Reviews and a music video teaser
Phoebe Tonkin in a Miles Fisher video: okay!
Patricia Aufderheide & Peter Jaszi, Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright: Ah, norm entrepreneurs, gotta love ‘em (when they’re on your side). Includes some nice shoutouts to the OTW and especially its work on DMCA exemptions for noncommercial video.
The authors argue that fair use should be, and descriptively is, readily capable of being applied by ordinary citizens to rework and reframe existing copyrighted material without fear. They suggest that Larry Lessig’s famous claim that fair use is “the right to hire a lawyer” is overstated to the detriment of fair use, and that the common copyfight language of rebellion and suppression is dangerous to the potential fair uses of the many people who don’t want to be rebels or pirates and who may therefore suppress their own, in fact unobjectionable, creative and educational activities. “Victim politics” “has the effect of validating powerlessness; as soon as victims gain any agency, they start to look more like the enemy…. Exaggerating or misrepresenting the acts of fair users, and their consequences, can unnecessarily deprive people of the agency to accomplish routine acts of cultural expression.” (There’s a really interesting dynamic here about radicals v. liberals in a movement sense; the OTW, the authors, and I are all clearly on the liberal-reformist side, though I think for rhetorical reasons of their own the authors downplay the important contributions the radicals make to getting the liberals’ claims heard and taken seriously-Sonia Katyal and Eduardo Peñalver’s book on Property Outlaws does a good job on this point.)
At least for a solid core of fair uses, members of practice communities (like media educators, documentary filmmakers, and even vidders-though the authors are pretty careful in their handling of vidders because of the music, as is everyone who writes on this topic) “do not need a lawyer to deliverate on their appropriate employment of fair use, if they have grasped the logic of earlier fair use codes.” Lawyers don’t necessarily like people reasoning on their own about the law, even though they do so all the time in non-copyright situations. “No one should be trying to ‘get away’ with anything, and nobody should assume more risk than they are comfortable with, when they can avoid it. Fair use does not usually require courage. It should be something that elementary schoolchildren can do without drama.”
The book concludes with suggestions for developing codes of best practices in new fields to complement existing ones. It also has a nice discussion of various myths, including the “right to hire a lawyer” idea, the claim that I’ve seen on occasion that what we really need is a good test case in court, and so on. There are also specific examples scattered throughout the book with “answers” in the back so people can practice their fair use determination muscles. All in all, a very strong contribution to the second wave of internet-era copyright reform literature.
Robert A. Brooks, Cheaper by the Hour: Temporary Lawyers and the Deprofessionalization of the Law: If you want to read a largely value-neutral account of the degradation of labor, here it is! Many people in this ethnographic narrative, including the author, repeatedly make the point that the lawyers doing mind-numbing work, often in terrible conditions, are getting paid in the area of $30 or more an hour, which makes it better than doing mind-numbing work in terrible conditions for $5 an hour, but I can’t help thinking that this framing represents an appalling narrowing of possibility both for moral evaluation and for policy response. Also, it’s very clear that as employers can drive down the wages, they will, so that $30 is not exactly stable-in fact the last chapter briefly discusses outsourcing to India, though the author only interviewed contract lawyers working in America. “[U]ntil the day when document review is fully automated, or until all of it is sent to India, the work of the project attorney-the leading edge of the new underclass-will continue.” Good times!
Richard Rhodes, Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World: Lightweight book about movie star Hedy Lamarr, who fled a bad European marriage (and overhanging Nazi threat) to come to the US, where she invented things in between making movies. No deep psychological insights, and though the missile radio-guidance technology she patented with the help of a Hollywood composer uses principles that still structure important technologies today there doesn’t seem to be a direct connection between her version and the versions we use now, so if she hadn’t been a movie star by day this would be an unremarkable story. Still, it was a decent read: creativity comes from everywhere, including Lamarr’s exposure to her arms-dealer husband’s discussions and her collaborator’s experience with player pianos; the flash of genius is more likely when a curious mind has building blocks on which to draw.
Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: A chronicle of the War of 1812’s northern front, featuring plenty of ego and incompetence on both sides though the US comes off worse in planning/discipline respects while Britain wins on sheer arrogance and high-handedness. The conflict had its inception British insistence that subjecthood was forever-one couldn’t avoid one’s obligations to the Crown by emigrating-while American citizenship wasn’t worthy of respect, particularly with respect to much-in-demand sailors impressed off of American ships. Mostly the people living in Canada just wanted to be left alone by both sides, which the Americans initially misread as sympathy for the US. One of the most notable parts from my perspective was the account of how a wealthy investor, who had many interests in a key area of the front, pressured the US government not to attack there, even though it was the only place that offered any realistic prospect of success in getting the British out of Canada. Meanwhile, he was lending a ton of money to the broke government, so it did what he wanted even as that made the military situation worse. Financiers: screwing things up since 1814! Taylor also discusses the terror generated in Americans by fear of Indians, often enough to make poorly trained troops break just from fear. The tribes were the biggest losers; Britain accepted a peace that involved abandoning their allies to US promises of fair treatment, easily broken. Basically a history of one blunder after another.
