Digital technologies are both very new and very old. They have not yet established their place and purpose in the world, yet we are already beginning to take them for granted as part of our everyday experience. This means that the decisions that will define their role and significance are often being made outside of public debate, and based on flimsy assumptions. It is more important than ever to really understand the complexity of their role in our culture and our culture's interests in them.

As the ways we communicate publicly turn to digital media, long-standing debates over how to think about authorship resurface. We tend to assume that we understand how authorship works and why it is important to the life of our culture -- and we have legal and economic systems in place, especially copyright, to make sure it happens in the right times and places and is rewarded. But, what authorship is and should be has actually been a point of contentious cultural debate for centuries. New technologies raise old questions in a new light, and bring new questions to the table.

This course will investigate both the claims made about technology and about authorship, to uncover important issues for cultural expression in a digital age: who gets to speak, what they can say, who will hear, and under what conditions. By examining several cases still in the news, we will reveal how the law offers an arena for the collision of authorship and ownership. And through this, we will work out an understanding of the interactions between technology, culture, law, and power.

Requirements:

Two short papers (2-3 pages each) during the course are intellectual exercises that ask that you to respond to the class discussions and the readings. A longer paper (6-8 pages) due during the scheduled exam period will round out the course; this paper, while it should of course deal with the readings and the lectures, is more a chance for you to delve deeper into a controversy that interests you, establish and defend a position on the issues involved, and write your own "cultural policy" around authorship and digital technology.

Attendance:

Attendance will be taken at every class meeting. While attendance does not count specifically towards your grade, you cannot pass this class if you miss more than two sessions.

Books

There are no assigned books for this class. A required course reader will be sold (by University Printing Service) at the end of the first three course meetings. There are also readings online; please check the online version of the syllabus regularly.

Tuesday, July 3 -- Introduction: the hype and hoopla of "digital culture"

Thursday, July 5 -- Histories and theories of authorship

Read:
* Plato, from "Ion", in Sean Burke, ed., Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern
* Edward Young, from "Conjectures on Original Composition", in Sean Burke, ed., Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern
* Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?" in Josue Harari, ed., Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism
* Howard Becker, from Art Worlds -- excerpts from ch 1, "Art Worlds and Collective Activity"

Tuesday, July 10 -- The legislation of authorship: copyright

Read:
* Mark Rose, from Authors and Owners -- ch 2, "The Regime of Regulation"
* Peter Jaszi, "Toward a Theory of Copyright: The Metamorphoses of 'Authorship'", Duke Law Journal, April 1991.
            online at: Lexis-Nexis, in "Law Reviews"
* James Boyle, from Shamans, Software, and Spleens -- ch 3, "The Public and Private Realms"
* Jane Gaines, from Contested Culture -- ch 2, "Photography Surprises the Law: The Portrait of Oscar Wilde"

Thursday, July 12 -- Authorship on the Net

Read:
* George Landow, from Hypertext 2.0 -- ch 4, "Reconfiguring the Author"
* Esther Dyson, "Intellectual Value", Wired, July 1995
            online at: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.07/dyson_pr.html
* Todd Lappin, "Déjà Vu All Over Again", Wired, May 1995
            online at: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.05/dejavu_pr.html
* Lawrence Lessig, from Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace -- ch 3, "Is-Ism"

Short paper #1 due

Tuesday, July 17 -- Domain name disputes, Sex.com, and the structure of the Net (who gets to publish)

Read:
* Jessica Litman, "The DNS Wars: Trademarks and the Internet Domain Name System," Journal of Small & Emerging Business Law, v. 4 n. 149 (2000)
            online at: Lexis-Nexis, in "Law Reviews"
* Henry Jenkins, "Digital Land Grab", MIT Technology Review, March / April 2000
            online at http://www.technologyreview.com/magazine/mar00/viewpoint.asp
* Beth Sydney Bulik, "The Brand Police", Business 2.0, November 28, 2000
            online at http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/print/0,1643,14287,FF.html

Thursday, July 19 -- Cyberpatrol and filtering software (who gets to read)

Read:
* Elizabeth Shea, "The Children's Internet Protection Act Of 1999: Is Internet Filtering Software The Answer?" Seton Hall Legislative Journal, v 24 n 167, 1999
            online at: Lexis-Nexis, in "Law Reviews"
* Lawrence Lessig, from Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace -- ch 12, "Free Speech"

Tuesday, July 24 -- Free Republic v. Washington Post and Los Angeles Times (who gets to comment)

Read:
* Los Angeles Times v. Free Republic, summary adjudication, April 2000
            online at: Lexis-Nexis, in "Get a Case"
* Rosemary Coombe, from The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties -- ch 7, "Dialogic Democracy"

Short paper #2 due

Thursday, July 26 -- DeCSS and the politics of the hyperlink (who gets to link)

Read:
* Jessica Litman, from Digital Copyright -- ch 6, "Copyright Lawyers Set Out to Colonize Cyberspace"
* Universal et al v Reimerdes et al, Injunction, August 2000
            online at: http://www.nysd.uscourts.gov/courtweb/pdf/D02NYSC/00-08592.PDF
or Lexis-Nexis, in "Get a Case"
* summary of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 1998 (from the U.S. Copyright Office)
            online at: http://www.loc.gov/copyright/legislation/dmca.pdf
* Carl Kaplan, "Is Linking Illegal?", New York Times, June 16, 2000
            online at: http://partners.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/06/cyber/cyberlaw/16law.html

Tuesday, July 31 -- Napster and peer-to-peer computing (who gets to distribute)

Read:
* A&M et. al. v Napster, Ninth Circuit Appeals Court revised injunction, Feb 2001 (amended April 2001)
            online at: http://news.findlaw.com/cnn/docs/napster/napsterop0212.html
or Lexis-Nexis, in "Get a Case"
* Charles Mann, "The Heavenly Jukebox" Atlantic Monthly, September, 2000
            online at: http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/09/mann.htm
                                  (note that the article is multiple pages)
* Seth Greenstein, "Copyright in the Age of Distributed Applications", unpublished paper for the TPRC conference, September 2000
* Lawrence Lessig, from Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace -- ch 10, "Intellectual Property"

Thursday, August 2 -- Conclusions: the play of social forces on cultural categories and troublesome technologies

Read:
* Mark Poster, "Underdetermination," New Media and Society, v 1, 1999
* Jim Johnson, a.k.a. Bruno Latour, "Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer," Social Problems, v 35, 1988.

Final paper due, Saturday, August 4th, 12noon. Details will be discussed in class.