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Yet control over popular culture by mass media is clearly eroding

this paper investigates three relevant traditions of theory that address these overlaps: HCI, poststructuralism, and theories of technological determinism, especially in media.

Creativity—its nature, conditions of possibility, inputs and outputs, and processes—plays a major role in virtually all academic, professional, and artistic domains. As a result, it is heavily, and heterogeneously, theorized.

Genealogically, HCI developed alongside cognitive science and computer science, and was most often put in service of professional productivity software.

All of this is in service of what Schneiderman calls “evolutionary creativity,” which he illustrates as follows:“doctors making cancer diagnoses, lawyers preparing briefs, or photo editors producing magazine stories”(2002, p. 238). Here, Page 17 Creativity in Amateur Multimedia 15 and pervasive throughout the essay, Schneiderman’s notion of creativity appears to be paraphrasable as professional innovation: His interest is not artistic self-expression and, as we shall see, he is not alone in understanding creativity in terms of professional discourses

Again, creativity is understood as it relates to professional discourses, in this case the discourse of art history and its pedagogical presentation to museum-goers. Even analyses of group creativity in HCI contexts that seek to go beyond rationalist- individualist notions of creativity nonetheless operate in a rationalist mode.

The notion of creativity that emerges from these mainstream HCI essays places its agency primarily in the intentional activity of the individual (though the individual is presumably a member of relevant groups). It sees the ecology of creativity as a community of expert practice comprising research, dialogue, and artifact exchange, facilitated by social and computer environments that forgivingly compel an iterative and basically scientific (correctness, discrete information, classification, hypothesis) approach toward truth.

In this conceptualization of writing, creativity occurs at the level of discursive rule- transgressing. The role of the historical human in this process is greatly diminished, not because humans are not involved in textual production, but because the individual is at the wrong level of granularity for analysis. A given historical individual authoring discourse does so within complex interactions involving several selves and the clash of languages

Related, but not identical, to Foucault’s notion of authorship are theories of “intertextuality” put forward by Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes. Intertextuality is the notion Page 19 Creativity in Amateur Multimedia 17 that a text is a “tissue” of (mis) quotations from other texts, considered to be more than mere collages, but transformative, of the sign systems from which they are derived (McAfee, 2004)

Creativity’s agency lies in the juxtaposition of sign systems (in which authorial identities are implicated), which occurs in the context of play, and results in artifacts that are significant not for what they say, but for the ways they materially contribute to the generative capacity of the discursive rule-set from which they operate.

Like Schneiderman (2002, 2003) and Foucault (1969/2000), Ellul (1964/2003, 1980/2003), too, is making claims about the origins and generation of knowledge in scientific discourses, but he situates the agency in the fierce pressures of technology as it overwhelms and often replaces the comparatively meek procedures of science and governance

As a result, according to Benjamin, our cognitive experience of the art also changes; whereas painting allows spectators to control their own stream of consciousness and reflect on what they see, cinema’s moving images disrupt association and contemplation, dominating viewers’ thoughts.

Benjamin’s (1936/1968) arguments are developed further by self-described technological determinist Marshall McLuhan, whose claim that “the medium is the message”(1964/2003) characterizes media as “extensions of ourselves” that “alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance”(p. 31).

For Manovich, the emergence of new visual languages is enabled not by an iterative, rational approach to innovation, as cognitive science might suggest; neither does it emerge from an evolutionary history of discursive transgression, as a poststructuralist approach might suggest 10. Rather, it is made possible by certain forms of productive convenience built into authoring tools that unleash visual languages and cultural logics that exceed any human intention, whether at the level of the individual or the group of experts.

A key first step is to understand how creativity is implemented in multimedia authoring software. Each program has ways it encourages authors to work. For example, Photoshop greatly rewards users who take advantage of layers, opening up avenues of possibility for compositing, nondestructive experimentation, and long-term editability. This in turn makes certain meanings (especially meanings created by the juxtapositions of spatial compositing) more easily realized than others. To what extent do contemporary authoring platforms encourage in the same ways (constituting and compelling a notion of digital creativity), or do different applications suggest different notions of digital creativity?

They're fighting to maintain a state of mind, an attitude toward creative work that says someone ought to own products of the mind, and control who can copy them. And by positioning the issue as a contest between the Beleaguered Artist, who supposedly needs copyright to pay the rent, and The Unthinking Masses, who would rather copy a song or a story off the Internet than pay a fair price, the industry has been astonishingly successful. They have managed to substitute the loaded terms "piracy" and "theft" for the more accurate "copying" — as if there were no difference between stealing your bicycle (now you have no bicycle) and copying your song (now we both have it).

Copyright is an outgrowth of the privatization of government censorship in sixteenth-century England. There was no uprising of authors suddenly demanding the right to prevent other people from copying their works; far from viewing copying as theft, authors generally regarded it as flattery. The bulk of creative work has always depended, then and now, on a diversity of funding sources: commissions, teaching jobs, grants or stipends, patronage, etc. The introduction of copyright did not change this situation. What it did was allow a particular business model — mass pressings with centralized distribution — to make a few lucky works available to a wider audience, at considerable profit to the distributors.

