Differences & Repetitions

Back in March I announced on my other blog that The Late Age of Print was available on the document sharing site, Scribd. I was excited to see it there for many reasons, chief among them the Creative Commons license I’d negotiated with my publisher, Columbia University Press, which provides for the free circulation and transformation of the electronic edition of Late Age. The book’s presence on Scribd was, for me, evidence of the CC license really working. I was also excited by Scribd’s mobile features, which meant, at least in theory, that the e-book version of Late Age might enjoy some uptake on one or more of the popular e-reading systems I often write about here.

Lately, though, I’m beginning to feel less comfortable with the book’s presence there. Scribd has grown and transformed considerably since March, adding all sorts of features to make the site more sticky — things like commenting, social networking, an improved interface, and more. These I like, but there’s one new feature I’m not feeling: ads by Google. Here’s a screenshot from today, showing what The Late Age of Print looks like on Scribd.

Note the ad in the bottom-right portion of the screen for a book called, Aim High! 101 Tips for Teens, available on Amazon.com. (Clearly, somebody at Google/Scribd needs to work on their cross-promotions.) You can subscribe to an ad-free version of Scribd for $2.99/month or $29.99/year.

Now, I’m not one of those people who believes that all advertising is evil. Some advertising I find quite helpful. Moreover, on feature-rich sites like Scribd (and in newspapers and magazines, on TV, etc.), it’s what subsidizes the cost of my own and others’ “free” experience.

Here’s the problem, though. The Creative Commons license under which the e-edition of Late Age was issued says this:

This PDF is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License, available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or by mail from Creative Commons, 171 Second St., Suite 300, San Francisco, CA 94105 U.S.A.

“Noncommercial” as defined in this license specifically excludes any sale of this work or any portion thereof for money, even if the sale does not result in a profit by the seller or if the sale is by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit or NGO.

I’m pretty sure the presence of advertising on Scribd violates the terms of the license, albeit in an indirect way. It’s not like Late Age is being sold there for money. However, it does provide a context or occasion for the selling of audience attention to advertisers, as well as the selling of an ad-free experience to potential readers. Either way, it would seem as though the book has become a prompt for commercial transactions.

As of today, the site has recorded close to 2,000 “reads” of Late Age (whatever that means), which would indicate that Scribd has managed to reach a small yet significant group of people by piggybacking on my book.

Honestly, I’m not sure what to do about this.

In software terms I’ve always considered the e-edition of Late Age to be more like shareware than freeware. That is, my publisher and I are comfortable with some folks free-riding provided that others — hopefully many others — go on to purchase the printed edition of the book. The e-edition is not, in other words, a total freebie. Columbia has invested significant time, money, and energy in producing the book, and if nothing else the Press deserves to recoup its investment. Me? I’m more interested in seeing the arguments and ideas spread, but not at the cost of Columbia losing money on the project.

In any case, the situation with advertising on Scribd raises all sorts of vexing questions about what counts as a “commercial” or “non-commercial” use of a book in the late age of print. This became clear to me after finishing Chris Kelty’s Two Bits: The Cultural Politics of Free Software (Duke U.P., 2008). Kelty discusses how changes in technology, law, and structures of power and authority have created a host of issues for people in and beyond the world of software to work through: can free software still be free if it’s built on top of commercial applications, even in part? can collectively-produced software be copyrighted, and if so, by whom? should a single person profit from the sale of software that others have helped to create? and so on.

Analogously, can the use of an e-book to lure eyeballs, and thus ad dollars, be considered “non-commercial?” What about using the volume to market an ad-free experience? More broadly, how do you define the scope of “non-commercial” once book content begins to migrate across diverse digital platforms? I don’t have good answers to any of these questions, although to the first two I intuitively want to say, “no.” Then again, I’m pretty sure we’re dealing with an issue that’s never presented itself in quite this way before, at least in the book world. Consequently, I’ll refrain from making any snap-judgments.

