Making authors the masters of their own destiny has long been a stated aspiration of copyright. Yet more often than not, the real subjects of American copyright are distributors – book publishers, record labels, broadcasters, and others – who control the rights, bring the lawsuits, and take copyright as their "life-sustaining protection." Much of modern American copyright history, and particularly its legislative history, revolves on distributors either demanding more industry protection or fighting amongst themselves. It is distributors who make the great financial investments in copyrighted works, and distributors who arguably most need the incentives and protections that the system is designed to provide. What then is the distinct role, if any, of the author in the copyright system? Why have an authorial copyright – a copyright that vests rights in authors? Here I suggest a new defense of authorial copyright. The reason is to encourage not just writing, but the invention of new types of writing. Stated otherwise, authorial rights may help support not just competition in the market, but for the market. Such rights, I argue here, can act as a means of seeding new types of creative works, as well as new modes of producing creative works, and new entrants into dissemination. On the aggregate, giving rights to authors can make the monopoly-prone creative industries more decentralized and open to market entry.
This essay argues that ghostwriting is a collective material practice that intervenes in the logic of the information political economy, which has commodified intellectual work as intellectual property. In everyday use, ghostwriting is when a text is written by an unnamed author and usually for the purposes of marketing. In this essay I retool ghostwriting as a critical and creative writing practice. It may be a strategy to resist the administrative and corporate attempts to interfere with academic intellectual property rights. It turns intellectual work that little bit more subversive. First I reflect on the relation between writing and the commons of knowledge. I then perform ghostwriting as an experimental practice that can put different fields into dialogue, and which use intellectual culture as common property. I quote the first and last sentence of 20 books that begin by reflecting on ideas about ghosts; but more broadly reflect on critical theory, practice, and architecture in the time of the Anthropocene. Texts are adjusted so that they talk to one another and through one another. I problematize authorship while allowing the shadow of the original authorial voice to remain. What is important is that ghostwriting frees the creative process from the private property of the knowledge industry. Ghostwriting is collective. It treats the commons of knowledge as the collective memory of intellectual culture. I argue that ghostwriting can articulate a different type of knowledge practice as a collective mode of authorship without aura.
From Duchamp's drag as Rrose Sélavy, photographed by Man Ray, through to contemporary artist Bob and Roberta Smith, the artist's pseudonym has served as a political tool challenging traditionally inherent concepts pertaining to authorship: gendered notions of genius, singular attribution, the scarcity model and notions of intellectual property, all of which are perpetuated by the art market. These facets of an art practice are not yet well recognised or documented because the artists' complex authorships defy the economy that would otherwise benefit from writing their 'biography'. This article explores the agency of the pseudonym over a sustained period of time through two case studies in particular: the Guerrilla Girls, an all-female collective working anonymously, and Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, the first British performance artist to be nominated for the Turner Prize. Through their practices, this article will reflect on how pseudonymous artists navigate intellectual property or work collectively and share recognition, and how a name might aid 'artivism'. There exist artists more dissident, but the fact that both these case studies work within the financially incentivised infrastructures of the artworld helps demonstrate how a pseudonym might critique, challenge and reshape the parameters of authorship from the inside out. This article concludes that contemporary artists' name/namelessness is inherently political.