For the vast majority of artists, copyright brings no economic benefits. True, there are a few stars — some quite talented — whose works are backed by the industry; these receive the lion's share of distribution investment, and generate a correspondingly greater profit, which is shared with the artist on better than usual terms because the artist's negotiating position is stronger. Not coincidentally, these stars are who the industry always holds up as examples of the benefits of copyright.

The first copyright law was a censorship law.

The method the government chose was to establish a guild of private-sector censors, the London Company of Stationers, whose profits would depend on how well they performed their function. The Stationers were granted a royal monopoly over all printing in England, old works as well as new, in return for keeping a strict eye on what was printed.

The system was quite openly designed to serve booksellers and the government, not authors. New books were entered in the Company's Register under a Company member's name, not the author's name. By convention, the member who registered the entry held the "copyright", the exclusive right to publish that book

The Stationers' right was a new right, though one based on a long tradition of granting monopolies to guilds as a means of control. Before this moment, copyright — that is, a privately held, generic right to prevent others from copying — did not exist.

Dissolution of the monopoly might have been good news for long-suppressed authors and independent printers, but it spelled disaster for the Stationers, and they quickly crafted a strategy to retain their position in the newly liberal political climate.

The Stationers based their strategy on a crucial realization, one that has stayed with publishing conglomerates ever since: authors do not have the means to distribute their own works. Writing a book requires only pen, paper, and time. But distributing a book requires printing presses, transportation networks, and an up-front investment in materials and typesetting. Thus, the Stationers reasoned, people who write would always need a publisher's cooperation to make their work generally available. Their strategy used this fact to maximum advantage. They went before Parliament and offered the then-novel argument that authors had a natural and inherent right of ownership in what they wrote, and that furthermore, such ownership could be transferred to other parties by contract, like any other form of property.

The first recognizably modern copyright, the Statute of Anne, was passed in 1709 and took effect in 1710.

The Statute of Anne, taken in historical context, is the smoking gun of copyright law. In it we can see the entire apparatus of modern copyright, but in still-undisguised form. There is the notion of copyright as property, yet the property is really intended for publishers, not authors. There is the notion of benefitting society, by encouraging people to write books, but no evidence was offered to show that they would not write books without copyright. Rather, the Stationers' argument was that publishers could not afford to print books without protection from competition, and furthermore that printers could not be depended to reproduce works faithfully if given unfettered freedom to print. The corollary, they implied, was that without the prospect of reliable distribution, authors would produce fewer new works.

The authors who succeeded in selling this new right to printers had no particular motivation to complain — and naturally, we don't hear very much about the authors not so favored. T

This is the secret that today's copyright lobby never dares say aloud, for once it is admitted, the true purpose of subsequent copyright legislation becomes embarrassingly clear.

Having granted the premise that copyrights should exist at all, the English government found themselves under pressure to extend copyright terms further and further.

The industry's centuries-long campaign for strong copyright law is not merely a reflexive land grab, however. It's a natural economic response to technological circumstances. The effect of the printing press, and later of analog sound recording technology, was to make creative works inseparable from their means of distribution. Authors needed publishers the way electricity needs wires. The only economically viable method of reaching readers (or listeners) was the bulk print run

There is nothing inherently exploitative about this; it's just straightforward economics. From a business point of view, a print run is a daunting and risky project.

When one realizes that all this must happen before the work has generated a penny of revenue, it is little wonder that publishers argue hard for copyright. The publisher's initial investment — that is, their risk — in any individual work is greater, in economic terms, than the author's

The arrival of the Internet fundamentally changed this equation.

But today, the medium over which content is distributed can be unrelated to the medium in which it is ultimately consumed. The data can be sent over a wire, at essentially no cost, and the user can print up a copy at her own expense, and at whatever quality she can afford, on the other end [7]. Furthermore, it is no longer important to possess the master; in fact, the concept of the master copy itself is obsolete. To make a perfect copy of a printed work is actually quite hard, although making a corrupt or abridged copy is very easy. Meanwhile, to make a perfect copy of a digital work is trivially easy — it's making an imperfect copy that requires extra effort.

Thus, a publisher's total expense was proportional to the number of copies distributed. In such a situation, it is reasonable to ask that each user bear a portion of the costs of distribution.

Thus the practice of charging the same fee for each copy, regardless of how many copies there are or who made them, is now unjustifiable. The cost of producing and distributing the work is now essentially fixed, no longer proportional to the number of copies

From society's point of view, every dollar spent beyond the amount needed (if any) to bring the work into existence in the first place is a waste, an impediment to the work's ability to spread on its own merits.

The Internet did something the Company of Stationers never anticipated: it made their argument a testable hypothesis. Would creators still create, without centralized publishers to distribute their works? Even minimal exposure to the Internet is enough to provide the answer: of course they will.

