Lackadaisical Laws: Research Report
From English 194 Wiki Site
By Brenna Robertson
19:11, 24 May 2006 (PDT)
Contents |
Abstract
The personal narrative of a confused scholar, sitting at her computer, in the 21st century. She is worried about citing her sources and providing proper credit where credit is due. She bought a book on how copyrights and their language of "intellectual property" needed to be changed and made more available to the public. She paid $19.00 for the pleasure. She feels that maybe it should have been available to read for free somewhere considering the subject matter it discussed, but alas, she is disappointed. Based on a true story.
Description
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The Low Down
Do you like the picture I put up here? I made sure to correctly format the title so there could be no confusion on whether or not I "stole" the image. But I realize that I didn't cite where I got the image from so, click here if you want to see the original site the picture was posted on.
Really this is the book that I based all of my research on. Actually not even that much, I read the introduction and was flabbergasted by what I was reading and surmised that a whole lot could be said just about those few weensy pages, well a few thoughtful pages at least. When I finished my last research report I wasn't necessarily satisfied with what I came up with. In most cases, one conducts research to gain an answer to some question they have been pondering and they find the answer through their search. Ahhh satisfaction. But then I looked the definition up on the internet (yay!), and found I was wrong. Dictionary.com calls it "scholarly or scientific investigation or close and careful study". Nothing about an ending. Perhaps an ending is only luck and people get Nobel prizes after finishing. But nevertheless, the questions I had left with me took me to a fog of intellectual property particles.
Originally copyright was used as a method for looking over a type of trade guild, making sure that the people who "had" the means to publish works and the people who "had not" were working freely with each other. It made sure that there was a good distribution of the products in the public domain, I can assume to avoid exclusion or greed. But as the US grew and became more diverse and literate, copyright laws began to change. There were worries of censorship, bogus copies of books, personal criticisms of government in underground papers (Benjamin Franklin) and people started to want these things for their own. There was also a shift of vernacular when copyright cases hit the US courts and rights became "property" and the eternal intellectual property battle ensued (Vaidhyanathan, 12).
People are terrified to post images on their webpages or download songs for fear they will be silently tagged by some government authority (heh, author). This wasn't really a problem initially because copyright used to be limited to 24 years and then whatever was copyrighted was considered public domain. Now however, because our government has been pushed to support big business instead of harbor concern for the public interest, those years have been lengthened to the life of the original producer, plus seventy years or so. How is information ever expected to be shared or how can creativity reach its full potential if there are such stiff statues? Vaidhyanathan says the confusion has comer over an "esoteric" discussion over who the "author" really is and not about what these laws and gray areas are doing to the public sphere of American life (10). The young rapper in her garage is not worried about her role as an author in her product; she is worried if she will get sued for using a three second clip from a crappy disco tune recorded more than 15 years before she was born. Most likely is that we will never hear Vaidhyanathan's young rapper. She will be in court before she records.
The term Intellectual Property is strangled under these laws and misnomers. It is not just merely about protection from theft anymore. It is about confusion regarding antiquated laws and misinformation regarding what they actually protect. Property rights are what copyright consists of and it has the possibility to choke out the "starving artist" (14). What copyright has really become is protection not of original ideas or artists but a protection of large corporation and their money. As long as corporations can make bundles of money from this property and can limit access to their products and that does no good for anyone. Copyrights should be changed from a matter of intellectual property to a matter of intellectual policy, says Vaidhyanathan.
But I still have no answers. There is this crazy halt where this type of policy is concerned, people are talking about it all the time but even though there is a recognized gargantuan gray area, no one is trying to remake anything, only find a way to make money off it when it does come around. As an English major poised on the edge of my career out of college, this worries me. Am I going to be spending my entire career lamenting the dusty laws of our forefathers and crying over who an author really is? Or am I going to enter a new world of sharing and production, of making better, of giving freely of our most inventive and reflexive personal experiences and the tangible things that come of them?
I hope someone publishes a book on it.
Works Cited
- Vaidhyanathan, Siva. Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity. New York: New York University Press, 2001.
