Group items tagged

The history of publishing is swimming with pirates—far more than Adrian Johns expected when he started hunting through the archives for them. And he thinks their stories may hold keys to understanding the latest battles over digital publishing—and the future of the book.

Along with the practice itself, "pirates" in publishing just keep resurfacing, and Johns argues that the label is no accident. He sees it as the pirates' attempt to evoke romantic notions of seafaring swashbucklers. Sure, the copying done by culture pirates may be technically illegal, but they have long claimed the moral high ground, arguing that they are not petty thieves, but principled heroes rightfully returning creative work to a public commons by making free or cheap copies available.

The weighty work, more than 550 pages, covers hundreds of years of history of copyright and intellectual property in the West, focusing on the stories of those angling to disrupt prevailing practices.

In fact, it could be argued that queer theory's main project is not the interrogation of homosexuality, but the subverting and challenging of heterosexuality as 'natural' and 'unmarked'.

Queer theory's main project is exploring the contestations of the categorization of gender and sexuality. Theorists claim that identities are not fixed – they cannot be categorized and labeled – because identities consist of many varied components and that to categorize by one characteristic is wrong.

Acknowledging the inevitable violence of identity politics, and having no stake in its own ideology, queer is less an identity than a critique of identity. However, it is in no position to imagine itself outside the circuit of problems energized by identity politics. Instead of defending itself against those criticisms that its operations attract, queer allows those criticisms to shape its - for now unimaginable – future directions. "The term," writes Butler, "will be revised, dispelled, rendered obsolete to the extent that it yields to the demands which resist the term precisely because of the exclusions by which it is mobilized."

open source software

spirit of 'open work' is decentralised

Nina Työlahti

A straight woman is using a male pseudonym to seem more authentic writing about gay men. Why is this not seen as wrong? Why is this not seen as a gross appropriation?

However - for a straight woman to summarise coming to terms with homophobia, your sexuality and the closet as “not having the balls to be happy.” Really, no. Seriously no. There is so much ignorant privilege there I can’t even begin to address it. Sorry if depiction of the reality of homophobia spoiled your Happily Ever After.

But not gay male experiences - but some of these authors feel free to claim they have and appropriate at will.

In the New Millennium, the tradition that Judy Chicago pioneered of recognizing and celebrating women’s contributions continues in the vibrant new medium of the Web. Talan Memmott has suggested the term "Rich Lit" for the cornucopia of delights that this new "Dinner Party" offers.

The protest of the literati may be misguided, but it has enough nanograms of truth to prompt me to suggest a complementary term to Talan’s rich lit: open-work.

As a term, open-work calls attention to the fact that the craftwork of making has again become a recognized and important component of textual production. During the last several hundred years, the commodification of book production drove a wedge between authorial process and the hands-on labor of producing the book as a physical object. The complex history behind this separation has been documented by Mark Rose in Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright, among others. Suffice it to say here that a constellation of economic, political and class forces was successful in promulgating the idea that what the author produced was an immaterial concept separated from and untainted by the commercial networks that brought the actual book into being.

Even in his first essays in the sixties, the author's approach to reading, interpreting and commenting on culture could already be seen as that of a semiotician who had not yet adopted the technical jargon of the discipline. In fact, it would not be too far-fetched to consider the Eco of the sixties as essentially a young Adso (see the discussions on reading signs betwen William and Adso in The Name of the Rose) ready to learn about semiotics from the right mentor. We must also remember that as soon as Eco no longer feels satisfied by the early writings of French semioticians and structuralists like Barthes and Levi-Strauss, he turns to the studies of Jakobson and Peirce on the science of signs.

Also, few intellectuals can match Eco's great interdisciplinary skills.

In general, Eco's critics (most of them academic) have suggested that he is successful because he publishes trendy books.

Article 51 Suspension of Release by Customs Authorities

 Members shall, in conformity with the provisions set out below, adopt procedures (13) to enable a right holder, who has valid grounds for suspecting that the importation of counterfeit trademark or pirated copyright goods (14) may take place, to lodge an application in writing with competent authorities, administrative or judicial, for the suspension by the customs authorities of the release into free circulation of such goods. Members may enable such an application to be made in respect of goods which involve other infringements of intellectual property rights, provided that the requirements of this Section are met.

 Members may exclude from the application of the above provisions small quantities of goods of a non-commercial nature contained in travellers’ personal luggage or sent in small consignments.

r. That's a reminder that "permission culture" isn't just recent, it's really recent. Even if you're not Joyce Carol Oates, writing fiction about public figures is okay.

This post from Publisher's Weekly puts a particular trend in fantasy (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies; Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter; et innumerable cetera) in context. The author predicts that the 70-year lag between death and fictionalization she identifies will collapse on freedom of speech grounds