what is yours, ours and mine

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

notes

An earlier version of this paper appeared in October 126 (fall 2008).

1 On 10 April 1710 the first copyright act was passed in London: “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Author's or Purchasers of Such Copies,” known as the Statute of Anne. Article 6(bis)1 of the Berne Convention Amendment of 1971 states:

Independently of the author's economic rights, and even after the transfer of the said rights, the author shall have the right to claim authorship of the work and to object to any distortion, mutilation or other modification of, or other derogatory action in relation to, the said work, which would be prejudicial to his honor or reputation.

2 For an excellent, polemical overview of the “literature and law” tendency in recent work in the humanities, see Peters 442–53.

3 A benchmark book of the intellectual property field is Landes and Posner's Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law.

4 For the putative source of the Lavery play, see Gladwell.

5 In adopting an activist approach as text owners, Frey's readers revoked his right to the term “memoir.” Here, genre assumes the value of trademark, a seal or guarantor of authenticity that regulates how forms of literature can be used. If the trademark fails to safeguard the textual properties it guarantees, then the literary works become legally vulnerable to “truth-in-advertising” regulations. What is starkly revealed is the extent to which signature and genre both serve to “propertise” literature. On the problem of what trademark guarantees as intellectual property and the expanded field of its applications, see Walker 50–53.

6 As Lydia Liu notes: “The anachronism of the lawsuit implies that the collective authorship of the script had been an original act of creation and ignores the fact that the Liuzhou writers had appropriated something collectively owned” (587).

7 For much-cited texts on intellectual property and the law, see Lessig; or Landes and Posner.

8 I like to think of this emergent field as anchored on the poststructural theory side by Barthes 142–49 and Foucault 101–20; and on the legal theory side by Hegel; Blackstone; Macpherson; Radin 957–1015; Lessig, Future of Ideas and How Big Media Uses Technology; Weber; and Benkler.

9 Jack Lynch reminds us that

It was only during the 18th century that “originality” in the modern sense became an ideal. An important milestone is Edward Young's Conjectures Concerning Original Composition, which appeared in London in 1759. There, Young celebrates novelty and attacks imitation: “Originals are, and ought to be, great Favourites, for they are great Benefactors; they extend the Republic of Letters, and add a new province to its dominion: Imitators only give us a sort of Duplicates of what we had, possibly much better, before.” Good authors are original, bad authors copy, and copying is no better than “sordid Theft.” (Ctd in Lynch, “Perfectly Acceptable Practice”)

10 In Britain, the Copyright Act of 1710 (the “Act of Anne”) invigorated an author's proprietary claim, but made him or her more personally vulnerable to censorship charges.

11 On the Eleanor Marx translation, see my essays “Biography of a Translation” 73–89, and “Taskography” 1403–15.

12 On Poe and plagiarism, see further: Muller and Richardson; Ruthven; Rachman 49–89; Kennedy 533–51; and Gutbrodt, Joint Ventures.

13 Terry Eagleton stresses that writing (as opposed to speech) “is meaning that has come adrift from its source” (“Unhoused”). The detachability of a text from its origin – a perfectly straightforward truism – qualifies as another way in which texts can be seen as unownable.

14 Fritz Gutbrodt argues in a complementary vein that

Plagiarism plays a pivotal role in “The Raven” after all … In order to understand the amazing ferocity and seriousness with which Poe hunted down plagiaries in his journalistic work we must address the seemingly contradictory and no less amazing tendency of his writing to usurp or incorporate without acknowledgment texts, images, props and properties that seem to belong to other authors or sources. To Poe authorship and originality are some form of outsourcing. (Joint Ventures 262)

15 Gutbrodt makes a similar argument:

Imitating human speech, the bird acts as an interlocutor. For the question of plagiarism the notion that to speak a language is to parrot language is of great significance. Like the orangutang that speaks all languages and no language at all in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” the raven is set up as a medium through which language speaks itself, mysteriously. (Joint Ventures 251)

16 McGill is fully wise to how difficult it is to control the metaphoric valences of “possession” and “ownership” language. While she provides a materialist corrective, grounding the plagiarism debates in a well-researched history of copyright law and antebellum print culture, ultimately, it would seem, the Poe case gets away from strict historical and legal referentialism as she evokes “the subjection of authors to propertyless dissemination and the invisibility of editorial ownership” (177).

17 The e-book edition can be downloaded at Project Gutenberg: <http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14082>.

18 Shakir's Koran is available online: <http://etext.virginia.edu/koran.html>.

19 See the PlagiarismToday website: <www.plagiarismtoday.com/2005/08/13/translation- plagiarism/>.

20 For a discussion of artists who have worked conceptually with the problem of self-sale, see my “DanGrahamInc.”

21 Jonathan Lethem works pre-emptively against this fate by offering almost-free intellectual property on his website under the rubric of The Promiscuous Materials Project: “These stories are for filmmakers or dramatists to adapt. They’re available non-exclusively – meaning other people may be working from the same material – and the cost is a dollar apiece.” See <www.jonathanlethem.com/promiscuous__materials.html>.

22 Joseph Slaughter writes:

Sellin was careful to avoid the charge of plagiarism, suggesting merely that Schwarz-Bart's novel provided a “blueprint” for Ouologuem's; however, on 5 May 1972, the Times Literary Supplement referred to Sellin's article to corroborate its evidentiary presentation of two “comparable” passages from Le Devoir de violence and Graham Greene's It's a Battlefield (1934). The scandal gained momentum as readers from Africa, Europe, the U.S., and Australia contributed their own discoveries in letters to the editors of newspapers and journals based in London, Paris, and Austin: Ouologuem takes a page from Proust's Le Temps retrouvé and a scene from Guy de Maupassant's “Boule de suif”; he borrows verses from T.S. Eliot and Emily Dickinson as well as lines and “accents” from Zola, Hugo, Robbe-Grillet, and Godard's films; he echoes Camara Laye's L’ Enfant noir and Cheikh Hamidou Kane's L’ Aventure ambigue; he incorporates passages from the Bible and the Koran that he mixes with cheap devices imported from popular detective fiction; he lifts histories from Jean Suret-Canale and the Arabic chronicles of the old Sahelian empires – Tarïkh el-Fettach and Tarïkh es-Soudan; etc. (Slaughter, “‘It's Good to be Primitive …’: Critic-Detectives Putting Yambo Ouologuem in His Place” in New Wor(l)d Orders, manuscript in progress)

23 Check the GAM3R 7H30RY Version 1.1 website: <http://www.futureofthebook.org/gamertheory>.

24 This Situation explicitly recalls work of the 1960s such as Allan Kaprow's “happenings” or Lawrence Weiner's 1969 Statements in which the owner-producer of the artwork was supplanted by the “receiver.” For a discussion of Weiner's Statements, see Foster et al. 560–64.

25 See Matta-Clark's Wikipedia entry: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Matta-Clark>.

26 Watch the trailer on You Tube: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8ygeihSPlk>.