seedstocdandcultureo fthecopy

Slide1: 

From Seeds to CD’s: The Culture of the Copy Lawrence Liang Alternative Law Forum

5 Puzzles of the Copy: 

5 Puzzles of the Copy Puzzle No. 1: The Seeds of Discontent Monsanto v. Schmesier Early 1990’s Monsanto spent US$10 billion to buy up seed companies and introduced genetically engineered products starting with bovine growth hormone, 80% of GM crops in the world produced by Monsanto All Most farmers start using Monsanto’s GM seeds for their Canola crops. Percy Schmeiser an organic farmer refuses 1998 Schmeiser’s canola fields produced a mixture of his own and Monsanto’s genetically engineered canola. The highest concentration was outside his property line in the ditch and some extended in decreasing concentration into his adjacent field The hybrid product has been caused either because of the wind carrying seeds from neighbouring fields or from trucks carrying plants Monsanto Brings an infringement suit against Schmesier

The Court Holds: 

The Court Holds “…we are not concerned here with the innocent discovery by farmers of blow-by patent plants…in their cultivated fields. Nor are we concerned with the scope of the patent, or the wisdom and social utility of the genetic modification of genes and cells. Our sole concern is with the application of established principles of patent law to…this case.” “The Patent Act confers on the patent owner ‘the exclusive right, privilege and liberty of making, constructing and using the invention and selling it to others to be used.’ Schmeiser was deemed to have been cultivating Monsanto’s canola, since intention to infringe is irrelevant in patent Law

Thereby Proving that the law is still an Ass: 

Thereby Proving that the law is still an Ass

Puzzle 2: A Bitter Pill to Swallow: 

Puzzle 2: A Bitter Pill to Swallow On 26th December 2004, the president of India Promulgated the Patents (3rd Amendment) act without any debate, introducing Product Patent for the Pharmaceutical sector This reversed 35 years of India’s Public health Policy A policy that did not allow product patents and instead promoted “Copying for cheaper drugs” India’s Generic Pharmaceutical sector Till 2000, Antiretroviral (ARV) drugs were not accessible to the vast majority of people living with HIV/AIDS (PLHA) because of the high price. MNC’s priced ARV drugs between US$12-13,000 annually per person. From 2000 the prices started falling after manufacturers from India introduced generic versions of ARV drugs. These generic drugs are currently provided to patients for as low as US$ 140 annually per person. This was possible because of the absence of a product patent regime in India.

Puzzle 3-The Black, White and Grey of Copyright : 

Puzzle 3-The Black, White and Grey of Copyright Plus

Equals: 

Equals

The Grey Tuesday Timeline: 

The Grey Tuesday Timeline December 23rd 2003: DJ Danger Mouse finishes The Grey Album and makes 3000 CD’s February 12th 2004, he receives a cease and desist notice from EMI February 24th - Launch of Black Tuesday protest, 171 sites offer to host the album March 11th- Over 1 million downloads of the album making it the biggest hit of the year beating Norah Jones and Britney Spears The Mouse Trap

Puzzle 4: Play it again Sam: 

Puzzle 4: Play it again Sam

The Marxist Casablanca: 

The Marxist Casablanca

Play it again Groucho: 

Play it again Groucho Casablanca was released in 1942 becoming an instant classic In 1947 The Marx Brothers began to make a parody of the classic called “A Night in Casablanca” Warner Brothers sent Groucho Marx a legal notice asking him to cease and desist from continuing with “A Night in Casablanca” on the basis that it violated the copyright of Warner Brothers To which Groucho sent a hilarious retort, staging what would become often repeated battles over copyright and creativity, but without much of the humour

Puzzle 5: The University of Copying: 

Puzzle 5: The University of Copying Andhra Pradesh to offer degrees in imitation and mimicry Tuesday, Jan 21, 2003

The Culture of the Copy: 

The Culture of the Copy The Culture of the copy is all around us How does IP deal with the culture of the Copy The discourse of IP is centered around massive anxieties produced by the copy and more importantly the culture of the copy What are the various ways through which we can think of the social, cultural and philosophical histories of the copy The conflicts between regimes of property, commodity forms and the culture of the copy

Slide18: 

The culture of the copy is a fascinating history that gestures towards a whole series of practices which can be narrated in terms of specific histories from art to music to film, quite outside of the history of property and commodity; and yet the law seeks to translate every aspect of the copy onto its own terms of legality But can we restrict the culture of the copy into being a legal question alone, and what gets narrated out when we attempt to reduce it into a legal question? What are some of the philosophical and cultural implications of the history of the copy?