Imagine the simplest scenario: you walk into the neighborhood print shop and tell the clerk the Web address of the book you want. A couple of minutes later, the clerk comes back with a freshly printed, hardbound book, straight off the Internet. He rings up the sale. "That'll be eight dollars. Would you like to add the one dollar author's suggested donation?" Do you say yes? Perhaps you do, perhaps not — but note that when museums charge a voluntary admission fee, people often pay it. The same sort of dynamic is at work in the copy shop. Most people are happy to pay a tiny extra bit on top of some larger amount, if they have their wallet out already and think it's for a good reason.

This is not the only possible system, and it can easily coexist with others. Those not convinced by voluntary donations should consider another method: the Fund and Release system (also called the Threshold Pledge system [9]).

turning a defeat in the marketplace into a victory in the aesthetic realm--the "fine" arts were now precisely those that did not have a big impact on the public.

Having traced the impact of the newly developed marketplace on the definition of art, Woodmansee turns in her second chapter to an examination of its impact on the development of the modern concept of the author.

As writers moved from an aristocratic patronage system to a democratic market-based system, attempting for the first time to earn a living on their own as professionals, they found the legal foundation necessary for this shift not yet in place. Germany had not yet developed a concept of intellectual property and, consequently, book piracy was rampant. In order to put an end to piracy and claim a portion of the profits from book sales for themselves, writers had to prove that ownership of a work extends beyond the mere physical foundation to which pirates had reduced it.

If Moritz, Fichte, and Schiller were interested in reforming the "supply side" of artistic production in response to the crisis of the new reading market, Johann Adam Bergk sought to work on the "demand side." Woodmansee shows how Bergk's hefty 416-page tome "The Art of Reading Books" (1799) was a response to Addison's advocacy of widespread leisure reading in the early years of the century.

Bergk seeks "to carry forward Addison's project under the radically altered conditions of literature in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century" (p. 93) by expressly detailing not so much what should be read as how books should be read, advocating an active and creative reader who, he hoped, would "automatically make the 'right' choices" once he/she learned to read, becoming "too sophisticated to derive much pleasure from the growing literature of sheer diversion" and turning instead to classical authors for leisure reading (p. 100).

After a brief, but interesting, excursus on the role of gender in eighteenth-century aesthetic theory that focuses on the career of the first popular German woman writer, Sophie von La Roche, whose gender denied [End Page 967] her (theoretical) ownership of her works,

Woodmansee ends her book by returning to the legal realm, detailing Wordsworth's defense of the Copyright Bill of 1842, which in effect legislated his anti-market aesthetic theory of 1815 and encouraged the production of "difficult" art for posterity rather than for the contemporary book-buying public. The law had finally intervened and provided support for those who would "rescue" art from the market.

In The Author, Art, and the Market, Woodmansee provides an exemplary model for integrating aesthetics and cultural studies,

"Neighboring rights" refer to the rights of performers, broadcasters, and other individuals who do not author works, but play an important role in communicating them to the public.

Exceptions

As in many other countries, the term "public domain" is not mentioned in Japanese copyright laws, and thus, even though some materials are claimed to be "public domain", there can be some restrictions. Sometimes the term copyright-free is used instead.

Works authored by an individual, under his own name or a known pseudonym, are protected for fifty years following the individual's death. Works authored anonymously or under an unknown pseudonym, as well as works authored by corporations, where the individual author or authors are unknown, are protected for fifty years following publication. Japan is considering extending the duration of protection to seventy years to be more in line with the United States and other nations.

Very soon,[when?] CDs will be copy-protected in Japan.

Once implemented, it may become impossible to play copyright-protected CDs on the CD-ROM drive of a computer.

In 1992, the "Compensation System for Digital Private Recording" was introduced. According to this system, those who make digital sound or visual recordings for personal use should pay compensation to the copyright owners. This compensation is added in advance to the prices of specified digital recording equipment (DAT, DCC, MD, CD-R, CD-RW), and specified recording media (DVCR, D-VHS, MVDISC, DVD-RW, DVD-RAM) (Japan Copyright Office 2001, 17; ibid. 24).

In other words, the clever user who tries to free-ride on the original genius of the creator of this or that tune has to be educated, and forced to participate in a trusted system in order to obtain the desired tunes. No one has so far mentioned about either fair use or the reach of the public domain.

In 1997, the Japanese Copyright Law was updated to expand the coverage of the author's "right of communication to the public" (established in 1986 under the name of Rights of Broadcasting and Wire Transmission) to the stage of making it transmittable. The objects of the right of communication to the public are the activities of connecting a server to a network, and the activities of transmission

Besides these two definitions, Article 23 (1) of the Copyright Law provides that "(t)he author shall have the exclusive right to make the public transmission of his or her work (including the making transmittable of his or her work in the case of the interactive transmission)". This can be considered an expansion of the right of public transmission of authors to the preceding stage of making transmittable, available (Fujiwara 1999, 98-99; Japan Copyright Office 2001, 31), and even of a right of making transmittable that goes further than the WIPO Copyright Treaty (Ficsor 2002, 506). Apart from this, and in order to comply with the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty, a right of making transmittable was also granted to performers and phonogram producers. The scope here is especially to regulate the internet broadcasting of live performances (Fujiwara 1999, 98; Japan Copyright Office 2001, 31).

when we look at it from the viewpoint of the public domain, the wider reach of the concept of communication to the public means a big limitation of the reach of this public domain. This is not a discourse against "copyright protection". Indeed, in a lot of cases, copyright protection seems to work as a system, and creates an incentive to produce. We only should be aware that the current transformations in the legislation concerning intellectual property rights — in Japan and in other countries — is moving very fast, and do not seem to take into account all facets of the story, nor remember the very basic goal of copyright, which is "to contribute to the development of culture".

