Ecstacy of Influence, Jonathan Letham, Harper's, February 2007

A brilliant piece in Harper's from February 2007 by Brooklyn author Jonathan Lethem.

I must admit I had mixed feelings as I was reading this. It's packed with so many of the ideas that have occupied my thoughts for the past couple years that I couldn't help but feel, well scooped. This folly gave way to glee when I realised that Lethem had performed a feat of spectacular plagiarism, one so cleverly constructed that the structure itself drives home the author's point. Many Kudos.

The full document with layouts and letters is available on the Harper's website.


I'm going to add links and annotations to this document overtime...

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The Ecstasy of Influence

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. . . .

—John Donne


LOVE AND THEFT

Consider this tale:
a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an amour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a preteen, whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator—marked by her forever—remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story: Lolita.

The author of the story I've described, Heinz von Lichberg, published his tale of Lolita in 1916, forty years before Vladimir Nabokov's novel. Lichberg later became a prominent journalist in the Nazi era, and his youthful works faded from view. Did Nabokov, who remained in Berlin until 1937, adopt Lichberg's tale consciously? Or did the earlier tale exist for Nabokov as a hidden, unacknowledged memory? The history of literature is not without examples of this phenomenon, called cryptomnesia. Another hypothesis is that Nabokov, knowing Lichberg's tale perfectly well, had set himself to that art of quotation that Thomas Mann, himself a master of it, called “higher cribbing.” Literature has always been a crucible in which familiar themes are continually recast. Little of what we admire in Nabokov's Lolita is to be found in its predecessor; the former is in no way deducible from the latter. Still: did Nabokov consciously borrow and quote?

“When you live outside the law, you have to eliminate dishonesty.” The line comes from Don Siegel's 1958 film noir, The Lineup, written by Stirling Silliphant. The film still haunts revival houses, likely thanks to Eli Wallach's blazing portrayal of a sociopathic hit man and to Siegel's long, sturdy auteurist career. Yet what were those words worth—to Siegel, or Silliphant, or their audience—in 1958? And again: what was the line worth when Bob Dylan heard it (presumably in some Greenwich Village repertory cinema), cleaned it up a little, and inserted it into “Absolutely Sweet Marie”? What are they worth now, to the culture at large?

Appropriation has always played a key role in Dylan's music. The songwriter has grabbed not only from a panoply of vintage Hollywood films but from Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Junichi Saga's Confessions of a Yakuza. He also nabbed the title of Eric Lott's study of minstrelsy for his 2001 album Love and Theft. One imagines Dylan liked the general resonance of the title, in which emotional misdemeanors stalk the sweetness of love, as they do so often in Dylan's songs. Lott's title is, of course, itself a riff on Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel, which famously identifies the literary motif of the interdependence of a white man and a dark man, like Huck and Jim or Ishmael and Queequeg—a series of nested references to Dylan's own appropriating, minstrel-boy self. Dylan's art offers a paradox: while it famously urges us not to look back, it also encodes a knowledge of past sources that might otherwise have little home in contemporary culture, like the Civil War poetry of the Confederate bard Henry Timrod, resuscitated in lyrics on Dylan's newest record, Modern Times. Dylan's originality and his appropriations are as one.

The same might be said of all art. I realized this forcefully when one day I went looking for the John Donne passage quoted above. I know the lines, I confess, not from a college course but from the movie version of 84, Charing Cross Road with Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft. I checked out 84, Charing Cross Road from the library in the hope of finding the Donne passage, but it wasn't in the book. It's alluded to in the play that was adapted from the book, but it isn't reprinted. So I rented the movie again, and there was the passage, read in voice-over by Anthony Hopkins but without attribution. Unfortunately, the line was also abridged so that, when I finally turned to the Web, I found myself searching for the line “all mankind is of one volume” instead of “all mankind is of one author, and is one volume.”

My Internet search was initially no more successful than my library search. I had thought that summoning books from the vasty deep was a matter of a few keystrokes, but when I visited the website of the Yale library, I found that most of its books don't yet exist as computer text. As a last-ditch effort I searched the seemingly more obscure phrase “every chapter must be so translated.” The passage I wanted finally came to me, as it turns out, not as part of a scholarly library collection but simply because someone who loves Donne had posted it on his homepage. The lines I sought were from Meditation 17 in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, which happens to be the most famous thing Donne ever wrote, containing as it does the line “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” My search had led me from a movie to a book to a play to a website and back to a book. Then again, those words may be as famous as they are only because Hemingway lifted them for his book title.

Literature has been in a plundered, fragmentary state for a long time. When I was thirteen I purchased an anthology of Beat writing. Immediately, and to my very great excitement, I discovered one William S. Burroughs, author of something called Naked Lunch, excerpted there in all its coruscating brilliance. Burroughs was then as radical a literary man as the world had to offer. Nothing, in all my experience of literature since, has ever had as strong an effect on my sense of the sheer possibilities of writing. Later, attempting to understand this impact, I discovered that Burroughs had incorporated snippets of other writers' texts into his work, an action I knew my teachers would have called plagiarism. Some of these borrowings had been lifted from American science fiction of the Forties and Fifties, adding a secondary shock of recognition for me. By then I knew that this “cut-up method,” as Burroughs called it, was central to whatever he thought he was doing, and that he quite literally believed it to be akin to magic. When he wrote about his process, the hairs on my neck stood up, so palpable was the excitement. Burroughs was interrogating the universe with scissors and a paste pot, and the least imitative of authors was no plagiarist at all.
CONTAMINATION ANXIETY

In 1941, on his front porch, Muddy Waters recorded a song for the folklorist Alan Lomax. After singing the song, which he told Lomax was entitled “Country Blues,” Waters described how he came to write it. “I made it on about the eighth of October '38,” Waters said. “I was fixin' a puncture on a car. I had been mistreated by a girl. I just felt blue, and the song fell into my mind and it come to me just like that and I started singing.” Then Lomax, who knew of the Robert Johnson recording called “Walkin' Blues,” asked Waters if there were any other songs that used the same tune. “There's been some blues played like that,” Waters replied. “This song comes from the cotton field and a boy once put a record out—Robert Johnson. He put it out as named ‘Walkin' Blues.' I heard the tune before I heard it on the record. I learned it from Son House.” In nearly one breath, Waters offers five accounts: his own active authorship: he “made it” on a specific date. Then the “passive” explanation: “it come to me just like that.” After Lomax raises the question of influence, Waters, without shame, misgivings, or trepidation, says that he heard a version by Johnson, but that his mentor, Son House, taught it to him. In the middle of that complex genealogy, Waters declares that “this song comes from the cotton field.”

Blues and jazz musicians have long been enabled by a kind of “open source” culture, in which pre-existing melodic fragments and larger musical frameworks are freely reworked. Technology has only multiplied the possibilities; musicians have gained the power to duplicate sounds literally rather than simply approximate them through allusion. In Seventies Jamaica, King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry deconstructed recorded music, using astonishingly primitive pre-digital hardware, creating what they called “versions.” The recombinant nature of their means of production quickly spread to DJs in New York and London. Today an endless, gloriously impure, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of music.

Visual, sound, and text collage—which for many centuries were relatively fugitive traditions (a cento here, a folk pastiche there)—became explosively central to a series of movements in the twentieth century: futurism, cubism, Dada, musique concrète, situationism, pop art, and appropriationism. In fact, collage, the common denominator in that list, might be called the art form of the twentieth century, never mind the twenty-first. But forget, for the moment, chronologies, schools, or even centuries. As examples accumulate—Igor Stravinsky's music and Daniel Johnston's, Francis Bacon's paintings and Henry Darger's, the novels of the Oulipo group and of Hannah Crafts (the author who pillaged Dickens's Bleak House to write The Bondwoman's Narrative), as well as cherished texts that become troubling to their admirers after the discovery of their “plagiarized” elements, like Richard Condon's novels or Martin Luther King Jr.'s sermons—it becomes apparent that appropriation, mimicry, quotation, allusion, and sublimated collaboration consist of a kind of sine qua non of the creative act, cutting across all forms and genres in the realm of cultural production.

In a courtroom scene from The Simpsons that has since entered into the television canon, an argument over the ownership of the animated characters Itchy and Scratchy rapidly escalates into an existential debate on the very nature of cartoons. “Animation is built on plagiarism!” declares the show's hot-tempered cartoon-producer-within-a-cartoon, Roger Meyers Jr. “You take away our right to steal ideas, where are they going to come from?” If nostalgic cartoonists had never borrowed from Fritz the Cat, there would be no Ren & Stimpy Show; without the Rankin/Bass and Charlie Brown Christmas specials, there would be no South Park; and without The Flintstones—more or less The Honeymooners in cartoon loincloths—The Simpsons would cease to exist. If those don't strike you as essential losses, then consider the remarkable series of “plagiarisms” that links Ovid's “Pyramus and Thisbe” with Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story, or Shakespeare's description of Cleopatra, copied nearly verbatim from Plutarch's life of Mark Antony and also later nicked by T. S. Eliot for The Waste Land. If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism.

Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing.

What happens when an allusion goes unrecognized? A closer look at The Waste Land may help make this point. The body of Eliot's poem is a vertiginous mélange of quotation, allusion, and “original” writing. When Eliot alludes to Edmund Spenser's “Prothalamion” with the line “Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song,” what of readers to whom the poem, never one of Spenser's most popular, is unfamiliar? (Indeed, the Spenser is now known largely because of Eliot's use of it.) Two responses are possible: grant the line to Eliot, or later discover the source and understand the line as plagiarism. Eliot evidenced no small anxiety about these matters; the notes he so carefully added to The Waste Land can be read as a symptom of modernism's contamination anxiety. Taken from this angle, what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?
SURROUNDED BY SIGNS

The surrealists believed that objects in the world possess a certain but unspecifiable intensity that had been dulled by everyday use and utility. They meant to reanimate this dormant intensity, to bring their minds once again into close contact with the matter that made up their world. André Breton's maxim “Beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table” is an expression of the belief that simply placing objects in an unexpected context reinvigorates their mysterious qualities.

This “crisis” the surrealists identified was being simultaneously diagnosed by others. Martin Heidegger held that the essence of modernity was found in a certain technological orientation he called “enframing.” This tendency encourages us to see the objects in our world only in terms of how they can serve us or be used by us. The task he identified was to find ways to resituate ourselves vis-à-vis these “objects,” so that we may see them as “things” pulled into relief against the ground of their functionality. Heidegger believed that art had the great potential to reveal the “thingness” of objects.

The surrealists understood that photography and cinema could carry out this reanimating process automatically; the process of framing objects in a lens was often enough to create the charge they sought. Describing the effect, Walter Benjamin drew a comparison between the photographic apparatus and Freud's psychoanalytic methods. Just as Freud's theories “isolated and made analyzable things which had heretofore floated along unnoticed in the broad stream of perception,” the photographic apparatus focuses on “hidden details of familiar objects,” revealing “entirely new structural formations of the subject.”

It's worth noting, then, that early in the history of photography a series of judicial decisions could well have changed the course of that art: courts were asked whether the photographer, amateur or professional, required permission before he could capture and print an image. Was the photographer stealing from the person or building whose photograph he shot, pirating something of private and certifiable value? Those early decisions went in favor of the pirates. Just as Walt Disney could take inspiration from Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Jr., the Brothers Grimm, or the existence of real mice, the photographer should be free to capture an image without compensating the source. The world that meets our eye through the lens of a camera was judged to be, with minor exceptions, a sort of public commons, where a cat may look at a king.

Novelists may glance at the stuff of the world too, but we sometimes get called to task for it. For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside. In a graduate workshop I briefly passed through, a certain gray eminence tried to convince us that a literary story should always eschew “any feature which serves to date it” because “serious fiction must be Timeless.” When we protested that, in his own well-known work, characters moved about electrically lit rooms, drove cars, and spoke not Anglo-Saxon but postwar English—and further, that fiction he'd himself ratified as great, such as Dickens, was liberally strewn with innately topical, commercial, and timebound references—he impatiently amended his proscription to those explicit references that would date a story in the “frivolous Now.” When pressed, he said of course he meant the “trendy mass-popular-media” reference. Here, transgenerational discourse broke down.

I was born in 1964; I grew up watching Captain Kangaroo, moon landings, zillions of TV ads, the Banana Splits, M*A*S*H, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. I was born with words in my mouth—“Band-Aid,” “Q-tip,” “Xerox”—object-names as fixed and eternal in my logosphere as “taxicab” and “toothbrush.” The world is a home littered with pop-culture products and their emblems. I also came of age swamped by parodies that stood for originals yet mysterious to me—I knew Monkees before Beatles, Belmondo before Bogart, and “remember” the movie Summer of '42 from a Mad magazine satire, though I've still never seen the film itself. I'm not alone in having been born backward into an incoherent realm of texts, products, and images, the commercial and cultural environment with which we've both supplemented and blotted out our natural world. I can no more claim it as “mine” than the sidewalks and forests of the world, yet I do dwell in it, and for me to stand a chance as either artist or citizen, I'd probably better be permitted to name it.

Consider Walker Percy's The Moviegoer:

Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.

Today, when we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a YouTube rebroadcast of the Berlin Wall's fall—i.e., when damn near everything presents itself as familiar—it's not a surprise that some of today's most ambitious art is going about trying to make the familiar strange. In so doing, in reimagining what human life might truly be like over there across the chasms of illusion, mediation, demographics, marketing, imago, and appearance, artists are paradoxically trying to restore what's taken for “real” to three whole dimensions, to reconstruct a univocally round world out of disparate streams of flat sights.

Whatever charge of tastelessness or trademark violation may be attached to the artistic appropriation of the media environment in which we swim, the alternative—to flinch, or tiptoe away into some ivory tower of irrelevance—is far worse. We're surrounded by signs; our imperative is to ignore none of them.
USEMONOPOLY

The idea that culture can be property—intellectual property—is used to justify everything from attempts to force the Girl Scouts to pay royalties for singing songs around campfires to the infringement suit brought by the estate of Margaret Mitchell against the publishers of Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone. Corporations like Celera Genomics have filed for patents for human genes, while the Recording Industry Association of America has sued music downloaders for copyright infringement, reaching out-of-court settlements for thousands of dollars with defendants as young as twelve. ASCAP bleeds fees from shop owners who play background music in their stores; students and scholars are shamed from placing texts facedown on photocopy machines. At the same time, copyright is revered by most established writers and artists as a birthright and bulwark, the source of nurture for their infinitely fragile practices in a rapacious world. Plagiarism and piracy, after all, are the monsters we working artists are taught to dread, as they roam the woods surrounding our tiny preserves of regard and remuneration.

