infobong.com

We're discussing intellectual property and appropriation next week in RTF 319. I would post this NYTimes story about the "Who Owns Culture" event with Larry Lessig and Jeff Tweedy to the class blog, but I've already posted a few articles about copyright. There's so much about this issue in the news media right now with the Grokster case that iit would be foolish to post everything I see about the issues. Also, my students are supposed to be posting articles that relate to the issues we discuss to their own blogs.

I read Chris Atton's An Alternative Internet a few weeks back, and his chapter "Radical Creativity and Distribution: Sampling, Copyright and P2P" excited me in a way that a piece of academic work hasn't excited me in a long time. He ties the idea of copyright to the issues of authenticity Benjamin lays out in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," which led me to assign in for class, and then deploys the notion of "usufruct" to resolve the needs of content producers and the broader cultural need for fair use and appropriation. The American Heritage Dictionary defines "usufruct" as "The right to use and enjoy the profits and advantages of something belonging to another as long as the property is not damaged or altered in any way," which seems obviously applicable to intellectual property issues. Atton treats usufruct a little more generally, using the idea to describe a reqime where property is loosely shared by a community in order to advance the interests of a community over the interests of individuals.

Granted, Atton is writing from an anarchist perspective, citing Proudhon's famous "property is theft," but it seems like usufruct is a very useful idea for conceptualizing debates over intellectual property - and useful for technology companies and users who want to position themselves as something other than pirates - yet I haven't seen this idea deployed in the copyright debates.