In November 2000, the "Copyright Management Business Law" (4.2.2.3) was enacted. Its main purpose is to facilitate the establishment of new copyright management businesses, in order to "respond to the development of digital technologies and communication networks" (Japan Copyright Office 2001, 27). In general, we can say that this law will facilitate the rise of copyright management businesses, and possibly create a further limitation to the reach of the public domain.

In its book, "Copyright System in Japan", the title of this section is "(t)o secure the effectiveness of rights by utilizing new technologies" (Japan Copyright Office 2001, 32). This shows clearly that the Japanese government considers software to be a tool for enforcing copyright legislation. Not mentioned, however, is the possible negative side-effects concerning fair use (limitation on rights), or the reach of the public domain.

It is quite clear that with this regulation, it becomes impossible to circumvent the copyright-protection of intellectual property in the context of fair use. This means that when a CD, etc. is copyright-protected, there is not only technically no space for fair use, but also from the legislative side, there is no support for copying in the context of fair use.

the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece

the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece

the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece

the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece,

the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece,

the instrumentalist's freedom is a function of the "narrative" structure of the piece, w

the new musical works referred to above reject the definitive, concluded message and multiply the formal possibilities of the distribution of their elements.

initiative of the individual performer

As he reacts to the play of stimuli and his own response to their patterning, the individual addressee is bound to supply his own existential credentials, the sense conditioning which is peculiarly his own, a defined culture, a set of tastes, personal inclinations, and prejudices. Thus, his comprehension of the original artifact is always modified by his particular and individual perspective. In fact, the form of the work of art gains its aesthetic validity precisely in proportion to the number of different perspectives from which it can be viewed and understood.

it is obvious that works like those of Berio and Stockhausen are "open" in a far more tangible sense.

Instead nowadays it is primarily the artist who is aware of its implications.

However, in this type of operation, "openness" is far removed from meaning "indefiniteness" of communication, "infinite" possibilities of form, and complete freedom of reception. What in fact is made available is a range of rigidly preestablished and ordained interpretative solutions,

and these never allow the reader to move outside the strict control of the author.

It is not that the four solutions of the allegorical passage are quantitatively more limited than the many possible solutions of a contemporary "open" work. As I shall try to show, it is a different vision of the world which lies under these different aesthetic experiences

Now if Baroque spirituality is to be seen as the first clear manifestation of modern culture and sensitivity, it is because here, for the first time, man opts out of the canon of authorized responses and finds that he is faced (both in art and in science) by a world in a fluid state which requires corresponding creativity on his part.

the new man's inventive role. He is no longer to see the work of art as an object which draws on given links with experience and which demands to be enjoyed; now he sees it as a potential mystery to be solved, a role to fulfill, a stimulus to quicken his imagination.

W. Y. Tindall, in his book on the literary symbol, offers an analysis of some of the greatest modern literary works in order to test Valéry's declaration that "il n'y a pas de vrai sens d'un texte" ("there is no true meaning of a text"). Tindall eventually concludes that a work of art is a construct which anyone at all, including its author, can put to any use whatsoever, as he chooses. This type of criticism views the literary work as a continuous potentiality of "openness"-in other words, an indefinite reserve of meanings. This is the scope of the wave of American studies on the structure of metaphor, or of modern work on "types of ambiguity" offered by poetic discourse.

Clearly, the work of James Joyce is a major example of an "open" mode, since it deliberately seeks to offer an image of the ontological and existential situation of the contemporary world.

Here the work is "open" in the same sense that a debate is "open." A solution is seen as desirable and is actually anticipated, but it must come from the collective enterprise of the audience. In this case the "openness" is converted into an instrument of revolutionary pedagogics.

the examples considered in the preceding section propose an "openness" based on the theoretical, mental collaboration of the consumer, who must freely interpret an artistic datum, a product which has already been organized in its structural entirety (even if this structure allows for an indefinite plurality of interpretations). On the other hand, a composition like Scambi, by Pousseur, represents a fresh advance.

it is clear that a composition such as Scambi poses a completely new problem. It invites us to identify inside the category of "open" works a further, more restricted classification of works which can be defined as "works in movement," because they characteristically consist of unplanned or physically incomplete structural units

If we turn to literary production to try to isolate an example of a work in movement," we are immediately obliged to take into consideration Mallarmé's Livre, a colossal and far- reaching work, the quintessence of the poet's production. He conceived it as the work which would constitute not only the goal of his activities but also the end goal of the world:

In every century, the way that artistic forms are structured reflects the way in which science or contemporary culture views reality.

