IP/Gender Conference, finally cont.: Keynote address
Thursday's notes.
Sixth Annual IP/Gender: Mapping the Connections
American University Washington College of Law
Keynote
The keynote on Friday (last Friday, now) was by Rebecca Tushnet, fan and lawyer, who teaches at Georgetown. Tushnet's keynote is posted on her blog. Which is great, because I suck at taking notes, as previously mentioned. I used to have great note-taking ability! Sigh. Anyway, she also posted notes to the other panels, which I will link to and probably excerpt as well.
Aspects I found intriguing from her keynote: the contrast between the models of multiplicity in organic fan culture vs. scarcity and selection in corporate attempts at creating fandom.
Fandom is particularly suitable for producing multiple prototypes because multiplicity is at the heart of fan cultures: you can have fifty first-time romantic encounters between the same two characters, or five hundred, because fanworks are not constrained to follow a single canon. Contrast that to the rhetoric of scarcity Zahr Stauffer identifies in attempts to monetize fandom and reward the “best” fans of a particular series. Commercial culture promises an infinity of options but cannot deliver; nobody gets to go home with the entire contents of the store. Selectivity seems so natural to the commercial project that the copyright owners trying to turn fandom into marketing don’t even seem to notice the way in which their baseline assumptions about value, coherence, and scarcity contradict the assumptions of the fans they’re trying to reach.
The corporate appropriation of fan culture and fanworks as advertising and control of their property is a topic that I find both fascinating and at times infuriating. More later on this as well as how it intersects with the perennial debate over remaining underground vs. "coming out" as fans, and the notion that by providing the platforms on which we create and post works (YouTube, Livejournal, etc) corporations are profiting from the labor and content provided by fans.
Another intriuging point was the manner with which the law approaches fan works:
Interdisciplinarity specifically draws our attention to the poverty of current legal analysis as applied to multimedia works; lawyers are very good at text and not very good at images or music, but fanworks increasingly incorporate multiple media: art and photomanipulation and video, extradiegetic music and snatches of dialogue and text, challenging law to use the insights of other disciplines to assess transformativeness...
And her conclusion is worth quoting as well:
What can we get out of making these links? Drawing on Carol Gilligan’s concepts of moral maturity, based on studies of certain women’s moral reasoning: I would argue that maturity in copyright’s theory of creativity requires both independence (respect for dissent) and connection (respect for the community). Women in fan communities seek recognition as creators and regularly recognize the claims of other creators in the form of credit and compensation. Asserting their creative independence and their creative embeddedness at the same time-their basis in and distinctions from the commercial economy--fanworks offer a working model of hybridity in creative production, one the law would do well to recognize.
Anyway, I recommend hopping over to Tushnet's blog to read her keynote in full, it's not too long, and it's packed with ideas.
Sixth Annual IP/Gender: Mapping the Connections
American University Washington College of Law
Keynote
The keynote on Friday (last Friday, now) was by Rebecca Tushnet, fan and lawyer, who teaches at Georgetown. Tushnet's keynote is posted on her blog. Which is great, because I suck at taking notes, as previously mentioned. I used to have great note-taking ability! Sigh. Anyway, she also posted notes to the other panels, which I will link to and probably excerpt as well.
Aspects I found intriguing from her keynote: the contrast between the models of multiplicity in organic fan culture vs. scarcity and selection in corporate attempts at creating fandom.
Fandom is particularly suitable for producing multiple prototypes because multiplicity is at the heart of fan cultures: you can have fifty first-time romantic encounters between the same two characters, or five hundred, because fanworks are not constrained to follow a single canon. Contrast that to the rhetoric of scarcity Zahr Stauffer identifies in attempts to monetize fandom and reward the “best” fans of a particular series. Commercial culture promises an infinity of options but cannot deliver; nobody gets to go home with the entire contents of the store. Selectivity seems so natural to the commercial project that the copyright owners trying to turn fandom into marketing don’t even seem to notice the way in which their baseline assumptions about value, coherence, and scarcity contradict the assumptions of the fans they’re trying to reach.
The corporate appropriation of fan culture and fanworks as advertising and control of their property is a topic that I find both fascinating and at times infuriating. More later on this as well as how it intersects with the perennial debate over remaining underground vs. "coming out" as fans, and the notion that by providing the platforms on which we create and post works (YouTube, Livejournal, etc) corporations are profiting from the labor and content provided by fans.
Another intriuging point was the manner with which the law approaches fan works:
Interdisciplinarity specifically draws our attention to the poverty of current legal analysis as applied to multimedia works; lawyers are very good at text and not very good at images or music, but fanworks increasingly incorporate multiple media: art and photomanipulation and video, extradiegetic music and snatches of dialogue and text, challenging law to use the insights of other disciplines to assess transformativeness...
And her conclusion is worth quoting as well:
What can we get out of making these links? Drawing on Carol Gilligan’s concepts of moral maturity, based on studies of certain women’s moral reasoning: I would argue that maturity in copyright’s theory of creativity requires both independence (respect for dissent) and connection (respect for the community). Women in fan communities seek recognition as creators and regularly recognize the claims of other creators in the form of credit and compensation. Asserting their creative independence and their creative embeddedness at the same time-their basis in and distinctions from the commercial economy--fanworks offer a working model of hybridity in creative production, one the law would do well to recognize.
Anyway, I recommend hopping over to Tushnet's blog to read her keynote in full, it's not too long, and it's packed with ideas.