Henry Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: A bunch of collected essays mostly between Textual Poachers and Convergence Culture, many available online. The longer, more academic ones have been edited down, which I think is unfortunate, and aside from an interesting dialogue with Matt Hills addressing some of Hills’s critiques of Jenkins and arguing that affect can’t be separated from meaning, there’s not really much here for those already familiar with Jenkins’s work.
Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population: Basically a policy history of the population control movement, focused on various unsavory alliances and splits in largely Western (and nonwestern elite) groups largely interested in overbreeding by people who weren’t them, though always and increasingly in dialogue with advocates for improving economic security, women’s education, and women’s power to decide for themselves how many children they wanted to have. Today’s successors to the population control movement are largely from that group. Connelly follows the view from the movement, which means talking a lot about what the experts thought and then just telling us that they were wrong without too much discussion of just what the people who were refusing to become “acceptors” were thinking and doing. A strength of the book is that it ties thinking on immigration to thinking on contraception and abortion. Connelly also notes that population controllers often ignored a proven means of reducing fertility: education for women. They did this because, he suggests, they were often simultaneously afraid of lower fertility in “high-quality” women, though it was hard to say this publicly as eugenics became increasingly in bad odor. I wish there’d been some unpacking of this racially inflected neglect, because as a matter of logic it’s just dumb: if you want uneducated people to stop having so many kids, educating them by definition ought to take them out of the troublesome group; you have to have an underlying idea that education won’t “fix” some more fundamental problem if you want to make them just stop reproducing.
Jon Krakauer, Three Cups of Deceit: Short, sad takedown of a man who promised to build schools in remote areas of Afghanistan and mostly just succeded in selling books and living well himself. Krakauer’s own disillusionment comes through without overpowering the story, but the most notable thing to me was that many inconsistencies in the narrative were already public-his stories changed from book to book, but they were good stories so people didn’t care. (And I think true stories also tend to change in the telling; that’s the way of humankind.)
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Patricia Aufderheide & Peter Jaszi, Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright: Ah, norm entrepreneurs, gotta love ‘em (when they’re on your side). Includes some nice shoutouts to the OTW and especially its work on DMCA exemptions for noncommercial video.
The authors argue that fair use should be, and descriptively is, readily capable of being applied by ordinary citizens to rework and reframe existing copyrighted material without fear. They suggest that Larry Lessig’s famous claim that fair use is “the right to hire a lawyer” is overstated to the detriment of fair use, and that the common copyfight language of rebellion and suppression is dangerous to the potential fair uses of the many people who don’t want to be rebels or pirates and who may therefore suppress their own, in fact unobjectionable, creative and educational activities. “Victim politics” “has the effect of validating powerlessness; as soon as victims gain any agency, they start to look more like the enemy…. Exaggerating or misrepresenting the acts of fair users, and their consequences, can unnecessarily deprive people of the agency to accomplish routine acts of cultural expression.” (There’s a really interesting dynamic here about radicals v. liberals in a movement sense; the OTW, the authors, and I are all clearly on the liberal-reformist side, though I think for rhetorical reasons of their own the authors downplay the important contributions the radicals make to getting the liberals’ claims heard and taken seriously-Sonia Katyal and Eduardo Peñalver’s book on Property Outlaws does a good job on this point.)
At least for a solid core of fair uses, members of practice communities (like media educators, documentary filmmakers, and even vidders-though the authors are pretty careful in their handling of vidders because of the music, as is everyone who writes on this topic) “do not need a lawyer to deliverate on their appropriate employment of fair use, if they have grasped the logic of earlier fair use codes.” Lawyers don’t necessarily like people reasoning on their own about the law, even though they do so all the time in non-copyright situations. “No one should be trying to ‘get away’ with anything, and nobody should assume more risk than they are comfortable with, when they can avoid it. Fair use does not usually require courage. It should be something that elementary schoolchildren can do without drama.”
The book concludes with suggestions for developing codes of best practices in new fields to complement existing ones. It also has a nice discussion of various myths, including the “right to hire a lawyer” idea, the claim that I’ve seen on occasion that what we really need is a good test case in court, and so on. There are also specific examples scattered throughout the book with “answers” in the back so people can practice their fair use determination muscles. All in all, a very strong contribution to the second wave of internet-era copyright reform literature.