A time is marked not so much by ideas that are argued about as by ideas that are taken for granted. The character of an era hangs upon what needs no defense. In this regard, few of us question the contemporary construction of copyright. It is taken as a law, both in the sense of a universally recognizable moral absolute, like the law against murder, and as naturally inherent in our world, like the law of gravity. In fact, it is neither. Rather, copyright is an ongoing social negotiation, tenuously forged, endlessly revised, and imperfect in its every incarnation.

Thomas Jefferson, for one, considered copyright a necessary evil: he favored providing just enough incentive to create, nothing more, and thereafter allowing ideas to flow freely, as nature intended. His conception of copyright was enshrined in the Constitution, which gives Congress the authority to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” This was a balancing act between creators and society as a whole; second comers might do a much better job than the originator with the original idea.

But Jefferson's vision has not fared well, has in fact been steadily eroded by those who view the culture as a market in which everything of value should be owned by someone or other. The distinctive feature of modern American copyright law is its almost limitless bloating—its expansion in both scope and duration. With no registration requirement, every creative act in a tangible medium is now subject to copyright protection: your email to your child or your child's finger painting, both are automatically protected. The first Congress to grant copyright gave authors an initial term of fourteen years, which could be renewed for another fourteen if the author still lived. The current term is the life of the author plus seventy years. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that each time Mickey Mouse is about to fall into the public domain, the mouse's copyright term is extended.

Even as the law becomes more restrictive, technology is exposing those restrictions as bizarre and arbitrary. When old laws fixed on reproduction as the compensable (or actionable) unit, it wasn't because there was anything fundamentally invasive of an author's rights in the making of a copy. Rather it was because copies were once easy to find and count, so they made a useful benchmark for deciding when an owner's rights had been invaded. In the contemporary world, though, the act of “copying” is in no meaningful sense equivalent to an infringement—we make a copy every time we accept an emailed text, or send or forward one—and is impossible anymore to regulate or even describe.

At the movies, my entertainment is sometimes lately preceded by a dire trailer, produced by the lobbying group called the Motion Picture Association of America, in which the purchasing of a bootleg copy of a Hollywood film is compared to the theft of a car or a handbag—and, as the bullying supertitles remind us, “You wouldn't steal a handbag!” This conflation forms an incitement to quit thinking. If I were to tell you that pirating DVDs or downloading music is in no way different from loaning a friend a book, my own arguments would be as ethically bankrupt as the MPAA's. The truth lies somewhere in the vast gray area between these two overstated positions. For a car or a handbag, once stolen, no longer is available to its owner, while the appropriation of an article of “intellectual property” leaves the original untouched. As Jefferson wrote, “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

Yet industries of cultural capital, who profit not from creating but from distributing, see the sale of culture as a zero-sum game. The piano-roll publishers fear the record companies, who fear the cassette-tape manufacturers, who fear the online vendors, who fear whoever else is next in line to profit most quickly from the intangible and infinitely reproducible fruits of an artist's labor. It has been the same in every industry and with every technological innovation. Jack Valenti, speaking for the MPAA: “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.”

Thinking clearly sometimes requires unbraiding our language. The word “copyright” may eventually seem as dubious in its embedded purposes as “family values,” “globalization,” and, sure, “intellectual property.” Copyright is a “right” in no absolute sense; it is a government-granted monopoly on the use of creative results. So let's try calling it that—not a right but a monopoly on use, a “usemonopoly”—and then consider how the rapacious expansion of monopoly rights has always been counter to the public interest, no matter if it is Andrew Carnegie controlling the price of steel or Walt Disney managing the fate of his mouse. Whether the monopolizing beneficiary is a living artist or some artist's heirs or some corporation's shareholders, the loser is the community, including living artists who might make splendid use of a healthy public domain.
THE BEAUTY OF SECOND USE

A few years ago someone brought me a strange gift, purchased at MoMA's downtown design store: a copy of my own first novel, Gun, With Occasional Music, expertly cut into the contours of a pistol. The object was the work of Robert The, an artist whose specialty is the reincarnation of everyday materials. I regard my first book as an old friend, one who never fails to remind me of the spirit with which I entered into this game of art and commerce—that to be allowed to insert the materials of my imagination onto the shelves of bookstores and into the minds of readers (if only a handful) was a wild privilege. I was paid $6,000 for three years of writing, but at the time I'd have happily published the results for nothing. Now my old friend had come home in a new form, one I was unlikely to have imagined for it myself. The gun-book wasn't readable, exactly, but I couldn't take offense at that. The fertile spirit of stray connection this appropriated object conveyed back to me—the strange beauty of its second use—was a reward for being a published writer I could never have fathomed in advance. And the world makes room for both my novel and Robert The's gun-book. There's no need to choose between the two.

In the first life of creative property, if the creator is lucky, the content is sold. After the commercial life has ended, our tradition supports a second life as well. A newspaper is delivered to a doorstep, and the next day wraps fish or builds an archive. Most books fall out of print after one year, yet even within that period they can be sold in used bookstores and stored in libraries, quoted in reviews, parodied in magazines, described in conversations, and plundered for costumes for kids to wear on Halloween. The demarcation between various possible uses is beautifully graded and hard to define, the more so as artifacts distill into and repercuss through the realm of culture into which they've been entered, the more so as they engage the receptive minds for whom they were presumably intended.

Active reading is an impertinent raid on the literary preserve. Readers are like nomads, poaching their way across fields they do not own—artists are no more able to control the imaginations of their audiences than the culture industry is able to control second uses of its artifacts. In the children's classic The Velveteen Rabbit, the old Skin Horse offers the Rabbit a lecture on the practice of textual poaching. The value of a new toy lies not it its material qualities (not “having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle”), the Skin Horse explains, but rather in how the toy is used. “Real isn't how you are made. . . . It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.” The Rabbit is fearful, recognizing that consumer goods don't become “real” without being actively reworked: “Does it hurt?” Reassuring him, the Skin Horse says: “It doesn't happen all at once. . . . You become. It takes a long time. . . . Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby.” Seen from the perspective of the toymaker, the Velveteen Rabbit's loose joints and missing eyes represent vandalism, signs of misuse and rough treatment; for others, these are marks of its loving use.

Artists and their surrogates who fall into the trap of seeking recompense for every possible second use end up attacking their own best audience members for the crime of exalting and enshrining their work. The Recording Industry Association of America prosecuting their own record-buying public makes as little sense as the novelists who bristle at autographing used copies of their books for collectors. And artists, or their heirs, who fall into the trap of attacking the collagists and satirists and digital samplers of their work are attacking the next generation of creators for the crime of being influenced, for the crime of responding with the same mixture of intoxication, resentment, lust, and glee that characterizes all artistic successors. By doing so they make the world smaller, betraying what seems to me the primary motivation for participating in the world of culture in the first place: to make the world larger.
SOURCE HYPOCRISY, OR, DISNIAL

The Walt Disney Company has drawn an astonishing catalogue from the work of others: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi, Song of the South, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Robin Hood, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, Mulan, Sleeping Beauty, The Sword in the Stone, The Jungle Book, and, alas, Treasure Planet, a legacy of cultural sampling that Shakespeare, or De La Soul, could get behind. Yet Disney's protectorate of lobbyists has policed the resulting cache of cultural materials as vigilantly as if it were Fort Knox—threatening legal action, for instance, against the artist Dennis Oppenheim for the use of Disney characters in a sculpture, and prohibiting the scholar Holly Crawford from using any Disney-related images—including artwork by Lichtenstein, Warhol, Oldenburg, and others—in her monograph Attached to the Mouse: Disney and Contemporary Art.

This peculiar and specific act—the enclosure of commonwealth culture for the benefit of a sole or corporate owner—is close kin to what could be called imperial plagiarism, the free use of Third World or “primitive” artworks and styles by more privileged (and better-paid) artists. Think of Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, or some of the albums of Paul Simon or David Byrne: even without violating copyright, those creators have sometimes come in for a certain skepticism when the extent of their outsourcing became evident. And, as when Led Zeppelin found themselves sued for back royalties by the bluesman Willie Dixon, the act can occasionally be an expensive one. To live outside the law, you must be honest: perhaps it was this, in part, that spurred David Byrne and Brian Eno to recently launch a “remix” website, where anyone can download easily disassembled versions of two songs from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, an album reliant on vernacular speech sampled from a host of sources. Perhaps it also explains why Bob Dylan has never refused a request for a sample.

Kenneth Koch once said, “I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.” It was a charming confession, and a rare one. For so many artists, the act of creativity is intended as a Napoleonic imposition of one's uniqueness upon the universe—après moi le déluge of copycats! And for every James Joyce or Woody Guthrie or Martin Luther King Jr., or Walt Disney, who gathered a constellation of voices in his work, there may seem to be some corporation or literary estate eager to stopper the bottle: cultural debts flow in, but they don't flow out. We might call this tendency “source hypocrisy.” Or we could name it after the most pernicious source hypocrites of all time: Disnial.
YOU CAN'T STEAL A GIFT

My reader may, understandably, be on the verge of crying, “Communist!” A large, diverse society cannot survive without property; a large, diverse, and modern society cannot flourish without some form of intellectual property. But it takes little reflection to grasp that there is ample value that the term “property” doesn't capture. And works of art exist simultaneously in two economies, a market economy and a gift economy.

The cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange is that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people, whereas the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection. I go into a hardware store, pay the man for a hacksaw blade, and walk out. I may never see him again. The disconnectedness is, in fact, a virtue of the commodity mode. We don't want to be bothered, and if the clerk always wants to chat about the family, I'll shop elsewhere. I just want a hacksaw blade. But a gift makes a connection. There are many examples, the candy or cigarette offered to a stranger who shares a seat on the plane, the few words that indicate goodwill between passengers on the late-night bus. These tokens establish the simplest bonds of social life, but the model they offer may be extended to the most complicated of unions—marriage, parenthood, mentorship. If a value is placed on these (often essentially unequal) exchanges, they degenerate into something else.

Yet one of the more difficult things to comprehend is that the gift economies—like those that sustain open-source software—coexist so naturally with the market. It is precisely this doubleness in art practices that we must identify, ratify, and enshrine in our lives as participants in culture, either as “producers” or “consumers.” Art that matters to us—which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience—is received as a gift is received. Even if we've paid a fee at the door of the museum or concert hall, when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us that has nothing to do with the price. The daily commerce of our lives proceeds at its own constant level, but a gift conveys an uncommodifiable surplus of inspiration.

The way we treat a thing can change its nature, though. Religions often prohibit the sale of sacred objects, the implication being that their sanctity is lost if they are bought and sold. We consider it unacceptable to sell sex, babies, body organs, legal rights, and votes. The idea that something should never be commodified is generally known as inalienability or unalienability—a concept most famously expressed by Thomas Jefferson in the phrase “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights . . .” A work of art seems to be a hardier breed; it can be sold in the market and still emerge a work of art. But if it is true that in the essential commerce of art a gift is carried by the work from the artist to his audience, if I am right to say that where there is no gift there is no art, then it may be possible to destroy a work of art by converting it into a pure commodity. I don't maintain that art can't be bought and sold, but that the gift portion of the work places a constraint upon our merchandising. This is the reason why even a really beautiful, ingenious, powerful ad (of which there are a lot) can never be any kind of real art: an ad has no status as gift; i.e., it's never really for the person it's directed at.

The power of a gift economy remains difficult for the empiricists of our market culture to understand. In our times, the rhetoric of the market presumes that everything should be and can be appropriately bought, sold, and owned—a tide of alienation lapping daily at the dwindling redoubt of the unalienable. In free-market theory, an intervention to halt propertization is considered “paternalistic,” because it inhibits the free action of the citizen, now reposited as a “potential entrepreneur.” Of course, in the real world, we know that child-rearing, family life, education, socialization, sexuality, political life, and many other basic human activities require insulation from market forces. In fact, paying for many of these things can ruin them. We may be willing to peek at Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire or an eBay auction of the ova of fashion models, but only to reassure ourselves that some things are still beneath our standards of dignity.

What's remarkable about gift economies is that they can flourish in the most unlikely places—in run-down neighborhoods, on the Internet, in scientific communities, and among members of Alcoholics Anonymous. A classic example is commercial blood systems, which generally produce blood supplies of lower safety, purity, and potency than volunteer systems. A gift economy may be superior when it comes to maintaining a group's commitment to certain extra-market values.
THE COMMONS

Another way of understanding the presence of gift economies—which dwell like ghosts in the commercial machine—is in the sense of a public commons. A commons, of course, is anything like the streets over which we drive, the skies through which we pilot airplanes, or the public parks or beaches on which we dally. A commons belongs to everyone and no one, and its use is controlled only by common consent. A commons describes resources like the body of ancient music drawn on by composers and folk musicians alike, rather than the commodities, like “Happy Birthday to You,” for which ASCAP, 114 years after it was written, continues to collect a fee. Einstein's theory of relativity is a commons. Writings in the public domain are a commons. Gossip about celebrities is a commons. The silence in a movie theater is a transitory commons, impossibly fragile, treasured by those who crave it, and constructed as a mutual gift by those who compose it.

The world of art and culture is a vast commons, one that is salted through with zones of utter commerce yet remains gloriously immune to any overall commodification. The closest resemblance is to the commons of a language: altered by every contributor, expanded by even the most passive user. That a language is a commons doesn't mean that the community owns it; rather it belongs between people, possessed by no one, not even by society as a whole.

Nearly any commons, though, can be encroached upon, partitioned, enclosed. The American commons include tangible assets such as public forests and minerals, intangible wealth such as copyrights and patents, critical infrastructures such as the Internet and government research, and cultural resources such as the broadcast airwaves and public spaces. They include resources we've paid for as taxpayers and inherited from previous generations. They're not just an inventory of marketable assets; they're social institutions and cultural traditions that define us as Americans and enliven us as human beings. Some invasions of the commons are sanctioned because we can no longer muster a spirited commitment to the public sector. The abuse goes unnoticed because the theft of the commons is seen in glimpses, not in panorama. We may occasionally see a former wetland paved; we may hear about the breakthrough cancer drug that tax dollars helped develop, the rights to which pharmaceutical companies acquired for a song. The larger movement goes too much unremarked. The notion of a commons of cultural materials goes more or less unnamed.

Honoring the commons is not a matter of moral exhortation. It is a practical necessity. We in Western society are going through a period of intensifying belief in private ownership, to the detriment of the public good. We have to remain constantly vigilant to prevent raids by those who would selfishly exploit our common heritage for their private gain. Such raids on our natural resources are not examples of enterprise and initiative. They are attempts to take from all the people just for the benefit of a few.
UNDISCOVERED PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE

Artists and intellectuals despondent over the prospects for originality can take heart from a phenomenon identified about twenty years ago by Don Swanson, a library scientist at the University of Chicago. He called it “undiscovered public knowledge.” Swanson showed that standing problems in medical research may be significantly addressed, perhaps even solved, simply by systematically surveying the scientific literature. Left to its own devices, research tends to become more specialized and abstracted from the real-world problems that motivated it and to which it remains relevant. This suggests that such a problem may be tackled effectively not by commissioning more research but by assuming that most or all of the solution can already be found in various scientific journals, waiting to be assembled by someone willing to read across specialties. Swanson himself did this in the case of Raynaud's syndrome, a disease that causes the fingers of young women to become numb. His finding is especially striking—perhaps even scandalous—because it happened in the ever-expanding biomedical sciences.