Hence, it is not overambitious to detect in the poetics of the "open" work – and even less so in the "work in movement” – more or less specific overtones of trends in contemporary scientific thought.

The notion of "possibility" is a philosophical canon which reflects a widespread tendency in contemporary science; the discarding of a static, syllogistic view of order, and a corresponding devolution of intellectual authority to personal decision, choice, and social context.

The two-value truth logic which follows the classical aut-aut, the disjunctive dilemma between true and false, a fact and its contradictory, is no longer the only instrument of philosophical experiment. Multi-value logics are now gaining currency, and these are quite capable of incorporating indeterminacy as a valid stepping-stone in the cognitive process. In this general intellectual atmosphere, the poetics of the open work is peculiarly relevant: it posits the work of art stripped of necessary and foreseeable conclusions, works in which the performer's freedom functions as part of the discontinuity which contemporary physics recognizes, not as an element of disorientation, but as an essential stage in all scientific verification procedures and also as the verifiable pattern of events in the subatomic world.

This is not the place to pass judgment on the scientific validity of the metaphysical construct implied by Einstein's system. But there is a striking analogy between his universe and the universe of the work in movement

All these examples of "open" works and "works in movement" have this latent characteristic, which guarantees that they will al- ways be seen as "works" and not just as a conglomeration of random components ready to emerge from the chaos in which they previously stood and permitted to assume any form whatsoever.

Now, a dictionary clearly presents us with thousands upon thou- sands of words which we could freely use to compose poetry, essays on physics, anonymous letters, or grocery lists. In this sense the dictionary is clearly open to the reconstitution of its raw material in any way that the manipulator wishes. But this does not make it a "work." The "openness" and dynamism of an artistic work consist in factors which make it susceptible to a whole range of integrations. They provide it with organic complements which they graft into the structural vitality which the work already possesses, even if it is incomplete. This structural vitality is still seen as a positive property of the work, even though it admits of all kinds of different conclusions and solutions for it

already acknowledged as the general background to performance. These poetic systems recognize "openness" as the fundamental possibility of the contemporary artist or consumer.

First of all, we should make a distinction between systems and texts. A system, for instance a linguistic system, is the whole of the possibilities displayed by a given natural language.

If you are able to use an English dictionary well you could write Hamlet, and it is by mere chance that somebody did it before you. Give the same textual system to Shakespeare and to a schoolboy, and they have the same odds of producing Romeo and Juliet.

A text castrates the infinite possibilities of a system.

Finnegans Wake is certainly open to many interpretations, but it is certain that it will never provide you with a demonstration of Fermat's last theorem, or with the complete bibliography of Woody Allen. This seems trivial, but the radical mistake of many deconstructionists was to believe that you can do anything you want with a text. This is blatantly false.

AT THIS POINT one can raise a question about the survival of the very notion of authorship and of the work of art, as an organic whole. And I want simply to inform my audience that this has already happened in the past without disturbing either authorship or organic wholes.

I have tried desperately to find an instance of unlimited and finite textual situations, but I have been unable to do so. In fact, if you have an infinite number of elements to play with why limit yourself to the production of a finite universe? It's a theological matter, a sort of cosmic sport, in which one, or The One, could implement every possible performance but prescribes itself a rule, that is, limits, and generates a very small and simple universe.

A hypertext can give the illusion of opening up even a closed text: a detective story can be structured in such a way that its readers can select their own solution, deciding at the end if the guilty one should be the butler, the bishop, the detective, the narrator, the author or the reader. They can thus build up their own personal story. Such an idea is not a new one.

All these physically moveable texts give an impression of absolute freedom on the part of the reader, but this is only an impression, an illusion of freedom.

n contrast, a stimulus-text that provides us not with letters, or words, but with pre-established sequences of words, or of pages, does not set us free to invent anything we want. We are only free to move pre-established textual chunks in a reasonably high number of ways.

A BOOK OFFERS US A TEXT which, while being open to multiple interpretations, tells us something that cannot be modified.

That is what every great book tells us, that God passed there, and He passed for the believer as well as for the sceptic. There are books that we cannot re-write because their function is to teach us about necessity, and only if they are respected such as they are can they provide us with such wisdom. Their repressive lesson is indispensable for reaching a higher state of intellectual and moral freedom.

Even after the invention of printing, books were never the only instrument for acquiring information. There were also paintings, popular printed images, oral teaching, and so on. Simply, books have proved to be the most suitable instrument for transmitting information.

Hypertexts will certainly render encyclopaedias and handbooks obsolete.

Then they are books to be consulted, like handbooks and encyclopaedias.

There are two sorts of book: those to be read and those to be consulted.

Yet, can a hypertextual disk or the WWW replace books to be read? Once again we have to decide whether the question concerns books as physical or as virtual objects. Once again let us consider the physical problem first.

Books belong to those kinds of instruments that, once invented, have not been further improved because they are already alright, such as the hammer, the knife, spoon or scissors.

