Collaborative Futures (2010)

This book was written in a collaborative Book Sprint by six core authors over a five-day period in January 2010. It was developed under the aegis of transmediale, and executed by FLOSS Manuals. The six starting authors each come from different perspectives, as are the contributors who were adding to this living body of text.

“As we began the collaborative process of crafting this book on the future of collaboration, we realized we were all working from a set of assumptions, many of them shared, some of them divergent. We were talking about a specific form of collaboration, specific media of collaboration, and specific goals of collaboration. And we were talking about a specific history of collaboration, and a correspondingly specific set of futures.

To begin looking at those futures, we look back to others who have looked into the future. Marshall McLuhan’s quote above, from “The Medium is the MESSAGE” give us our first clue about all of these assumptions we are making. We are talking about media, we are talking about freedom, we are talking about technologies, and we are talking about culture. McLuhan’s prophetic utterance, several decades before the photocopier fueled the punk cut-up design aesthetic, or the profusion of home-brew zines, is still a prophecy unmet. We are still chasing it. Mainstream culture continues to consolidate around block buster films, books, and music. Copyright restrictions make it harder and harder to exercise the creative power of these reproduction tools without breaking increasingly restrictive intellectual property rights laws. But one thing is unanimously true: “Teamwork succeeds private effort.” ”

© Collaborative Futures Book Sprint team 2010
Written and produced by Mushon Zer-Aviv, Mike Linksvayer, Michael Mandiberg, Marta Peirano, Alan Toner and Adam Hyde with a number of special guest writers
Produced by FLOSS Manuals and Transmediale
To be published by Transmediale
Series: parcours #3

organisers

PDF (PDF)
View online (by chapter; HTML)
View online (full; HTML)

Siva Vaidhyanathan: Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (2001)

Copyright reflects far more than economic interests. Embedded within conflicts over royalties and infringement are cultural values—about race, class, access, ownership, free speech, and democracy—which influence how rights are determined and enforced. Questions of legitimacy—of what constitutes “intellectual property” or “fair use,” and of how to locate a precise moment of cultural creation—have become enormously complicated in recent years, as advances in technology have exponentially increased the speed of cultural reproduction and dissemination.

In Copyrights and Copywrongs, Siva Vaidhyanathan tracks the history of American copyright law through the 20th century, from Mark Twain’s vehement exhortations for “thick” copyright protection, to recent lawsuits regarding sampling in rap music and the “digital moment,” exemplified by the rise of Napster and MP3 technology. He argues persuasively that in its current punitive, highly restrictive form, American copyright law hinders cultural production, thereby contributing to the poverty of civic culture.

In addition to choking cultural expression, recent copyright law, Vaidhyanathan argues, effectively sanctions biases against cultural traditions which differ from the Anglo-European model. In African-based cultures, borrowing from and building upon earlier cultural expressions is not considered a legal trespass, but a tribute. Rap and hip hop artists who practice such “borrowing” by sampling and mixing, however, have been sued for copyright violation and forced to pay substantial monetary damages. Similarly, the oral transmission of culture, which has a centuries-old tradition within African American culture, is complicated by current copyright laws. How, for example, can ownership of music, lyrics, or stories which have been passed down through generations be determined? Upon close examination, strict legal guidelines prove insensitive to the diverse forms of cultural expression prevalent in the United States, and reveal much about the racialized cultural values which permeate our system of laws. Ultimately, copyright is a necessary policy that should balance public and private interests but the recent rise of “intellectual property” as a concept have overthrown that balance. Copyright, Vaidhyanathan asserts, is policy, not property.

Bringing to light the republican principles behind original copyright laws as well as present-day imbalances and future possibilities for freer expression and artistic equity, this volume takes important strides towards unraveling the complex web of culture, law, race, and technology in today’s global marketplace.

Publisher New York University Press, 2001
ISBN 0-8147-8806-8
Length 256 pages

Keywords and phrases
Mark Twain, Napster, Pac-man, U.S. Supreme Court, D. W. Griffith, African American, Ben-Hur, Led Zeppelin, Marx Brothers, Statute of Anne, Willie Dixon, rhythm and blues, Groucho Marx, Martha Graham, DMCA, U.S. Congress, Schoolly D, intellectual property, rap music, He’s So Fine

More info (publisher)
More info (google books)

PDF

Janneke Adema: Living Books: Experiments in the Posthumanities (2021)

“Reimagining the scholarly book as living and collaborative—not as commodified and essentialized, but in all its dynamic materiality.

In this book, Janneke Adema proposes that we reimagine the scholarly book as a living and collaborative project—not as linear, bound, and fixed, but as fluid, remixed, and liquid, a space for experimentation. She presents a series of cutting-edge experiments in arts and humanities book publishing, showcasing the radical new forms that book-based scholarly work might take in the digital age. Adema’s proposed alternative futures for the scholarly book go beyond such print-based assumptions as fixity, stability, the single author, originality, and copyright, reaching instead for a dynamic and emergent materiality.

Adema suggests ways to unbind the book, describing experiments in scholarly book publishing with new forms of anonymous collaborative authorship, radical open access publishing, and processual, living, and remixed publications, among other practices. She doesn’t cast digital as the solution and print as the problem; the problem in scholarly publishing, she argues, is not print itself, but the way print has been commodified and essentialized. Adema explores alternative, more ethical models of authorship; constructs an alternative genealogy of openness; and examines opportunities for intervention in current cultures of knowledge production. Finally, asking why it is that we cut and bind our research together at all, she examines two book publishing projects that experiment with remix and reuse and try to rethink and reperform the book-apparatus by taking responsibility for the cuts they make.”

Publisher MIT Press, August 2021
Leonardo series
Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 International License
ISBN 9780262046022, 0262046024
xiii+335 pages

Interview with author: Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra (Dariah Open, 2021).

Publisher
WorldCat

HTML (on PubPub)
PDF
PDFs