STRATEGIC IMPROPRIETIES: CULTURAL STUDIES, THE EVERYDAY, AND THE POLITICS OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTIES
2006; Routledge; Volume: 20; Issue: 2-3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09502380500495635
ISSN1466-4348
Autores Tópico(s)Australian History and Society
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Kembrew McLeod would like to thank the University of Iowa's Project on the Rhetoric of Inquiry (POROI), Office of the Vice President for Research, College of Law, and the Department of Communication Studies for their support of the February 25, 2005 symposium “Intellectual Property: An Interdisciplinary Conversation,” which brought together many of the contributors to this special issue. Notes 1. The paperback edition published by Harvard/Belknap retails for US$23.95, which is a steal for an academic book exceeding 1000 pages. 2. It also is true of the African-American musical form of hip-hop, whose musical appropriation traditions were interrupted and, in many cases, ended by copyright infringement lawsuits (see Vaidhyanathan 2001 Vaidhyanathan, S. 2001. Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity, New York: NYU Press. [Google Scholar], McLeod 2001 McLeod, K. 2001. Owning Culture: Authorship, Ownership, and Intellectual Property Law, New York: Peter Lang. [Google Scholar] 2005 McLeod, K. 2005. Freedom of Expression®: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity, New York: Doubleday. [Google Scholar]). 3. For an extended discussion of this issue, see McLeod 2005 McLeod, K. 2005. Freedom of Expression®: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity, New York: Doubleday. [Google Scholar], pp. 52–60. 4. ‘[E]very diagram’, writes Gilles Deleuze, ‘is intersocial and constantly evolving. It never functions in order to represent a persisting world but produces a new kind of reality, a new model of truth. It is neither the subject of history, nor does it survey history. It makes history by unmaking preceding realities and significations, constituting hundreds of points of emergence or creativity, unexpected conjunctions or improbable continuums. It doubles history with a sense of continual evolution’ (1988 Deleuze , G. ( 1988 ) Foucault , trans. Seán Hand , University of Minnesota Press , Minneapolis and London . [Google Scholar], p. 35). 5. Lawrence Grossberg has written: ‘When the early work of British Cultural Studies was appropriated’ by US scholars, ‘it was inevitably read as an alternative approach to the study of communication and media. There is in fact a certain historical rationale for this identification. Writing about the reception of Richard Hoggart's foundational book, The Uses of Literacy, Stuart Hall acknowledged that it was read, ‘ – such were the imperatives of the moment, essentially as a text about the mass media’. Consequently, cultural studies was framed, both within and outside of the [Birmingham] Centre, as a literary-based alternative to the existing work on mass communication’ (1996 Grossberg, L. 1996. “‘Toward a Genealogy of the State of Cultural Studies: The Discipline of Communication and the Reception of Cultural Studies in the United States’”. In Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies, Edited by: Nelson, C. and Gaonkar, D. P. 131–147. New York and London: Routledge. [Google Scholar], pp. 138–139). 6. See, for example, from a cultural studies/critical theory vantage point, Elspeth Probyn's (2000 Probyn, E. 2000. Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities, London and New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar]) Carnal Appetites and Jane Adams’ (1999 Adams , C. J. ( 1999 ) The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory , 10th anniversary edn , Continuum , New York . [Google Scholar]) The Sexual Politics of Meat. For a more sociological account, see George Ritzer's (2004 Ritzer , G. ( 2004 ) The McDonaldization of Society , revised new century edn , Sage , Thousand Oaks . [Google Scholar]) The McDonaldization of Society, and, from a more journalistic perspective, Eric Schlosser's (2002 Schlosser, E. 2002. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, New York: Harper Perennial. [Google Scholar]) Fast Food Nation and Morgan Spurlock's (2005 Spurlock, M. 2005. Don't Eat This Book: Fast Food and the Supersizing of America, New York: Putnam Adult. [Google Scholar]) Don't Eat This Book: Fast Food and the Supersizing of America. 7. Rosemary J. Coombe, John Nguyet Erni, and Peter Jaszi are notable exceptions. We'd add, too, that those cultural studies practitioners who work in the area of queer theory often are among the most engaged (in both practice and in their scholarly publishing) with the law and legal concerns. 8. For work that speaks to the connections between academic cultural studies and the culture industries, see Sean Nixon's (1996 Nixon, S. 1996. Hard Looks: Masculinities, Spectatorship, and Contemporary Consumption, New York: St. Martin's Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) Hard Looks; Tony Bennett's (1998 Bennett, T. 1998. Culture: A Reformer's Science, London: Sage. [Google Scholar]) Culture: A Reformer's Science; Angela McRobbie's (1998 McRobbie, A. 1998. British Fashion Design: Rag Trade or Image Industry?, London: Routledge. