People really need to learn some basic, immutable facts about life, art and the internet. That was my bugbear this month, I think, so here it is out in simple word format, for all of you crazy people to gawk at.
1. The Internet is a public forum
Oh my god! What an incredible shock! The internet is… public? You mean people might actually… look at the stuff I put up there? And have opinions on it? Why yes! They do, and will; after all, that’s what makes the Internet the wonderfully powerful medium it is today [insert 'information superhighway' hype bullshit here].
Or, to put it in simpler words; my parents read my website. If you are in any way connected to me, they probably also read you website. My parents. Who (while lovely, unjudgmental people) are old people. Not the sort of audience you’re expecting, I assume. This is the quintessential point of the Internet; people whom you don’t necessarily want or expect to view your content invariably will. By putting it online, you are, in fact, encouraging it. Otherwise you’d be circulating it in some little zine or something.
You can’t stop them (short of withdrawing from the medium), nor are you particularly entitled to try.
2. Copyright does not work the way you think it does
Take it from someone who has a copy of their local Copyright Act in their cupboard. While I’m not going to go into the details — not to mention many lawyers disagree on what the details, exactly, are — [dex=http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/index.html]here[/dex] is a handy link to the American Copyright Act so you can check it out for yourselves.
However, in a brief summary; copyright in general is reasonably specific, and does not cover things like style, colour, hair, circumstance… in essence, all it covers is the actual object itself. That individual one. (There’s a debate over whether it also extends to other instances of related material, not being an actual lawyer, I couldn’t tell you exactly, but I have been informed that it doesn’t, and that this is what Trade Marks are for.)
If you don’t believe me, check out s102(b) of the American Act: ” In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work”.
Additionally, copyright rights are limited by things like Fair Use which essentially states you are legally allowed to use copyrighted material for the purposes of “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research” without breaching the original owner’s rights. Additoinally, market value is incorporated into fair use; in short, if you weren’t making money off it in the first place, and after it’s been copied, you still aren’t… too bad.
The good news, however, is that you probably do have control over who archives your work. Probably. Unless it has to do with news.
Of course, that’s all oldskool law. You may get more luck under the DMCA (Digital Milennium Copyright Act)… but I’m not even going to wade into that commercialist quagmire.
So, in summation, you really don’t, legally, own as much stuff as you think you do. Everything else is just convention.
3. Intertextuality, or, the Recognition that Nothing is Original
Aah, what a controversially postmodern mess this one is, Death of the Author and all that. It gets very complex and uses big words like ‘semiotics’ and ‘paradigm’, but can essentially be boiled down to this: nothing is original anymore. Intertextuality deals with the way a ‘text’ (which, in the postmodern sense, equates to words, art, video, an object, or practically anything else which exists) relates between both its creator/audience and between itself and other texts. It was created to counter the notion that texts and authors are somehow unieque and stand alone from other influences. It recognises that ‘authorship’, ‘individuality’, ‘creativity’ and ‘uniequeness’ are essentially historical creations (there was no notion in Medieval art of plagiarism, for example). For the long version, go here.
So, what does this mean for you? It means, essentially, that in the eyes of current thinking you screaming “you copied me!” wildly at every opportunity is a very 200-years-ago way of thinking. It essentially recognises and validates the use of ‘influences’ in artistic works (so anyone who’s ever been accused of copying someone’s style, take heart).
So what?
So nothing really. None of this will probably change anything, everyone will still be strung out over the same wire they were before.
Just thought I should say it, is all.
:music: Siousxie and the Banshees, “Something Wicked This Way Comes”