COPYRIGHTS AND WRONGS?

CITIZENSHIP, INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY & USING THE CREATIVE COMMONSImage credit: englishsnow [CC-BY-SA], http://www.flickr.com/photos/tylerburrus/3662141080/

AGENDA

Talk & Examples (55 Min)

Break (10min)

Demos And Tools (55 Min)

WHY TALK ABOUT THIS?

Know The Cultural Context Of Copyright/left

Know The History

Find Where You Are In All Of It

AUTO-TUNE THE NEWS

group of friends utilizing legally obtained news footage to produce satirical take on US news

everyday practice of youtube - remixing or answering other youtube content

This practice has long historical precedent

what's new about it is the scale of distribution/participation and the form of disembodiment/alienation in that participation

Video credit: The Gregory Brothers [CC-PD], http://www.youtube.com/user/schmoyoho#p/a/u/0/LnoD3NUux3M

THE GREY ALBUM

this vid represents technologies bringing people together (dialectical w/alienating practice)

Jay-Z made his tracks freely available, Beatles did not. Beatles are one of the worst examples of the excesses of locking down music. (outside the law; cultural critique)

commentary on race, hiphop, sampling/remixing

sampling/remixing as done by the Beatles - like Disney, they draw from the cultural commons, but don't give much back

Video credit: DJ Dangermouse [CC-PD], http://waxy.org/random/video/grey_video.mov . However, reproduce at your own peril, as portions of this video may violate prior rights of sampled work of other rightsholders.

GIMME THE MERMAID

Negativland - band/pirate radio phreaks, started in the 1980s, culture-jammers (a term they invented) : re-use of media as a direct cultural critique (of capitalism, copyright, etc)

their critique is embodied in their practice - as with the Little Mermaid, where calls from a Disney lawyer are integrated into the composition along with images from the film. another rich commentary on the problems (and gendering) of copyright and capital

Video credit: Negativland [CC-PD?], http://www.illegal-art.org/video/popups/gimme.html . However, reproduce at your own peril, as portions of this video may violate prior rights of sampled work of other rightsholders.

OVERVIEW - COPYRIGHT/COPYLEFT SPECTRUM

copyright

fair use/dealing

creative commons

GNU/copyleft

cultural anarchism

PREINDUSTRIAL COPYRIGHT

originally a perpetual, exclusive right

the Statute of Anne limited this right to 14 years from the date of a work's publication.

Scottish booksellers argued that the Statute did not extinguish the perpetual rights in common law.

In 1774, the House of Lords rejected this argument, affirming copyright’s limited term (14 years) to preserve a public domain (repository of cultural history) (Lessig 2004:93).

In 1790 a similar law was adopted in the Unites States. Canada's first Copyright Act came much later, in 1921.

INDUSTRIAL COPYRIGHT

The 19th Century saw the evolution of copyright law generally in step with industrialization

enshrining of mechanical processes in international copyright law: The Berne Convention of 1886 rights as being "fixed" in some physical medium, rather than in the works themselves.

20TH CENTURY

growth of royalty collection societies during this period marked the separation of the idea of the work from a fixed medium (mechanical vs performance rights)

broadcast media demanded new models for remuneration for creators and creative businesses (to pay performance royalties, they required advertising $)

new (re)production tech (movie studios, broadcast infrastructure) increasingly designed to preclude mass participation in culture

20TH CENTURY - 2ND HALF

growth in advertising, profit motivations for cultural creation

Beginning in 1962, the call for an extension in the term of copyright began (since extended 11 times)

Meanwhile - growing demand for consumer-grade recording technologies, such as analog tape, 16 and 8 mm camera (and later video) formats - disruptive of elite modes of creation

AND NOW?

successful lobbying by groups representing media corporations has curtailed our right to legally participate in our culture

DMCA (1998) - the rights to modify the very technologies we use to listen, watch, or read media are prohibited by law

current Copyright ‘reform’ in Canada - hotly politicized

but digital media threaten the corporate media regime more than prior tech (open code, componentization of computer equipment)

FAIR USE/DEALING

fair use in the US/fair dealing in Canada - differences:

no category for parody in Canada

covers “research and private study” in Canada (& generally int he U.S. too) - must meet certain criteria

centerforsocialmedia.org/fair_use/C25/

under siege by Bill C61/other copyright ‘reform’ initiatives

CULTURAL ANARCHISM

historical relationship of anarchist politics and avant gardism (Weir 1997)

from Surrealism to Situationism to Sampling to Negativland, the breaking of dominant institutional codes of intellectual property isn’t anything new, and isn’t going away any time soon

GNU/COPYLEFT

Image credit: Aurelio A. Heckert [FAL 1.3], http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en

CREATIVE COMMONS

http://creativecommons.org/license/

Image credits (both): Marcus McCallion [CC-BY-SA 3.0], http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/copyleft_graphic_icons . Incorporated into this animation by Jean Hébert.

Image credits (both): Marcus McCallion [CC-BY-SA 3.0], http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/copyleft_graphic_icons . Incorporated into this animation by Jean Hébert.

~break~

walkthroughs and interactive demos

Creative Commons: Get a License!

ccmixter(open source media repository and community)

opensourcecinema(remixing media resources online)

jamglue(remixing online audio in real-time)

This slideshow is...

Kate Milberry mmilberr@sfu.caJean Hébert jeanhebert@sfu.ca