Excerpts from Article on Filk and Intellectual Property

[meltatum]

As I've mentioned before, my co-authored article on Gender and attitudes toward intellectual property has been accepted for publication and will appear in early 2010. A draft is available for free public download at www.ssrn.com (search for the word "filk"). Because the full article is rather long, several folks have asked if I would post a summary

Comments

[billroper]

Looks interesting.

My one observation is that I think you're correct that surveying another source than Xenofilkia might give you markedly different results for the male/female original/borrowed breakdown. Xenofilkia -- as I recall! -- is slanted fairly heavily towards the West Coast filk community. Each of the different regions has a somewhat unique identity of its own.

[e_moon60]

It is my informal observation, unsupported by any formal collection and analysis of data, that males more often express distaste/contempt for intellectual property rights than females when it comes to both writing and music. Recent discussions in other venues that related to the Google settlement issues reinforced my perception: males more than females seem to justify copyright infringement on the grounds that a) "copyright is broken" and b) "the big media companies are unfair to their public," while females more than males saw attacks on copyright as a direct threat to their livelihood. It's not 100% of course. One female in particular, with a background in publishing, agreed that "copyright is broken" (no one could define how, other than to cite the unfairness of big media corporations in their pursuit of infringers and attempts to elicit a mechanism resulted in moderator truncation of the discussion.) All the anti-copyright posts to my LJ have been from males, often citing other males as authorities (most typically Doctorow,

[meltatum]

I'd been approaching this from what I see in filk circles - I hadn't thought about the broader perspective of comparing it to the copyright debates in other contexts. It does make a lot of sense, and it fits with my informal observations, as well, now that I think about it.

[madfilkentist]

My observation confirms yours that there are more female writers of songs with original music, or at least they write more songs, than male writers. I don't know why this is, but it might be that male filkers are following the tradition of filk-as-parody that prevailed when science fiction fandom was mostly a male province.

I think it's a given, because of the nature of filk, that filkers take a narrower view of the exclusive right to make derivative works than authors do.

Another datum that might be interesting to you is that on the newsgroup rec.music.filk, there has been a long-standing tradition of not posting lyrics to copyrighted songs without the permission of the copyright holder.

[meltatum]

Thanks! I haven't hung out on usenet in quite a while, so I didn't know about that tradition.

[kayshapero]

It derives from the house rules of the Fidonet FILK echo, ancestor of the current usenet rec.music.filk newsgroup. See the rmf FAQ for more info. See also the group charter.

[kayshapero]

Oh, btw - in the earliest days of posting lyrics to the echo/newsgroup, I would frequently write things to known tunes so that people on the other side of the country or the planet would have a chance of singing them. Well, the ones who didn't just decide to write their own tune for it, which did happen occasionally.