Slide19: 

Hillel Schwartz’s brilliant and eclectic account that traces the history of the copy and the double from twins to mannequins, wax dolls, puppets, mirrors, photographs, copiers, parrots etc. He traces out our central obsession with the copy, and identifies act of copying as an essential mode of going about the world; Poses the problem of the cultural responses to the copy, and it’s relation to the idea of modernity, authenticity and identity

The Copy in our Uncanny Lives: 

The Copy in our Uncanny Lives One of the key puzzles for Schwartz is the inherent tension between the fact that we are all simultaneously copies and copying machines, surrounded by a world of copies, and yet we feel the the incessant need to distinguish, to be unique, to differentiate ourselves, to find the authentic and to create the original

Various ways of entering the Culture of the Copy: 

Various ways of entering the Culture of the Copy We will explore the following Print Culture and the preservation of the copy Art History and the Transformation of the Copy Music History and Circulation of the Copy

I. Print History and the Preservation of the Copy: 

I. Print History and the Preservation of the Copy Historians of print and the pre-print period have shown us complex forms of the reproduction of texts and cultural objects that existed both in the world of Christendom and the Dar-ul-Islam. In the west, medieval monks and notaries toiled away copying books, legal documents and contracts. In particular the medieval notary, played a crucial role in the emerging socio-legal relations of the emerging absolutist state. ” Stenography transforms the spoken word into the written. Copying transforms the One into the Many. Notarizing transforms the private into the public, the transient into the timely, then into the timeless…The notary was a symbol of fixity in a world of flux, yet the making of copies is essentially transformative – if not as the result of generations of inadvertent errors, then as a result of masses of copies whose very copiousness affects the meaning and ambit of action.” (Schwartz: 214-5)

The historian Elizabeth Eisenstein suggests that with the coming of the print revolution, a “typographical fixity” was imposed on the word. The sheer volume of the print revolution was incredible, between 1450-1500; more books had been printed than those copied in the entire history of Islam and Christianity. : 

The historian Elizabeth Eisenstein suggests that with the coming of the print revolution, a “typographical fixity” was imposed on the word. The sheer volume of the print revolution was incredible, between 1450-1500; more books had been printed than those copied in the entire history of Islam and Christianity.

Slide24: 

Eisenstien’s assertion seems too categorical, for the first 100 years, errors were rife in printed books, Papal Edicts against “Faulty bibles” had no effect on the volume of production. Print in fact opened up the floodgates of diversity by the 17th century: historical work on the cultural uses of print in the French revolution, shows the proliferation of pornographic, anti-clerical and revolutionary texts. There were deliberate forgeries, and the insertion of parodic statements in official texts. Adrian Johns “Nature of the Book” looks at the use of property law (copyright) to establish the stability of the knowledge commodity The monasteries and later universities acted as "nodes" of learning, text copying, cultural creation, and exchange of a wide variety of material. Among monasteries, news traveled faster and more efficiently than we might imagine. This system of monasteries was the original Internet. Medieval Christians thought of themselves as connected to a greater consciousness, a community of souls, which was as real and powerful to them as cyberspace is to its denizens today.

Slide25: 

Medieval neo-Platonists imagined a mediating mystical intelligence or "Nous" between God and man that we might see as a sort of collective wired consciousness. Some wealthier members of medieval society even had laptops - traveling altars that folded up like books, or prayer books which contained private devotional images - so that they would never find themselves out of touch. While medieval monks did not have powerful copying technology we possess today, their literary and scholarly production was based on copying, on the physical work of reproducing manuscripts, and this heavily influenced their aesthetics. It was virtually impossible to be a reader without also being a writer; in fact, from the errors many monastic copyists made, we can infer that they may have learned, physically, to write before being able to really read.