Undiscovered public knowledge emboldens us to question the extreme claims to originality made in press releases and publishers' notices: Is an intellectual or creative offering truly novel, or have we just forgotten a worthy precursor? Does solving certain scientific problems really require massive additional funding, or could a computerized search engine, creatively deployed, do the same job more quickly and cheaply? Lastly, does our appetite for creative vitality require the violence and exasperation of another avant-garde, with its wearisome killing-the-father imperatives, or might we be better off ratifying the ecstasy of influence—and deepening our willingness to understand the commonality and timelessness of the methods and motifs available to artists?
GIVE ALL

A few years ago, the Film Society of Lincoln Center announced a retrospective of the works of Dariush Mehrjui, then a fresh enthusiasm of mine. Mehrjui is one of Iran's finest filmmakers, and the only one whose subject was personal relationships among the upper-middle-class intelligentsia. Needless to say, opportunities to view his films were—and remain—rare indeed. I headed uptown for one, an adaptation of J. D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey, titled Pari, only to discover at the door of the Walter Reade Theater that the screening had been canceled: its announcement had brought threat of a lawsuit down on the Film Society. True, these were Salinger's rights under the law. Yet why would he care that some obscure Iranian filmmaker had paid him homage with a meditation on his heroine? Would it have damaged his book or robbed him of some crucial remuneration had the screening been permitted? The fertile spirit of stray connection—one stretching across what is presently seen as the direst of international breaches—had in this case been snuffed out. The cold, undead hand of one of my childhood literary heroes had reached out from its New Hampshire redoubt to arrest my present-day curiosity.

A few assertions, then:

Any text that has infiltrated the common mind to the extent of Gone With the Wind or Lolita or Ulysses inexorably joins the language of culture. A map-turned-to-landscape, it has moved to a place beyond enclosure or control. The authors and their heirs should consider the subsequent parodies, refractions, quotations, and revisions an honor, or at least the price of a rare success.

A corporation that has imposed an inescapable notion—Mickey Mouse, Band-Aid—on the cultural language should pay a similar price.

The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors but “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” To this end, copyright assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work. This result is neither unfair nor unfortunate.

Contemporary copyright, trademark, and patent law is presently corrupted. The case for perpetual copyright is a denial of the essential gift-aspect of the creative act. Arguments in its favor are as un-American as those for the repeal of the estate tax.

Art is sourced. Apprentices graze in the field of culture.

Digital sampling is an art method like any other, neutral in itself.

Despite hand-wringing at each technological turn—radio, the Internet—the future will be much like the past. Artists will sell some things but also give some things away. Change may be troubling for those who crave less ambiguity, but the life of an artist has never been filled with certainty.

The dream of a perfect systematic remuneration is nonsense. I pay rent with the price my words bring when published in glossy magazines and at the same moment offer them for almost nothing to impoverished literary quarterlies, or speak them for free into the air in a radio interview. So what are they worth? What would they be worth if some future Dylan worked them into a song? Should I care to make such a thing impossible?

Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The citations that go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read; they are quotations without inverted commas. The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. Neurological study has lately shown that memory, imagination, and consciousness itself is stitched, quilted, pastiched. If we cut-and-paste our selves, might we not forgive it of our artworks?

Artists and writers—and our advocates, our guilds and agents—too often subscribe to implicit claims of originality that do injury to these truths. And we too often, as hucksters and bean counters in the tiny enterprises of our selves, act to spite the gift portion of our privileged roles. People live differently who treat a portion of their wealth as a gift. If we devalue and obscure the gift-economy function of our art practices, we turn our works into nothing more than advertisements for themselves. We may console ourselves that our lust for subsidiary rights in virtual perpetuity is some heroic counter to rapacious corporate interests. But the truth is that with artists pulling on one side and corporations pulling on the other, the loser is the collective public imagination from which we were nourished in the first place, and whose existence as the ultimate repository of our offerings makes the work worth doing in the first place.

As a novelist, I'm a cork on the ocean of story, a leaf on a windy day. Pretty soon I'll be blown away. For the moment I'm grateful to be making a living, and so must ask that for a limited time (in the Thomas Jefferson sense) you please respect my small, treasured usemonopolies. Don't pirate my editions; do plunder my visions. The name of the game is Give All. You, reader, are welcome to my stories. They were never mine in the first place, but I gave them to you. If you have the inclination to pick them up, take them with my blessing.



* * *

KEY: I IS ANOTHER

This key to the preceding essay names the source of every line I stole, warped, and cobbled together as I “wrote” (except, alas, those sources I forgot along the way). First uses of a given author or speaker are highlighted in red. Nearly every sentence I culled I also revised, at least slightly—for necessities of space, in order to produce a more consistent tone, or simply because I felt like it.

TITLE

The phrase “the ecstasy of influence,” which embeds a rebuking play on Harold Bloom's “anxiety of influence,” is lifted from spoken remarks by Professor Richard Dienst of Rutgers.

LOVE AND THEFT

“. . . a cultivated man of middle age . . .” to “. . . hidden, unacknowledged memory?” These lines, with some adjustments for tone, belong to the anonymous editor or assistant who wrote the dust-flap copy of
Michael Maar's The Two Lolitas. Of course, in my own experience, dust-flap copy is often a collaboration between author and editor. Perhaps this was also true for Maar.

“The history of literature . . .” to

“. . . borrow and quote?” comes from Maar's book itself.


“Appropriation has always . . .” to “. . . Ishmael and Queequeg . . .” This paragraph makes a hash of remarks from an interview with Eric Lott conducted by David McNair and Jayson Whitehead, and incorporates both interviewers' and interviewee's observations. (The text-interview form can be seen as a commonly accepted form of multivocal writing. Most interviewers prime their subjects with remarks of their own—leading the witness, so to speak—and gently refine their subjects' statements in the final printed transcript.)

“I realized this . . .” to “. . . for a long time.” The anecdote is cribbed, with an elision to avoid appropriating a dead grandmother, from Jonathan Rosen's The Talmud and the Internet. I've never seen 84, Charing Cross Road, nor searched the Web for a Donne quote. For me it was through Rosen to Donne, Hemingway, website, et al.

“When I was thirteen . . .” to “. . . no plagiarist at all.” This is from William Gibson's “God's Little Toys,” in Wired magazine. My own first encounter with William Burroughs, also at age thirteen, was less epiphanic. Having grown up with a painter father who, during family visits to galleries or museums, approvingly noted collage and appropriation techniques in the visual arts (Picasso, Claes Oldenburg, Stuart Davis), I was gratified, but not surprised, to learn that literature could encompass the same methods.
CONTAMINATION ANXIETY

“In 1941, on his front porch . . .” to “. . . ‘this song comes from the cotton field.'” Siva Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs.

“. . . enabled by a kind . . . freely reworked.” Kembrew McLeod, Freedom of Expression. In Owning Culture, McLeod notes that, as he was writing, he

happened to be listening to a lot of old country music, and in my casual listening I noticed that six country songs shared exactly the same vocal melody, including Hank Thompson's “Wild Side of Life,” the Carter Family's “I'm Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes,” Roy Acuff's “Great Speckled Bird,” Kitty Wells's “It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” Reno & Smiley's “I'm Using My Bible for a Roadmap,” and Townes Van Zandt's “Heavenly Houseboat Blues.” . . . In his extensively researched book, Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock 'n' Roll, Nick Tosches documents that the melody these songs share is both “ancient and British.” There were no recorded lawsuits stemming from these appropriations. . . .

“. . . musicians have gained . . . through allusion.” Joanna Demers, Steal This Music.

“In Seventies Jamaica . . .” to “. . . hours of music.” Gibson.

“Visual, sound, and text collage . . .” to “. . . realm of cultural production.” This plunders, rewrites, and amplifies paragraphs from McLeod's Owning Culture, except for the line about collage being the art form of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which I heard filmmaker Craig Baldwin say, in defense of sampling, in the trailer for a forthcoming documentary, Copyright Criminals.

“In a courtroom scene . . .” to “. . . would cease to exist.” Dave Itzkoff, New York Times.

“. . . the remarkable series of ‘plagiarisms' . . .” to “. . . we want more plagiarism.” Richard Posner, combined from The Becker-Posner Blog and The Atlantic Monthly.

“Most artists are brought . . .” to “. . . by art itself.” These words, and many more to follow, come from Lewis Hyde's The Gift. Above any other book I've here plagiarized, I commend The Gift to your attention.

“Finding one's voice . . . filiations, communities, and discourses.” Semanticist George L. Dillon, quoted in Rebecca Moore Howard's “The New Abolitionism Comes to Plagiarism.”

“Inspiration could be . . . act never experienced.” Ned Rorem, found on several “great quotations” sites on the Internet.

“Invention, it must be humbly admitted . . . out of chaos.” Mary Shelley, from her introduction to Frankenstein.

“What happens . . .” to “. . . contamination anxiety.” Kevin J.H. Dettmar, from “The Illusion of Modernist Allusion and the Politics of Postmodern Plagiarism.”
SURROUNDED BY SIGNS

“The surrealists believed . . .” to the Walter Benjamin quote. Christian Keathley's Cinephilia and History, or the Wind in the Trees, a book that treats fannish fetishism as the secret at the heart of film scholarship. Keathley notes, for instance, Joseph Cornell's surrealist-influenced 1936 film Rose Hobart, which simply records “the way in which Cornell himself watched the 1931 Hollywood potboiler East of Borneo, fascinated and distracted as he was by its B-grade star”—the star, of course, being Rose Hobart herself. This, I suppose, makes Cornell a sort of father to computer-enabled fan-creator reworkings of Hollywood product, like the version of George Lucas's The Phantom Menace from which the noxious Jar Jar Binks character was purged; both incorporate a viewer's subjective preferences into a revision of a filmmaker's work.

“. . . early in the history of photography” to “. . . without compensating the source.” From Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig, the greatest of public advocates for copyright reform, and the best source if you want to get radicalized in a hurry.

“For those whose ganglia . . .” to

“. . . discourse broke down.” From David Foster Wallace's essay “E Unibus Pluram,” reprinted in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. I have no idea who Wallace's “gray eminence” is or was. I inserted the example of Dickens into the paragraph; he strikes me as overlooked in the lineage of authors of “brand-name” fiction.

“I was born . . . Mary Tyler Moore Show.” These are the reminiscences of Mark Hosler from Negativland, a collaging musical collective that was sued by U2's record label for their appropriation of “I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For.” Although I had to adjust the birth date, Hosler's cultural menu fits me like a glove.

“The world is a home . . . pop-culture products . . .” McLeod.

“Today, when we can eat . . .” to “. . . flat sights.” Wallace.

“We're surrounded by signs, ignore none of them.” This phrase, which I unfortunately rendered somewhat leaden with the word “imperative,” comes from Steve Erickson's novel Our Ecstatic Days.
USEMONOPOLY

“. . . everything from attempts . . .” to “defendants as young as twelve.” Robert Boynton, The New York Times Magazine, “The Tyranny of Copyright?”

“A time is marked . . .” to “. . . what needs no defense.” Lessig, this time from The Future of Ideas.

“Thomas Jefferson, for one . . .” to “‘. . . respective Writings and Discoveries.'” Boynton.

“. . . second comers might do a much better job than the originator

. . .” I found this phrase in Lessig, who is quoting Vaidhyanathan, who himself is characterizing a judgment written by Learned Hand.

“But Jefferson's vision . . . owned by someone or other.” Boynton.

“The distinctive feature . . .” to “. . . term is extended.” Lessig, again from The Future of Ideas.

“When old laws . . .” to “. . . had been invaded.” Jessica Litman, Digital Copyright.

“‘I say to you . . . woman home alone.'” I found the Valenti quote in McLeod. Now fill in the blank: Jack Valenti is to the public domain as ______ is to ________.
THE BEAUTY OF SECOND USE

“In the first . . .” to “. . . builds an archive.” Lessig.

“Most books . . . one year . . .” Lessig.

“Active reading is . . .” to “. . . do not own . . .” This is a mashup of Henry Jenkins, from his Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, and Michel de Certeau, whom Jenkins quotes.

“In the children's classic . . .” to

“. . . its loving use.” Jenkins. (Incidentally, have the holders of the copyright to The Velveteen Rabbit had a close look at Toy Story? There could be a lawsuit there.)
SOURCE HYPOCRISY, OR, DISNIAL

“The Walt Disney Company . . . alas, Treasure Planet . . .” Lessig.

“Imperial Plagiarism” is the title of an essay by Marilyn Randall.

“. . . spurred David Byrne . . . My Life in the Bush of Ghosts . . .” Chris Dahlen, Pitchfork—though in truth by the time I'd finished, his words were so utterly dissolved within my own that had I been an ordinary cutting-and-pasting journalist it never would have occurred to me to give Dahlen a citation. The effort of preserving another's distinctive phrases as I worked on this essay was sometimes beyond my capacities; this form of plagiarism was oddly hard work.

“Kenneth Koch . . .” to “. . . déluge of copycats!” Emily Nussbaum, The New York Times Book Review.
YOU CAN'T STEAL A GIFT

“You can't steal a gift.” Dizzy Gillespie, defending another player who'd been accused of poaching Charlie Parker's style: “You can't steal a gift. Bird gave the world his music, and if you can hear it you can have it.''

“A large, diverse society . . . intellectual property.” Lessig.

“And works of art . . . ” to “. . .

marriage, parenthood, mentorship.” Hyde.

“Yet one . . . so naturally with the market.” David Bollier, Silent Theft.

“Art that matters . . .” to “. . . bought and sold.” Hyde.

“We consider it unacceptable . . .” to “‘. . . certain unalienable Rights . . .'” Bollier, paraphrasing Margaret Jane Radin's Contested Commodities.

“A work of art . . .” to “. . . constraint upon our merchandising.” Hyde.

“This is the reason . . . person it's directed at.” Wallace.

“The power of a gift . . .” to “. . . certain extra-market values.” Bollier, and also the sociologist Warren O. Hagstrom, whom Bollier is paraphrasing.
THE COMMONS

“Einstein's theory . . .” to “. . . public domain are a commons.” Lessig.