Contemporary video game theory (Galloway 2006, Wark 2007, Kirkpatrick 2011) defines the video game as allegory. First introduced by Stallabrass 1993, the theory draws on Walter Benjamin's study of the allegory under capitalism, The Arcades Project. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009, identify those games with a simulated urban game space as allegorical of neo-liberal capitalism: 'The City is a key site of Empire' (153). Fallen London (Failbetter Games, UK 2010-2016) is an adventure RPG set in a subterranean Victorian London driven so deep into the gothic underground that it shares its borders with Hell. As a 'new face in Fallen London', you, fresh out of jail, are invited to negotiate dangerous, bewildering, grindy passages in 'the labyrinthine city' to acquire the status and goods to advance your persona to the pinnacles of ruinous glory. Fallen London is allegorical: its game algorithms – leveling-up though chance-based outcomes of actions – determine play, even as its game space is emblematised through generic figures circulating within topographic areas. FL's game space, however, is not rendered through video graphics, but through thousands of static text frames. It is not virtual simulation, but allusive writing – Lovecraft, Conan Doyle, Blavatsky, Shelley, Freud, Wilde – that renders the atmosphere of the fin-de-siècle city as a deeply immersive experience, though also a recognizably sardonic, allegorical one. While operating in the sphere of independent games, FL game economy is cohered through literary authorship. This is evidenced in three areas: i) authorship of FL: game writer/coder Alexis Kennedy's IP value, unusually, is not in the game engine but in the story world, FL's subscription model, periodical release of FL story events; ii) authorship in FL: renditions of 19th century literary circles, high cp/item rewards for 'author' actions in the game itself; iii) authorship through FL: the immersive game space provides scope for socially interactive authorship – fictional persona(l) accounts in the style of FL - both in-game and on community forums. Within this framework, allegory is inseparable from allegorical reading: FL community forum discussion habitually interprets FL story events as historical or political allegory. The most spectacular of FL allegories, which Kennedy describes as 'an artistic experiment', is the recently reopened post-Gamergate story event 'Seeking the Name' (2014, 2016). As a player, you choose to enter harrowing passages that mercilessly raze your persona's accrued status and wealth; as the mysteries are revealed, you know it will irrevocably lead to death. The video game's allegorical mode – algorithms as an ideal order of universe (Wark, 2007) game-play as 'allegorithmic' interpretation (Galloway, 2006) – does not allow for death (Kirkpatrick, 2011). FL does: few players have experienced the revelation; their persona(l) accounts have been permanently deleted by the game system. How bystander players read this allegorically – as heroic self-immolation, as potlatch resource sink, as authoring your own end in a boundless story world – may be synthesised by revisiting The Arcades Project. First published in Paradoxa.
Examining the significance of women's work in popular film genres, Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers sheds light on women's contribution to genre cinema through an exploration of filmmakers like Kathryn Bigelow, Diablo Cody, Sofia Coppola and Kelly Reichard. Exploring genres as diverse as horror, the war movie, the Western, the costume biopic and the romantic comedy, the book interrogates questions of authorial subversion, gendered concepts of film authorship and male/female genre divisions, as well as re-evaluating certain genres as a space worthy of feminist criticism. By offering an analysis of the films themselves and the circumstances of production and reception, this book redefines political, theoretical and commercial conceptualisations of women's cinema, and offers new perspectives on how women filmmakers explore the aesthetic and imaginative power of genre.
In his provocative, interesting contribution (The Sunday Times, September 6), Or Giovanni Bonello tried to solve the riddle of the authorship of the book Recherches Historiques et Politiques sur Malte, published anonymously in Paris in 1799. Or Bonello brought valid arguments to discredit the attribution to Mgr. Onorato Bres and to propound the theory, apparently for the first time ever, that the Recherches were written by none other than Mikiel Anton Vassalli (1764-1829). ; N/A
Rezension zu Paratextuelle Politik und Praxis. Interdependenzen von Werk und Autorschaft. Hg. Martin Gerstenbräun-Krug und Nadja Reinhard. Wien: Böhlau, 2018, 325 S.