TWO NEW INVENTIONS, however, are on the verge of being industrially exploited. One is printing on demand: after scanning the catalogues of many libraries or publishing houses a reader can select the book he needs, and the operator will push a button, and the machine will print and bind a single copy using the font the reader likes. This will certainly change the whole publishing market.

Simply put: every book will be tailored according to the desires of the buyer, as happened with old manuscripts.

Alas, if by chance one hoped that computers, and especially word processors, would contribute to saving trees, then that was wishful thinking. Instead, computers encourage the production of printed material. The computer creates new modes of production and diffusion of printed documents.

But perhaps even more significantly, scholarship on a cell phone will be more social and more interactive -- and therefore more aligned or coincidental with teaching. We may begin thinking less in terms of scholarly publications as vetted objects, and more in terms of scholarly activities being conducted by trusted authorities. This raises profound questions about peer reviewing practices, as well it should. We are going to find that sophisticated intellectual work is going to be conducted outside of the ivory tower, and those within those elite walls must find ways to articulate their skills and knowledge through these new intellectual mechanisms (hardware, software, social practices) -- or risk getting excluded from the more consequential conversations.

But perhaps even more significantly, scholarship on a cell phone will be more social and more interactive -- and therefore more aligned or coincidental with teaching. We may begin thinking less in terms of scholarly publications as vetted objects, and more in terms of scholarly activities being conducted by trusted authorities. This raises profound questions about peer reviewing practices, as well it should. We are going to find that sophisticated intellectual work is going to be conducted outside of the ivory tower, and those within those elite walls must find ways to articulate their skills and knowledge through these new intellectual mechanisms (hardware, software, social practices) -- or risk getting excluded from the more consequential conversations.

Scholarship has in many ways retained its authority relative to its erudite isolation; but reputation and authority are rapidly evolving online within popular culture and across a vast array of online social interaction.

So, by claiming that scholarly communication must be mobile, I am also claiming that this will drive and/or accompany profound epistemological and rhetorical shifts for learned communication.

Content in itself is not the issue--Child pornography has been outlawed because the methods involved in production involve real children in possibly abusive circumstances. How the material was produced is what makes it criminal, not what impression it conveys on the audience. 

Child pornography involving real children being sexually abused is horrid beyond words. For that very reason, I find it reprehensible to mix together such acts of human misery and suffering with illusionary fantasy that exists only in the author's imagination. Widening the definition of child pornography to include fictional material belittles the gravity of real sex abuse.

Many convicted criminals also cite the Bible as their inspiration of conducting astonishingly savage acts, and yet few would attribute the Bible as the root cause of such criminal behavior. Why?--Because free societies accept the principle that people are responsible for their own actions.

It is very dangerous to restrict the actions and rights of citizens based on the principle that some limited number of individuals may act irresponsibly. This is the equivalent of removing knives from the household kitchen because someone used a meat cleaver to commit a crime. Again, this logic is unbelievably reckless as well.

Furthermore, crime statistics published by the Japanese police themselves show no causality between the proliferation of erotic material and sex crimes. The crime rate has dramatically decreased since WW2 while the availability of erotica and violent fictional entertainment has risen by leaps and bounds during the same period.

It is easily imaginable that an endless cycle of accusations and denials will unfold regarding establishing the "true age" of fictional characters. Authors and publishers will more than likely attempt to proclaim that the characters look young, but they are actually above the age of 18. Physical attributes vary between widely depending on race and ethnicity, not to mention fictional non-human characters.

Publishers and authors are extremely proficient in adapting toward new regulations. If graphical depictions are banned, then abstract or comedic depictions will increase.

Either an ever increasing set of symbols will be deemed to be inappropriate to be linked to a core human attribute--human sexuality--or the futility of the ban will lead the law to become impotent over all.

Even today, numerous adult manga publications have self censorship standards that are mind-boggling. Authors have complained about how some editors have insisted on having all female characters appearing in their works be endowed with large breasts because drawing women as they appear more like in real life was deemed "too childish looking." 

Banning the fictional depictions of minors involved in sexual situations will make a fundamental core human attribute taboo.

Such a ban will stifle creativity and impoverish the cultural landscape.

The value attributed to works of literature and art change over time. The works of modern art and literature from the last two centuries are filled with examples where they were deemed to be vile, corruptive trash by contemporary authorities, but now these same works enjoy high status as priceless cultural treasures.

A culture grows richer through addition, not by subtraction.

A ban on fictional depictions of minor engaged in sexual situations has the very real potential to brand individuals as sex offenders even though they have had no sexual contact with real people. I believe there could be no legal justification for destroying people's lives simple because they drew doodles on paper, but the proposed ban would create such a legal precedence. 

I am absolutely certain that history will not look back kindly upon such a ban, and it will join a long list of colossal failures of regulatory policy, such as the prohibition of alcohol in the US between 1920 to 1933, various sodomy laws, the comic book code, and bans on socialist literature in Japan during the prewar era. It is important to note that all these failed moral crusades were led by virtuous and diligent individuals intent on making the world a better place. 