“That a language is a commons . . . society as a whole.” Michael Newton, in the London Review of Books, reviewing a book called Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language by Daniel Heller-Roazen. The paraphrases of book reviewers are another covert form of collaborative culture; as an avid reader of reviews, I know much about books I've never read. To quote Yann Martel on how he came to be accused of imperial plagiarism in his Booker-winning novel Life of Pi,

Ten or so years ago, I read a review by John Updike in the New York Times Review of Books [sic]. It was of a novel by a Brazilian writer, Moacyr Scliar. I forget the title, and John Updike did worse: he clearly thought the book as a whole was forgettable. His review—one of those that makes you suspicious by being mostly descriptive . . . oozed indifference. But one thing about it struck me: the premise. . . . Oh, the wondrous things I could do with this premise.

Unfortunately, no one was ever able to locate the Updike review in question.

“The American commons . . .” to

“. . . for a song.” Bollier.

“Honoring the commons . . .” to

“. . . practical necessity.” Bollier.

“We in Western . . . public good.” John Sulston, Nobel Prize‒winner and co-mapper of the human genome.

“We have to remain . . .” to “. . . benefit of a few.” Harry S Truman, at the opening of the Everglades National Park. Although it may seem the height of presumption to rip off a president—I found claiming Truman's stolid advocacy as my own embarrassing in the extreme—I didn't rewrite him at all. As the poet Marianne Moore said, “If a thing had been said in the best way, how can you say it better?” Moore confessed her penchant for incorporating lines from others' work, explaining, “I have not yet been able to outgrow this hybrid method of composition.”
UNDISCOVERED PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE

“. . . intellectuals despondent . . .” to “. . . quickly and cheaply?” Steve Fuller, The Intellectual. There's something of Borges in Fuller's insight here; the notion of a storehouse of knowledge waiting passively to be assembled by future users is suggestive of both “The Library of Babel” and “Kafka and his Precursors.”
GIVE ALL

“. . . one of Iran's finest . . .” to “. . . meditation on his heroine?” Amy Taubin, Village Voice, although it was me who was disappointed at the door of the Walter Reade Theater.

“The primary objective . . .” to “. . . unfair nor unfortunate.” Sandra Day O'Connor, 1991.

“. . . the future will be much like the past” to “. . . give some things away.” Open-source film archivist Rick Prelinger, quoted in McLeod.

“Change may be troubling . . . with certainty.” McLeod.

“. . . woven entirely . . .” to “. . . without inverted commas.” Roland Barthes.

“The kernel, the soul . . .” to “. . . characteristics of phrasing.” Mark Twain, from a consoling letter to Helen Keller, who had suffered distressing accusations of plagiarism (!). In fact, her work included unconsciously memorized phrases; under Keller's particular circumstances, her writing could be understood as a kind of allegory of the “constructed” nature of artistic perception. I found the Twain quote in the aforementioned Copyrights and Copywrongs, by Siva Vaidhyanathan.

“Old and new . . .” to “. . . we all quote.” Ralph Waldo Emerson. These guys all sound alike!

“People live differently . . . wealth as a gift.” Hyde.

“. . . I'm a cork . . .” to “. . . blown away.” This is adapted from The Beach Boys song “'Til I Die,” written by Brian Wilson. My own first adventure with song-lyric permissions came when I tried to have a character in my second novel quote the lyrics “There's a world where I can go and/Tell my secrets to/In my room/In my room.” After learning the likely expense, at my editor's suggestion I replaced those with “You take the high road/I'll take the low road/I'll be in Scotland before you,” a lyric in the public domain. This capitulation always bugged me, and in the subsequent British publication of the same book I restored the Brian Wilson lyric, without permission. Ocean of Story is the title of a collection of Christina Stead's short fiction.

Saul Bellow, writing to a friend who'd taken offense at Bellow's fictional use of certain personal facts, said: “The name of the game is Give All. You are welcome to all my facts. You know them, I give them to you. If you have the strength to pick them up, take them with my blessing.” I couldn't bring myself to retain Bellow's “strength,” which seemed presumptuous in my new context, though it is surely the more elegant phrase. On the other hand, I was pleased to invite the suggestion that the gifts in question may actually be light and easily lifted.
KEY TO THE KEY

The notion of a collage text is, of course, not original to me. Walter Benjamin's incomplete Arcades Project seemingly would have featured extensive interlaced quotations. Other precedents include Graham Rawle's novel Diary of an Amateur Photographer, its text harvested from photography magazines, and Eduardo Paolozzi's collage-novel Kex, cobbled from crime novels and newspaper clippings. Closer to home, my efforts owe a great deal to the recent essays of David Shields, in which diverse quotes are made to closely intertwine and reverberate, and to conversations with editor Sean Howe and archivist Pamela Jackson. Last year David Edelstein, in New York magazine, satirized the Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarism case by creating an almost completely plagiarized column denouncing her actions. Edelstein intended to demonstrate, through ironic example, how bricolage such as his own was ipso facto facile and unworthy. Although Viswanathan's version of “creative copying” was a pitiable one, I differ with Edelstein's conclusions.

The phrase Je est un autre, with its deliberately awkward syntax, belongs to Arthur Rimbaud. It has been translated both as “I is another” and “I is someone else,” as in this excerpt from Rimbaud's letters:

For I is someone else. If brass wakes up a trumpet, it is not its fault. To me this is obvious: I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it, I listen to it: I make a stroke of the bow: the symphony begins to stir in the depths, or springs on to the stage.

If the old fools had not discovered only the false significance of the Ego, we should not now be having to sweep away those millions of skeletons which, since time immemorial, have been piling up the fruits of their one-eyed intellects, and claiming to be, themselves, the authors!

Neo-Confucianism and copyright in China

Influences of Neo-Confucianism in the Information Society
The Spreading of China in Internet Mediated Communications
by Aristides Pereira


An essay about Neo-Confucianism and its relations on Chinese policies concerning copyrights and Internet use in the 21st Century.

Australian extradited to US over cracked software

From the Sydney Morning Herald

Aussie software pirate extradited
Kenneth Nguyen
May 7, 2007

BEFORE he was extradited to the United States, Hew Griffiths, from Berkeley Vale in NSW, had never even set foot in America. But he had pirated software produced by American companies.

Now, having been given up to the US by former justice minister Chris Ellison, Griffiths, 44, is in a Virginia cell, facing up to 10 years in an American prison after a guilty plea late last month.

Griffiths' case - involving one of the first extraditions for intellectual property crime - has been a triumph for US authorities, demonstrating their ability to enforce US laws protecting US companies against Australians in Australia, with the co-operation of the Australian Government.

"Our agents and prosecutors are working tirelessly to nab intellectual property thieves, even where their crimes transcend international borders," US Attorney Chuck Rosenberg said.

In some corners of the Australian legal community, however, there is concern about Griffiths' case. In a recent article for the Australian Law Journal, NSW Chief Judge in Equity, Peter Young, wrote: "International copyright violations are a great problem. However, there is also the consideration that a country must protect its nationals from being removed from their homeland to a foreign country merely because the commercial interests of that foreign country are claimed to have been affected by the person's behaviour in Australia and the foreign country can exercise influence over Australia."

Griffiths, a Briton, has lived in Australia since the age of seven. From his home base on the central coast of NSW, he served as the leader of a group named Drink Or Die, which "cracked" copy-protected software and media products and distributed them free of cost. Often seen with long hair and bare feet, Griffiths did not make money from his activities, and lived with his father in a modest house.

But Drink or Die's activities did cost American companies money — an estimated $US50 million ($A60 million), if legal sales were substituted for illegal downloads undertaken through Drink or Die. It also raised the ire of US authorities.

In 2003, the US Department of Justice charged Griffiths with violating the copyright laws of the US, and requested his extradition from Australia. Senator Ellison signed a notice for Griffiths' arrest and Australian Federal Police arrested him at his home.

Griffiths fought the prospect of extradition through the courts for three years, in which time he was denied bail and detained in prison. He indicated that he would be willing to plead guilty to a breach of Australian copyright law, which meant he could serve time in Australia.

Last year, Griffiths ran out of avenues for appeal in Australia. His fate lay in the hands of Senator Ellison, who had the power to refuse Griffiths' extradition. But in December, Senator Ellison issued a warrant for extradition — a decision welcomed by the US Government. Griffiths' extradition in February is believed to be the first out of Australia for a breach of intellectual property law.

"This extradition represents the (US) Department of Justice's commitment to protect intellectual property rights from those who violate our laws from the other side of the globe," US Assistant Attorney-General Alice Fisher said.

But Justice Young described as "bizarre" the fact that "people are being extradited to the US to face criminal charges when they have never been to the US and the alleged act occurred wholly outside the US".

Griffiths appears to have been singled out by US authorities. British-based members of Drink or Die were reportedly tried in Britain. Last month, in news that slipped the local media's radar, Hew Griffiths pleaded guilty in a US District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, to criminal copyright infringement offences. According to US authorities, Griffiths admitted to overseeing all the illegal operations of the now-disbanded Drink Or Die.

On top of a possible 10-year jail term, Griffiths could be fined $US500,000. (By way of comparison, the average sentence for rape in Victoria is six years and 10 months.)

Any Australian who has pirated software worth more than $US1000 could be subject to the same extradition process as Griffiths was. "Should not the Commonwealth Parliament do more to protect Australians from this procedure?" Justice Young asked in his article. Others, however, argue that extradition is necessary to prevent internet crimes that transcend borders.

Griffiths will be sentenced on June 22.

Wikipedia entry with links to many newpaper reports here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hew_Raymond_Griffiths

Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange: Copies at Corbis & the Library of Congress

A New York Times story on Corbis was accompanied by a slideshow that included the very famous photo Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange.

A search of the Corbis site finds that the company claims copyright to the image (IH081187|Rights Managed|Image:© CORBIS). (The price charged depends on usage: full page inside an academic journal with 10000 circulation in Australia costs around 280AUD, web use for a year plus archiving is 220AUD.)

But the Library of congress site tells another story.

"There are no known restrictions on the use of Lange's "Migrant Mother" images. A rights statement for the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information black-and-white negatives is available online at: http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/res/071_fsab.html."

The image that is digitally reproduced above is from a film copy negative (LC-USZ62-95653)--it is not retouched and "This version of the image shows a thumb in the immediate foreground on the right side." The retouched version is also available for download. It's Library of Congress copy looks like this:



To investigate:

What is Corbis claiming a copyright on? Are they claiming a copyright on the specific copy (print) that they own? If so, does their claim effect other copies?

Or, is Corbis charging for the service of clearing the rights which as the LofC warns elsewhere

" researchers should be advised that determining the copyright status of photographs can be problematic because of the lack of pertinent information, and researchers often have to make calculated risk decisions concerning the appropriate use of an image when its copyright status is unknown or ambiguous. Privacy and publicity rights may also apply."

(I've been thinking a lot about photography recently, having picked up my copy of Looking At Photographs: 100 Pictures from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art by John Szarkowski (MOMA, 1973, 1999))

Tracking video clips online: Vidmeter finds not big media

April 7, 2007
What’s Online
YouTube’s Favorite Clips
By DAN MITCHELL

ON YouTube, copyrighted video clips of movies and TV shows are far less popular compared with noncopyrighted material than previously thought, according to a new study.

On their face, the results could have serious implications for YouTube’s owner, Google, and the media companies, most notably Viacom, with which it has been negotiating. But not everyone agrees.

Vidmeter, which tracks the online video business, determined that the clips that were removed for copyright violations — most of them copyrighted by big media companies — comprise just 9 percent of all videos on the site. Even more surprising, the videos that have been removed make up just 6 percent of the total views (vidmeter.com).

Google is in negotiations with big media companies in hopes of reaching agreements that would allow YouTube to feature clips of movies and television shows. Viacom, owner of MTV Networks, is suing Google over the showing of copyrighted material like clips from “The Daily Show” and “South Park” on the site.

“This finding,” writes Henry Blodget on his Internet Outsider blog, “is the opposite of consensus, which assumes that Big Media videos account for a small percentage of total videos, but a large percentage of views.” It means, he adds, that Google has “a lot more leverage in the YouTube-Big Media negotiations than was commonly thought” (internetoutsider.com).

But the consensus might not have been so far off after all, writes Adario Strange on the Epicenter blog at Wired News (blog.wired.com/business). The study is flawed because it examined only those videos that YouTube removed after receiving a complaint from a copyright holder, he writes. It “fails to take into account the vast number of copyrighted videos that slip under the radar daily, existing on YouTube sometimes for months before any removal request is made.”

How large that number is, however, remains unknown. Far from this giving Google a leg up in its negotiating power, Mr. Strange says just the opposite may occur. “None of this will slow the Viacom lawsuit,” he writes. “In fact, the report’s finding may even bolster the company’s claims. Vidmeter found that Viacom was the leader in terms of pirated content on YouTube.”

Vidmeter explains how they track videos from across the most popular sites:

How Vidmeter Works

Vidmeter gathers data from across the web to provide an accurate representation of the most popular online videos. While it is impossible to tell the exact number of views a given video has received from every website and every download, Vidmeter gathers the reported view count from a large cross-section of web-based video sites, giving a very close indicator to the relative popularity of a video. Vidmeter gathers this data like so:

First, Vidmeter's software automatically records the numbered of views and comments from the top listed videos on Addicting Clips, Atom Films, Break.com, Brightcove, Daily Motion, Google, Grouper, iFilm, Metacafe, Myspace, Revver, Veoh, vSocial, Yahoo, and Youtube once per hour.

Second, Vidmeter editors "merge" similar videos on multiple websites. This allows Vidmeter to count the views of a video on all websites as a single video, giving a more accurate ranking of a video's popularity and not just a URL's popularity.

Third, Vidmeter automatically ranks videos for the day by counting the difference between that day's view total and the previous day's view total. The most viewed videos are the most popular and ranked highest. For videos that are new (that do not have a previously recorded view count), the first view count is listed under "before" as we cannot necessarily tell on which day those views occurred. On some days videos will show a negative comment number, this is because some networks allow users to delete comments and thus lower the total comment count.

Fourth, the latest view and comment counts are set as the "all time" counts for the videos and they are ranked accordingly.

Vidmeter's resulting list of video provides a great tool for industry watchers to track trends in online videos, for marketers to see what's hot, for makers and advertisers to track their video's popularity, and for eager video watchers to get their fill of the most poplar entertainment online.

And Vidmeter's response to criticism (plus a link to the full report as a PDF:

Copyright Report
Mar 31, 2007

We have completed a study on the number and popularity of copyrighted videos on YouTube. Download the full PDF report at:

http://www.vidmeter.com/i/vidmeter_copyright_report.pdf

In summary, we found that of the 6,725 most popular videos on YouTube, only 621 had been removed due to copyright requests. Views to the removed videos made up less than 6% of all recorded YouTube views.



Follow Ups (Apr 5, 2007):

With all the controversy surrounding our recent report, we would like to take a minute to respond to some of the comments.

