I’m a huge Michael Jackson fan. I wore his “Thriller” t-shirt to my second-grade class picture. So is sampling in music ethical? An author in the movie (is it Lessig?) tells us that “the answer will always be ‘it depends,’ and it depends on who it is and how upset they are.” But I don’t think that’s really the issue for the “kids,” as Lessig puts it. I think it’s simply an issue of cool factor.

Lessig tells us that an entire generation has been criminalized. He tells us all the kids are doing it: creating their own spliced songs and movies via they’re computer. But for this to be true, three other things have to be true: 1) that the kids have the technology, 2) that they know how to use it, and 3) that a cooler counter-movement doesn’t exist. For let’s face it: I know one person who works with samples (you know who you are). I still have students who need help logging into Blackboard and Campus Connection and navigating their way through those systems. And the “my computer messed up my homework” excuse? Well it’s used so much that maybe they are all criminals. But I don’t think so. I think that technology is simply a different form of hierarchy. Quite obviously, I am on a pretty low end of this hierarchy. The kids don’t all have the technology and they don’t all know how to use it. Or is it less of a hierarchy and more of a pendulum? Interestingly, Gaylor points out that Girl Talk’s parents were “back-to-the-earth” types. I bet a lot more of us know people that are unplugging than are plugging in, at the moment. This all says nothing about the music; how much knowledge and practice (20,000 hours, right?) it takes to become proficient at something could be the same for a cello or a laptop as far as I know.

Lessig mentions Bob Dylan several times in part one of Remix. I kept waiting for him to talk about Dylan’s history in music, and how he was the criminal. Oh wait—everyone was a criminal. Because Dylan was a folk artist at first. Folk songs are traditional; passed on to keep the old stories alive, and a lot of these stories were about underdogs who were unfairly prosecuted. Sounds familiar. Gaylor and Lessig are saying the same thing about remix culture. And the scenes from the movie would seem to support that. When Dylan started putting his own spin on folk songs, people were upset. You don’t mess with a person’s story. You don’t rewrite their words or change their melodies. When Dylan’s technology changed and he started playing the electric guitar, people were more than upset. Dylan, in effect, remixed and then morphed into his own artist. Though he made those concerned with tradition mad, his cool factor went up. So it doesn’t matter so much after all who gets upset; as long as someone is upsetting tradition, they are participants in the trajectory of the conversation of culture, and, god help us all if that ever ends.

Questions:

If the author is the collector, why does Gaylor put credits at the end of his movie?

This movie is highly stylized and politicized. What does that do in the Burkean Parlor?

Thoughts on Remix

In a sequence of serendipitous timing, I found myself reading Lawrence Lessig’s Remix over the course of NDSU’s Red River Graduate Conference, where I presented a paper that addressed what I now think can be framed as a genre of remix: literary tattoos, wherein readers take selected passages from literary works and incorporate them into their bodies via the act of tattooing.  Over the course of my presentation I mentioned some authors who have gone on record expressing their concern—and, in some cases, outright disapproval—of fans taking too much creative leeway with their texts.  An author I mentioned specifically was George RR Martin, creator of the Song of Ice and Fire series, currently taking HBO by storm.

Martin is an interesting man and a talented writer, with an active website and an extensive record of ‘Con appearances.  He is NOT a fan of fanficiton: a genre consisting of fans (book fans, TV show fans, movies, anime, etc) using the universe and characters of a published author to write their own stories.  Martin speaks to fanfiction directly in the Q & A section of his website:

Q:  I want to be a writer. Can you give me any advice?

A:  The most important thing for any aspiring writer, I think, is to read! And not just the sort of thing you're trying to write, be that fantasy, SF, comic books, whatever. You need to read everything. Read fiction, non-fiction, magazines, newspapers. Read history, historical fiction, biography. Read mystery novels, fantasy, SF, horror, mainstream, literary classics, erotica, adventure, satire. Every writer has something to teach you, for good or ill. (And yes, you can learn from bad books as well as good ones -- what not to do)

And write. Write every day, even if it is only a page or two. The more you write, the better you'll get. But don't write in my universe, or Tolkien's, or the Marvel universe, or the Star Trek universe, or any other borrowed background. Every writer needs to learn to create his own characters, worlds, and settings. Using someone else's world is the lazy way out. If you don't exercise those "literary muscles," you'll never develop them.