For the Authorship Attribution (AA) task, character n-grams are considered among the best predictive features. In the English language, it has also been shown that some types of character n-grams perform better than others. This paper tackles the AA task in Portuguese by examining the performance of different types of character n-grams, and various combinations of them. The paper also experiments with different feature representations and machine-learning algorithms. Moreover, the paper demonstrates that the performance of the character n-gram approach can be improved by fine-tuning the feature set and by appropriately selecting the length and type of character n-grams. This relatively simple and language-independent approach to the AA task outperforms both a bag-of-words baseline and other approaches, using the same corpus. ; Mexican Government (Conacyt) [240844, 20161958]; Mexican Government (SIP-IPN) [20171813, 20171344, 20172008]; Mexican Government (SNI); Mexican Government (COFAA-IPN);
Die Einführung gibt einen historischen Überblick über die Entwicklung von Autorschaftskonzepten und ihre jeweiligen Bezüge zum Prophetie-Paradigma. Es wird deutlich, in welchem Maß sich die säkulare Vorstellung vom Autor von religiösen Bedeutungskonzepten herleitet. ; The introduction looks at the historical development of concepts of authorship and their relations to prophecy. It demonstrates that the secular notion of the author draws heavily on religious concepts.
In contemporary debates over copyright, the figure of the author is too-often absent. As a result, these discussions tend to lose sight of copyright's role in fostering creativity. I believe that refocusing discussion on authors – the constitutional subjects of copyright – should restore a proper perspective on copyright law, as a system designed to advance the public goal of expanding knowledge, by means of stimulating the efforts and imaginations of private creative actors. Copyright cannot be understood merely as a grudgingly tolerated way-station on the road to the public domain. Nor does a view of copyright as a necessary incentive to invest in dissemination of copy-vulnerable productions adequately account for the nature and scope of legal protections. Much of copyright law in the US and abroad makes sense only if one recognizes the centrality of the author, the human creator of the work. Because copyright arises out of the act of creating a work, authors have moral claims that neither corporate intermediaries nor consumer end-users can (straightfacedly) assert. This makes it all the important to attempt to discern just what authorship means in today's copyright systems. This Article endeavors to explore the concept of authorship in both common law and civil law jurisdictions. It considers legislative, judicial and secondary authorities in the US, the UK, Canada and Australia, as well as in the civil law countries of France, Belgium and the Netherlands. The legal systems here examined appear to agree that an author is a human being who exercises subjective judgment in composing the work and who controls its execution. But that description may neither fully capture nor exhaust the category of "authors." Contending additional or alternative authorial characteristics range from sweat of the ordinary brow, to highly skilled labor, to intent to be a creative author, to investment. The under- or over-inclusiveness of the subjective judgment criterion depends on which of these other characteristics national laws credit. Despite these variations, I nonetheless conclude that in copyright law, an author is (or should be) a human creator who, notwithstanding the constraints of her task, succeeds in exercising minimal personal autonomy in her fashioning of the work. Because, and to the extent that, she molds the work to her vision (be it even a myopic one), she is entitled not only to recognition and payment, but to exert some artistic control over it. If copyright laws do not derive their authority from human creativity, but instead seek merely to compensate investment, then the scope of protection should be rethought and perhaps reduced.
In contemporary debates over copyright, the figure of the author is too-often absent. As a result, these discussions tend to lose sight of copyright's role in fostering creativity. I believe that refocussing discussion on authors – the constitutional subjects of copyright – should restore a proper perspective on copyright law, as a system designed to advance the public goal of expanding knowledge, by means of stimulating the efforts and imaginations of private creative actors. Copyright cannot be understood merely as a grudgingly tolerated way station on the road to the public domain. Nor does a view of copyright as a necessary incentive to invest in dissemination of copy-vulnerable productions adequately account for the nature and scope of legal protections. Much of copyright law in the United States and abroad makes sense only if one recognizes the centrality of the author, the human creator of the work. Because copyright arises out of the act of creating a work, authors have moral claims that neither corporate intermediaries nor consumer end-users can (straightfacedly) assert. This makes it all the more important to attempt to discern just what authorship means in today's copyright systems. This Article endeavors to explore the concept of authorship in both common law and civil law jurisdictions. It considers legislative, judicial and secondary authorities in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, as well as in the civil law countries of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The legal systems here examined appear to agree that an author is a human being who exercises subjective judgment in composing the work and who controls its execution. But that description may neither fully capture nor exhaust the category of "authors." Contending additional or alternative authorial characteristics range from sweat of the ordinary brow, to highly skilled labor, to intent to be a creative author, to investment. The under- or over-inclusiveness of the subjective judgment criterion depends on which of these other characteristics national laws credit. Despite these variations, I nonetheless conclude that in copyright law, an author is (or should be) a human creator who, notwithstanding the constraints of her task, succeeds in exercising minimal personal autonomy in her fashioning of the work. Because, and to the extent that, she moulds the work to her vision (be it even a myopic one), she is entitled not only to recognition and payment, but to exert some artistic control over it. If copyright laws do not derive their authority from human creativity, but instead seek merely to compensate investment, then the scope of protection should be rethought and perhaps reduced.
In Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs) and virtual worlds, the idea of authors seems to have 'died' or been 'wiped out,' at least from the perspective of users. The concept of authorship does not receive adequate attention or recognition in MMOs and online games in particular appear to deprive authors of their rights, both legally and morally. Users of MMOs are required to consent to the deprivation of rights in both authorship and intellectual property before they can access multi-user environments. This deprives users of their rights as authors. This paper will show that currently acceptable practice is problematic and leads to a decrease of innovation. Furthermore, it will consider a fresh approach to such issues, in light of the idea of authors as producers and as a vivid force for innovation. In addition to this, consideration will be given to the idea of collective authorship. Rather than a strictly legal analysis, this paper will explore a legal and media approach to authorship in MMOs.The concept of authorship will be considered initially from three vantage points: Barthes' death of the author, Foucault's author as a function, and von Hippel's concept of democratic innovation. These considerations will be developed to present our perspective that the author goes beyond the producing subject to become a function of a process of collective construction. The function of the author within an MMO follows the process the author assumes in this virtual world. Hence, the moral rights upon the creative production remain with every author, whereas the collective compilation becomes an untraceable product, which dissolves within the collective process of production itself. As such, authorship, once collective, cannot be disentangled into specific parts of the whole. Copyright and moral rights in virtual worlds and MMOs must reflect this - otherwise what is the underlying purpose of copyright? At the very least, the notion of authorship ought to be acknowledged and rights attributed to those who are responsible for the creativity. Furthermore acknowledgement of the author is necessary to signal to other potential authors to distribute their ideas to these virtual worlds and thereby share innovative ideas within the virtual worlds. The motivation to contribute ideas is linked with any form of recognition for the work. After all, these online spaces are persistent and ever developing, and this cannot happen without the user base, or as we argue, the authors.
6 páginas ; In Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs) and virtual worlds, the idea of authors seems to have 'died' or been 'wiped out,' at least from the perspective of users. The concept of authorship does not receive adequate attention or recognition in MMOs and online games in particular appear to deprive authors of their rights, both legally and morally. Users of MMOs are required to consent to the deprivation of rights in both authorship and intellectual property before they can access multi-user environments. This deprives users of their rights as authors. This paper will show that currently acceptable practice is problematic and leads to a decrease of innovation. Furthermore, it will consider a fresh approach to such issues, in light of the idea of authors as producers and as a vivid force for innovation. In addition to this, consideration will be given to the idea of collective authorship. Rather than a strictly legal analysis, this paper will explore a legal and media approach to authorship in MMOs. The concept of authorship will be considered initially from three vantage points: Barthes' death of the author, Foucault's author as a function, and von Hippel's concept of democratic innovation. These considerations will be developed to present our perspective that the author goes beyond the producing subject to become a function of a process of collective construction. The function of the author within an MMO follows the process the author assumes in this virtual world. Hence, the moral rights upon the creative production remain with every author, whereas the collective compilation becomes an untraceable product, which dissolves within the collective process of production itself. As such, authorship, once collective, cannot be disentangled into specific parts of the whole. Copyright and moral rights in virtual worlds and MMOs must reflect this - otherwise what is the underlying purpose of copyright? At the very least, the notion of authorship ought to be acknowledged and rights attributed to those who are responsible for the creativity. Furthermore acknowledgement of the author is necessary to signal to other potential authors to distribute their ideas to these virtual worlds and thereby share innovative ideas within the virtual worlds. The motivation to contribute ideas is linked with any form of recognition for the work. After all, these online spaces are persistent and ever developing, and this cannot happen without the user base, or as we argue, the authors. ; Revista no incluida en la base de datos Sherpa Romeo
