The Disappointments of Networks

Comparative Research in Law Political Economy, 2011

Bepress Legal Series, 2005

The Internet has affected information flow in copyrighted content in a profound manner. Authors and artists are enabled through the Internet to assert greater control over the flow of information in their works as these new technologies offer new and different distribution channels for content. These new technologies also allow consumers to use content in ways, which had not been anticipated by the copyright industries. This paper presents that copyright law was developed for a specific purpose, which was to encourage learning and growth. As new technologies emerge and as content industries experience changes in information flow in copyrighted works, copyright law had been used to maintain control over existing information flows. The law has a pivotal role to play as the industries assert greater control over the flow of information in content. The role of copyright law in this instance is not to maintain the existing status quo as the industries undergo changes and loss of control over information flow in copyrighted works. Rather, the law serves a more fundamental purpose of balancing information flow between private and public interests. As the law was designed to encourage authors and artists to produce creative works for the public purposes of education, socioeconomic and cultural growth, copyright law in the global information society plays an even more important role in ensuring that society has access to information in copyrighted works. 1 Analog platforms ""fix" works of authorship through some human or mechanical process of deforming a physical object (such as stone, paper, vinyl, film) in a manner that conveys an image (a letter, number, or graphic image) or signal varying in audio frequency (sound) or light or color intensity (film). The term "analog" is used to signify that the medium uses an "analogy" to represent the phenomenon."

This study is the embodiment of an intellectual evolution over a decade in the making. As an electronic and hip hop music DJ when I began my graduate studies in 2000, I became fascinated with remix culture, questions about creativity, and—with a nudge from Brian Ott—the socially constructed nature of authorship.

Creativity and Cultural Production, 2012

This article discusses the resistance to the Digital Revolution and the emergence of a social movement " resisting the resistance. " Mass empowerment has political implications that may provoke reactionary counteractions. Ultimately—as I have discussed elsewhere—resistance to the Digital Revolution can be seen as a response to Baudrillard's call to a return to prodigality beyond the structural scarcity of the capitalistic market economy. In Baudrillard's terms, by increasingly commodifying knowledge and expanding copyright protection, we are taming limitless power with artificial scarcity to keep in place a dialectic of penury and unlimited need. In this paper, I will focus on certain global movements that do resist copyright expansion, such as creative commons, the open access movement, the Pirate Party, the A2K movement and cultural environmentalism. A nuanced discussion of these campaigns must account for the irrelevance of copyright in the public mind, the emergence of new economics of digital content distribution in the Internet, the idea of the death of copyright, and the demise of traditional gatekeepers. Scholarly and market alternatives to traditional copyright merit consideration here, as *

Consumption Markets & Culture, 2017

This article argues that copyright is a systemic marketplace icon, because of the breadth of its effects on market operations. Copyright determines how intellectual property rights for creative work are allocated between the different actors involved in production and consumption, and must balance the civic priority of public access to creative work with the market-driven principle of rewarding private interests for their effort. This duality tends to polarise opinion about its implementation by rights holders, because very different ideological assumptions underpin civic and market objectives. Copyright discourses reveal how these ideological struggles play out among interested parties, who use the concept of copyright to make normative arguments about how markets should be structured, how creative work should be exchanged, and how consumers should behave. In the process, copyright is constructed, explained, branded and promoted as an object to which market actors must orient themselves if they wish to conduct themselves appropriately, and as a rationale for material changes to market structures. Thus, copyright discourses illustrate the breadth and depth of copyright's systemic influence on the marketplace. At the same time, copyright discourses, which invoke both the market and democracy, reveal the implications of copyright for the quality of democracy, the circulation of creativity and the availability of public knowledge and help to explain why ideological struggles over copyright are so difficult to resolve. In this series, marketplace icons have been described variously as 'brands, products or services that are historically significant for their cultural meanings' (Gopaldas 2016); as a 'basic aspect of the marketplace, something we cannot imagine living without […] essential to consumption markets and/or culture' (Consumption Markets and Culture 2017); as 'polarising' (Parmentier 2016) and ideologically significant (Holt 2016). While copyright may not seem to be an obvious marketplace icon-it is an intellectual property right, not a product, service or brand-it is a basic aspect of the marketplace, is deployed in the service of different ideologies, and is perhaps one of the most polarising of all market mechanisms. In this article I argue that copyright is a systemic marketplace icon, going beyond brand, product or service. It is a disputed concept and a constructed object without which marketplaces cannot function. Copyright is most often associated with the creative and media industries, but it can be applied to any kind of expression of an idea-though not to the idea itself. We all own copyright in something: images we have posted, letters we have written, objects we have created. Like other creative work (music, film, performance), if these things enter the public domain, our status as rights holders entitles us to recognition (and, potentially, financial reward) as their original creator, and requires our permission to be sought for their use. These fundamentals of copyright are quite simple-but over 300 years of copyright law development, and the contemporary context of complex, globalised markets for creative work, have led to a dense thicket of policy and regulation around copyright. It is disputed territory, continually (re)constructed in networks of actions that generate inevitable tensions between producers, creators, users and other rights holders. Corporations are suspected of using it to realise ideological and economic control over the marketplace, creators need it to secure a necessary source of income and recognition, and users try to assert their right to publicly accessible forms of knowledge and creativity within its parameters. 'natural' right to reward for authors, all emerged over time as received wisdom (Kawohl and Kretschmer 2009). Today, the early balance of public and private interests has shifted, with international and domestic copyright laws now stipulate long periods of exclusivity before creative work is released into the public domain. Nonetheless, the need to balance these two imperatives continues to generate disagreement about copyright's role in contemporary markets, focused on the degree to which laws that seem to favour exclusivity can also protect the 'public domain' as a space for accessing and circulating creative work without restriction, so that the pool of collective creativity and knowledge may continually expand (Deazley and Meletti 2017). Given that limiting public access through copyright law constitutes an imposition on citizens, it must be justified as a proportionate measure not only to lawyers, but also in the public arena (Hettinger 1989); the values it is grounded in should be widely understood by what John Rawls described as 'reasonable' citizens (Sykes 2003, : 17). Copyright's iconic status-that is, its acceptance as a concept that guides the operations of markets and a valid object of attention for all market actors-depends on the degree to which these explanations are accepted.

