Focus Group Discussion

Fellow Classmates,
(I was given permission to post this request here.)

My focus group discussions on "Facebook, Politics, and Hillary Clinton" are scheduled for Monday (2/4) and Tuesday (2/5) from 4:45-5:45 p.m. in Reavis Hall Lab 203. This discussion will be for my thesis and for my presentation and paper in this class.

If you are a Facebook user and are available on one of those days, please come join us! Simply post a comment here to let me know that you will attend.

Food and beverages will be provided and your name will be entered into a drawing to win a $25 TCF Bank Visa Gift Card.

Thank you!

FanFic

Our discussion in class, and the copyright article that June Cleaver posted (excellent article for this class!) got me thinking about Fan Fiction.

As literature fans, I am sure that most of us will grant that the original author of a work has the ultimate creative authority. Meaning, we can't going to place much, if any, stock in what other people create using the original author's characters or setting. For example, when I was in elementary school, I was very taken by Dahl's Matilda. So much so, in fact, that I wrote a sequel. Of course in those days I could not publish this sequel (online or elsewhere), and even at that young age, I realized that (a) my writing was no where near as good as Dahl's and (b) that even if my writing were amazing, Matilda wasn't my character.

Today, even though I love the Harry Potter books (yes, go ahead, brand me), I recognize that only Rowling truly knows how her characters would act and behave. Therefore, how could anyone possibly write anything with these exact characters? What I mean is, because Rowling created Harry, only she knows what he would do as a character; so anyone else writing about Harry (especially stories that put Harry into situations that he would never be in if Rowling were writing) is actually creating a new Harry, a character with the same name but different (much like two people in real life having the same name). Harry would be acting out of character if someone else wrote him; therefore, it's not actually Rowling's Harry Potter. It's Joe Smith's Harry Potter who looks a heck of a lot like Rowling's, may even act somewhat like Rowling's Potter, but because Rowling is the mind behind Harry, anyone's else's Harry is just that, their Harry.

So my question is, at what point is a FanFic character a completely new character? If Harry Potter takes on a sexual role in a FanFic piece, isn't that a new literary character with the same name as Rowling's? When does enough change in major characteristics result in a new character?

I think this is an important distinction, especially after reading the Open Spaces article regarding how our society's perception of copyright law is steady shifting toward one focused mainly on the monetary aspect of someone's work.

This website has some interesting notes on copyright and fan fiction along with a cease and desist database, which ties in well with the discussion in the Open Spaces article of ISPs pulling content off the web at the copyright holders discretion.

Anyone for a game of copyright monopoly?

Here's a great article that highlights the class discussion (and more) about copyright:
The Purpose of Copyright

by Lydia Pallas Loren

It's from Open Spaces Quarterly

The article takes you back to the printing press and history of the monopolization of copyright, then moves on to the birth of censorship,etc., all as proof of a change from copyright's inital inception as a creative tool to today's misuse as a financial boon. I'll let you read the rest, but it's an easy-to-digest background for those of us who aren't entirely familiar with copyright in the past or the present and brings up a few fundamental questions to chew on. In the end, this author argues against time extensions for copyright owners.

I particularly like the the link between copyright owners and their ability to act as censor for the material--this is an area I'd like to hear more opinions and facts about.

Sources and originality

I’ve been thinking about this since class last night. We believe that John Webster drew on multiple sources to write his two major plays, The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil.

Those probably include contemporary or near-contemporary sources like Barnabe Rich’s New Description of Ireland, Francois de Rosset’s Histoires tragiques de nostre temps, Thomas Marsh’s Palace of Pleasure, Lady Arbella Stuart’s life, John Florio’s Letter Lately Written from Rome, the Fugger newsletters (German – admittedly, a long shot), a French account of the visit of Virginio Orsini (also a long shot), and definitely Orsini’s contemporary residence in London.

So, a mix of previous authors (including also the Greeks, whom Webster and his age read for models of tragedy in drama) and real life. With, if you like to say, his own particular genius. Genius, by the way, originally meant just one’s residing spirit. Not talent or brilliance, but particularity – so forget for a minute the history of taste, and value judgments.

The point is that Webster was unique; each of his sources was unique (should add the caveat “as far as we know,” since we really don’t know for sure). Although he drew material from them, he put it together in a unique way (he really did; he changed historical events to make them more dramatic).

Voilà the author.

If it’s not about taste or value, it is about money. The publication of a Webster tragedy would make more money than the publication of the Fugger letters (I’m assuming!) and be sold more widely than the account of Virginio Orsini’s visit to France (very rare document; I know because I had to track it down). Of course, selling better / more popularity is a value judgment added to the history of taste right there.

Others since Webster have written this story, Stendhal being probably the best-known now. I am biased because of my focus on Webster, but I’d venture that his version has been the definitive one.

