Episode 88A: OTW Legal Advocacy Interview - Extended Cut

[fffinnagain]

Episode 88A: OTW Legal Advocacy Interview - Extended Cut

Want to know more about legal issues faced by transformative work creators and how we can protect our rights to create? Here is the extended cut of Finnagain's interview with legal advocacy committee member Rebecca Katz from The Organization of Transformative Works. This longer discussion includes with extra material on international policy and the impacts of the interaction of law and technology for our fannish communities. Show notes, streaming, and direct download information are available HERE at three-patch.com.

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Comments

[sarahthecoat]

ah, excellent, #to listen!

[sarahthecoat]

Just listened to this, such a great interview, thanks!
One thing that I got thinking about, why this interface between owners and fans of content gets so hairy, is it's to do with the monetization of culture. Nothing against writers or artists being able to make a living doing their thing! But, looking back in human history, stories and art are a HUGE part of culture, alongside language, customs, etc. and while artists of various kinds had patrons that released them to do this work, plenty of artists and story tellers and singers and musicians, did and still do just do it for fun, to participate in their own culture and pass it on. Pop culture is still culture.

I'm not a student of cuneiform, but I know while there are tablets full of stories, and tablets to do with business (inventory lists, complaints about substandard materials etc.) so far as I know, there aren't any about what we would call plagiarism or intellectual property. The stories we have are cobbled together from fragments of many versions or copies, and we treat all as equally legit.

I used to read loads of arthurian stories, they're all over in the middle ages, but did any of those writers deride others for stealing their intellectual property? I doubt it. Was it the printing press, which simply made production of copies of written content easier, that brought up the idea of copyright? That seems to be a big issue in the digital age, and it doesn't seem to have been an issue in the manuscript age.

[drinkingcocoa]

Your comment has got me thinking about forms of cultural transmission that are free and communal vs. stories that can bring writers a paycheck. Literacy is so widespread in our era, and access to written material is universal, but it was not always so. I wonder if writers in other eras could have made a living from their writing in the way that we do now, through profit rather than patrons.

[sarahthecoat]

yes, and it's so weird that people WEREN'T (apparently) concerned about copying back when it was hard to do, only a few people could read and write and make books, they had to be copied by hand. but every monastery had a scriptorium hard at work. I dimly recall a story about some ruler somewhere that intercepted any books arriving in his port and had them copied before letting them go. But now that copying is easy, suddenly it's not ok except in certain parameters. Doubtless many more songs and stories were only passed on orally, but now that we can easily make and copy sound recordings, suddenly it's not ok unless you have paid. People felt free to change or add things to songs and stories that reflected their own experience or preferences or just memory, and all those versions of ballads are now collected as of great interest in how these cultural materials travelled and were transmitted, but the books they are in are all copyrighted.
oh dear, don't get me started on privatizing the commons!! :D