Digital appropriation artists have developed a number of monetization models: royalties, distribution agreements, reasonably priced licenses that permit remix practitioners to sell their appropriations legally, and small-scale compensation intended only to reimburse remixers for their outlay. Although fan filmmakers and game modders have experimented with these models, fan fiction writers have not conducted similar experiments in marketing their works.

Fanfic authors who think that selling appropriative art is always and absolutely against the law are mistaken. No such case law exists, and many appropriating artists make money from their work today without constantly encountering legal trouble.

Why, then, do fic writers resist earning income from their output? Many scholars of fan studies claim that fan fiction is, and must remain, free—that is, "free of charge," but also "free of the social controls that monetization would likely impose on it"—because it is inherently a gift culture, as Hellekson describes in this issue. In fact, even the fan organization, the Organization of Transformative Works, one of whose goals is to redefine fan works as transformative and therefore legal, states: "The mission of the OTW is first and foremost to protect the fan creators who work purely for love and share their works for free within the fannish gift economy."

Therefore, writing fan fiction for personal gain—financial, psychological, or emotional—aligns with the fact that self-enrichment is already inherently an important motivation for women to produce and consume fanfic. For some women, belonging to an affinity group or discussing stories with fellow writers and readers is not the primary reason for engaging with this type of fiction.

The rewards of participating in a commercial market for this genre might be just as attractive as the rewards of participating in a community's gift culture; and the existence of commercial markets for goods does not typically eliminate parallel gift economies.

If fans successfully professionalize and monetize fan fiction, the amateur culture of fic writing will not disappear.

Although fans have legitimate anxieties about fan fiction being corrupted or deformed by its entry into the commercial sphere, I argue that there is far greater danger of this happening if fan fiction is not commodified by its own producers, but by parties foreign to fandom who do not understand why or for whom the genre works, and who will promote it for purposes it is unsuited for, ignoring the aspects that make it attractive and dear to its readers.

However, an even greater danger than this is that fan fiction may not be monetized at all, in which case no one, particularly women authors, will earn the financial rewards of fanfic's growing popularity. Only the corporate owners of the media properties that fic authors so creatively elaborate on will see economic gain from these writers' volunteer work.

if women can formulate a model for the monetization of their artworks, the gap will be narrowed.

In the absence of such experimentation, women writing fanfic for free today risk institutionalizing a lack of compensation for all women that practice this art in the future. Woolf asked of her forebears, "What had our mothers been doing then that they had no wealth to leave us?" Will our generation answer that we have been giving our talents away as gifts, rather than insisting on the worth of our work?

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Furthermore, Koven argues that legend ostension in popular culture texts encourages audiences to engage in "some form of postpresentation debate regarding the veracity of the legends presented" (2008, 139) (note 4). This is reflected in Supernatural; most episodes engage with narratives that are usually told in their folk context as if they were "true." Vampires, werewolves, shtrigas, the Hook Man, La Llorona, witches, Robert Johnson's rumored pact with the Devil, zombies, djinn, changelings, evil clowns, and ghosts of all kinds have been featured on the show. Moreover, Sam and Dean's methods of defeating these creatures are those which folk belief likewise deems "true": salting and burning remains, performing exorcisms, helping ghosts resolve unfinished business, casting magic spells attested to by the folklore record, and so forth.

The majority of the scholarship on fan fiction, especially slash fan fiction, understands it as a way for women to intervene creatively in male-dominated pop culture texts. Fairy tales can be said to follow a parallel tradition—like fan fiction, fairy tales are a gendered genre of storytelling. As Marina Warner notes, "although male writers and collectors have dominated the production and dissemination of popular wonder tales, they often pass on women's stories from intimate or domestic milieux" (1995, 17). Postmodern feminist writers such as Angela Carter, Anne Sexton, and Emma Donoghue reworked the "old wives' stories" collected by Perrault, the Grimms, and others, seeing in them a space to articulate female experiences and desires—a move not dissimilar to those performed by fan writers, most of whom identify as female.

In other words, to traditionalist folklorists, the "folk" were best understood as "illiterate, rural, backwards peasants" (Dundes 1980, 6), who, isolated from modern culture, retained "rural, quaint, or 'backward' elements of the culture" (Toelken 1979, 5). Underpinning this condescension was the theory of "cultural evolution," a late 19th-century adaptation of the then cutting-edge theory of Darwinian evolution to fields that had nothing to do with biology. This theory, whose primary exponents were E. B. Tylor and Andrew Lang, posited that cultures, just like individual humans, proceeded in a unilinear fashion through the stages of "savagery" (infancy), "barbarism" (childhood), and finally "civilization"—with upper-class European patriarchal Christian culture representing the pinnacle of civilization (and adulthood), of course. European peasants were, naturally, barbarians, and their folklore represented traces of earlier "stages" of civilization; information on the ancestors of civilized peoples could be supplemented with studies of contemporary "savages," such as African tribespeople (Dundes 1980, 2). Lang, in particular, argued that the child is the microcosm of the culture, and therefore, logically, the stories of lower-class "barbaric" adults were suitable material—after extensive bowdlerization—for upper-class children, as they were all on the same level of development (see Smol 1996). In other words, the still-pervasive notion that folktales, especially fairy tales, are primarily "kids' stuff" owes a great deal to 19th-century racism, classism, and religious bigotry.