II. Art History and the Transformative Copy: 

II. Art History and the Transformative Copy Art History offers us fascinating entry points into the world of copying and the copy Takes us through various forms of copying: As learning a skill As tribute As inspiration As forgery And questions the very assumption of originality and authenticity

Slide27: 

Before the commercial art market, copying a work of a master was considered a tribute, not a forgery. In the previous centuries, many painters like Rembrandt had workshops with apprentices that studied painting techniques by copying the works and style of the master. As a payment for the training, the master had a right to sell these works for money. Some of these works have been later erroneously attributed to the masters In Fact some of the works of the old master are available to us only because of “slavish copies” that were made of such works.

Take for instance Raphael’s Judgment of Paris: 

Take for instance Raphael’s Judgment of Paris Or Rather Ravenna’s slavish copy of Raimondi’s print of Raphael since the original is lost

Slide29: 

350 years later, Edouard Manet is inspired by it and creates “Le Dejeuner”, now recognised as one of the modern masterpieces In 1900, a young painter Picasso sees Manet’s “Le Dejeuner”

And in 1961 towards the end of his career returns to pay a tribute to it: 

And in 1961 towards the end of his career returns to pay a tribute to it

Slide31: 

Some of the geniuses we adore were the among the most skilled forgers of their times Art Forgery became more prominent in the Renaissance when the interest of antiquities increased their value.

Slide32: 

The issues raised by the art forger after the emergence of the modern painting went straight to the heart of authenticity, individuality, uniqueness and historicity as the representational logic of the bourgeois art work The forger also serves as a metaphor for a set of wider issues within the domain of art history. The forger attacks originality from the point of view of historical authenticity, insofar as his work gives the impression that it contains the story that conveys the same historical evidence as the original. However the clock of history is ticking away for the forger’s work as well, it too embarks on a life of its own, and it is only a question of quality, good luck, and time that having survived in historical memory sufficiently long, it becomes authentic, a genuine forgery…” Sandor Radnoti

Slide33: 

More often than not the specific history of the forger also underlies the arbitrary violence of the idea of value in Art To Vermeer or not to Vermeer After the defeat of the Nazis, a painting of Vermeer was discovered in the collection of Hermann Goering. He had allegedly exchanged 200 Other paintings to obtain this rare Vemeer

Slide34: 

The painting was traced back to Hans van Meegeren who was charged with selling national treasures to the Nazis (which was punishable by death) Van Meegeren then claimed that he had infact painted the fake Vermeer, and to prove it in his defence he painted another Exact Vermeer while in prison

Slide35: 

Vermeer’s innocence was proved, and he was revealed as a master forger of Vermeer, and he had painted 14 Vermeer masterpieces which hung in prestigious galleries. He was acquitted on the charge of Selling Vemeer to the Nazis but was Found guilty of Forgery and died in prison When the Goering fake was discovered, critics denounced it saying that it was Nothing like Vermeer Abraham Bredius wrote of Meegeren's "Vermeer" forgery Christ at Emmaus: "It is a wonderful moment in the life of a lover of art when he finds himself suddenly confronted with a hitherto unknown painting by a great master, untouched, on the original canvas, and without any restoration, just as it left the painter's studio! What we have here is – I am inclined to say – the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft..."