1. Counting only Removed Videos
One of the biggest criticisms directed at the report is that it underreports the number of copyrighted videos on YouTube because it only counts videos that have been removed and does not include copyrighted videos that have not been removed. Our response to this is: yes, as we noted in the report, this is true. However, as it also states in the report, the goal of the document is to provide a “general estimate” which we feel the report does well.

We created this report in response to the question, “Is the majority of traffic on YouTube going to copyrighted videos?” And the study, even being a general estimate, clearly says no. Here’s a bit of math to demonstrate:

We found that slightly less than 6% of the top-video views went to removed videos.

Even if only half of copyrighted clips in our study have been removed, then the total views to copyrighted videos would be approximately 12%.

Even if only one-third of the most popular copyrighted videos have been removed, then the total view count is around 18%. 18% would be a fair chunk of traffic on YouTube, but it’s far from the majority.

2. Skewed to Favor Non-removed Videos
Another point that has been brought up is that non-removed videos are skewed with a higher view count because they are able to keep accumulating views while removed videos stop as soon as they are removed. Again, this is true, but as we stated in the report: this may show that there is a demand for such copyrighted material, but in its current state it does not contribute to a significant portion of YouTube’s traffic.

3. Non-random Sample
The point was made that the report is flawed because the videos sampled in the report were not random, but taken from the most-viewed list. To this we respond that: YouTube’s traffic falls into a long-tail distribution where the most popular videos receive exponentially more traffic than the less popular videos; therefore, in order to get the best idea of YouTube’s traffic, one needs to look at the most-viewed videos. To put this into perspective:

Viacom’s most-viewed removed video was I Write Sin’s No Tragedies with 6.9 million views. That video received over 500 times more traffic than Viacom’s least popular removed video about Sarah Silverman with 12 thousand views.

4. Over-Extrapolating
It’s important for us to stress, as it states in the report, that this report is designed to provide a fact-based estimation. The report should not be taken to say that 6% of all of YouTube’s traffic goes to copyrighted videos. Instead it says that 6% of traffic we’ve monitored in the most-viewed videos has gone to copyrighted videos and our conclusion from the data is that the vast majority of traffic on YouTube goes to legal videos.

Steve Jobs changes tune on DRM

Steve Jobs changes tune on DRM
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6337275.stm

research about mp3 blogs

O'Donnell, Patrick W., The Users and Marketing Efficacy of MP3 Music Blogs
PhD thesis: "This paper examined the users and marketing efficacy of MP3 music blogs. MP3 blogs are a specific type of blog that feature posts about musicians and have sample MP3s available for download. This study found that artists looking to gain access to an early adopter and non-mainstream music audience might find some success approaching blogs as a promotional tool with the hopes that blog chatter would influence a larger, more mainstream music audience, but would not likely generate sales within the core readership by simply making songs available for download. A factor analysis identified four uses for music blogs: free music, learn about a band, be in on the buzz, and library building. Qualitative data added a fifth use, being a part of the blog culture and community. Regression demonstrated that using blogs for the purpose of obtaining free music negatively affected album purchases."


a legal perspective: Goldstone, Andrew, "MP3 Blogs: A Silver Bullet for the Music Industry or a Smoking Gun for Copyright Infringement?" . Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=930270

Australian legal perspective: Fitzgerald, Brian and O'Brien, Damien (2005) Digital Sampling and Culture Jamming in a Remix World: What Does the Law Allow?. Media and Arts Law Review 10(4):pp. 279-298.

DJ Drama drama--collected stories about his arrest for violation of copyright

VH1 reporting:


What's Next For The Mixtape World After DJ Drama Raid?
'The movement is stronger than ever right now,' says DJ Sense, one-third of Drama's embattled Aphilliates crew — but others see tough times ahead.
by Shaheem Reid and Jayson Rodriguez

'Play The Game Fair': Lil Wayne Responds To DJ Drama's Mixtape Bust
Diplomats' DukeDaGod, mixtape DJ also weigh in on the raid's impact.
by Shaheem Reid
-this piece addresses the tension that exists between the street-based DIY culture that the recording industry makes it's money off.
" With us it's a little different; we only do Diplomat mixtapes, we don't promote other artists. But still, I want to know all the guidelines so we don't have to run down this road anymore. We're gonna follow the guidelines and fall back and see what it is. If they had a mixtapes seminar, that would be hot. Have the RIAA come in and say what you can and what you can't do."
Here we have a label afraid to use their own recordings and uttering the most non-street thing I've ever heard. Seminar?


RIAA Speaks On DJ Drama Raid: 'We Enforce Our Rights'
'We don't consider this being against mixtapes,' spokesperson says.
by Jem Aswad, with reporting by Joseph Patel

hip hop mixtapes -MTV 2003 report

In the wake of DJ Drama's arrest I thought I'd collect some of the excellent reporting that exists on the web about hip hop mixtapes.

In 2003, MTV put together this report, Mixtapes: THe Other Music Industry by Shaheem Reid.

Worth noting:

-the existence of mixtapes preceeded rap records. People like Grandmaster Flash and Kool Herc made customised tapes (charging by the minute and adding customised shoutouts) and distributed recordings of their djing performances at parties. A real corner stone of hip hop culture.

-DJ Clue's tapes mark a shift in mixtape culture: his were less about turntable skills and more about finding new talent and new music. Tapes are crucial entry for young talent based entirely on merit. Also mark the continuation of DJs being at the forefront of tastemking

-mixtapes may be outselling official albums. Artists say they like them because they can say and do what they want. They also capture the more collaborative nature of the culture eg arists freestyling over beats they like. The energy is palpable.

-also nice description about how easily and quickly the mixtapes can spread around the world and the animosity about the distribution (it being the crucial element of illegality.)

Michelle Kuo on Invader

Nice piece by Michelle Kuo about Invader in the January 2007 issue of Artforum(See p.57).

Notes:

"Vandalism, then, emerges as a mode of public address--as one of the last remaining collective activitioes taking place in urban space."

"Of course, what could be closer to the pervasive drift of global consumerism than a ubiquitous logo liek Invaders? Graffiti meets branding in a partnership that is by now familiar: Increasingly, urban art's yen for self-multiplication has transitioned from hand painted signage to the easily reproduced stencil or sticker. The collaborative procedures of the postwar avant-garde return as viral marketing."

"Like this absurd sortie [refering to the potentially endless warfare of Space Invaders], Invaders project entails a bombardment without limit, an occupation without real conquest."

"The grids resemble less the gestural script of graf writer than the "monocromes" resulting from police painting over graffiti itself." (Sydney artist, Mickie Quick, worked with this idea directly in his piece at Mays last year.)

Real fakes

"Imagine the consequences if lots of people started creating “fake” art without acknowledging what they were up to?"

Last Chance | Lester Hayes
A Promise That Never Bloomed, a Post-Minimalist You’ve Never Heard Of

By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: January 16, 2007
New York Times

collision detection: Why interactive websites can create false memories

Clive Thompson ponders false memories and interactive marketing after reading a paper to be published this month in the Journal of Consumer Research by Ann Schlosser, a business professor at the University of Washington.
collision detection: Why interactive websites can create false memories

No pre-owned games to be allowed for Playstation 3

No pre-owned games to be allowed for Playstation 3

Thought DMCA was bad? Here’s DTCS! | blog.forret.com

Thought DMCA was bad? Here’s DTCS! | blog.forret.com

Court upholds sizable file-swapping fine | CNET News.com

Court upholds sizable file-swapping fine | CNET News.com

net neutrality video

Save the Internet | Rock the Vote

Detritus: Manifesto (Journal of Recycled Culture)

Detritus: Manifesto: "Detritus: the Manifesto

- in nature, detritus is dead plant and animal matter that makes new life possible. The very bottom of the food chain, detritus is the rotting leaves in the forest, the silt on the bottom of the pond, the thick dark mud in the salt marsh. It sticks to your shoes, it smells, but someday it will be food for something else, and that something will be food in turn, on and on up the food chain until you pick it up in the supermarket and put it in your mouth.

Our society spends a lot of time telling us that there is some brand new, fresh cultural produce, generated from thin air and sunshine, slick and clean. They package it with pretty plastic & ribbons and then feed it to us. A lot gets thrown away: the ribbons, the wrapping; culture becomes garbage, or it dies, and rots behind the refrigerator. But the new fluffy shiny stuff still gets churned out, and it gets forced between our teeth. And we are told to swallow it.

We will not swallow. We will chew, and then spit. We will play with our food, and create something new and interesting from it."

India Culture of Copy :: Publics and Music

[Reader-list] Culture of Copy :: Publics and Music: "f the singers and the tunes became secondary and were replaced by the creators of new tunes. Cassettes began to be sold in their name. One of them was ‘Bali Sagu’. It was a new experiment and became popular. It influenced the films after a few years. Whole songs of the films began to be remixed. Some of the films whose remixed songs were like very were ‘Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge’, ‘Taal’, ‘Pardes’, etc. "

U.S. Official Presses China to Punish Piracy - New York Times

U.S. Official Presses China to Punish Piracy - New York Times: "“These are criminal organizations and one of the things they do is run a supply chain for illicit goods, pirated goods,” Mr. Gutierrez said during an interview on the second day of a four-day visit to China at the head of an American business delegation. “This is organized crime. One day it could be T-shirts, the next day it could be watches and the next day it could be medicines.”"

Hmmm...who are the bad guys again?

Piracy Unlimited: Excerpt from the Pirate Party election program

Piracy Unlimited Blog with an excerpt from the Pirate Party election Program

flamingos: real, fake, real fakes, fake fakes, copied no more

Follow the pink flamingos cultural trajectory...

From The New York Times

November 17, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
In the Pink No More
By JENNY PRICE

Los Angeles

ON Nov. 1, just two months shy of its 50th birthday, the plastic pink flamingo went extinct. Or more accurately, it stopped reproducing, when its manufacturer, Union Products, shut down the factory in Leominster, Mass.

That’s sad news, but hardly surprising. The flamingo’s glory days were behind it. Union Products cited the rising cost of plastic resins and of electricity, along with financing woes. Yet while the bird reigned as an icon in the late 20th century, it was bound to succumb to the very different tastes — or the absence thereof — in the 21st.

In 1957, the flamingo that would become lawn-art king was invented by a young Union Products designer with the fitting name of Don Featherstone. Sears sold the bird for $2.76 a pair: “Place in garden, lawn, to beautify landscape,” the 1957 catalog read. Working-class homeowners readily planted it on their modest lawns — a nod to the marble or bronze sculpture on vaster properties — and art critics promptly pegged it as a prime example of the despicable spread of kitsch. In the 1960s, the suburban lawn flamingo — cheap, mass-produced, artificial and unusually neon pink — was widely reviled as the dregs of bad taste.

Which is exactly what John Waters loved about it. He made his breakout film, “Pink Flamingos,” in 1972, and to his delight the critics were outraged: “It’s like getting a standing ovation,” he said, “if someone vomits watching one of my films.”

In the 1970s, my rebel generation of middle-class baby boomers adopted the plastic bird to challenge the boundaries of high art and good taste. The gay male subculture made it a mascot, and in 1979 the student government at University of Wisconsin planted a thousand flamingos on the lawn outside the dean’s office. The bird had become a signpost for the transgression of social and cultural convention. And Union Products was reaping the rewards.

By the 1980s, flamingo-themed installations were appearing in avant-garde galleries. But the baby boomers were also carrying the flamingo in backpacks across Europe, and kayaking with it through the wilderness. The bird became the ultimate marker for crossing boundaries of every conceivable kind. By the 1990s, it had become a popular housewarming gift. In 1994, the “pink flamingo relay” at the Gay Games in New York featured a swim race and costume pageant. By 1996, you could mark a birthday by hiring the company Flamingo Surprise to plant 30 or 40 flamingos on the celebrant’s lawn the night before. And as Don Featherstone — by this point the president of Union Products — remarked proudly, “I’ve never seen a wedding cake with a duck on it.”

Which is why I’d peg the beginning of the end to the moment in the late 1990s when the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles began selling the Union Products flamingo in its gift shop. Or perhaps to the Sundance Film Festival’s 1997 celebration of the 25th anniversary of “Pink Flamingos.” Or — maybe — to the day in 1987 when Mr. Featherstone inscribed his signature in the original plastic mold, to distinguish the authentic fake flamingo from the knockoffs.

After 30 years of assaults on the cultural barricades, kitsch had become high art, and bad taste had become thoroughly acceptable.

An object that marks the crossing of borders works effectively only when the object transgresses boundaries a majority of people believe should exist. And in 2006, art is pretty much whatever you call art. The boundary of bad taste can be hard to find: decades ago, Variety called “Pink Flamingos” “one of the most vile, stupid and repulsive films ever made,” but film critics now hail the Farrelly brothers as auteurs and find “Jackass” merely annoying. And anyway, who actually knows what’s fake anymore?

The boomers’ children and grandchildren cannot possibly see a plastic flamingo lawn sculpture as outrageously funny or transgressive. My 15-year-old nephew calls it “lame.” My 16-year-old cousin says, “I don’t really think about it one way or the other.” The members of this YouTube generation will find their own conventions to challenge, but they will also have to find their own objects with which to do it.

My generation is beginning to retire, and our plastic flamingo has met its demise — officially the victim of oil prices, but really the inevitable victim of its own legitimacy.

Rest in peace, my pink plastic friend. It was fun while it lasted.

Jenny Price is the author of “Flight Maps: Adventures With Nature in Modern America.”

Mixi, Japan’s Biggest Social Network - Mashable!

Mixi, Japan’s Biggest Social Network - Mashable!

Mashable discusses some of the differences between the Japanese social networking site Mixi and US-based sites.

One of the mmost interesting aspects of Mixi is the "social commerce" element

Tim Wu-How the Bell lobby helped midwife YouTube. - By Tim Wu - Slate Magazine

You Tube and the benefits of "Tolerated-Use"

How the Bell lobby helped midwife YouTube. - By Tim Wu - Slate Magazine

Does YouTube Really Have Legal Problems?
How the Bell lobby helped midwife YouTube.
By Tim Wu
Posted Thursday, Oct. 26, 2006, at 4:28 PM ET

When Google bought YouTube, the conventional wisdom—expressed in op-eds, newspaper articles, and scary editorial cartoons—was that they'd also bought themselves a whole heap of copyright trouble. The New York Times used the phrase "litigation-laden landmine." Part-time copyright theorist Mark Cuban warned that YouTube would face the same copyright fate as Napster.

There's only one problem with these theories: the copyright law itself. Under the copyright code, YouTube is in much better legal shape than anyone seems to want to accept. The site enjoys a strong legal "safe harbor," a law largely respected by the television and film industries for the choices it gives them.