While reading Remix, I immediately thought of Martin.  Lessig talks about Souza’s tendency to “romanticizing culture” (27), about his fear that “people would be less connected to, and hence practiced in, creating that culture” (27) with the advent of the phonograph and copy-able music.  Similarly, lawyer Charles Sims is quoted with regards to his feelings on “original creativity” :

“I can’t say strongly enough that I think what Larry is really fundamentally focused on…[-]this parasitic reuse[-] is such a terrible diversion of young people’s talent…I think that if you have young film people you should be encouraging them to make their films and not to simply spend all of their time diddling around with footage that other people have made at great expense, to create stuff that’s not very interesting.  There’s a fundamental failure of imagination…” (91). 

Lessig’s point with regards to Souza is that the man was correct to fear the loss of RW culture, but wrong to assume that technology will always be the force keeping it down.  Remix, the artform of RW culture, is possible only through the use of digital technology, which will change us from a RO consuming culture to one capable of creating anew.  Lessig’s point with regards to Sims and others like him—I am going to include Martin in that category—is that they erroneously believe “original creativity” does NOT include the act of remixing.  This has obvious ties to the authorship definitions we’ve studied all semester, particularly the romantic, single-author, creative-genius-working-in-solitude view, which many argue does not truly exist.  

So for that reason, I find it interesting to compare Martin’s attitude toward fanficiton with his own work.  For example, here’s an article from The New Yorker on the origins of Martin’s series:

“In 1996, he published a novel of seven hundred pages, “A Game of Thrones,” the first volume of a projected trilogy called “A Song of Ice and Fire.” The series chronicles the struggle for power among several aristocratic families in the Seven Kingdoms, an imaginary medieval nation. In a genre crowded with stale variations on what Joseph Campbell called “the hero’s journey,” with plots distilled from ancient legends, Martin took his inspiration from history instead of from mythology; he based his tale, loosely, on the Wars of the Roses, the bloody dynastic struggles in medieval England. Compared with most epic fantasy fiction, Martin’s story contained relatively little magic, and it felt dangerous, lusty, and real.”

And in this interview, Martin himself speaks to the influence of history and historical fiction on his work:

“It's definitely a fantasy novel. It has dragons and so forth in it. It does have the feel of historical fiction. I love history. I wanted to get a lot of sense of history in A Storm of Swords and the other books and some of the feel of historical fiction. Historical fiction is wonderful to read, but the only problem I have with historical fiction is that I know too much history. So I always know what's going to happen. So you're reading a novel about the War of the Roses and no matter how good or bad it is, you know who is going to win. With this sort of thing you can take people by surprise. It reads like historical fiction, it feels like historical fiction but you don't know how it's going to come out.”

So for Martin, taking elements of history like the War of the Roses (Lancaster = Lannister; York = Stark) does not violate the principles of original creativity—it’s not “lazy,” in his mind.  But his work is read-only, and his fans must not attempt to interact with it by writing.  I suppose we are all fortunate that nobody’s yet found a way to make history RO.    

Don’t get me wrong—I love Martin’s work.  But I do not support the distinctions he is drawing.  One would think he would welcome fan interest in his work, particularly given the lengthy waits between novels.  And, as Lessig asks: what is remix hurting?  Fanfiction is never going to take money out of Martin’s pocket, nor do I buy the idea of readers abandoning his work in favor of a fanfiction-only diet.  And I disagree with the idea that a young writer exploring Martin’s world via fanfiction is not exercising a literary muscle.        

Question For Class:

Do you find yourself more aligned with Lessing’s “legalize it” take on remix, or Martin’s “it’s lazy” perspective?

A Confusing Contemplation on the Ethics of Authorship

As we've been reading, the implications of our understanding and construction of the Author are far-reaching and potentially severe. Jaszi (who has a sweet DJ name) examines just a few of these implications in his discussion of Jeff Koons and his legal battles and offers an ironic view of Foucault's observation that the author arose in part as a way to punish author-criminals--the irony being that authors are now being punished for taking/borrowing from authors (that is the justification by prosecutors, i.e. publishers, anyway). Like Koons, other writers/Authors/authors have run into similar problems; but unlike Koons, I know more about others' stories.

In the 1960s, Lenny Bruce started to combine an interest in free-flow, improv jazz--something he'd picked up from the Beat poets--with observational, stand-up comedy. Comedy, as most of you know, tends to exploit audiences' fears and taboos for the sake of eliciting laughter. This has just been how comedy has worked for a long time. Bruce didn't invent that aspect of comedy--see Rabelais, Chaucer, etc. hundreds of years before; or the recent discovery of what many are calling the world's oldest Yo Mama joke (it involves her sexual activities and it comes from Babylon 1500 B.C.).