Robert A. Brooks, Cheaper by the Hour: Temporary Lawyers and the Deprofessionalization of the Law: If you want to read a largely value-neutral account of the degradation of labor, here it is! Many people in this ethnographic narrative, including the author, repeatedly make the point that the lawyers doing mind-numbing work, often in terrible conditions, are getting paid in the area of $30 or more an hour, which makes it better than doing mind-numbing work in terrible conditions for $5 an hour, but I can’t help thinking that this framing represents an appalling narrowing of possibility both for moral evaluation and for policy response. Also, it’s very clear that as employers can drive down the wages, they will, so that $30 is not exactly stable-in fact the last chapter briefly discusses outsourcing to India, though the author only interviewed contract lawyers working in America. “[U]ntil the day when document review is fully automated, or until all of it is sent to India, the work of the project attorney-the leading edge of the new underclass-will continue.” Good times!
Richard Rhodes, Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World: Lightweight book about movie star Hedy Lamarr, who fled a bad European marriage (and overhanging Nazi threat) to come to the US, where she invented things in between making movies. No deep psychological insights, and though the missile radio-guidance technology she patented with the help of a Hollywood composer uses principles that still structure important technologies today there doesn’t seem to be a direct connection between her version and the versions we use now, so if she hadn’t been a movie star by day this would be an unremarkable story. Still, it was a decent read: creativity comes from everywhere, including Lamarr’s exposure to her arms-dealer husband’s discussions and her collaborator’s experience with player pianos; the flash of genius is more likely when a curious mind has building blocks on which to draw.
Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: A chronicle of the War of 1812’s northern front, featuring plenty of ego and incompetence on both sides though the US comes off worse in planning/discipline respects while Britain wins on sheer arrogance and high-handedness. The conflict had its inception British insistence that subjecthood was forever-one couldn’t avoid one’s obligations to the Crown by emigrating-while American citizenship wasn’t worthy of respect, particularly with respect to much-in-demand sailors impressed off of American ships. Mostly the people living in Canada just wanted to be left alone by both sides, which the Americans initially misread as sympathy for the US. One of the most notable parts from my perspective was the account of how a wealthy investor, who had many interests in a key area of the front, pressured the US government not to attack there, even though it was the only place that offered any realistic prospect of success in getting the British out of Canada. Meanwhile, he was lending a ton of money to the broke government, so it did what he wanted even as that made the military situation worse. Financiers: screwing things up since 1814! Taylor also discusses the terror generated in Americans by fear of Indians, often enough to make poorly trained troops break just from fear. The tribes were the biggest losers; Britain accepted a peace that involved abandoning their allies to US promises of fair treatment, easily broken. Basically a history of one blunder after another.
Henry Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: A bunch of collected essays mostly between Textual Poachers and Convergence Culture, many available online. The longer, more academic ones have been edited down, which I think is unfortunate, and aside from an interesting dialogue with Matt Hills addressing some of Hills’s critiques of Jenkins and arguing that affect can’t be separated from meaning, there’s not really much here for those already familiar with Jenkins’s work.
Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population: Basically a policy history of the population control movement, focused on various unsavory alliances and splits in largely Western (and nonwestern elite) groups largely interested in overbreeding by people who weren’t them, though always and increasingly in dialogue with advocates for improving economic security, women’s education, and women’s power to decide for themselves how many children they wanted to have. Today’s successors to the population control movement are largely from that group. Connelly follows the view from the movement, which means talking a lot about what the experts thought and then just telling us that they were wrong without too much discussion of just what the people who were refusing to become “acceptors” were thinking and doing. A strength of the book is that it ties thinking on immigration to thinking on contraception and abortion. Connelly also notes that population controllers often ignored a proven means of reducing fertility: education for women. They did this because, he suggests, they were often simultaneously afraid of lower fertility in “high-quality” women, though it was hard to say this publicly as eugenics became increasingly in bad odor. I wish there’d been some unpacking of this racially inflected neglect, because as a matter of logic it’s just dumb: if you want uneducated people to stop having so many kids, educating them by definition ought to take them out of the troublesome group; you have to have an underlying idea that education won’t “fix” some more fundamental problem if you want to make them just stop reproducing.
Jon Krakauer, Three Cups of Deceit: Short, sad takedown of a man who promised to build schools in remote areas of Afghanistan and mostly just succeded in selling books and living well himself. Krakauer’s own disillusionment comes through without overpowering the story, but the most notable thing to me was that many inconsistencies in the narrative were already public-his stories changed from book to book, but they were good stories so people didn’t care. (And I think true stories also tend to change in the telling; that’s the way of humankind.)
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.