pakuri
Thursday, May 24, 2007, 01:31 PM - Copyfight
From Marxy:
For a long time, I have been writing about pakuri - the unprincipled use of creative elements from someone else in a similar context as the original without self-acknowledgment of the borrowing. There remains a loud minority contingent who believes that there is Western bias underlying any judgments against pakuri. I have countered this with examples of a Japanese gallery threatening to sue a record label for pakuri of their exclusive images, the Japanese net community criticizing Japanese singers for pakuri, and the mainstream media criticizing a Japanese painter for ripping off a Western painter.A japanese photographer meaning Miyamoto Ryuji. A Western Band meaning New Order.
Now, we have a more interesting case: a Western band re-creating a work from a Japanese photographer for the cover of their DVD without acknowledgment of the original work.
29 comments the original problem
Tuesday, May 15, 2007, 11:59 AM - Copyfight
The Accidental Plagiarist: The Trouble with Originalityby Erik Campbell
Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
That bit from Nietzsche quoted above (appropriately enough from Human, All Too Human) has sighed and moaned about in my mind like an insistent, unfortunate mantra for four years now, years during which, not coincidentally, I have had a modicum of small-press literary success. As a writer of poetry and the occasional essay (read anachronism and anathema to the God of Economic Utility or, simply, Secular Humanist), I am constantly trying to come up with, if not an original idea, then at least an original rendering of one. But this pursuit is a difficult and quixotic one, since poetry and essays (and, outside of certain genres, most fiction) now fall under the canopy of “specialist” reader- and authorship, and the hundreds of literary journals and magazines that publish such esoterica are read by a small, select few. And we few, we hapless few readers are also, more often than not, the authors. Thus, not only are we readers and writers oftentimes taking out one another’s laundry, but also we periodically end up, as it were, wearing one another’s pants. Sometimes we do this unconsciously (which we politely euphemize as Influence: a laudable thing denoting wide reading and artistic ecumenicalism), and sometimes calculatingly (which we call Plagiarism: the redheaded stepchild of literature, the specter that haunts high-school compositions, the cancer that parasites the bowels of literary veritas whilst making many an author’s—and virtually every rapper’s—career[2]). And then there’s the sticky phenomenon of “subconscious plagiarism,” of which we’re all guilty (by virtue of being human), and of which George Harrison is, in many ways, the poster boy.
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Read The Accidental Plagiarist by Erik Campbell at The Virginia Quatterly Review
The Ethic of the Essential
Monday, March 5, 2007, 08:09 PM - Theory, Copyfight
In Behind the curtain, Milan Kundera mourns the death of the novel by what he calls the ethic of the archive, the collectionist fever that merges all material produced by an stablished genius with what was intended for publishing -the finished artwork- by the author himself.
(...) "the work" is what the writer will approve in his own final assessment. For life is short, reading is long, and literature is in the process of killing itself off through an insane proliferation. Every novelist, starting with his own work, should eliminate whatever is secondary, lay out for himself and for everyone else the ethic of the essential.
But it is not only the writers, the hundreds and thousands of writers; there are also the researchers, the armies of researchers who, guided by some opposite ethic, accumulate everything they can find to embrace the Whole, a supreme goal. The Whole, which includes a mountain of drafts, deleted paragraphs, chapters rejected by the author but published by researchers, in what are called "critical editions", under the perfidious title "variants", which means, if words still have meaning, that anything the author wrote is worth as much as anything else, that it would be similarly approved by him.
The ethic of the essential has given way to the ethic of the archive. (The archive's ideal: the sweet equality that reigns in an enormous common grave.)
Along with his complaint there is a comment on what belongs to the artist and the concept of natural ownership.
Let us remember: before Cervantes had completed the second volume of his novel, another writer, still unknown, preceded him by publishing, under a pseudonym, his own sequel to the adventures of Don Quixote. Cervantes reacted at the time the way a novelist would react today: with rage. He attacked the plagiarist violently and proudly proclaimed, "Don Quixote was born for me alone, and I for him. He knew about action, I about writing. He and I are simply one single entity."
Since Cervantes, this has been the primary, fundamental mark of a novel: it is a unique, inimitable creation, inseparable from the imagination of a single author. Before he was written, no one could have imagined a Don Quixote; he was the unexpected itself, and, without the charm of the unexpected, no great novel character (and no great novel) would ever be conceivable again.
The birth of the art of the novel was linked to the consciousness of an author's rights and to their fierce defence. The novelist is the sole master of his work; he is his work. It was not always thus, and it will not always be thus. But when that day comes, then the art of the novel, Cervantes's legacy, will cease to exist.
Read the entire paper at The Guardian.
Patenting Life
Saturday, March 3, 2007, 12:12 AM - Theory, Copyfight
Patenting Life: Commodification, the Patent Regime, and the Public InterestThis paper will look at bioinformatics and the various ethical issues raised by the patenting of life forms. Debates over life patents, specifically the 2002 Canadian Supreme Court decision which ruled against patenting the OncoMouse®, highlight how technological discourses on science and technology are inextricably integrated with prevailing economic discourses. The paper will also critique the creation of a patent regime which has privatized public knowledge and resources, and its institutionalization through the World Trade Organization’s TRIPS – the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights–and the tensions inherent when power is vested in the hands of corporations and public goods become transmogrified into private commodities.
