{"id":10335,"date":"2010-04-06T10:51:31","date_gmt":"2010-04-06T09:51:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/?p=10335"},"modified":"2012-04-25T17:28:32","modified_gmt":"2012-04-25T16:28:32","slug":"copyright-copyleft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/?p=10335","title":{"rendered":"PAST EVENT: Copyright, Copyleft"},"content":{"rendered":"

Who Owns the Words?
\nSunday 6 June
\nThe Guardian Hay Festival, Wales<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019s books on the web, but for how long? The potential replacement of our beloved ink and paper objects with cold electronic devices\u2014an eventuality in which many of us still refuse to believe\u2014came one sinister step closer this year. The must-have gift of the 2009 holiday season? The e-book reader.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s high noon in the digital age, but many of us are still lounging in bed. We\u2019ve 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\u2014they\u2019re free.<\/p>\n

Among the many provocative arguments David Shields makes in his new book\u00a0Reality Hunger: A Manifesto<\/a>, he argues that the economic model based on the copy is not only no longer sustainable, it\u2019s no longer relevant:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

We have become a culture virtually and literally inundated with \u201ccultural artifacts and debris: all of this is part of our lives, but much of it is off limits or artistic expression because someone \u2018owns\u2019 it.\u201d In a world where so much content has become so readily accessible, isn\u2019t it a natural development that artists want to make use of available material? This debate over ownership and appropriation in music is widely known\u2014musical artists have been fighting for the right to creatively \u201csample\u201d for decades. But the debate has been more subdued, perhaps more settled in literature. Or has it?<\/p>\n

Shields\u2019 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<\/em> without attribution. He lost.<\/p>\n

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\u2014long considered a protection of the artist\u2019s creative output, has actually become an obstacle to the \u2018natural evolution of human creativity\u2019.<\/p>\n

For more information visit the Guardian Hay Festival website<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Copyright, Copyleft, Who Owns the Words? Hay Festival, 6 June<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[7],"tags":[102,103,1942,1524,1944,746],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10335"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/31"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10335"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10335\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35711,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10335\/revisions\/35711"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}