Open Source Culture: Intellectual property, Technology, and the Arts

This is an interdisciplinary graduate seminar offered in fall 2004 at the Columbia University School of the Arts.

Course description

Artists have always influenced and imitated one another, but in the 20th century various forms of appropriation, from collage to sampling, emerged as an alternative to originary creativity. Instead of making things entirely from scratch, artists began to use found images and sounds in their work. The rise of appropriation, driven initially by technologies of mechanical reproduction, became even more pronounced with the appearance of personal computers, the Internet, and peer-to-peer file sharing networks. Meanwhile, the intellectual property laws that regulate access to appropriated material have become increasingly restrictive. As the tension between artistic practices and intellectual property policies has increased, an unlikely alliance of progressive legal scholars, artists, and technologists has developed alternative models, such as CopyLeft and Creative Commons, for sharing intellectual property. This seminar examines artistic practices of appropriation from 1913 to the present as they relate to intellectual property and technology. Specific artistic practices to be examined include Cubist and Dadaist collage, Pop Art, Found Footage Film, Appropriation Art of the 1980s, DJ music, and Net Art. We will consider the ethical, legal, and conceptual implications of these practices, paying particular attention to their relationship to authorship, originality, and authenticity.

Syllabus

Mediography

This is a compilation of various media items pertaining to Open Source Culture ideas and topics. The mediography is divided into Art & Music, Books, Reports, Transcripts & Recordings, and Websites.

Art and Music

Anonymous/unknown artists. Jay-Z Construction Set. Software for remixing Jay-Z’s Black Album. Annotation

2 Many DJs (Steven and David Dewaele) AKA Soulwax.] BBC article

Beastie Boys, The. Paul's Boutique (1989) RollingStoneReview Index of samples and references in the album An enthusiast's commentary on the album Recent news article on the album's relevance Decision of Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals on "Bridgeport Music Inc. v. Dimension Films

Cosic, Vuk. Documenta Done "The Cut-Up Page." Annotation

DJ Danger Mouse. The Grey Album

Etoy, Toywar

Headmap. "Gysin, Burroughs, Cut-Ups and Knowledge Management"

Mandiberg, Michael. AfterSherrieLevine.com.

Miller, Paul D. AKA Dj Spooky That Subliminal Kid Rhythm Science. Cambridge, MIT Press, 2004. CD is bundled with book. Various tracks available online at

Oswald, John Plunderphonics

Forsythe, Tom Food Chain Barbie. Phototographs, 1999.

Foreman, Richard Ontological-Hysteric Theatre Annotation

Articles

Bezroukov, Nikolai. "Open Source Software Development as a Special Type of Academic Research (Critique of Vulgar Raymondism)." First Monday, 4(10), October 1999. http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_10/bezroukov/index.html

Biddle, Peter, Paul England, Marcus Peinado, and Bryan Willman. "The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution." http://www.nothing.org/osc/DarknetAndTheFutureOfContentDistribution.htm pdf

"Bollywood caught in copycat wrangle." CNN.com International. http://www.barbarataylorbradford.com/cnn.htm link

Burt, Jeb. "CU Cracks Down on Illegal Copying." Columbia Spectator, October 13, 2004. Vol 128. http://www.columbiaspectator.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/10/13/416cc00516b34?in_archive=1

Cohen, Julie E., Mark A. Lemley. "Patent Scope and Innovation in the Software Industry." California Law Review, Vol 89:1, 2001. pdf Annotation

Critical Art Ensemble. "Utopian Plagiarism, Hypertextuality, and Electronic Cultural Production." Critical Issues in Electronic Media, Simon Penny, ed. New York: SUNY Press, 1994. http://college.hmco.com/english/amore/demo/ch5_r4.html pdf

Doctorow, Cory. "Microsoft Research DRM Talk." http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt http://www.nothing.org/osc/DRMtalkByCoryDoctorow.htm

Forsythe, Tom. "Food Chain Barbie & the Fight for Free Speech." National Coalition Against Censorship. August 10, 2004. http://www.ncac.org/issues/foodchainbarbie.htm

Garnett, Joy. "Steal This Look." Intelligent Agent Vol. 4 No. 2, Spring 2004. http://www.intelligentagent.com/archive/Vol4_No2_ip_garnett.htm pdf

Goldsmith, Kenneth. "The Bride Stripped Bare: Nude Media and The Dematerialization of Tony Curtis." http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/nude.pdf pdf

GNU Project. "Free Software Definition." http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Graham, Jefferson. "Summer tours help bands pay bills." USA Today. August 6, 2004. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2004-08-05-bela-cover2_x.htm

Hunter, Dan, "Culture War." August 10, 2004. http://ssrn.com/abstract=586463 pdf

Ippolito, Jon. "Why Art Should Be Free." http://detritus.net/contact/rumori/200204/0197.html http://www.nothing.org/osc/WhyArtShouldBeFree.htm

Jordan, Ken, and Paul D. Miller. "Freeze Frame--Sound in the Era of Digital Networks." http://www.kenjordan.tv/Freeze%20Frame.doc http://www.nothing.org/osc/FreezeFrame.htm

Krauss, "The Originality of the Avant-Garde" in The Originality of the Avant-Garde, Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1986, c1985. annotation

Landes, William M., "Copyright, Borrowed Images and Appropriation Art: An Economic Approach" (December 2000). ‘’U Chicago Law & Economics’’, Olin Working Paper No. 113. http://ssrn.com/abstract=253332 pdf Annotation

