Communication Studies: Capstone (proposal, 10 weeks earlier)

Conception & Definition of the Project

“If nature has made one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess themselves of it... no one possesses the less, because everyone possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and the improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement, or exclusive appropriation.”
VI WRITINGS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON, 1760-1826, at 180-81 (H.A. Washington ed., 1854) (letter to Isaac McPherson, August 13, 1813) (qouted in Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1, 8-9 n.2 (1966)).

New technology has separated many forms of media from any kind of physical product. Instead of CDs in plastic cases, books with different sorts of bindings, paintings done on stretched canvas, or myriad other traditional forms of media which must be physically exchanged, allowing the producer(s) of the media to profit, data can be traded infinitely between any two people with internet access. Karl Marx described one of the conditions of capitalism as “the alienation of the production from consumption;” file sharing has made this a fact for all different kinds of media.

File sharing has resulted in a lot of copyright lawsuits and copyright legislation, but it has also changed the way artists view their own work. It has changed the way consumers view artists' work. The traditional industries which make a lot of profit off of media rely on the me-to-you physical exchange of the media. Either they are paid directly by the purchase of their media product or indirectly by advertisers who decide how much to pay based on the extent of that media product’s me-to-you transfer. These industries reacted initially with lawsuits, both against the people sharing files and the people producing the software which allows this sharing, they have tried various forms of Digital Rights Management technology to prevent their files from being freely shared, and lobbied for intensified copyright control.

In response to this intensified legal control within the traditional copyright idea of “all rights reserved,” a group of legal scholars and technology experts founded Creative Commons in 2001 to offer alternative forms of licensing. When licensing your work this way, you can choose which rights (commercial use, modifications, attribution, etc.) you reserve and which you do not reserve. You can also choose to license your work as “Share alike” which restricts derivative works from being published unless they are licensed in an identical way.

This form of license had it's first test in court , as a dutch court held March 6th 2006 that it was binding- a well-known ex-TV personality posted pictures of his family on a website under a "Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial Sharealike" license. A dutch tabloid printed the photographs, and the TV personality sued. This type of license allows reproduction of the bit of media licensed so long as proper attribution is used crediting it's source and as long as the form of reproduction is not commercial - clearly the tabloid is commercial. The court ruled in favor of the TV personality.

Marshall McLuhlan famously described the way the changing forms of technology, especially information and media technology, change culture; how the message is not only something separate which we encode into one medium or another, but that the medium itself carries wide foundational messages no matter what message we encode into it. “Environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are invisible.”

How has the environment of facile exchange fostered by file sharing technology and fast internet connections changed ownership? How do creators of traditional media like painters, authors of novels, and musicians see their work, which was at it’s origin a statement of individuality and obviously personal and owned, now that it is distributed freely and often without accreditation?

Proposed is a critical study of the current invisible environment through which media is exchanged, and how this environment shapes ideas about ownership of that media. It is important that such a study approach the topic from several angles. Legal perspectives on the topic are important, and so are the perspectives and opinions of affected media-producers. Literature on intellectual property and copyright should be considered and examined and so should media being created in this new environment.

Some of the specific books and theorists which should start this engine have already been touched on, but they are repeated: Marshall McLuhan’s insight about how the form of communication informs the content and meaning and receiver, reader, listener, devourer of that communication, as discussed in 1967’s The Medium is the Massage.

Lawrence Lessig’s far more contemporary writings about intellectual property, 2001’s The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World are also an excellent point of entry. Incidentally, Lessig’s book is licensed in the same way as our tv-personality’s photographs from the dutch court case: it is available online for download, and you can print it out for free so long as you don’t use it for commercial purposes; this book can be used as an example as well as a source.

The first interview scheduled would be Cameron Gaut, a local musician whose 2008 release, “Six minute city” is licensed under a creative commons license and distributed mostly online. I hope to find another local artist with a recently published work that they chose to copyright in the traditional way also. Interviews with legal scholars would serve to inform the technical aspects of the specific changes going on in the realm of copyright and ownership.

The final product of this study would be to create a small publication which would present this topic in a format that could be distributed in the traditional methods (print) as well as digitally. Arranged as a guide for anyone interested in self-publishing artwork, writing, music, or other forms of media, it would explain each option from traditional “all rights reserved” copyright to the complete opposite decision, publishing in the public domain. Ideally, making this an understanding of this information easily available to new publishers of self-made media so they can understand the legal environment surrounding ownership of their work might increase the likelihood for a person to publish.

Significance

McLuhan identifies the idea of authorship as personal ownership to have come about with the advent of print technology. “The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property. Mechanical multiples of the same text created a public- a reading public. The rising consumer-oriented culture became concerned with labels of authenticity and protection from theft and piracy. The idea of copyright - “the exclusive right to reproduce, publish, and sell the matter and form of a literary or artistic work” was born.”

As the capacity for technology to reproduce with a high degree of quality and accuracy and freely share media develops, the physical product of media further becomes abstracted from it’s production. It is as Jefferson described, “like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening... incapable of confinement, or exclusive appropriation.” How has this new abstraction from physical-product affected producers of art, media, and music, and how can they navigate this new environment to the benefit of themselves and their work?

Timetable for the project

March 4th-25th - Proposal writing, information gathering
April 1st - 1st day of class, turn in signed proposal
Week 1 - Information gathering, seek interviews
Week 2 - Research, seek/conduct interviews, identify major sections of the final product
Week 3 - Research, seek/conduct interviews, organize information
Week 4 - Research, create first outline, first graphical framework for final product (Adobe Indesign)
Week 5 - Begin to write main body, academic format first, secondary research
Week 6 - Write main body, secondary research, create graphical table of contents and introduction for the final product
Week 7 - Finish main body in academic format, turn in for feedback. Begin to fill each section of the graphical framework, in such a way as to make the topic
available to the audience, secondary research
Week 8 - Revise as needed main body, continue to make the research into the final production, print a first copy to identify formatting problems
Week 9 - Make final revisions as needed to both the academic research and the print publication. Print a final copy of the publication, license it.
Week 10 - Turn in both the academic paper and the publication in class. Print copies of the publication and distribute them around campus or wherever possible. Make the digital format freely available online.


Bibliography

Some of the books which have informed the creation of this proposal have already been referenced, but here is a list; these may or may not be referenced in the publication part of the project, but will most likely be a part of the academic paper.

Lessig, Lawrence. The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World. 2001. http://www.the-future-of-ideas.com/download/.
Marx, Karl & Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. Oxford University Press: New York, 1992.
McLuhan, Marshall. The Medium is the Massage. Bantam Books: New York, 1967.
McLuhan, Marshall and Eric. Laws of Media: The New Science. University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1988.

-------Footnotes which were lost in formatting
Creative Commons. http:/creativecommons.org/about/licenses. 22 March 2008.
3 Creative Commons. http://creativecommons.org/press-releases/entry/5822. 16 March 2008.
4 McLuhan, Marshall. The Medium is the Massage (1967) Bantam Books: New York. Page 68.
5 McLuhan, Marshall. The Medium is the Massage. (1967) Bantam Books: New York. Page 122.