Traditional regulation of copyright has recently been criticized from two opposing angles: While copyright holders and industries bemoan insufficient protection of copyrighted material in the digital era of lossless copying and file-sharing, a diverse coalition of dissident copyright lawyers, artists and activists claims that the prevalent copyright regime hinders new forms of content creation and distribution. In this paper, we compare the resource mobilization of industry-led Digital Rights Management (DRM) initiatives and the Creative Commons copyright licenses project. While the former was, despite the resourcefulness of the actors, fraught with collective action problems, the latter was, despite an originally weak resource position, able to mobilize support from a broad range of civil society groups and users. We conclude that there is something inherently political in the governance of new digital markets which provides opportunities for civil society actors to counterbalance the influence of large companies.

2011

In this provocative book, Carys Craig challenges the assumptions of possessive individualism embedded in modern day copyright law, arguing that the dominant conception of copyright as private property fails to adequately reflect the realities of cultural creativity. Employing both theoretical argument and doctrinal analysis, including the novel use of feminist theory, the author explores how the assumptions of modern copyright result in law that frequently restricts the kinds of expressive activities it ought to encourage. In contrast, Carys Craig proposes a relational theory of copyright based on a dialogic account of authorship, and guided by the public interest in a vibrant, participatory culture. Through a critical examination of the doctrines of originality and fair dealing, as well as the relationship between copyright and freedom of expression, she explores how this relational theory of copyright law could further the public purposes of the copyright system and the social val...

2011

Contents: 1. Introduction Part I: Copyright and Cultural Creativity in Context 2. Constructing Authorship: The Underlying Philosophy of the Copyright Model 3. Authorship and Conceptions of the Self: Feminist Theory and the Relational Author Part II: The Origin of Copyright: Locke, Labour and Limiting the Author's Right 4. Against a Lockean Approach to Copyright 5. The Evolution of Originality: The Author's Right and the Public Interest Part III: Use, Transformation and 'Appropriation': Exploring the Limits of Copyright 6. Fair Dealing and the Purposes of Copyright Protection 7. Dissolving the Conflict between Copyright and Freedom of Expression 8. Final Conclusions

Societal Studies, 4(3):1009-1030, 2012

This article theoretically analyses via scholarly literature the consequences of how the networked technology, the Internet is conceptualised. The Internet, as argued here, can be understood in many ways, in the sense that the digital environment is very much dependant on metaphors and conceptual loans to be spoken and thought of. This affects our behaviour and social norms and forms a number of legal challenges emerging in the transition from pre-digitalisation to digitalisation. The objective of the article is to understand digitalisation and social change better, including legal dilemmas, from a conceptual metaphor perspective; hence the article is looking for conceptions “in the code”. In order to do this, three main topics around which the analysis circles, are chosen: 1) conceptions of the Internet and how metaphors control what we think of it; 2) the role of digital technology in creating a gap between law and social norms: the example of copyright; and, 3) legal conceptions of creativity challenged in a digital context. This means that the article opens a multidisciplinary dialogue between the cognitive theory and the sociology of law, which here, for example, relates to studies in culture and technology, in order to speak of legal and social issues related to digitalisation.