Slide36: 

And yet the Fake shall haunt us On 30th March 2004, a painting which had originally been considered a Vermeer and subsequently been ‘deattributed’ after the Van Meeregen scandal, was restored to it’s ‘original’ glory and declared to be an ‘authentic’ Vermeer after all Is it or is it not? Who knows? Who Cares? “I am a Fake” - Mona Lisa

The Secret Lives of Mona Lisa: 

The Secret Lives of Mona Lisa

III. Music History and the Circulation of the Copy:Napster was invented in the 19th century: 

III. Music History and the Circulation of the Copy: Napster was invented in the 19th century

Slide47: 

Sheet Music Piracy enabled By the technological revolution Of Lithography; All of a sudden music available At a much lower cost without Any decrease in quality; The music industry claims that This will be the death of the music industry; Recognition that the law will not work in curbing piracy and the Creation of a new paradigm of property enforcement, that of private raids and a recognition of the complex networks of non legal media

The Rich Semantic World of the Copy from Print, Art and Music History: 

The Rich Semantic World of the Copy from Print, Art and Music History Adaptation Appropriation Bricolage Capriccio Cento Collage Contrafacuon Fake Farrago Faux Mimesis Montage Palimpsest Parody Plagiarism Recycling Refiguration Simucalrum Travesty

Slide49: 

For most parts there was never a problem with this conceptual level of copying which is why the question of originality and copyright was never as big an issue as it was to become This is not to say that there were no attempts at establishing or creating a regime of stability Till the time that the copying is by ‘hand’ there is never an issue The major difference that arises is with the conversion of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction: the creation of a new commodity form The major transformation of the culture of the copy takes place in the 19th century. From the times of the Renaissance where copying of cultural products was common and legitimate, the 19th century sees the emergence of proprietary regimes of mechanical reproduction, when the culture of the non-legal copy enters a secular period of criminalisation and delegitimation.

Slide50: 

Each form of Intellectual Property (Copyright, Patent, Trademark etc) determines the mode through which it deals with the idea of Knowledge, Property, the Commodity and the Copy For Instance The Problem may be posed in the following way: If the Value of a good is the socially necessary labour time expended for it's reproduction, then the nature of these IP goods is such that it can be socially reproduced at a lower labour-time given the available social productivity (technical and knowledge capacity to reproduce the goods). Copyright is enforced to curtail reproduction of these goods. It intervenes and reduces forms of social productivity. Conflict areas: One specific conflict is between social productivity and IP producing enterprises. Two visible forms of this social conflict are `criminalisation of reproduction` ( e.g piracy) `denial / barriers to access to material'. (e.g encryption, cost of access like licenses)

Slide51: 

Modern Copyright was traditionally concerned with the regulation of the first or the commodity form of knowledge and culture Thus the need to criminalize copies of the ‘original’ work through the process of mechanical reproduction See Walter Benjamin Film Whereas the world of copying of ideas was relatively free But in the digital era this Binary begins to collapse and Copyright begins to assert itself not only on the copy but on copying itself

Slide52: 

This has caused considerable anxiety to critical scholars and practitioners of the “Public Domain” who argue that the world of ideas should be free for allow to draw from The expansion of copyright into the domain of ideas in fact will curtail free speech, especially given contemporary creativity rests on the ability to appropriate, parody etc

Slide53: 

Scholars like James Boyle and Lawrence Lessig argue for a pro active approach to the public domain, and using ideas from the free software movement they have started initiatives like the Creative Commons, which believes that the future of creativity lies in allowing users to transform and create Which is great, but……….

Slide54: 

What happens to the other form of Copying, of the ‘commodity form’ where there is allegedly no transformation !! Lawrence Lessig’s idea of Asian Piracy where is no creativity, and only mass scale copying

Slide55: 

The first question is of course (after the Kill Bill example) whether there is such a thing as the untransformed copy? Second approach would be to look at the absurdity of the idea of the ‘original’ v. the ‘copy’ in most information commodities Third question for us is then how do we move towards providing an account of this world of ‘Asian Piracy’, and how do we reconcile this world of the Copy with the older history of the Culture of the Copy?

Slide56: 

The Social World of Piracy in India The Raid The Players (Lamhe Case) History of the Music Industry Kaanta Laga and the Remixing of Commodity and Content politics

Slide57: 

Kaanta Laga Ver. 4.0 Kaanta Laga Ver. 5.0 Kaanta Laga Ver. 8 Kaanta Laga Ver. 10