As I’ve said here before, though, I recently ported The Differences and Repetitions Wiki from Wikidot to its own independent site after Wikidot became inundated with advertising. In general I’m not a fan of my work being used to sell lots of other, unrelated stuff, especially when there are more traditionally non-commercial options available for getting the work out.

Wow! I’m happy to report that my home discipline, communication, is finally making some strides in terms of bringing its book and journal publishing policies into the 21st century.

Last week, the International Communication Association (ICA), in Conjunction with American University’s Center for Social Media, released its Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Scholarly Research in Communication. The Society for Cinema and Media Studies devised a similar statement of best practices way back in 1993 (it updated the document in 2009), so needless to say I’m pleased to see ICA catching up at long last.

These types of policy statements are vitally important for media and communication scholars, and indeed for scholars more generally. As more and more of our work engages words, sounds, images, and other artifacts drawn from the popular media, we need to be reasonably assured that we can criticize and, where necessary, reproduce content protected by copyright, trademark, and other forms of intellectual property law. That’s exactly what these best practices statements do, in part by identifying a “community of practice” and carefully defining its — in this case, scholarly — customs. But it’s not only about “show and tell.” Reproducing copyrighted content in academic work is important to the scholarly process. How else would reviewers, other scholars, and anyone else who may happen to read our work assess the validity of our claims?

Academics routinely — and often unnecessarily, I might add — self-censor our work, for instance by opting to exclude images we’re analyzing for fear we’ll get sued by some deep-pocketed media giant. Heck, I’ve even done it myself. And that’s why I’m such a champion of these best practices statements. They may not give us carte blanche to use intellectual properties in our work however we may see fit. They do give us a useful set of guidelines for making informed judgments about how best to proceed in these matters, though, plus they underscore how our own practices are in solidarity with others.

The other bit of good news is that Boston College’s Charles (Chuck) E. Morris III has drafted a resolution calling on the National Communication Association (NCA) to revise its fees for licensing NCA-copyrighted material. In a preamble to the document, Chuck writes:

The resolution seeks to regulate the prohibitively expense copyright fees charged by Taylor & Francis [publisher of NCA journals] in conjunction with NCA. Particularly alarming is that while for more than a decade NCA Executive Directors, who contractually have the prerogative to waive or reduce fees, intervened to make reprinted NCA journal materials affordable for high quality anthologies/readers of pedagogical and scholarly value, the current NCA Executive Director, Nancy Kidd, has prioritized profit and is allowing a dramatically higher fee.

Basically, NCA jacked up its licensing fees about a year ago, a move that will price smaller publishers out of the business of republishing top-quality communication research. The change not only promises to whittle down the competition (leaving only giants like Taylor & Francis, Wiley-Blackwell, and Sage standing), but it’s also inimical to the larger cause of scholarly communication. When Chuck writes that NCA is putting profits ahead of publishing, he’s exactly right.

If you’re an NCA member, you have until Tuesday, June 29th the add your name to the document. You can do so by contacting Chuck via email: morrisch@bc.edu. And hey — if you’re not an NCA member but you believe in the spirit of the resolution, why not go ahead drop Chuck a line anyway? I don’t know if he can add your name to the formal list of signatories, but it can’t hurt for him to be able to attest to support coming from beyond NCA.

Now, if only we could get NCA to adopt a best practices for fair use statement of its own. It’s an embarrassment, frankly, for the oldest and largest professional association for communication scholars in the United States to lag so far behind its peer organizations.

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a couple months now. An article of mine, which may be of interest to readers of my book, The Late Age of Print, was published in the October 2009 issue of the journal, Critical Studies in Media Communication (CSMC). Here’s the citation, abstract, and keywords:

Ted Striphas, “Harry Potter and the Simulacrum: Contested Copies in an Age of Intellectual Property,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 26(4) (October 2009): 1-17.

