August 17th, 2011
Local papers in Albemarle County, Virginia, have reported that Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, has been
removed from sixth-grade reading lists after a parent complained that it was “our young students’ first inaccurate introduction to an American religion.” In the book, in which a father and daughter are rescued by Mormons on condition they adopt the Mormon faith, Conan Doyle wrote that Mormons were “persecutors of the most terrible description”.
April 28th, 2011
The
Chinese government has
refused author Liao Yiwu an exit visa to attend the PEN World Voices Festival in New York. Authors at the event, led by Salman Rushdie, issued a protest on Friday (22 April) and called on the Chinese authority to overturn their ban. Liao is best known for his poem Massacre about the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown for which he spent four years in jail. The festival has
vowed to set up an empty chair to represent Liao.
April 6th, 2010
Who Owns the Words?
Sunday 6 June
The Guardian Hay Festival, Wales
Articles abound about the ways the internet, twitter, text-messaging and Facebook status updates have changed the culture of reading and writing across the globe. This year Google scaled back its ambitious project to put the world’s books on the web, but for how long? The potential replacement of our beloved ink and paper objects with cold electronic devices—an eventuality in which many of us still refuse to believe—came one sinister step closer this year. The must-have gift of the 2009 holiday season? The e-book reader.
It’s high noon in the digital age, but many of us are still lounging in bed. We’ve been hitting the snooze button since the 90s, refusing to wake from a dream we began in the nineteenth century, when advancing technologies in mass-production made music and image, film and literature widely available. Copies were cheap, and copyright laws have historically protected artists and allowed distributors to prosper. But technology marches on, dragging the culture behind it, and a little over two hundred years later, copies are no longer cheap—they’re free.
Among the many provocative arguments David Shields makes in his new book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, he argues that the economic model based on the copy is not only no longer sustainable, it’s no longer relevant:
The new model is based on the intangible assets of digital bits: copies are no longer cheap but free and flow freely everywhere. As computers retrieve images from the web or displays from a server, they make temporary internal copies of those works. Every action you invoke on your computer requires a copy of something to be made. Many methods have been employed to try to stop the indiscriminate spread of copies, including copy-protection schemes, hardware-crippling devices, education programs, and statutes, but all have proved ineffectual. The remedies are rejected by consumers and ignored by pirates. Copies have been dethroned; the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connection and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer and engage a work.
We have become a culture virtually and literally inundated with “cultural artifacts and debris: all of this is part of our lives, but much of it is off limits or artistic expression because someone ‘owns’ it.” In a world where so much content has become so readily accessible, isn’t it a natural development that artists want to make use of available material? This debate over ownership and appropriation in music is widely known—musical artists have been fighting for the right to creatively “sample” for decades. But the debate has been more subdued, perhaps more settled in literature. Or has it?
Shields’ book is made up of some 600 aphorisms, mini-essays, provocative statements and unattributed quotations. Using both his own words and the words of others, he takes on the nature of art, pits fiction against non-fiction, essay against story and imagination against invention. Citing a a literary history of unattributed copying, cribbing and appropriation that includes Nabokov, TS Eliot and Shakespeare, Shields fought for the right to publish hisManifesto without attribution. He lost.
So the question arises, who owns the words? Who owns the music, the images, the stories and touchstones of our culture? The individual artists, the distributing corporations, or the consumers who purchase it? Index on Censorship and Penguin Books bring together a provocative panel, including Mr Shields, to discuss creative sampling the age of the easy copy, and whether the evolution of copyright—long considered a protection of the artist’s creative output, has actually become an obstacle to the ‘natural evolution of human creativity’.
For more information visit the Guardian Hay Festival website
March 30th, 2010
Expatriate Sri Lankan author, Sarah Malini Perera,
has been arrested in whilst on holiday Sri Lanka for writing two books— From Darkness to Light and Questions and Answers—about her conversion from Buddhism to Islam. Perara, who has lived in Bahrain since 1985, was detained last week after apparently causing offence to the largely Buddhist Sinhalese population of the country. Authorities have declined to comment on the situation.
March 25th, 2010
Author Murzban Shroff has been
charged with obscenity and making “prejudicial” remarks to “national integration” in his novel Breathless in Bombay. The latter charge is based on the use of the word “ghati”; a defamatory term for Maharashtrians, people from the
Maharashtra region in western
India. Following Shroff’s hearing at the Bombay High Court on Friday, Justice BR Gavai ordered that police not to take any
“coercive action” against the author during the ongoing investigation but he granted the prosecution three weeks to file a reply.
February 12th, 2010
Ahmad Rajabzadeh’s ‘Book Censorship’ is a guide to some of the stranger examples of literary repression in Iran. Azar Mahloujian takes a look
(more…)
May 20th, 2009
The PEN American Center is part of International PEN. It is an association of writers working to advance literature, defend free expression, and foster international literary fellowship.