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) British Fashion Design; and Ted Striphas’ (2002 Striphas, T. 2002. ‘Banality, Book Publishing, and the Everyday Life of Cultural Studies’. The International Journal of Cultural Studies, 5(4): 438–460. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) ‘Banality, Book Publishing, and the Everyday Life of Cultural Studies’. Thomas Streeter's (1996 Streeter, T. 1996. Selling the Air: A Critique of the Policy of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) Selling the Air is an exemplary work showing how cultural studies’ interest in the cultural (in this case, commercial and public television) also connects tangibly with legal concerns. 9. Consider in this regard the work of Lawrence Lessig (2001) and Siva Vaidhyanathan (2001 Vaidhyanathan, S. 2001. Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity, New York: NYU Press. [Google Scholar]), who argue respectively for a return to ‘thin’ and ‘leaky’ IP protections as the best strategy for combating more restrictive IP laws. For a critique of their positions, see Striphas (in press) Striphas T. ( in press ) ‘Disowning Commodities: Ebooks, Capitalism, and Intellectual Property Law’ , Television and New Media . [Google Scholar]. 10. An analogous story is told by Johns (1998 Johns, A. 1998. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) about the stationers’ guilds of early-modern England. 11. The conflicts between formal, legal modes of governing the production, distribution, exchange, and consumption of ideas in the West and the methods Indigenous groups have used to do so have been documented by scholars working both in and outside of cultural studies. See, among many others: Coombe (1998 Coombe, R. J. 1998. The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law, Durham and London: Duke University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]); McLeod (2001 McLeod, K. 2001. Owning Culture: Authorship, Ownership, and Intellectual Property Law, New York: Peter Lang. [Google Scholar], 2005 McLeod, K. 2005. Freedom of Expression®: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity, New York: Doubleday. [Google Scholar]); Brown (2004 Brown, M. F. 2004. Who Owns Native Culture?, Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. [Google Scholar]); and Goodman (2005 Goodman, J. E. 2005. Berber Culture on the World Stage: From Village to Video, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. [Google Scholar]). 12. The organization was known as the Society for Cinema Studies when the report was written. 13. This happened in the case of ‘aspirin’, a term which, between 1899 and 1921, referred to a specific brand name of the drug, acetylsalicylic acid. The public's overuse of ‘aspirin’ to refer to competing brands resulted in a US Federal Court decision, in which the Court ruled that ‘aspirin’ no longer deserved trademark protection (‘Aspirin’ 2005 ‘Aspirin’ ( 2005 ) Wikipedia , [online] Available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirin [Google Scholar], n.p.). Clearly the threat of genericide is real, and it is precisely why some companies actively promote their brands as just that – brand names and not general terms for competing products (think ‘Xerox’ for photocopies, ‘Kleenex’ for facial tissues, ‘Band-Aid’ for bandages, and ‘Jacuzzi’ for whirlpool baths). 14. To be fair, since Jenkins wrote Textual Poachers, he has acknowledged the censoring uses of copyright that make it harder for texts to be appropriated. 15. One implicit goal in making McLeod's documentary Copyright Criminals: This is a Sampling Sport, which is based on chapter two of his book Freedom of Expression®, is to demonstrate that fair use does exist in practice, not just in theory. In that chapter he tells the story, in the medium of print, of how hip-hop and sound collage practices were impacted by copyright law and rights clearance policies. However, it becomes more complicated – practically and legally – when the documentary version of that story necessitates that McLeod and his co-producer use brief quotations of sound and image, rather than a blank screen or silence. 16. Mark Rose's (1995 Rose, M. 1995. Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright, Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. [Google Scholar]) Authors and Owners and Martha Woodmansee's (1996 Woodmansee, M. 1996. The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics, New York: Columbia University Press. [Google Scholar]) The Author, Art, and the Market are exemplary of this kind of work. 17. John Frow notes, for instance: ‘[T]here is no single form of ‘the gift’ and no pure type either of the gift economy or of the commodity economy…. The gift…cannot and should not be conceived as an ethical category: it embodies no general principle of creativity, of generosity, of gratuitous reciprocality, or of sacrifice or loss. At best it is an ambivalent category, oscillating between the poles of generosity and calculation’ (1997 Frow, J. 1997. Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity, Oxford: Clarendon Press. [Google Scholar], p. 124).
Referência(s)