This essay begins by investigating how and on what basis the boundary between originals and copies gets drawn within the framework of intellectual property law. It does so by exploring Harry Potter-related doubles that were featured in the 2000 trademark and copyright infringement case, Scholastic, Inc., J. K. Rowling, and Time Warner Entertainment Company, L.P. v. Nancy Stouffer. The paper then moves on to consider how, within the context of the case, the boundary line dividing “originals” from “copies” grows increasingly indeterminate, so much so that it becomes untenable to speak of either category at all. It thus investigates what happens when the figure of the simulacrum, which troubles bright-line distinctions between originals and copies, enters into the legal realm. Theoretically, the simulacrum would seem to pose a challenge to intellectual property law’s jurisprudential foundations, given how it blurs what should count as an “original” or a “derivative” work. This paper shows that while this may be true in principle, powerful multimedia companies like Scholastic, Time Warner, and others can strategically deploy simulacra to shore up their intellectual property rights.

Keywords: Harry Potter; Intellectual Property; Copyright; Trademark; Simulacrum

There’s a good deal of thematic overlap between the article and Chapter 5 of The Late Age of Print, which also focuses on Harry Potter and intellectual property rights. They differ, though, in that the journal essay is more theoretically focused than the book chapter; the latter, I suppose, is more historical and sociological.

The strange thing about “Harry Potter and the Simulacrum” is that even though it’s quite theoretical, it’s also quite — I’m not sure what exactly — playful? comical? whimsical? In any case, it’s probably the most fun piece that I’ve ever written and published. I attribute that largely to the bizarre court case at the center of the essay, which I swear must have been plucked from the pages of a Lewis Carroll story.

In a perfect world I’d link to a PDF of the article, but the journal publisher, Taylor & Francis, prohibits it. In an almost perfect world I’d link you to a post-print (i.e., the final word processing version that I submitted to CSMC), but even that I’m contractually barred from doing for 18 months from the time of publication.

Taylor & Francis charges $30 for the essay on its website, which to my mind is just ridiculous. Heck, a yearly personal subscription to the journal costs $81! So, if you’re university-affiliated and want to take a look at the piece, I’d encourage you to check with your own institution’s library. If you’re not, I’m allowed to share a limited number of offprints with colleagues, and you can email me for one.

To complicate matters even more, the printed version of “Harry Potter and the Simulacrum” has the wrong copyright declaration. I signed Taylor & Francis’ double-secret “license to publish” form instead of the usual copyright transfer. Despite that, the piece still says © National Communication Association, which is the scholarly society under whose auspices CSMC is published. Sigh.

Suddenly this is starting to sound like a Lewis Carroll story….

CANADIAN JOURNAL OF MEDIA STUDIES

CALL FOR PAPERS

2009 marks the 30th anniversary of the publication of Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. “[I}t is common knowledge,” he wrote, “that the miniaturization and commercialization of machines is already changing the way learning is acquired, classified, made available, and exploited” (1984, org. 1979: 4). In 2010, “Connected Understanding” will be the theme of the Congress of Social Sciences and Humanities in Montreal (http://www.fedcan.virtuo.ca/congress2010/). The Canadian Journal of Media Studies announces a special issue on Media, Knowledge and the Network University edited by Bob Hanke, York University, and David Spencer, University of Western Ontario.

The massification and informationalization of the university has transformed not only the content of teaching and research but also disciplinary processes of knowledge production and the technological form of academic life and culture. The integration and normalization of ICT’s raises many questions about the university, academic labour, scholarly communication and collaboration, and academic technoculture. In 1957, Marshall McLuhan invited us to reconsider the education process by announcing that, with the advent of television, the “classroom without walls” had arrived. A half a century later, we are working in the university without walls and the ICT “revolution” is over. In “Universities, wet, hard, and harder,” German media theorist Friedrich Kittler reviewed 800 years of university-based media history to observe that “universities have finally succeeded in forming once again a complete media system.” Yet media scholars have rarely chosen to study their own universities as media systems. This special issue of the CJMS is an invitation to reflexive, critical media studies. Established and emerging scholars are invited to address continuities and transformations in new media and the network university and to set the agenda for future study and debate.