A final comment. Shakespeare may or may not be regarded today as a snooty taste. In point of fact, he was the Anne Rice of his day. The public, the hoi polloi, loved his shows, and he was a major financial success. Webster, though he didn’t have similar success, wrote for the same audience. Webster was probably the Alice Borchardt of his day.

Classical Authorship - Reader Response

We see a progression of thought from Plato to his most famous student, Aristotle, to the famous rhetorician Quintillian: whether authorship is the “Bacchic transport,” imitation of real life, or imitation of good authors.

Plato, in Ion, speaks of the Muse as similar to a magnet that first inspires poets who then can inspire rhapsodes to recite their work and enthuse an audience (enthuse and inspire both etymologically implying possession by the god): a chain of emotional transference, with a strong focus on cathartic response. Poetry is a religious experience.

For Aristotle, the poet seeks to imitate real life in his work, in degrees of similarity (better than real life, worse than real life, or like real life): the focus is on the lifelikeness of the story itself, not, indeed, the affective quality.

Quintillian directs the orator to study and imitate all the best human authors; he does discuss the emotional reaction to a great oration, but prefers reading orations in order to study them most coolly and rationally.

These three thinkers approach authorship from different perspectives. Plato’s concept of divine inspiration by the Muse sidesteps the question of intellectual copyright altogether: it belongs (if to anyone) to the gods, and is shared with certain humans, who then transmit it in their turn. Aristotle’s approach deals with the mechanics of imitation: medium, manner, and objects. This is not a question of plagiarism: Aristotle points out that Sophocles and Homer are imitators of the same kind (tragedy), and on a broader scale like Aristophanes (imitation of persons). Quintillian takes it further by specifically prescribing study and imitation of the best authors.

So, for Plato, the “author” receives a divine gift; no other receives exactly the same, as Ion can speak eloquently of Homer but “dozes off” when other poets are mentioned. An author has a specialty. This suggests that plagiarism is actually not possible, although that is complicated by Plato’s chain, which is a web of sharing freely the gifts of the gods, mass possession the goal. If the entire audience is moved and affected by the recital of the rhapsode, the transference of this emotion has transmitted the gift of the gods (at least temporarily). Does this or doesn’t it complicate Plato’s concept of divine inspiration (i.e., how dangerous is the Muse that had to be cast out of the Republic – the power to sway mobs by emotion rather than reason)?

Aristotle sees authors as discrete units. They may imitate the manner of Homer in using a narrator, or imitate the genre (tragedy, drama), but that kind of imitation would hardly be considered plagiarism by anyone today. Authorship for Aristotle means the production of realistic (or more or less “realistic”) character, emotion, movement – in short, the lived human experience. Authors work differently, some depicting men as nobler than in real life, others as viler.

Imitation does not mean an exact copy, however; as Quintillian points out (like jb, I think this is one of the central points here), you should not imitate only one author, for all copies are inherently inferior to the originals (recalling the concept of ideal forms). Like Cicero, who, “after he devoted himself wholly to imitate the Greeks . . . embodied in his style the energy of Demosthenes, the copiousness of Plato, and the sweetness of Isocrates,” so you can draw from many sources yet create your own utter newness, cf. Joyce’s Ulysses.

Note
If you want to look a little further, here’s a blog on the subject of authorship in antiquity which I found thought-provoking:
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/kenne329/antiquity/cat_greek.html

"CyberLaw and You: What New-Media Professionals Must Know"

Last semester, I attended an STC Chicago (The Chicago Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication) meeting held in Oak Park, Illinois. The guest speaker was Christopher Julliet, an attorney in Ann Arbor, MI: "Chris focuses his law practice on business, Internet, electronic commerce and estate planning." (stc-chicago.org)

He defined copyright, trademarks, etc. in plain language and gave a very interesting presentation. I remember thinking: How does Walt Disney get away with keeping the rights to Mickey Mouse when they allegedly copied the character in the first place?

He also shared a story about a woman who was at a party taking pictures and apparently shot a great photo of some famous coach (name and sport escapes me now). The woman wanted to put that photo onto postcards and send them out as Christmas cards (or something of that nature), but Chris, the attorney, advised her not to go down that road. The battle would be uphill!

Read Chris' article, "CyberLaw and You: What New-Media Professionals Must Know." It's from 2002, but I think it's still relevant, and I hope you find it interesting.

Having done the readings for this coming week and being exposed to some classical ideas about authorship and the impact of authorial production on society, I was interested in seeing what the legal definition of author might be. From a quick google search the first set of results dealt with Foucault's concepts of what an author is and some large databases of famous authors. After following a few links and perusing a few poorly made pages, I found this link to the U.S. Copyright Office.

That page obviously has a lot of information on it and a lot of legal jargon that might not be pertinent at this stage in the semester. However, I do think its interesting to look at all the amendments that have been added as time has passed, and to skim over some of the more recent additions to see that ways that concepts of who owns what has changed.

Here's a link to the form to fill out to copyright a sound recording. Interesting to see the level of detail that precedes the actual form itself and to think about the lengths people have to go to to protect their own work.