But the most interesting thing is where all this legal armor protecting YouTube—and most of the Web 2.0 (user-generated content) industry—comes from. It's the product of the Bell lobby—Google's bitter opponent in the ongoing Net Neutrality debates. So, while YouTube may be the creative child of Silicon Valley, it is also, as much, the offspring of Bell lobbying power.

Back in the early 1990s, when the "information highway" was the talk of the town, Hollywood and the recording industry worked hard to make Internet companies responsible for any and all copyright infringement that happened via the Internet. Jack Valenti, Hollywood's chief lobbyist, warned that without congressional action, "the information superhighway … will collapse the great wonder of intellectual property." The recording industry, for its part, dispatched Johnny Cash to rhetorically link Internet piracy and, yes, a "ring of fire."

This summer, Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, earned the bemused contempt of geeks everywhere when he described the Internet as "a series of tubes." But back in 1995, Hollywood was insisting that the Internet be characterized as "a bookstore." And a bookstore, unlike a series of tubes, breaks the law if it "carries" pirated novels. So too, Hollywood urged, Internet companies should be liable if they carry any illegal materials, whether the companies know it or not.

Had that view prevailed, there would probably be no YouTube today, and also no free blog sites, and maybe not even Google or Web 2.0. What venture capitalist would invest in a company already on the hook for everything its users might do? But, in one of the lesser-known turning points in Internet history, Hollywood never got its law. Its unstoppable lobbyists ran into an unmovable object: the Bell companies, who own those "tubes" over which the Internet runs. In the mid-1990s, fearing a future of liability, the Bells ordered their lobbyists to fight Hollywood's reforms, leading to one of the greatest political struggles in copyright history. (This paper provides a history of this and other struggles.)

Hollywood employs legendary lobbyists, like Jack Valenti, but when they ran into the Bells, it was like Frazier meeting Foreman. The Bells quickly put holds on all the legislation the content industries wanted. Telecom lobbyists like Roy Neel, a close friend of Al Gore (and later Howard Dean's campaign manager), went to Congress and began saying things like, the "copyright law threatens to put a damper on the expression of ideas on the Internet."

Facing stalemate, in 1997 the industries settled on a compromise: something called the Online Copyright Liability Limitation Act, which became Title II of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (§512 of the Copyright Code). It is this law that makes YouTube worth paying more than what you pay for its videos. And its long-term effects have been enormous—you might call §512 the Magna Carta for Web 2.0.

Why? Section 512(c) of the law applies to "Information Residing on Systems or Networks At Direction of Users." In 1998, that meant Geocities and AOL user pages. But in 2006, that means Blogger, Wikipedia, Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, and, yes, YouTube—all the companies whose shtick is "user-generated content."

Thanks to the Bells, all these companies are now protected by a "notice and take down" system when they host user content. That means that if Jon Stewart notices an infringing copy of The Daily Show on YouTube, Comedy Central can write a letter to YouTube and demand it be taken down. Then, so long as YouTube acts "expeditiously" and so long as YouTube wasn't already aware that the material was there, YouTube is in the clear. In legal jargon, YouTube is in a "safe harbor." Earlier this week, when YouTube took down 30,000 files after requests from a Japanese authors' group, that was §512(c) in action.

Of course, as with any law, YouTube's legal status might not be 100-percent airtight. The law suggests (in §512(c)(1)(A)(ii)) that YouTube might be liable if, in the absence of notice, it is "aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent." Also, YouTube provides a search, and maybe it could be liable for that. There might be enough to make trouble in the hands of a judge who really hates "that whole Web 2.0 thing."

But we may never find out. What's really interesting is that the content industry actually likes §512 more than anyone will admit. The notice-and-takedown system gives content owners the twin advantages of exposure and control. When stuff is on YouTube, the owners have an option. They can leave it posted there, if they want people to see it, and build buzz. But they can also snap their fingers and bring it all down. And for someone who is juggling her desire for publicity against her need for control, that's ultimately a nice arrangement.

Stated otherwise, much of the copyrighted material on YouTube is in a legal category that is new to our age. It's not "fair use," the famous right to use works despite technical infringement, for reasons of public policy. Instead, it's in the growing category of "tolerated use"—use that is technically illegal, but tolerated by the owner because he wants the publicity. If that sounds as weird as "don't ask, don't tell," you're getting the idea. The industry is deeply conflicted about mild forms of piracy—trapped somewhere between its pathological hatred of "pirates" and its lust for the buzz piracy can build.

But what about Mark Cuban's copyright argument? Why isn't YouTube in trouble in the same way Napster and Grokster were? The first difference, as indicated, is that Napster simply wasn't covered by the §512 safe-harbor law, and YouTube is. Napster wasn't "hosting" information at the direction of its users, but rather providing a tool for users to find and download predominantly infringing content. It may sound odd that Napster gets in more trouble for helping you find illegal stuff than YouTube does for actually hosting it. But that's the law and why YouTube should really, really thank its friends at Bell.

There may also be deeper differences. If the Internet were not a bookstore, or tubes, but rather a red-light district, YouTube would best be imagined as the hotel, and Napster, well, the pimp. YouTube, like a hotel, provides space for people to do things, legal or not. It's not doing anything illegal itself, but its visitors may be. But Napster, everyone more or less now admits, was cast as the pimp: It was mainly a means of getting illegal stuff. Right or wrong, we seem to accept the benign vision of YouTube as an entity which, unlike Napster, was basically born as a place to showcase stupid human tricks.

The upshot is, as YouTube goes mainstream, copyright's etiquette rules are becoming clearer. Yes, these sites can make it easier to infringe copyright. But so long as that's not the principal aim of your company, you have more breathing room today than you once did. And under the emerging regime, if you do cause infringement, you have to be nice about it and make determined efforts to stop it. Apple has learned that dance well, even as its iPods make swapping music all the more part of being American. And YouTube has, in turn, learned from Apple the early lessons of Napster: You can act out in cyberspace. Just don't be a copyright pimp.
Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School and co-author of Who Controls the Internet?

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2152264/

Copyright 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

Inside Google: YouTube Deals To Obtain Copyrights For Its Users � InsideGoogle � part of the Blog News Channel

Another perspective on the You Tube deals with media companies.

Makes argument that we're seeing a new copyright model emerging, one in which the owners of the copyright obtain rights for users. Communities build up around the owners of the copyright.

� YouTube Deals To Obtain Copyrights For Its Users � InsideGoogle � part of the Blog News Channel

The Mike Abundo Effect � Blog Archive � Comedy Central Back on YouTube

New Biz practices? Media companies sue then sign deals with YouTube.

The Mike Abundo Effect � Blog Archive � Comedy Central Back on YouTube

Automatic Meaning Discovery Using Google

[cs/0412098] Automatic Meaning Discovery Using Google

Automatic Meaning Discovery Using Google
Authors: Rudi Cilibrasi (CWI), Paul M. B. Vitanyi (CWI, University of Amsterdam, National ICT of Australia)
Comments: 31 pages, 10 figures; eliminated some typos etc. On pages 1-3 corrected Eq (1) and handcrafted horse-rider and by-with examples using now 10 decimal precision
Subj-class: Computation and Language; Artificial Intelligence; Databases; Information Retrieval; Learning
ACM-class: I.2.4; I.2.7

We have found a method to automatically extract the meaning of words and phrases from the world-wide-web using Google page counts. The approach is novel in its unrestricted problem domain, simplicity of implementation, and manifestly ontological underpinnings. The world-wide-web is the largest database on earth, and the latent semantic context information entered by millions of independent users averages out to provide automatic meaning of useful quality. We demonstrate positive correlations, evidencing an underlying semantic structure, in both numerical symbol notations and number-name words in a variety of natural languages and contexts. Next, we demonstrate the ability to distinguish between colors and numbers, and to distinguish between 17th century Dutch painters; the ability to understand electrical terms, religious terms, and emergency incidents; we conduct a massive experiment in understanding WordNet categories; and finally we demonstrate the ability to do a simple automatic English-Spanish translation.

Lost Moon landing tapes discovered | COSMOS magazine

Tapes found in Western Australia

Lost Moon landing tapes discovered | COSMOS magazine

Techdirt: If You're Going To Sue For Copyright Infringement, First Make Sure You Own The Copyright

Techdirt: If You're Going To Sue For Copyright Infringement, First Make Sure You Own The Copyright

Sean Hogan Vrs MPAA

Good Morning Silicon Valley: iTunes saves "The Office" from NBC-series-in-jello gag

Digital copies 'save' a show from cancelation.

Is iTunes a better indication than Neilson ratings? Could "My So called Life" have been saved?

Good Morning Silicon Valley: iTunes saves "The Office" from NBC-series-in-jello gag

Gathering to Celebrate Food Made the Old, Slow Way - New York Times

Seed saving at slow food festival, as reported in the New York Times

Gathering to Celebrate Food Made the Old, Slow Way - New York Times: "Seed diversity was another a rallying cry. “Every seed saved is a seed of freedom for the farmer,” said Vandana Shiva, a physicist and author from New Delhi and a leader of the anti-globalization movement. Her seed manifesto was in the hands of many people at Terra Madre.

Workshops explored the disappearing stock of seed varieties and the growth of seeds engineered to produce only one crop, which sends the farmer back to the large corporations to buy more each year."

Lost in Light � 8mm film to video project

Lost in Light � About: "This is a project about the 8mm film format. But 8mm is dead, you say? On the contrary! Not only is the format alive with innovation by filmmakers around the world, but hours and hours of Super 8 and regular 8mm film exist in attics and basements the world over—as home movies, educational films, works of art—that is slowly fading from the historical record.

We’re here to preserve that record before these films are lost, and to make those films available for viewing by the public and for use by artists seeking new, compelling footage. Lost in Light is a project devoted to preserving, showcasing, and celebrating films created on the small-gauge 8mm film format.

To that end, we provide free Super 8 and 8mm to video transfers to anyone who asks, in exchange for posting their video to the Lost in Light site and on the Internet Archive with their choice of Creative Commons licenses. In addition, Lost in Light includes articles and features by members of the filmmaking and film preservation communities, video tutorials for making 8mm films, as well as creative work, all with the goal of preserving and championing this important film format.

Lost in Light is a labor of love by Aaron Valdez and Jennifer Proctor. We are filmmakers who love small-gauge filmmaking, and we maintain this project at no profit to ourselves. "

Apple's iPod code 'cracked' - Digital Music - Gadgets - Technology - smh.com.au

Apple's iPod code 'cracked' - Digital Music - Gadgets - Technology - smh.com.au
From Asher Moses in the Sydney Morning Herald

Apple's iPod code 'cracked

Asher Moses
October 24, 2006
Cracked the code ... Jon Lech Johansen.

Cracked the code ... Jon Lech Johansen.
Photo: AP
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The iPod has just had its fifth birthday, but Apple's celebrations may be cut short thanks to a 22-year-old Norwegian who claims he's cracked Apple's proprietary iPod-iTunes ecosystem.

Jon Lech Johansen, affectionately known as DVD Jon, garnered worldwide fame and notoriety when, at the age of 15, he cracked the encryption scheme used by DVD. This allowed for DVDs to be copied and played back on any device.

Now Johansen claims he's mastered the inner workings of the iPod and its FairPlay encryption technology, allowing him to remove many of the restrictions Apple places on its users.

Today, songs purchased from Apple's iTunes store can't be played on non-iPod devices, and, if you've bought songs from other music stores, the chances are you won't be able to play them on the iPod either since they use a form of copy protection that Apple doesn't support.

Johansen's latest company, DoubleTwist, has developed programs to get around these restrictions, and plans to license them to digital music stores that are looking to sell copy-protected songs capable of being played on the iPod.

Johansen's driving force is his belief that users have the right to listen to songs they have bought legally on any device they own.

"Today's reality is that there's this iTunes-iPod ecosystem that excludes everyone else from the market," he told Fortune magazine.

"I don't like closed systems," he added.

Specific details on how his programs work are as yet unknown, but it's understood that they trick an iPod into thinking it's playing an iTunes-purchased song by emulating Apple's own FairPlay encryption technology.

Unlocking the iPod-iTunes ecosystem is seen by many as a good thing for consumers, as it will most likely result in increased competition to the iTunes Store, possibly resulting in lower prices and a higher quality service.

DoubleTwist has already signed its first client, which it refuses to name. It remains to be seen whether or not other companies will license the technology, as it's possible they could be sued by Apple.

Johansen says that his new business is operating well within the law, because, rather than removing protection, his programs are technically adding copy protection.

"The law protects copyrights, but it doesn't keep you locked into the iPod," Johansen told Fortune.

Whether or not US law agrees with him remains to be seen, and may only be determinable in court since there are few previous cases that can be used as precedents.

A spokesman for Apple Australia refused to comment on this story, and would not confirm or deny whether or not Apple would be taking legal action against DoubleTwist.

Either way, Johansen doesn't appear to be concerned, as indicated by the title of his personal blog: So Sue Me.

Recording industry targets Aussie downloaders - Digital Music - Gadgets

My understanding is that the individuals who have been targeted by the music industry in the US were those who made files available for download rather than those who downloaded. Article is ambiguous about this.

It would seem an invasion of privacy and undue burdon if ISPs were asked to moniter and police the online activity of their customers.

Recording industry targets Aussie downloaders - Digital Music - Gadgets

Recording industry targets Aussie downloaders

Asher Moses
October 31, 2006
Chairman and CEO of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, John Kennedy.

Chairman and CEO of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, John Kennedy.
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The peak body representing the interests of the world's music companies has issued a stern warning to Australians: obtain your music illegally and we'll get your internet provider to terminate your service.

John Kennedy, chairman and CEO of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), will be meeting members of the local music industry today to formulate a strategy around clamping down on people who download pirated music.

Mr Kennedy, who is based in London, arrived in Sydney on Sunday for the ARIA Awards.

He plans to first approach internet service providers (ISPs), urging them to terminate the contracts of those who obtain their music through illegal means.

"What we hope is our next step is to engage ISPs in performing a role in dealing with piracy online," he said.

Mr Kennedy added that the terms and conditions of most ISPs state that "if you infringe copyright they will disconnect you", but he said these provisions were "hidden further down".

If ISPs refuse to co-operate, Mr Kennedy said he would take his requests up to Australian politicians.

"We're saying to governments: 'If the ISPs aren't willing to do this on a voluntary basis, isn't this something you're prepared to regulate?' " he said.

To date, targeting individuals for music piracy has occurred mainly in the US and Europe.

Earlier this month, the IFPI launched 8000 lawsuits against alleged file-sharers in 17 countries.

The industry has up until now filed approximately 18,000 lawsuits in the United States and 13,000 in the rest of the world.

Mr Kennedy admits that the measures he has taking are "draconian", but said it was the only way to convince users to obtain their music legally.

"It's very hard to shift those who have got into the habit of taking their music illegally," he said.

"Free is very difficult to compete with.