Possible questions and areas of research and critical inquiry include:

• What is unthought, unrepresented and unquestioned in discussions of the public university and the ‘neoliberal turn,’ technologically-mediated post-secondary education, and institutional initiatives in the virtualization of the educational process?

• What is the impact of the cybernation of the university? What is happening in information technology (IT) infrastructure, planning and governance? What IT strategies are pursued by specific institutions in different jurisdictions? What is the role of IT professionals as intermediaries between IT industries, intermediating organizations, private-sector partners and the university? What is the faculty experience of ICTs, and IT “solutions,” services, and support?

• What are the networks of possibility and affordances of technology, and what are the obstacles and limits? the unintended, unanticipated consequences?

• What hybrid methodologies, research techniques and software enhance our capacity to map the wireless campus and network condition of the university?

• What philosophers of technology and politics are relevant to sharpening our thinking on the question of technology? What scholarly perspectives on invention, innovation and the process of emergence enable us to break the habit of instrumentalist thinking and discard the “tool” metaphor? How can we take technical artifacts, from small, portable technology to entire campus networks, out of their “black boxes” in order to study them? How does the technical substrate matter to our thinking? Our reading and writing of “texts”? Our notions of “research”? How is the university embedded in the network society and cognitive capitalism? What are the drivers of IT change in universities? What are the consequences of the disjuncture between the digital culture and practices outside the university and IT (planning, procurement/evaluation/implementation, support and services) inside universities?

• How can we move beyond user-centric approaches to Web 2.0 based software applications and learning management systems, peer-to-peer networks, and small tech in academic settings? In the new network culture, how can we grasp the relations between what is “given” and what is unlikely, surprising, unexpected and unrealized?

• How can we move beyond debates over “student centered” learning and faculty deskilling to new models of reskilling and organized research networks, technological literacy and technologies of the common? How can we articulate scholarly “collaboration” and student “engagement” with a politics of knowledge (commodified knowledge, open scholarship and knowledge within the social sciences and humanities, popular knowledge, indigenous knowledge, etc.) that will strengthen the public mission of the university after the recession? How can we turn away from the “knowledge economy” and towards knowledge cultures? What does the prototype of the Canadian Institute for Health Research’s Knowledge Broker Model portend for the social sciences and humanities?

We also invite investigations of:

• computerization, campus networking strategies, and ICT-related organizational change since the advent of distributed computing, the Internet and the WWW

• space, time, speed and rhythm in the network university

• the production and operativity of networks and archives, scholarly journals and portals, web-based learning environments and objects, research cyberinfrastructure, critical cyberpedagogy, technological literacy, copyright/left, intellectual property rights

• open access movement, open access research, open educational resources, open courseware, institutional repositories, ‘Do it Yourself’ education or edupunk

• tropes of factory, ecology, network, mobility, common

• articulations and destabilizations of oral/written, actual/virtual, bureaucratic records/institutional memory, off-line/on line, knowledge creation/information sharing, formal learning on campus/informal learning off campus, amateur/professional, artist/researcher

• ideology of convenience, ethos of performativity, immaterial academic labour, general intellect, circuits of knowledge and struggle

• technological “progress,”“knowledge economy,” knowledge “transfer” or “mobilization,” creativity, innovation, academic freedom, academic capitalism

• the coming network university, knowledge futures, ecoethical perspectives on the university’s inputs and outputs and the discourse of “sustainability”

Since intellectual innovation may be engendered at the intersections of disciplines, contributions are welcome from outside of Communication and traditions and trajectories of media studies outside of Canada. Solo or collaborative work that provides a comparative, international perspective on the network university in different countries is especially welcome.

Submission Guidelines

Authors should submit papers of about 25 pages (or 8000 words) in MLA style with abstract and keywords electronically to David Spencer, Editor, dspencer@uwo.ca. With the exception of the title page, please remove all indications of authorship.

The deadline for papers is February 28, 2010. Peer review and notification of acceptance will be completed by March 31, 2010. Final manuscripts accepted for publication will be due April 30, 2010.

