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Entry tags:
The internet, property, intellectual property, and the politics of pleasure
This article is about Scientology, but this quote is priceless in any context: “After Haggis had emergency surgery, his doctor told him that it would be four or five months before he could work again: ‘It would be too much strain on your heart.’ He replied, ‘Let me ask you how much stress you think I might be under as I’m sitting at home while another director is finishing my fucking film!’” I feel a kinship with this man.
It's a themed post! In that it's about stuff circling around my core interests.
Alfred Brophy et al., Integrating Spaces: Property Law & Race: Good collection of materials mostly about race and property, with some additional materials about the rights of nonowners that help explain some of the other cases. Race has profoundly structured Western property law, and the opening cases about slavery make that stunningly clear. The later material loses some focus, but the sections on predatory lending and at the end comparative approaches to addressing dispossession on racial/ethnic grounds are very good.
Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property, ed. Gaëlle Krikorian and Amy Kapczynski: Available for free download. A long collection with a mix of practical and theoretical perspectives, including pieces on Nollywood, medicines and patents, open source journals, and similar topics on the theme of access to various kinds of knowledge, especially in the developing world. I was most interested in the pieces by Lawrence Liang, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Book and Beyond Representation: The Figure of the Pirate. The former links the concept of property in books with property in wife and children, as has long been linked in Western theory, but draws some rather different conclusions: mistaking your wife for a book, or either for something you can own, is a delusion that has done and is still doing great damage. The latter argues that access to knowledge advocates have, often strategically, neglected to defend practices in which poor people actually engage, which is related to the absence of a politics of pleasure. Here’s his best anecdote:
The reform most of the contributors agree on is amending Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act so that internet service providers would risk liability if they didn’t take down material on their sites posted by users that was (alleged to be) defamatory or invasive of privacy. I was uncertain about this fix the first time I encountered it, and further experience (with, among other things, the notice and takedown provisions of the DMCA, which have the same regime applied to copyright, not with great results) has only hardened me further against it. The proponents of such a change are, as far as I can tell, basically indifferent to the argument that ISPs won’t investigate claims of legal violation; if they may be liable if the content is defamatory etc., they will simply take that content down and avoid any risk. We know well from the DMCA that even people with good fair use claims rarely counternotify to restore the material, and if you think fair use can be tricky, take a look at how hard it is to determine whether content is defamatory or invasive of privacy. I would support a change in the law that 230 immunity should not cover instances in which the person seeking the takedown has in hand a ruling from a court of competent jurisdiction that the material at issue is unlawful, but without some requirement other than an unadjudicated claim of unlawfulness this is just another way for people to shut each other up.
What would be pretty interesting would be to get some of the main contributors to each book together and have them engage in a dialogue. (Actually, it would have been even better to add in the A2K folks from above.) Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.
Ali Davis, True Porn Clerk Stories: Short and enjoyable account of the author’s time as a clerk in a video store that did a lot of porn business. She writes with compassion and annoyance about the customers and the porn: some of the porn really is degrading, and some of the customers are trying to substitute porn for human connection, but others just want an orgasm, which is fine as long as they clean up after themselves.
Whitney Strub, Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right: Entertaining if preachy and disorganized account of attacks on pornography in the US from the early 20th century. Strub’s best points come when he shows how right-wing politicians explicitly connected attacking pornography to letting the rest of capitalism do its dirty work unhindered by any other kind of regulation—our kids need protection from smut, not from child labor! Strub blames the failure of liberalism to defend a politics of pleasure for allowing right-wingers to set the terms of debate, and argues that antipornography feminists made a bad alliance with conservatives even as pro-pleasure feminists couldn’t find a home in late-20th-century liberalism.
It's a themed post! In that it's about stuff circling around my core interests.
Alfred Brophy et al., Integrating Spaces: Property Law & Race: Good collection of materials mostly about race and property, with some additional materials about the rights of nonowners that help explain some of the other cases. Race has profoundly structured Western property law, and the opening cases about slavery make that stunningly clear. The later material loses some focus, but the sections on predatory lending and at the end comparative approaches to addressing dispossession on racial/ethnic grounds are very good.
Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property, ed. Gaëlle Krikorian and Amy Kapczynski: Available for free download. A long collection with a mix of practical and theoretical perspectives, including pieces on Nollywood, medicines and patents, open source journals, and similar topics on the theme of access to various kinds of knowledge, especially in the developing world. I was most interested in the pieces by Lawrence Liang, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Book and Beyond Representation: The Figure of the Pirate. The former links the concept of property in books with property in wife and children, as has long been linked in Western theory, but draws some rather different conclusions: mistaking your wife for a book, or either for something you can own, is a delusion that has done and is still doing great damage. The latter argues that access to knowledge advocates have, often strategically, neglected to defend practices in which poor people actually engage, which is related to the absence of a politics of pleasure. Here’s his best anecdote:
An NGO in Bangalore that works in the field of information and communication technologies for development was conducting a workshop on accessing the Internet for the information needs of rural women working to empower other poor rural women in India. The facilitator guided the women through the basics of the Internet, including how to access information relevant to their work, which ranges from providing access to credit to promoting women’s health. The training was highly appreciated, and all the women volunteers seemed to be enjoying themselves while fiddling with the computers and exploring the Internet. At the end of the training, when the NGO started cleaning up the computers, including the browsing histories and the cached copies of the sites accessed, they were a little aghast to find that most of the women volunteers had been surfing pornography—and a range of pornography, at that. So while the trainers were holding forth eloquently about the real information needs of the poor, the poor were quite happy to access their real information needs.The Offensive Internet: Privacy, Speech, and Reputation, ed. Saul Levmore & Martha C. Nussbaum: This is the equally frustrating inverse of last week’s reviewed book on the internet; unfortunately, this one’s not available for free download. This time, the internet is full of haters, attacking people—mostly women—and violating their privacy (with occasional assists from institutions engaging in privacy violations for very different, commercial reasons). Included are some thoughtful essays on the meaning of free speech, some elitist condemnations of the proles who speak online, and one very good analytic piece by Nussbaum on what it means to try to drag someone (again, most likely a woman) down with words—even though I don’t agree with the piece’s conclusions about legal reform.
The reform most of the contributors agree on is amending Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act so that internet service providers would risk liability if they didn’t take down material on their sites posted by users that was (alleged to be) defamatory or invasive of privacy. I was uncertain about this fix the first time I encountered it, and further experience (with, among other things, the notice and takedown provisions of the DMCA, which have the same regime applied to copyright, not with great results) has only hardened me further against it. The proponents of such a change are, as far as I can tell, basically indifferent to the argument that ISPs won’t investigate claims of legal violation; if they may be liable if the content is defamatory etc., they will simply take that content down and avoid any risk. We know well from the DMCA that even people with good fair use claims rarely counternotify to restore the material, and if you think fair use can be tricky, take a look at how hard it is to determine whether content is defamatory or invasive of privacy. I would support a change in the law that 230 immunity should not cover instances in which the person seeking the takedown has in hand a ruling from a court of competent jurisdiction that the material at issue is unlawful, but without some requirement other than an unadjudicated claim of unlawfulness this is just another way for people to shut each other up.
What would be pretty interesting would be to get some of the main contributors to each book together and have them engage in a dialogue. (Actually, it would have been even better to add in the A2K folks from above.) Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.
Ali Davis, True Porn Clerk Stories: Short and enjoyable account of the author’s time as a clerk in a video store that did a lot of porn business. She writes with compassion and annoyance about the customers and the porn: some of the porn really is degrading, and some of the customers are trying to substitute porn for human connection, but others just want an orgasm, which is fine as long as they clean up after themselves.
Whitney Strub, Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right: Entertaining if preachy and disorganized account of attacks on pornography in the US from the early 20th century. Strub’s best points come when he shows how right-wing politicians explicitly connected attacking pornography to letting the rest of capitalism do its dirty work unhindered by any other kind of regulation—our kids need protection from smut, not from child labor! Strub blames the failure of liberalism to defend a politics of pleasure for allowing right-wingers to set the terms of debate, and argues that antipornography feminists made a bad alliance with conservatives even as pro-pleasure feminists couldn’t find a home in late-20th-century liberalism.