Larkin, Brian. "Bollywood comes to Nigeria." ‘’Samar 8.’’ Winter/Spring, 1997. http://www.samarmagazine.org/archive/article.php?id=21

Larkin, Brian. "Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy." ‘’Public Culture.’’ 16.2, 289-314, 2004. PDF

Larkin, Brian. "Looking at Piracy." Social Science Research Council. http://www.ssrc.org/programs/ccit/publications/brian.larkin.rtf

Lohr, Steve. “In Competitive Move, I.B.M. Puts Code in Public Domain.” New York Times, August 3, 2004. link

Miller, Paul D. AKA Dj Spooky That Subliminal Kid. “Uncanny/Unwoven.” http://www.djspooky.com/articles/uncanny.html http://www.nothing.org/osc/Uncanny-Unwoven.htm

Moglen, Eben. “Freeing the Mind: Free Software and the Death of Proprietary Culture.” http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/maine-speech.html pdf

Moglen, Eben. "The dotCommunist Manifesto". Accessed on 9/08/04. pdf link

Noronha, Frederick. "Pakistan Government Looks to the Linux Users Group." 13 July 2002. http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6204

Open Source Initiative. "The Open Source Definition." http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php

Oswald, John. "Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative.” Wired Society Electro-Acoustic Conference, Toronto, 1985. Original version: http://www.plunderphonics.com/xhtml/xplunder.html pdf More on Plunderphonics: http://www.fact-index.com/p/pl/plunderphonics.html

Pareles, Jon. "No fears -- Laptop DJs have a feast." New York Times, September 10, 2004. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/10/arts/music/10INTE.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5090&en=1754341400ebc367&ex=1252555200&partner=rssuserland

Prelinger, Rick. “Remarks on Appropriation Art” Rick Prelinger http://www.othercinema.com/otherzine/otherzine6/pprelinger.html Archived at http://www.nothing.org/osc/RemarksOnAppropriationArt.htm

Porcello, Thomas. 1991. "The Ethics of Digital Audio-Sampling: Engineers' Discourse." Popular Music 10(1):69-84.

Quin, Douglas. “Digital Sampling, the Mimetic Impulse and Appropriation in Modern Art.” http://www.nothing.org/osc/SamplingMimeticImpulseAppropriation.htm

Smith, Roberta. “When One Man's Video Art Is Another's Copyright Crime.” New York Times, May 6, 2004. Review of Jon Routson’s exhibition of video shot in cinemas. http://www.nothing.org/osc/WhenOneMansVideoArtIsAnothersCopyrightCrime.htm

Sundaram, Ravi. "Recycling Modernity: Pirate electronic cultures in India." The Sarai Reader 2001. http://www.sarai.net/journal/pdf/093-099%20(piracy).pdf archived pdf]

Wineburg, S. “Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts.” Accessed at http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/kwin9903.htm

Books

Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. New York, Verso, 1996. Annotation

Bettig, Ronald V. Copyrighting Culture: The Political Economy of Intellectual Property. Boulder: Westview Press, 1996.

Buchloh, Benjamin H.D. Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000.

Buskirk, Martha. The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003.

Debord, Guy. The Society of Spectacle (1968). Cambridge, MIT Press, 1995. Annotation

De Duve, Thierry. Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp's Passage from Painting to the Readymade. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.

DiBona, Chris, Sam Ockman, and Mark Stone, Eds. Open Sources: Voices of the Open Source Revolution. Sebastopol, O’Reilly and Associates, 1999.

Dillard, Annie. Mornings Like This: Found Poems. New York: Perennial, 1996.

Galloway, Alexander R. Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization. Cambridge, MIT Press, 2004.

Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Lessig, Lawrence. The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World. New York: Vintage Books, 2001.

Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004. This book is also available online in many formats at http://free-culture.org/remixes.

Litman, Jessica. Digital Copyright. Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2001.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MIT Press, 2002. Annotation

Miller, Paul D. AKA Dj Spooky That Subliminal Kid. Rhythm Science. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. See also Peter Halley’s remix at http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/mediawork

Moody, Glyn. Rebel Code: The Inside Story of Linux and the Open Source Revolution. New York: Basic Books, 2001.

Murphie, Andrew and John Potts. Culture and Technology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Patterson, Lyman Ray. Copyright in Historical Perspective. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968.

Raymond, Eric S. The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary. Sebastopol: O’Reilly and Associates, 1999. Available online in several formats at http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/

Samuels, Edward. The Illustrated Story of Copyright. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.

Schwartz, Hillel. The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996.

Stallman, Richard M. and Joshua Gay, Ed. Free Software Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman. Boston: GNU Press, 2002.

Vaidhyanathan, Siva. Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity. New York: New York University Press, 2001.

Wark, McKenzie. A Hacker Manifesto. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Williams, Sam. Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software. Sebastopol: O’Reilly and Associates, 2002.

Reports

Committee on Intellectual Property Rights and the Emerging Information Infrastructure, Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Applications, National Research Council. The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age. Washington: National Academies Press, 2000.

http://www.nap.edu/html/digital_dilemma/

Digital Connections Council of the Committee for Economic Development. “Promoting Innovation and Economic Growth: The Special Problem of Digital Intellectual Property.” March 2004.

Free Expression Policy Project, The. "A Preliminary Report on the Chilling Effects of 'Cease and Desist' Letters"

http://www.fepproject.org/commentaries/ceaseanddesist.html

Free Expression Policy Project, The. "’The Progress of Science and Useful Arts’: Why Copyright Today Threatens Intellectual Freedom”

North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. "Copyright in an Electronic Environment (Guidelines from Consortium of College & University Media Centers)."