Comments and queries can be sent to Bob Hanke, Guest Co-Editor, bhanke@yorku.ca.
For more information about the Canadian Journal of Media Studies, visit http://cjms.fims.uwo.ca/default.htm.

Off and on throughout the years I’ve been reporting on instances in which academic authors were prohibited from doing their jobs as a result of unreasonable intellectual property regulations — or the perception thereof. Here’s the latest case: composer and Bard College Music professor Kyle Gann, whose latest book, about the music of the avant-garde art group Fluxus, will be without some important material. Gann reports:

Apparently I’ve just broken copyright law. I can’t believe what’s holding up my Cage book: you are no longer allowed to quote texts that are entire pieces of art. This means I’ve been trying to get permission simply to refer to Fluxus pieces like La Monte Young’s “This piece is little whirlpools in the middle of the ocean,” and Yoko Ono’s “Listen to the sound of the earth turning.” And of course, Yoko (whom I used to know) isn’t responding, and La Monte is imposing so many requirements and restrictions that I would have to add a new chapter to the book, and so in frustration well past the eleventh hour, I’ve excised the pieces from the text.

You can read the complete post over on his blog PostClassic, which is hosted on the ArtsJournal website.

Odd, isn’t it, how you can pay a relatively small fee to license the rights to cover an entire song, yet you can’t get permission to do the same thing in a different medium for academic purposes? Something’s gotta give. Really. This is getting ridiculous, and it is an affront to academic freedom.

Malcolm Gladwell’s review of Chris Anderson’s latest book, Free! The Future of a Radical Price (Hyperion), is out in this week’s New Yorker. As with all things Gladwell, it’s smart and insightful. Above all it stresses the practical and conceptual limits of “free,” as in this pithy excerpt about how Anderson misunderstands the economics of YouTube:

So how does YouTube bring in revenue? Well, it tries to sell advertisements alongside its videos. The problem is that the videos attracted by psychological Free—pirated material, cat videos, and other forms of user-generated content—are not the sort of thing that advertisers want to be associated with. In order to sell advertising, YouTube has had to buy the rights to professionally produced content, such as television shows and movies. Credit Suisse put the cost of those licenses in 2009 at roughly two hundred and sixty million dollars. For Anderson, YouTube illustrates the principle that Free removes the necessity of aesthetic judgment. (As he puts it, YouTube proves that “crap is in the eye of the beholder.”) But, in order to make money, YouTube has been obliged to pay for programs that aren’t crap. To recap: YouTube is a great example of Free, except that Free technology ends up not being Free because of the way consumers respond to Free, fatally compromising YouTube’s ability to make money around Free, and forcing it to retreat from the “abundance thinking” that lies at the heart of Free. Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube will lose close to half a billion dollars this year. If it were a bank, it would be eligible for TARP funds.

You can find the review — which is indeed worth reading in its entirety — here. Chris Anderson responds to Gladwell on his blog, The Long Tail. Seth Godin (siding with Anderson) chimes in here.

I’m still gathering my thoughts on the subject, though I’m quite persuaded by Gladwell’s infrastructural (as opposed to Anderson’s artifactual) orientation. I suppose that’s why The Guardian recently labeled me a “distribution nerd.” Anyway, more to come….

…a primer, courtesy of the good folks at the Center for Social Media at American University.

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One of the defining attributes of the late age of print is the erosion of old publishing certainties. Among them is the notion that the free circulation of book content leads inevitably to lost sales. Another is the belief that strong, proprietary systems are the best way for publishers and authors to secure value in their intellectual properties. Maybe it’s too soon to let go of these notions completely. It’s fast becoming clear, however, that they cannot be taken for granted any longer.

There are two ways of responding to the erosion of old certainties like these. One way is to dig in your heels, hoping to keep familiar ground from shifting under your feet. The other is to allow the erosion to expose opportunities that may have been buried underfoot all along. With the latter you risk coming up empty, but with the former you risk something worse — inertia.