However, because Bruce's setups were longer and more complex than the older style of insults or setup-punchline, and because he fused those older comedic tropes of sexuality, death, and the body with profane language, he was labeled a "sick" comic, arrested multiple times, charged with obscenity and indecency, and spent most of his later years as a broke alcoholic in and out of court.

George Carlin, considered a Bruce protege, also had his nights in jail and days in court--and a response to one of his acts made its way to the Supreme Court and ultimately established the primetime family hour, i.e. no sex, profanity, etc. when kids might be watching/listening.

Another writer, Salman Rushdie, went into hiding in the late-1980s because a death sentence was issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in response to one of his novels, The Satanic Verses.

A few years ago, an Indian politician offered an $11 million bounty on the Danish cartoonist who depicted Muhammad in a position he didn't appreciate.

A few weeks ago, American media reported the deaths of Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik, two journalists covering the violence in Syria.

I could go on, but the point I'm trying to make is that writing and Authorship are very corporeal--as LeFevre (still and also a sweet name) has pointed out, describing writing as a social act. It does not merely take place in the textual record. And I think that this needs to be taken into account when we examine and redefine our constructs of postmodern authorship. So, my question is this: If writers live to write; brave death, injury, and exile to write; and sometimes experience death, injury, and exile because of what they write, how should this be considered when we define postmodern authorship? Do these dangers change how we view the Author-text connection, or how we assign the benefits of authorship (including ownership) to those who write or author?

conjunction junction: language as posthuman object

In this week's reading from LeFevre, we are introduced to some Kantian philosophy as related to language. Unfortunately for you, Kant and Latour have some interesting intersections that I cannot resist exploring here. But first, let's revisit LeFevre's buildup. She asks us to consider the eternal question: what is language? A reflection, distortion, metaphor, medium, obstruction, tool, or reality itself? A pretty ambitious question, one that thinkers have been trying to answer for some time. And perhaps there is no answer that satisfactorily answers that question.

Yet Kant, and later Latour, come as close to answering that question as possible, in my estimation. As LeFevre notes, Kant makes some valuable observations regarding the relationships between humans and objects, notably that it is the relationship between the two that is important, not the anthropocentric point of view that even considers whether or not the fabled tree falling in the woods makes sound. Kant argued that it would be "an absurdity if we conceded no things in themselves or set up our experience as the only possible mode of knowing things" (107). In other words, the tree does make a sound. Of course it does, because the world is not centered around and dependent upon a human's presence.

Yet meaning--and indeed language--is still made by humans, but it is made via a series of a priori categories that comprise our epistemologies and ontologies, and lead us to evaluate the world in a system of shared symbolic meaning. Ideas, then, become objects in themselves, and, as Bronowski notes, "the world is not a fixed, solid array of objects...it shifts under our gaze, it interacts with us..." (109-110). So we are interacting with the world and making our own meaning, yet that meaning is dynamic and dependent on the networks of objects/actors in which we find ourselves entangled.

So what is language? At least according to Kant and Latour, we might frame language as objects. In an elementary way, this makes sense. We teach language as a series of building blocks (words) that do different things when used in different ways, right?

So can we talk about language as a Latourian actor? This is complex, of course, because I would have to prove that language can be separated from the user. But language has been disembodied since Gutenberg, and it is increasingly disembodied as our words and language systems are uploaded, downloaded, remixed, and hacked in digital spaces.

Q: If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

Q: What is language's relationship to reality? With whom do you most closely align yourself?

Q: If we consider (even for just a moment) that language is an actant on the same ontological footing as its users, how can we reframe the idea of authorship?

Interaction in Invention

As I continued reading Lefevre, there was one section that really sparked my interest. The section “Inventing by Interaction” discusses the importance of interaction as a means of creation. Lefevre talks about how this method has been useful for composition teachers to teach writing, she brings in Carl Rogers’ and his notion of “client-centered therapy” and how that relates to the reader helping the writer realize his or her potential as well as the writing’s. Lefevre states further on, “the writer is the principal discoverer, with others serving as catalysts that make discovery possible,” I found it very interesting that Lefevre uses the exact same word that Eliot uses to describe the function of an author (68). There is a clear difference in their purposes for using the term, but Lefevre’s use, that the reader is a catalyst for the writer to realize how he or she can make a piece of writing better, and Eliot’s, that the author is the catalyst for reworking old ideas in a new way, create a nice balance for each other. If the writer and reader can both be catalysts, what other roles can they both take on?