"It would be wonderful to think that human nature is such that if you point out online piracy isn't a victimless crime ... this would be an awakening ... [for] consumers and they would suddenly go to consume their music legally. Life isn't like that, unfortunately."

In a recent report, the IFPI said global digital music sales climbed 106 per cent during the first six months of 2006, to $US945 million ($1.2 billion). This represents 11 per cent of worldwide recorded music sales.

But in total, music sales are down 4 per cent during the same six-month period, a result of lagging compact disc sales.

While his campaign in Australia "hasn't really started" yet, Mr Kennedy said that global support had been "close to zero".

But political support was beginning to ramp up, he said.

"When we first started the fight against online piracy, we were in a very hostile market. Media and politicians seem to be concerned about taking a draconian approach," he said.

"And then when we sat down and discussed it ... there was a sea change and they realised that if we didn't take action, then this industry, which provided employment and nurtured talent and helped local culture and delivered wonderful entertainment to consumers was going to fall to its knees."

Taking action at the ISP level is seen as the next step up from flagging the illegal use of copyrighted music on services such as MySpace and YouTube.

Today MySpace announced that it would use "audio fingerprinting" technology to block its users from uploading copyright music.

The company said users who repeatedly attempted to upload copyright music files would be barred permanently from the site.

remixes and current copyright law

Report on Legal Scholars Damien O'Brien and Brian Fitzgerald ponder the question of remixes and mash-ups under current Australian copyright law. Story refers to this paper: O'Brien, Damien and Fitzgerald, Brian (2006) Mashups, remixes and copyright law. Internet Law Bulletin 9(2):pp. 17-19.
http://eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00004239/


YouTubers cut and paste at their peril - Technology - smh.com.au

From the Sydney Morning Herald
YouTubers cut and paste at their peril

Asher Moses
October 30, 2006 - 11:32AM
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The days of anything goes on YouTube are over. If you're planning on using copyrighted content as part of your own creative masterpiece, you're more or less inviting legal action, says a new research paper.

The paper, authored by Damien O'Brien and Brian Fitzgerald of Queensland University of Technology, identifies "remixes" and "mash-ups" of copyrighted content as a critical factor that's been overlooked by the Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock, in his new copyright reforms, announced on May 14.

"We now inhabit a 'remix culture', a culture which is dominated by amateur creators - creators who are no longer willing to be merely passive receptors of content," the paper reads.

"The challenge for creativity and the economy of digital content production is the extent to which mash-up and remix artists should be allowed to borrow."

YouTube serves more than 100 million short video clips per day, which includes many from amateur film producers who use copyrighted material in conjunction with their own creativity to develop something new. Permission from the original copyright owners is rarely sought.

One example cited in the paper is a video remix from December last year, where a Perth group called Dean Gray uploaded a remixed version of Green Day's album American Idiot - dubbed American Edit - to the internet.

"Within days they received a cease and desist letter on behalf of Warner Bros and Green Day," the paper reads.

"Dean Gray is like many of a new generation of amateur creators. They can sit at home in the bedroom and produce the most wonderful things. Most often they do not want money. Merely, they wish to share the finished product with the world."

The paper poses the question: should Dean Gray (and authors of other remixes) pay for a licence, even if their clip is non-commercial and doesn't necessarily rob Green Day of album sales?

Under current copyright laws, unless permission has been given in advance through an open content licence, such as Creative Commons, according to the law the answer is "yes".

"The exclusive rights of the copyright owner over acts such as reproduction/copying, communication, adaptation and performance - unless licensed openly - by their very nature reduce the ability to negotiate copyright material without permission," says the paper.

The copyright reforms announced by Mr Ruddock do little to remedy the issue, which means legal action could be taken against Australian mash-up and remix artists, says the paper.

"There appears to be no provision for any fair dealing exception for mash-ups or remixes which are highly transformative, non-commercial derivatives that do not compete with the primary market of the copyright owner."

The legal implications of this could be felt sooner rather than later, having already surfaced in the US. It appears copyright owners are far more confident in taking legal action against YouTube now it has the weight of Google's substantive cash reserves behind it.

On October 20, YouTube removed no less than 29,549 videos that used material from Japanese copyright holders without permission. Six days later the site removed 1000 sports videos (including Australian Open Tennis footage), while on Friday YouTube removed all clips taken from The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and South Park, at the request of Comedy Central.

About the Author

Brian Fitzgerald
Law School, Queensland University of Technology
http://www.law.qut.edu.au/about/staff/lsstaff/fitzgerald.jsp

Professor Brian Fitzgerald
BA (Griff) LLB (Hons) (QUT) BCL (Oxon.) LLM (Harv.) PhD (Griff)
Head of Law School, QUT Brisbane Australia

Brian is a well-known intellectual property and information technology lawyer. He has published articles on Law and the Internet in Australia, the United States, Europe, Nepal, India, Canada and Japan and his latest (co-authored) books are Cyberlaw: Cases and Materials on the Internet, Digital Intellectual Property and E Commerce (2002); Jurisdiction and the Internet (2004); Intellectual Property in Principle (2004). Brian is also Project Leader for the DEST funded Open Access to Knowledge Law Project OAK Law Project, looking at legal protocols for open access to the Australian research sector. His current projects include work on intellectual property issues across the areas of Copyright and the Creative Industries in China, Open Content Licensing and the Creative Commons, Free and Open Source Software, Research Use of Patents, Science Commons, e-Research, Licensing of Digital Entertainment and Anti-Circumvention Law. Brian is a Project Leader for Creative Commons in Australia. From 1998-2002 Brian was Head of the School of Law and Justice at Southern Cross University in New South Wales, Australia and in January 2002 was appointed as Head of the School of Law at QUT in Brisbane, Australia.

Damien O'Brien
Law School, Queensland University of Technology
http://www.law.qut.edu.au/

Damien is a research assistant with the law school’s Intellectual Property: Knowledge, Culture and Economy research program at Queensland University of Technology. Damien holds a bachelor of laws and a graduate certificate in international studies (international relations). His research interests include copyright law, internet law and other associated technology law issues.

The You Tube Comedy Central Purge

you tube purge reporting in mediabistro.com: FishBowlNY

mediabistro.com: FishBowlNY

This morning's New York Times reported that YouTube is "purging" copyrighted clips — from some of YouTube stalwarts like the Daily Show, Colbert Report and South Park — in preparation for the finalizing of its $1.65 billion sale to Google.

The Times, however, was relying on "'third-party notification by Comedy Central' according to one such e-mail message sent to a YouTube user, Jeff Reifman, who broke the news on the Web site NewsCloud." YouTube did not respond to the Times.

FishbowlNY spent about 25 minutes on YouTube this afternoon, and the news of an all-out purge seems to have been a bit premature. For instance, a user named "SouthParkSeason10" reports he "just recently got suspended," yet his "Director's Channel" page continues to play clips of the show.

A simple search for "south park" turned up 6,714 results — and not one of the handful of clips we checked [including the one above] had been pulled.

According to some users, it appears that clips under 5 minutes in were not removed. Those over 5 minutes were.

YouTube has yet to respond to FishbowlNY's e-mails seeking comment.

Posted by Dylan | 03:15 PM | TV

MySpace takes steps against copyright infringement - Los Angeles Times

Word of Mouth is every marketers dream. Yet My Space is taking steps against it in their attempt to prevent users from uploading copyrighted songs to their My Space pages.
Not only does this make their product less powerful for both users and marketers, but it also gives an advantage to their independent competitors who allow people to pass on the message their trying to convey and (hopefully) sell.

Reuters story as published in the LA Times
MySpace takes steps against copyright infringement
From Reuters
October 31, 2006

News Corp.'s MySpace.com said Monday that it had licensed a technology to stop users from posting unauthorized copyrighted music on the social networking website and oust frequent violators of its policy.

The move comes amid pressure from major studios and record labels against popular online sites such as MySpace and YouTube, which they accuse of infringing the copyrights of their artists' music and videos.

Santa Monica-based MySpace, one of the most popular sites on the Internet, licensed technology from privately held Gracenote Inc. enabling it to review music recordings uploaded by community members to their profiles.

The technology compares those filed with Gracenote's database of copyrighted material and can block uploads without proper rights. Terms of the licensing agreement were not disclosed.

Popular sites such as MySpace and YouTube are littered with copyrighted music and video posted by legions of users, who hope to share them with friends and strangers alike.

Both sites say they remove unauthorized copyrighted material when notified.

But MySpace, increasingly seen as a destination to see and hear music and video, will soon begin selling songs from nearly 3 million unsigned bands. It aims to eventually offer copyright-protected songs from major record companies.

Once Emeryville, Calif.-based Gracenote's technology is integrated into its service, users who repeatedly try to upload unauthorized music will have their accounts deleted, MySpace said.

YouTube, which recently agreed to be acquired by Google Inc., has similar aspirations to cash in on Web video use and protect itself from legal challenges.

EMI Group, Vivendi's Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony BMG Music Entertainment own about 75% of mainstream popular music. Most of this music is available on MySpace only for live streaming as a promotional tool.

MySpace was acquired by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. for $580 million less than a year ago. It boasts more than 90 million active users.

eLab 2.0 Panel

eLab 2.0 Panel � eLab 2.0

studies online consumer behaviour

Books banned in Australia

Book ban anger: it will hinder freedoms - National - smh.com.au

"The books, Join the Caravan and Defence of the Muslim Lands, were banned in July by the Classification Review Board after an application by the Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock, who was acting on advice from the federal police.

A ruling on a third book, The Lofty Mountain, is pending.

All were written by Abdullah Azzam, the so-called Godfather of Jihad, who was murdered in 1989."

Beyonce in the clear on copyright infringment

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Court rejects Beyonce copy claim

Digital Copyright Canada | All Canadian Citizens are "Rights Holders"!

Digital Copyright Canada | All Canadian Citizens are "Rights Holders"! A Blog By Russell McOrmond

Jefferson Debate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jefferson Debate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Thomas Jefferson's August 13, 1813 letter to Isaac McPherson read in part:

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light "

The Fader on ITunes

What's a music magazine without the music? Media Bistro examines The Fader's decision to launch an iTunes "issue" and wonders why so many other magazines are so far behind in this regard.

Steely Dan: America's first men of the borrowed couch?

To what extent does an artist/writer/musician 'own' the characters they create once they've released their artwork/book/song into the public sphere?

70s studio band Steely Dan have written an open letter to actor Owen Wilson, via his brother Luke, essentially accusing the film he's starring in "You, Me and Dupree," of appropriating the character they created in their Grammy winning song "Cousin Dupree". They complain that they have not crediting them (or as seems more important in their letter, compensating them financially) in any way.

As Salon's Audiofile blog explains: "Both the song and film feature a moocher named Dupree living on a borrowed couch and getting up to no good, or as Becker and Fagen put it in their letter: "They, like, took our character, this real dog sleeping on the couch and all and put him in the middle of some hokey 'Down and Out in Beverly Hills' ripoff story and then, when it came time to change the character's name or whatever so people wouldn't know what a rip the whole thing was, THEY DIDN'T EVEN BOTHER TO THINK UP A NEW FUCKING NAME FOR THE GUY!"

It's a pretty funny letter but besides their, like, obviously ripping off the speech patterns of the youth of the nation and, like, not apologising for putting out crappy songs like "Rickey Don't Lose That Number" or other indulgent over-produced 70s numbers (watch the jaws drop when you play them Turn That Heartbeat Over Again) do they really believe that there was something terribly original about a a mooch on a borrowed couch? If their song had any resonance in the first place, it was because they captured something familiar, not really that they invented something new. The film in question certainly seems like a genre flick and that it pays open hommage to the name of the character in their song inserts that filmmaker's script into the artistic continuum of 70s couch moochers (and thankfully leaves out the whole kissing cousin part of the Steely Dan song story.) It's called clever writing.

But what Steely Dan actually seem worried about is money. They're making an intellectual property grab, an incresingly common occurence, and acting hard done by at the same time. However even under US copyright law, characters are only protected if they are significantly original and not stock characters-not sure that Dupree really qualifies.

Why they're targeting the actor and trying to shame him is another interesting development and can be seen as part of the ongoing attempt to change the public's mind about what constitutes ownership and fair use. (A PR campaign so they look like good guys instead of whining rich guys a la Metallica and Napster?) Indeed, do copyright holders even think of their work as going public anymore or has it become all about private market transactions?

Here's Ivan Hoffman, an American lawyer's take on copyright and trademark of characters.

Woody Guthrie on copyright

http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2004/07/27/woody_guthrie_on_copyright.php#comments

American Copyright law in verse

An amusing (if nerdy, in the best way possible) rendering of US copyright law into verse at Yehuda

iThenticate, Ann Coulter and intellectual property grabs

A while ago, I noted the existence of iParadigm, a company in the US who had gone into the business of finding instances of Plagarism in students work. I was also fascinated by their iThenticate, a similar service that looked for what could be deemed was the unliscensed use of material protected under copyright in other media. I was intrigued by this company because their entire business model was contingent on the ability to make and use copies of freely available material as well as licensed material. But more than an amusing irony, I also wondered if such a system could be used by companies with the money to use the service to make sweeping claims for intellectual property. It could prove to be a tangled web, afterall.

Here is an Editor & Publisher story that chronicles the accusations of plagarism against Columnist Ann Coulter via this aforementioned service.

Apart from the interesting issues of the potential for money being the only deciding factor in who gets to use and own copies, this whole saga brings up a lot of interesting ideas about originality and it's limits.

Whether or not the accusations against Coulter are true or false, I was thinking about how many popular columnists, musicians etc. are often not the most "original" creators, but instead they are folks who are good at distilling ideas that are bubbling up on the fringes to the mainstream or capturing the mood and ideas of something a large group of people are already thinking or talking about. Conservative columnists and politicians, talk radio etc are all particularly good at this. The mainstream music industry has also proved adept at creating a version of underground music that will sell to a broad audience. The oft cited example in this regard is Madonna, a genius at distilation and making something her own.

But I don't think that the limits of originality are only about commercial culture, a simple case of co-opting the little guy and telling people what they want to hear. I suspect that most of cultural creation is derivative in some sense.

In terms of non-fiction writing, there are only so many ways you can state a fact. When I write reported article, I assemble the facts according to the strictures of a genre and while I may be pleased with some turn of phrase or particularly proud of a quote I managed to get or fact I managed to unearth, I know that there probably won't be a lot of difference between my piece and someone else's who is similarly trained. The originality comes simply from how I link the information together. But what sort of "property" claim can I make on that is a big question and one we're all grappling with now.

While I recorgise that there are people who knowingly attempt to co-opt and commercialise the creative work that other people do, I don't think this also means that non-commercial or idependent cultural creation works outside a sphere of shared knowledge and common ideas. Perhaps the difference will be recognising what we owe to each other rather than trying to stake out our own territory. This may be the spot from which true originality may flow.