I’m pleased to report that my publisher, Columbia University Press, isn’t one of those digging in its heels. It’s taken the bold step of releasing The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control not only as a copyrighted, bound physical volume, but also as a Creative Commons-licensed electronic book. You can download the e-edition by clicking here. The file is a “zipped” .pdf of the complete contents of Late Age, minus one image, for which I was (ironically) unable to secure electronic publishing rights.

I thank Columbia University Press for releasing my book electronically under a Creative Commons license. In doing so, it’s embraced the extraordinary spirit of openness that is beginning to flourish in the late age of print. Mine is the first book the Press has decided to release in this way. Here’s hoping that many more will follow.

This is probably one of the most intriguing developments in academic book publishing to happen in a long time.…

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A CALL FOR OPEN COLLABORATION FROM THE CULTURE MACHINE JOURNAL
http://www.culturemachine.net

Culture Machine is seeking open collaboration on the writing and editing of the first volume of its online Liquid Books series, New Cultural Studies: The Liquid Theory Reader: http://liquidbooks.pbwiki.com/New+Cultural+Studies:+The+Liquid+Theory+Reader.

The first provisional version of this volume — New Cultural Studies: The Liquid Theory Reader (Version 1.0) — has been put together by Gary Hall and Clare Birchall as a follow-up to their 2006 “woodware” edited collection, New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory (Edinburgh University Press and Georgia University Press).

From here on in, however, the idea is for this new online “liquid book” — to which everyone is invited to contribute — to be written and developed in an open, co-operative, decentralised, multi-user-generated fashion: not just by its initial “authors,” “editors,” or “creators,” but by a multiplicity of collaborators distributed around the world.

In this way, the New Cultural Studies Reader will be freely available for anyone, anywhere, to read, reproduce and distribute. Once they have requested access, users will also be able to rewrite, add to, edit, annotate, tag, remix, reformat, reinvent and reuse this reader, or produce alternative parallel versions of it, however they wish. In fact, they are expressly invited and encouraged to do so, as the project relies on this intervention.

It is hoped that the New Cultural Studies: Liquid Theory Reader project will raise a number of important questions for ideas of academic authorship, attribution, publication, citation, accreditation, fair use, quality control, peer review, copyright, intellectual property, content creation and cultural studies. For instance, with its open editing and free content the project decenters the author and editor functions, making everyone potential authors/editors. It also addresses an issue raised recently by Geert Lovink: why are wikis not utilised more to create, develop and change theory and theoretical concepts, instead of theory continuing to be considered as the “terrain of the sole author who contemplates the world, preferably offline, surrounded by a pile of books, a fountain pen, and a notebook”? At the same time, in “What Is an Author?”, Foucault warns that any attempt to avoid using the concept of the author to close and fix the meaning of the text risks leading to a limit and a unity being imposed on the text in a different way: by means of the concept of the “work.” So to what extent does users’ ability to rewrite, remix, reversion and reinvent this liquid “book” render untenable any attempt to impose a limit and a unity on it as a “work?” And what are the political, ethical and social consequences of such ‘liquidity’ for ideas that depend on the concept of the “work” for their effectivity: those concerning attribution, citation, copyright, intellectual property, academic success, promotion, tenure, and so on?

To find out more, please go to:
http://liquidbooks.pbwiki.com/New+Cultural+Studies:+The+Liquid+Theory+Reader

For a quick and easy-to-read guide on how to collaborate on the writing and editing of New Cultural Studies: The Liquid Theory Reader, please visit:
http://liquidbooks.pbwiki.com/How-to-Contribute-to-a-Liquid-Book

Clare Birchall and Gary Hall

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Perhaps the only thing more daunting than squaring off in front of the United States Supreme Court is having to go head-to-head with Stephen Colbert on his television talk show. Lawrence Lessig handles things beautifully in discussing his latest book, Remix: Making Art & Culture Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (Penguin, 2008). Bravo, Professor Lessig.

Be sure to check out Lessig’s Blog for some creative remixes of the segment.

P.S. Happy 2009, y’all!