            Immediately in this section of her book, Lefevre describes interactive invention as,

“a writer interacts with others (teachers, peers, colleagues, editors) in the course of writing and revising. Generally this type of relationship, one person (writer, teacher, boss) has the right to make final decisions about which ideas are to be kept or changed or omitted. The principal role of others is to help the individual to generate and evaluate ideas and information” (68).

As soon as I read this, I started thinking about how this translates to gaming culture. A gamer interacts not with other people, but the environment created by other people. Further, the gamer has the “final decision” to invent, not writing but what the meaning of the surroundings and the overall game through their interaction with it. The game environment created by others gives the gamer the context from which the gamer then creates the meaning. Interactivity is a key component to consider in gaming studies and this concept situated in the realm of composition helps to explain to those not familiar with gaming the importance and implications interaction has.

Questions:

On 76, Lefevre mentions to concept of the salon or parlor, she does so to demonstrate places where regular and ongoing contact with others can take place so ideas and concepts don’t “die or disappear” (75). Given our previous discussion about the parlor, how does this idea change, if at all, our thoughts towards the concept?

Lefevre includes the idea of synectics which is, “a systematic procedure intended to enhance creativity in small groups” (71). One key component to synectics working is that criticism is absent from the group discussions so that members do not need to censor their ideas for fear of judgment. How would it be possible and would it be beneficial to bring this into our classrooms for our students?

Interpreter and Repurposer ---Jaszi

Peter Jaszi in “Is There Such a Thing as Postmodern Copyright?” looks back at a 1992 essay he wrote where he discussed the Rogers Vs. Koons court case to look at how copyright views have changed, again using a Koons case as one of his examples. In his 1992 article, Jaszi articulated the reason Koons lost his case was because he wasn’t seen as an author, but looking back Jaszi feels that this isn’t the case as much as views on copyright have changed.  For instance, in the second case (Koons v. Blanche) Koons now uses the defense that the way he uses images are “transformative” in nature. Koons paints himself as an “interpreter and repurposer of existing content” (419). Jazsi articulates how it was through these arguments that Koons won his second case. And though it may be easy to argue this happened because of a postmodern view of copyright, Jazsi feels that copyright isn’t old enough to be labeled postmodern and furthermore our culture has changed in how it views the “romantic author.”

My first experience with the notion of copyright occurred because of the Livejournal blogging community. When Livejournal first started, it was a site that many writers and visual artists used to post their work (late 90s, early 2000s). I remember one instance where a LJ “friend” wrote about how we all needed to make our posts private as she had found out a high school student had “stolen” a few photos she had taken and “repurposed” them for a class project (she obviously did not use the word repurposed.) I remember her also discussing how we all should copyright our works to make sure our art was protected. (As a high school student, I felt this was incredibly unrealistic for me, much less not particularly worth it. Now I realize that Livejournal itself may have had some fine print about postings made to their site, just like how Facebook today does.)

At first, I was with the angry poster. How awful to steal something from someone and not give credit. But when I thought about it more, I felt a bit differently. For one, I like art in part because art can be shared and repurposed, like Any Warhol did and like Girl Talk does now. (I think most people know where things come from and if they don’t they will eventually find out. Plus, that “original” art was probably repurposed from somebody else. At the same time, I also find it hard to leave the romantic author notion where credit should be given where it is due.) Secondly, I kind of commended the high school student for going to LJ to find a piece of work he or she could use since I felt there were some talented individuals there. It certainly was a smarter thing to do considering the situation. I also wondered how this artist had found out about her work being “stolen” as she never explained it to us. She just wrote a rant about ownership and art and accused some nameless high school student of “stealing from her.” (I admit that I felt bad for that student. I certainly wouldn't have felt so great after reading that if I were the student who had "stolen" the photos from her.) 

I think that it is a positive thing that we are having discussions about copyright and authorship, especially considering the internet. I remember liking the internet immediately because of the sharing aspect of it and the fact I could talk to people without having to go outside and talk with them. (I was very shy.) At the same time, it is hard for me, as a writer, to leave that author construct behind because even though I know I repurpose and transform my work from other models, I am also the one who sits down to write. 

Questions:

1.                    When did you first learn about copyright and what did it mean to you at the time? Basically, how did you understand it?

2.                    Do you think there are other reasons why Koons won the second case that Jaszi discusses?