Official Post #6 (Unit 3 Takeaways)

Unit 3

What is culture? According to Chander and Sunder, culture is understood as "traveling, engaging in both internal and external dialogue along the way" (Chander). It's not a fixed thing, and thus the meaning of created things evolves over time as culture evolved. In "RIP: A Remix Manifesto," LaSalle states that "culture always builds on the past" and the past past always tries to control the future; culture is an expression of what came before. If we can't access the past, creating new things becomes nigh impossible.

 
Another good question is: what is privacy? I used to think privacy was being able to take a shower with no one watching, or even in the same room. Right now, most of us see privacy as a personal thing. Applied to a digital context, this concept seems obsolete. We've all heard about how the government monitors our lives through our technology. So we've acclimated to the idea that online/digital privacy is a thing of the past and just doesn't exist. "In contemporary democracies, privacy is recognized as a basic human right- the 'right to be left alone' " (Papacharissi). According to Papacharissi, privacy has actually become a luxury commodity, "raded, in exchange for access to social services...our personal information is exchanged as currency to gain digital access to friends" (Papacharissi). And who gains access to this private information? Cooperate entities, of course. The more time we spend online, the more personal information we depart, and the more access companies gain into our lives by using the tools at their disposal.

According to Lessig, copyright is "the mix of protections crafted by Congress to reward artists for their creativity by creating incentives for artists to produce great work" (23). Sousa believed that the part of culture "where commercial entities profited from creative works needed to be regulated more" (33). Today, copyright has become a tool used by companies (like Disney) to monopolize ideas (from the past or from other cultures), profit off of them, and then seal them away from being used by anyone else. Copyright is outdated in this digital age where remixing and sampling are people's way of creating media. It "has expanded hugely, particularly in the twentieth century, giving creators ever-greater powers to stop other people from making derivative or secondary uses of their work" (Keller).

Here is a lovely infographic about common-held myths of copyright:

The problem with this infographic, and copyright in general, is that it's too easy to break. The rules are unclear due to our digital tools and our use and creation of media and information. Copyright used to be an incentive; now it's just a bunch of laws you are probably breaking. Get ready to be sued. 

Read/Write (RW) culture is produced by amateur creativity; the "young people of the day" would add to this culture they read and heard by creating and re-creating the culture around them (28).

Read Only (RO) culture deals only with consumption, not creation.  Sousa, quoted by Lessig, feared that R/W culture would be displaced by this RO culture; however, we can see that this just hasn't been the case. A strong argument can be put forth that today we have expanded the idea of RW culture due to the vast digital tools at our disposal. Today we are re-creating and creating new forms of media from the old, in ways unimagined by those living in pre-internet times.

Amateur creativity goes along with the idea that non-professionals could "get together and sing" (32). This type of creativity creates RW culture, and needs to be left unregulated, according to Lessig. As we can see by the current copyright legal system, too much control can choke this creativity and cause remix music artists (for example) to go into hiding from legal battles they have no hope of winning.

 Authorship, according to Laurent LaSalle, maker of “RIP: A Remix Manifesto,” has been around since the printing press; copyright was first introduced as an incentive to create, and only lasted 14 years. Then everything went into the public domain.  This changed during the 20th century, when copyright was extended to the life of the author plus 75 years, mostly thanks to Disney. Suddenly, ideas that corporations monopolized became off-limit to the public for over a hundred years.

The problem is that it's almost impossible to create something that hasn’t been made before, that doesn’t draw from the past.

Fair use is an attempt to address the overly-strict and oftentimes non-applicable copyright laws. Under this doctrine, "criticism and parodies can copy a work without infringing the work's copyright" (Keller). Still, it is not a good legal tool for "appropriationist artists" in the court because 1) it's expensive, and 2) it's unclear what the court will consider fair use. In other words, If I were to use Harry Potter in a way Rowling didn't like, and she decided to threaten me, I would stop doing it because I just don't have enough money to afford fair use lawyers. She has millions to pit against me. This illustration shows how fair use in the legal system still caters to those who can afford the lawyers.

 Open and closed information circulation are bi-polarized ways of thinking about circulation. Either information must be shared to everyone, or no one at all. Right now, creative commons and fair use seem to be advocating the open polar, the idea that information should be accessible to everyone and everyone should be able to see/use it. The problem with this way of thinking is that not all information should be accessible to everyone; in some cultures, certain types of info belong to certain types of communal groups (men, women, male, female, elders, etc.). In a completely open culture, this information would not be protected and anyone could do what they wished with it, regardless of the "creator"-community's wishes.
A closed culture says that information should be completely protected and belongs solely to the creator. Copyright law as it is now seems to be wavering towards this polar. Originally, copyright was meant to be an incentive for authors; however, now it deters remixing and sampling and other forms of information circulation. Cultural appropriation is...
But why does information circulation have to be black and white? There must be a middle ground where creativity is fostered, yet ideas with cultural meaning can be protected and accessed in the way those communities deems appropriate according to its culture.

This middle ground can be referred to as ethical pluralism, which tries to land somewhere in the middle between ethical monism (right and wrong) and ethical relativism ("well, it depends..."). Pluralism says that some things can be right/wrong; we share some basic human values but can change throughout time. Social contexts also change. These values are NOT in conflict (you can be right and I can be right). This sort of thinking is dialogical, meaning that it accepts differences and universal norms, which change, at the same time. Thus, these terms can be negotiated.