6 p�ginas ; In Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs) and virtual worlds, the idea of authors seems to have �died� or been �wiped out,� at least from the perspective of users. The concept of authorship does not receive adequate attention or recognition in MMOs and online games in particular appear to deprive authors of their rights, both legally and morally. Users of MMOs are required to consent to the deprivation of rights in both authorship and intellectual property before they can access multi-user environments. This deprives users of their rights as authors. This paper will show that currently acceptable practice is problematic and leads to a decrease of innovation. Furthermore, it will consider a fresh approach to such issues, in light of the idea of authors as producers and as a vivid force for innovation. In addition to this, consideration will be given to the idea of collective authorship. Rather than a strictly legal analysis, this paper will explore a legal and media approach to authorship in MMOs._x000D_ The concept of authorship will be considered initially from three vantage points: Barthes� death of the author, Foucault�s author as a function, and von Hippel�s concept of democratic innovation. These considerations will be developed to present our perspective that the author goes beyond the producing subject to become a function of a process of collective construction. The function of the author within an MMO follows the process the author assumes in this virtual world. Hence, the moral rights upon the creative production remain with every author, whereas the collective compilation becomes an untraceable product, which dissolves within the collective process of production itself. As such, authorship, once collective, cannot be disentangled into specific parts of the whole. Copyright and moral rights in virtual worlds and MMOs must reflect this - otherwise what is the underlying purpose of copyright? At the very least, the notion of authorship ought to be acknowledged and rights attributed to those who are responsible for the creativity. Furthermore acknowledgement of the author is necessary to signal to other potential authors to distribute their ideas to these virtual worlds and thereby share innovative ideas within the virtual worlds. The motivation to contribute ideas is linked with any form of recognition for the work. After all, these online spaces are persistent and ever developing, and this cannot happen without the user base, or as we argue, the authors. ; Revista no incluida en la base de datos Sherpa Romeo
In Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs) and virtual worlds, the idea of authors seems to have 'died' or been 'wiped out,' at least from the perspective of users. The concept of authorship does not receive adequate attention or recognition in MMOs and online games in particular appear to deprive authors of their rights, both legally and morally. Users of MMOs are required to consent to the deprivation of rights in both authorship and intellectual property before they can access multi-user environments. This deprives users of their rights as authors. This paper will show that currently acceptable practice is problematic and leads to a decrease of innovation. Furthermore, it will consider a fresh approach to such issues, in light of the idea of authors as producers and as a vivid force for innovation. In addition to this, consideration will be given to the idea of collective authorship. Rather than a strictly legal analysis, this paper will explore a legal and media approach to authorship in MMOs. The concept of authorship will be considered initially from three vantage points: Barthes' death of the author, Foucault's author as a function, and von Hippel's concept of democratic innovation. These considerations will be developed to present our perspective that the author goes beyond the producing subject to become a function of a process of collective construction. The function of the author within an MMO follows the process the author assumes in this virtual world. Hence, the moral rights upon the creative production remain with every author, whereas the collective compilation becomes an untraceable product, which dissolves within the collective process of production itself. As such, authorship, once collective, cannot be disentangled into specific parts of the whole. Copyright and moral rights in virtual worlds and MMOs must reflect this - otherwise what is the underlying purpose of copyright? At the very least, the notion of authorship ought to be acknowledged and rights attributed to those who are ...