Village Voice, Code Warriors Jan 10, 2006

Education Supplement 2006
Code Warriors
Free culture takes flight at NYU

by Carla Blumenkranz
January 10th, 2006 11:32 AM

Steal this look: Inga Chernyak and Fred Benenson photo: Brian Kennedy

Over a cup of tea on Carmine Street, NYU junior Inga Chernyak explains how to break current copyright law. All it takes, Chernyak explains, is one finger on the Shift key while you put a CD in your computer, disabling corporate-installed software designed to prevent you from copying music. Just downloading a fairly purchased, DRM-protected CD from a laptop to an iPod amounts, in most cases, to a federal misdemeanor. "If I bought a CD that had DRM"—the software that blocks duplication—"I would obviate it," Chernyak says, carefully. "If there are laws I believe are wrong, I will break them." And she's just talking about Shift keys.

In fact, just explaining this maneuver may constitute aiding and abetting. "And for you to publish it!" Chernyak gasps. In response to cyberspace logistics, which create a copy each time a user takes a listen online, music industry corporate interests are bearing down hard on individual users, with a vast array of copyright protections on their side. It's a familiar story, and one that usually places the blame on "piracy," which supposedly robs artists of their due profits. But new ideas about the bounds of "fair use" are slowly shifting the blame to antiquated notions of intellectual property, for making copies a crime. Contrary to popular logic, there's an argument to be made that access to our common culture has never been as restricted as today, when the simple act of circulating a song comes with the threat of a lawsuit.

Chernyak and her friend Fred Benenson, a recent NYU graduate, make this argument at length, eyes widening. For them, the freedom to download music, as well as art in any medium, doesn't just mean sticking it to Sony: It's about maintaining a national tradition of grassroots cultural development. And if artists don't have access to our natural resources—if all digital copies are crimes—then that tradition, Chernyak says, is at risk. She and Benenson are the founders of Free Culture NYU, one chapter of what they predict will be the next great student movement. The man this time is RIAA, and Chernyak and Benenson are gearing up, cautiously, for a revolution.

Fittingly, they cribbed their arguments from the work of copyright lawyers— specifically, a popular 2004 nonfiction book called Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig. In the book, Lessig, a Stanford law professor, argues that piracy as we know it is just the latest development in technology distribution, and that this development makes it worth rethinking how we protect intellectual property. The American public shouldn't let corporations stifle our creative culture, he argues, simply because copyright legislation is working on outdated terms. Lessig says, in retrospect, that he never expected his book to inspire a student movement, but of course he's "thrilled." He had a hint, though, when he first came onto the campus scene in 2003 to help Free Culture's eventual founders, Swarthmore students Nelson Pavlosky and Luke Smith, take on Diebold, a voting-machine manufacturer. (Pavlosky and Smith had posted online some of the company's internal e-mails, and Diebold had responded by invoking copyright protections.) College campuses, Lessig notes, are natural incubators for Free Culture ideology. Today, a national network of chapters hosts websites, wikis, and blogs, as well as conventional meetings and protests. (The first regional Free Culture conference is scheduled for January 13 and 14 at Columbia.)

Despite some similarities, the movement hasn't lent itself easily to free-property ideology on the left, or free trade on the right. (This lack of partisan staging may be why Free Culture takes so much flack, from both sides, for not tackling more "important" problems.) Lessig remembers arriving at Swarthmore and finding "one self-acknowledged socialist," and "one self-acknowledged libertarian"; Chernyak proclaims herself a free-market radical, while Benenson broaches vague objections to American internationalism. What holds the group together is its consumer rights orientation: a broad and well-considered objection to the way copyright restrictions make most listeners and viewers into "passive consumers." Free Culture's mission is to convince students that the law, and not just their downloading habits, ought to work otherwise. "In a sense, we're a copyright reform organization," Chernyak explains. "What we aim to do is give direction to the way copyright reform is going to evolve."

At a recent meeting, Free Culture NYU, a dozen members strong, was exploding with responses to the latest in blogs. (Benenson says, "That in itself is tremendous, to have a weekly forum where you're talking about the cutting edge of copyright.") Then it was on to the group's best prospects for civil disobedience. Benenson, an aspiring digital artist, was advocating for a Free Culture–sponsored film-remixing contest: Tisch students would be presented with a feature film or two and, within a short time frame, encouraged to figure out what they can make of it.

As usual, the problem is copyright. Offer access to studio films too freely, and risk a lawsuit; then again, isn't risk, for these supposed rabble-rousers, just the point? An adult agitator who's been showing up lately—Trina Semorile, a former Ph.D. candidate at NYU's Steinhardt School of Education— keeps trying, clearly, to pull the group back to reality. Instead, what she's exposing is a generational gap. There are things worth being jailed for, she says—"a draft card," for example. It's the rhetoric of 20th-century activism. Benenson and Chernyak, however, are operating on different planes: not as part of a bottom-up, top-down struggle, but as a multi-dimensional network of players. Challenging copyright law isn't "about absolutes," Benenson tells Semorile. It's "about harm reduction": minimizing penalties and maximizing opportunities, for artists and audiences alike. More often than not, they have the same interests; they may even be the same people. And as the youth soccer league saying goes, when everyone plays, everyone wins.

Law clerk fired from job for her views on DRM

Law clerk fired from job for her views on DRM

See Freeculture @ NYU

walmart sued over copies

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/5068838.stm

see-through signs

An Amnesty International ad campaign that plays with photography as a copy of what's real how it can both be manipulated and bare witness. The real and the fake and the real again.

http://amnesty.ch/f/eminf/2006/celaexiste/index.html

Creative accounting: Creation as theft

It goes something like this:

"Good artists borrow. Great artists steal."

or

"Bad artists copy. Good artsists steal."

Variations on this quote have been attributed to Picasso, TS Eliot and Salvador Dali and that its exact mesage and authorship are a mystery, seems fitting. At the very the heart of this provacative statement is the idea that originality is a bit of a scam.

I thought I would start collecting variations on this theme of theft in creation as I come across them. I think its corollary is the struggle that creative people have with ideas about secrecy vrs. openness. (When you recognize theft as a part of your arsenal, perhaps it's natural to fear someone can turn your secret weapon against you.) It's a theme that seems precient in an era of great intellectual property grabs, and one I think Copy Culture will visit regularly.

• From O'Reilly Radar, Enterpenural proverbs

If you keep your secrets from the market, the market will keep its secrets from you -- entrepreneurs too often worry about keeping their brilliant secrets locked away; we should all worry much more about springing a surprise on a disinterested market (anyone remember the Segway?). To quote Howard Aiken: "Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats."

• A SitePoint web designer on how he uses this idea of copying, stealing and borrowing to make something new.
  
• SOMETHING BORROWED Should a charge of plagiarism ruin your life?
  by MALCOLM GLADWELL in the New Yorker, 2004-11-22. A writer's personal story with copyright, creation and appropriation.
  
• Blender Kitty, an illustrator and comic artist's take on the subject and art history
  

Oh Really, O'Reilly

Hilarious: http://www.flickr.com/photos/twentymajor/153600721/

Whose Web 2.0?

Today the New York Times reports on the use of the term "Web 2.0".

Squabble Over Name Ruffles a Web Utopia
by Sarah Ivry

O'Reilly, an American publishing group who also run tech-related biz conferences, claimed that the use of the term Web 2.0 by a non-profit IT conference in Cork, Ireland, was an infringement of their trademark.

See the blog by one of IT@Cork's organizers, Tom Raftery, for the letters from O'Reilly and their perspective.

And the O'Reilly Radar Blog has their account of what happened.

second life for virtual game

Clive Thompson (Collision Detection) has a nice piece on wired about Tringo, a game within a game in Second Life, that is getting a real-world launch.

Read it here: http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,70945-0.html?tw=rss.index

Fired for Blogging

Jessaisms was fired from her job at an aquarium in Philadelphia for her blog. The museum also threatened legal action if it wasn't dismantled. She did so. But, a cached copy of the blog before the action still exists so the copy outlives the original.
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Blogebrity story

Interns? No Bloggers Need Apply from the New York Times (rather heavy-handed in terms of how young people "handle the transition to corporate life" but it's a trend story so this sort of overwrought analysis comes with the territory.)

recorded music and the abyss

From my friend Evan's Blog

Sunday, May 21, 2006

do you speak javanese?????? Current mood: anxious Category: Music if so, you might be able to help me recover one of the greatest recorded pieces of music I've ever heard. I'm an obsessive collector of musical recordings. a consummate nerd, especially in terms of vinyl. And I am ever grateful that we possess the technology to record music. Imagine if it were otherwise: not only would music be less sophisticated since artists would no longer be capable of responding to a rich historical precedent of other musicians, but also (more disturbingly) any music could only exist in the single instance of its originary performance, never to be repeated again. As soon as the unrecorded music is heard it is simultaneously exiled into oblivion, destroyed and never capable of being experienced again, unless of course through imitation, which always makes it not quite the same. When performed music remains unrecorded it slips into the void before our ears can even take the time to fully imbibe the richness of what is offered, and that is an abomination. Years ago I saw a friends' rock band perform at the BQE lounge. The music was an artsy electronic experiment that evoked aspects of both Robert Hood's minimalist abstraction and Brian Eno's ambient works. It was arresting and beautifully melancholy. I was enraptured, so was everyone attending. The haunting and doleful synth patches transformed the otherwise raucous patrons of the bar into quiet, introverted bodies, no longer intent on loud social interaction. I was impressed. After the performance I marched over to the band to congratulate them on their success, but also to determine when a recording might be available. Sadly, no. The recording equipment failed. Could the band at least reattempt an approximation of what was earlier achieved? No, it was a one time only experiment. What? You mean to say that I'll never hear this music again? Precisely so. Music mimics the ontological character of our lives. It is temporal in both senses of the word, that is to say, 1 ) music happens through time, and 2) it is essentially ephemeral. Much like our lives, performed music exists never in a perfected instant (except in the form of sheet music), but as a flow that moves through time, and it exists as we do with a deadline; it's terminus is always audibly anticipated. Recordings, however, change the rules. Recordings (as with any system of writing as Derrida would note) defer the oblivion attached to the transient sound. A record allows me to listen to the same piece of music again, and again, ad infinitum. The recording staves off the death. ...ah, now the depth of my neurosis is more clear. There is a distinct link between my archival obsessions and mortal anxiety, I will admit that. But you cannot deny the beauty of how recordings (audio, or visual; what is said of music is equally valid in terms of film) reassuringly suggest a quality of permanence in a world where absolutely everything else is doomed to disappear into an abyss that is unyielding. This leads me to consider some of my greatest musical experiences of my life and whether or not I can attain recordings of these performances. Two experiences spring to mind. The first takes me back to Somerville, Massachusetts, Summer 1991. I was a long-haired hippie doing school courses in philosophy in Cambridge, but I was spending the the majority of my time taking mushrooms with other hippie friends who lived in the neighboring county of Somerville. (surprised?) We would regularly convene at one friend's house who was roommates with an old delta blues man named "Watermelon Slim." (no kidding, honest.) Slim stood over 6' 3", was white, sported an impressively well-groomed moustache, spoke with an impenetrably dense southern drawl...and he was arguably one of the greatest living pundits on the blues. Many of the fellow hippies at the party were Berkley Music School kids. They knew their shit, and they revered Watermelon Slim as God. I found out why one night after Slim decided to bust out the steel guitar and slide after putting back 2 mugs of mushroom tea. He played a rolling medley of classics (muddy waters, howlin' wolf, robert johnson, etc.) for something like four straight hours while the whole house of hippie kids (about 15 of us) sat transfixed, wordless, barely remembering to breathe. Afterwards I thought that I witnessed the best music I've heard. ever. Years later I realized how tragic it was that it was not recorded. Perhaps there are recordings of Slim now? doubtful. In 1991 he was an alcoholic in his 60's who had no success at all in the music industry. In all likliehood Slim and his music have left us forever. The second greatest experience takes me back only four years to an Indonesian restaurant on East 4th Street in New York City. One night I had dinner with 2 old friends at this establishment. During the meal the owners of the restaurant played tapes of music from Southeast Asia. One tape stood out. It was a recording of 150 Javanese boys playing the gamelon. Holy Shit! It was stunning. Loopy, percussive, cyclical rhythms, densley layered and reminiscent of Steve Reich. Trance inducing and hypnotic. I was smitten. After the meal I requested to buy the tape. No such luck. Sadly, not for sale. bummer. Months later I went back with $80 in my pocket. Ready to shell out for a recording that I figured was worth preserving. Unfortunately the tape was missing....fuckkk!!!!!!!! It would seem that I'm doomed to never acquire the tape; there is however a faint glimmer of hope. I have the name of the tape. Here it is: JARANAN GENDHING GENDHING DOLANAN OLEH PAK KATNO DENGAM PUTRA 2. I tried googling this info. no success. also my handwriting is a bit sloppy when I copied the "dengam" part, it might actually say, "densaw"...not quite sure. This is a most inauspicious predicament. It would seem that the gamelon recordings have eluded my grasp and have (like so many other musical experiences) vanished into oblivion. If, however, you know Javanese, you might be able to help. Does the title of my tape mean anything to you? Please let me know. Seriously. I have remote and unlikely fantasies of becoming an English school teacher in Jakarta, who, once fluent in the regional dialects, could become better acquainted with the Indonesian music recording industry. Then perhaps I could parlay my skills into those elite circles that would know the tape that I heard only once, but have been haunted by for years. Wouldn't that be a journey! All to save some music from the abyss, so that one day my ungrateful grandkids can hear it with all of my dusty, old house records from the early 90s. Ha! Currently listening: Dins By Psychic Ills Release date: By 07 February, 2006

Kevin Kelly on Google Books in New York Times

Scan This Book

by kevin kelly in the New York Times Magazine (registration required)

on google books project

It only takes one person to tell the truth

the copies do the rest...

"It only takes one person to tell the truth" is what Marx said as he was being led away by police at a public press conference between the Australian Prime Minster and (mostly) Australian Press during his official visit to the US

SBS - The World News

Construction worker Jay Marx repeatedly shouted "John Howard, get out of Iraq. The Bush administration is a sinking ship".

Mr Howard was speaking to journalists outside Blair House, the official residence where he and his wife Janette are staying as guests of President Bush.

Although Marx was at least 20 metres away from Mr Howard , he was clearly distracted the prime minister.

Eventually, secret service agents moved a black van to block his view of Howard.

Marx told journalists he had recognised Mr Howard after seeing Australian flags outside the White House.

"I know that the majority of Australian people oppose the war, I know that John Howard has supported the Bush administration from the get-go, and it's pathetic," he said.

Marx said he happened across the Australian PM by chance.

He was at nearby Lafayette Park for a mothers' rally organised by CODEPINK, a
women's peace group.