Download the paper (PDF)
Inspired by the excellent CAUT conference on Controlling Intellectual Property - The Academic Community and the Future of Knowledg
DRM, net neutrality, etc
Thursday, March 1, 2007, 11:52 PM - Copyfight, Media
From slashdot:
Speaking before the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee advocated for net neutrality, saying that the Web deserves 'special treatment' as a communications medium to protect its nondiscriminatory approach to content. Berners-Lee's more controversial statements came on the topic of DRM, in which he suggested that instead of DRM, copyright holders should provide information on how to legally use online material, allowing users the opportunity 'to do the right thing.' This led to an odd exchange with Representative Mary Bono who compared Berner-Lee's suggestion to 'having a speed limit but not enforcing the speed limit.'"Also from /. today
"C-Net says last year saw a 131 percent jump in digital sales, but overall the industry still saw about a 4 percent decline in revenue. Some executives at this week's Digital Music Forum East conference lashed out at Jobs, blaming Apple and its CEO for their troubles. The impression at the conference was that Jobs' call three weeks ago for DRM-free music was anything but sincere. As the article puts it, 'Apple has maintained a stranglehold on the digital music industry by locking up iTunes music with DRM ... and "it's causing everybody else who is participating in the marketplace — the other service providers, the labels, the users — a lot of pain. If they could simply open it up, everybody would love them."
The Perils of Authorship
Sunday, February 25, 2007, 06:18 AM - Copyfight
This article by Kerry Grens is a tiny fraction of a Scientist's special issue dedicated to conflict in the labs (kinds of, how to avoid the, etc). Original from here.The Perils of Authorship
by Kerry Grens
For about a decade Susan Parkhurst, who leads a developmental biology laboratory at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, served as the informal ombudsman for postdocs. She says authorship disputes were the most common problem for postdocs. "I would have someone in here complaining about authorship once a week," Parkhurst says.
Even in her own lab, authorship issues arise. Several years ago two lab members were pursuing different projects: One was characterizing a mutation, and the other had identified a gene and was working to find a mutant. "It became clear at a lab meeting that they were working on the same thing, and we had to work out who goes on with this line of research," Parkhurst says. Parkhurst felt that having two papers published would be less effective than one, but only one person could be first author. Together they worked out a solution: the person who was leaving the lab first could complete the project and receive first authorship and the other person could follow up with subsequent studies. "Everyone could walk away not overjoyed, but understanding ... it was best for the lab."
Often, Parkhurst says, disputes arise because lab members are unaware of the rules of authorship or the rules change late in the research. The best practice, she says, is to be consistent and to establish authorship guidelines ahead of time.
Some things to consider:
-Will the order of authorship be determined before or after the project is completed? -Who is primarily responsible for the project?
-Will a statement indicating that two authors contributed equally to the work suffice?
-Who receives higher order - the person who worked longest on a project, or the person who completed the study?
-Will technicians receive authorship?
-Who are the people whose contributions were necessary to complete the project?
Note: Some of these considerations came from HHMI's handbook, Making the Right Moves: A Practical Guide to Scientific Management
Can History be Open Source?
Wednesday, February 21, 2007, 06:21 AM - Theory, Copyfight, Media
WIKIPEDIA AND THE FUTURE OF THE PASTby Roy Rosenzweig, originally published in The Journal of American History Volume 93, Number 1 (June, 2006)
History is a deeply individualistic craft. The singly authored work is the standard for the profession; only about 6 percent of the more than 32,000 scholarly works indexed since 2000 in this journal’s comprehensive bibliographic guide, “Recent Scholarship,” have more than one author. Works with several authors—common in the sciences—are even harder to find. Fewer than 500 (less than 2 percent) have three or more authors.Historical scholarship is also characterized by possessive individualism. Good professional practice (and avoiding charges of plagiarism) requires us to attribute ideas and words to specific historians—we are taught to speak of “Richard Hofstadter’s status anxiety interpretation of Progressivism.”2 And if we use more than a limited number of words from Hofstadter, we need to send a check to his estate. To mingle Hofstadter’s prose with your own and publish it would violate both copyright and professional norms.
A historical work without owners and with multiple, anonymous authors is thus almost unimaginable in our professional culture. Yet, quite remarkably, that describes the online encyclopedia known as Wikipedia, which contains 3 million articles (1 million of them in English). History is probably the category encompassing the largest number of articles. Wikipedia is entirely free. And that freedom includes not just the ability of anyone to read it (a freedom denied by the scholarly journals in, say, jstor, which requires an expensive institutional subscription) but also—more remarkably—their freedom to use it. You can take Wikipedia’s entry on Franklin D. Roosevelt and put it on your own Web site, you can hand out copies to your students, and you can publish it in a book—all with only one restriction: You may not impose any more restrictions on subsequent readers and users than have been imposed on you. And it has no authors in any conventional sense. Tens of thousands of people—who have not gotten even the glory of affixing their names to it—have written it collaboratively. The Roosevelt entry, for example, emerged over four years as five hundred authors made about one thousand edits. This extraordinary freedom and cooperation make Wikipedia the most important application of the principles of the free and open-source software movement to the world of cultural, rather than software, production.
Despite, or perhaps because of, this open-source mode of production and distribution, Wikipedia has become astonishingly widely read and cited. More than a million people a day visit the Wikipedia site. The Alexa traffic rankings put it at number 18, well above the New York Times (50), the Library of Congress (1,175), and the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica (2,952). In a few short years, it has become perhaps the largest work of online historical writing, the most widely read work of digital history, and the most important free historical resource on the World Wide Web. It has received gushing praise (“one of the most fascinating developments of the Digital Age”; an “incredible example of open-source intellectual collaboration”) as well as sharp criticism (a “faith-based encyclopedia” and “a joke at best”). And it is almost entirely a volunteer effort; as of September 2005, it had two full-time employees. It is surely a phenomenon to which professional historians should attend.
To that end, this article seeks to answer some basic questions about history on Wikipedia. How did it develop? How does it work? How good is the historical writing? What are the potential implications for our practice as scholars, teachers, and purveyors of the past to the general public?
Keep reading Can History be Open Source?
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