Endemic to this line of theorizing is the assumption that the folklorist, the one collecting and interpreting folklore, is not of the folk: the folk are always the Other. Traditional folklorists were educated bourgeois outsiders who traveled to rural areas in their own lands—or, better yet, foreign locales—since one cannot find folklore among one's own group, because only "they" have folklore—"we" have Culture

Unlike Mulder and Scully, the Winchesters, even before Mary's death, are decidedly working-class; John, prior to becoming a homeless drifter, was a mechanic. Julia M. Wright, in a perceptive article on class in the series, argues that "to hunt in Supernatural is to be immersed in the local, not the multinational-driven culture of brand recognition and globalized consumerism, and this is understood in the series as an insistently classed move" (Wright 2008, ¶15). Although Sam and Dean often behave like professional traditional folklorists—not just by doing research, but also in the fact that they are almost always geographic outsiders to the sites they visit—they are actually amateurs, autodidacts with no formal academic training in the field (note 8).

Before getting into this episode's presentation of fairy tales, some background information is in order. Fairy tales, as a genre, are considered to be a subcategory of folktales. The category of "folktale" is a broad one, defined by most folklorists as "a narrative which is related and received as a fiction or fantasy" (Oring 1986, 126), as opposed to myths or legends, both of which are making truth claims;

Within that group of stories, fairy tales are usually understood as folktales which involve magic, particularly magical acts, objects, and transformations that are not remarked upon as unusual within the story: no one in a fairy tale stops and cries, "Wait a minute, frogs don't talk!"

While initially published for scholars, the Grimms' collection achieved some success as a book for children, and subsequent editions (seven in total, with the final and most widely available edition appearing in 1857) were extensively revised by Wilhelm Grimm to better conform to changing ideas of what was appropriate for young readers. This marked a major shift in the perceived audience,

Other revisions, documented by Tatar (1987), Jack Zipes (1991, 45–70, 2002a, 2002b), and Ruth Bottigheimer (1986), reflect a systematic imposition of bourgeois mores, particularly in the realm of gender: this included curtailing the proactivity and direct speech of heroines, while increasing them for female villains (because good women are passive and silent). This was especially noteworthy in stories that featured wicked stepmothers (note 13), as the texts often, in an exception to the general rule of harsh justice, bend over backward to exonerate fathers for their failure to protect their children

This story about fairy tales—we can call it the "recovery story"—is a rescue operation, uncovering the "real" fairy tale and liberating it from Disney oppression, and theoretically also recovering the "true" voices of the "original" tellers, usually figured as female. Versions of this approach have a long history in folklore studies, which, in the early days, tended to treat all folklore as brands rescued from the fire: in this case, the "fire" destroying a once-pure folk product is not urbanization and mechanization per se, but the stultifying effects of male collectors and male-dominated popular media.

Fairy tales have absolutely been sanitized to rid them of elements deemed unacceptable, whether those elements be violence, sexuality, nonnormative gender roles, insufficient respect for authority, or whatever bugaboos moral guardians wish to prevent young readers from encountering. In addition, female tellers, writers, and collectors have absolutely been ignored, silenced, and subsumed under the totalizing category of the anonymous "folk" by male authorities—and those male authorities such as Perrault sometimes had to turn around and defend fairy tales as worthwhile, despite the perceived feminine (or even, in the case of the French female salon writers, feminist) "taint" of the genre (Warner 1995, 168–70). I merely want to point out that, in the realm of popular culture, the "recovery narrative" is a story we tell about fairy tales, and it's one that both contradicts and relies upon the existence of the "fairy tales are sweet and innocent" narrative for its power. Disney's "normative influence" is so pervasive that any literature or media that concerns itself with fairy tales must negotiate the received Disney understanding, even if only to dismiss it.

As James R. Kincaid (1998) might put it, the best thing about innocence is the threat of its violation, and roughing up a story for kids is thrilling in a way that pre-roughed-up stories for adults are not. Thus, it is unsurprising that there are a number of horror films based explicitly on fairy tales, including Snow White: A Tale of Terror, Suspiria, Freeway, and The Company of Wolves.

Dean's snide, defensive comments spring from the centuries-long linkage of fairy tales with women: the fairy tale is a gendered genre of folklore. More to the point, fairy tales often suffer the same fate as other female-identified artistic genres such as romance, "chick flicks," and fan fiction—widespread dismissal and denigration. It is no accident that the term "fairy tale" is widely used as a synonym for "childish, unrealistic fantasy"—the kind women must be discouraged from having, at all costs.

In response, Sam invokes the recovery narrative, which, in the context of the rest of the scene, suggests a problematic conclusion: it is the goriness and sexuality of fairy tales that renders them appropriate for masculine interest.

Within the show, fairy tales do not automatically possess the status of "real" folklore, but must be shown to be both "scary" and "sexy"—as the show's UK tagline promises—to be worthy of the brothers' attention.

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