#we reused old art; sue us

[tf2-bhs]

Meet Mun-dee Mundy!

The quietest student in all of MANN High and Sixth form. Growing up on a farm in the middle of nowhere in Australia, Mun-dee was isolated from most experiences, such as school or even having friends. He knew of them, but it was so strange to even imagine having them himself. So when he eventually moved it felt like he had been transported into a new dimension.

If lost, when he was younger, all his grandparents had to do was to search the nearest few fields and he'd be there. There was a sort of unspoken arrangement about where that family always was. His mother was at work, his father was off in a shed on the boundaries of the farm and Mun-Dee himself was, as mentioned, sitting outside in a field. Because of this, he was never close to either of his parents, instead preferring his grandparents. He was so close that usually, he would often address his grandparents as if they were his actual parents. They would try to correct him, he never listened, but eventually, he came to grow out of it.

As he grew up, Mun-dee would spend his time in further and further fields until he just wasn't seen for days. Would always come back of course, otherwise, I wouldn't be writing this. Not even his grandparents knew if he even came back to the house at night.

What he does during those disappearances is rather unknown. His Father's camping equipment, and a small stash from under his mattress are all he takes.

One day, after one of his little disappearances, he returned to find both of his parents home, and his grandparents nowhere at all. That was when he was told he would be moving to England.

Because of his distance from his parents, Mun-dee never really felt that sorry if he were to say, 'borrow' money or a credit card. The main things he would buy was merch and physical media. That would he explained by the fact that he is a massive nerd. He adores all things gaming, comics and film. From Gateways to Full-Day, Dawning to Miles Cobra, or even Bloodcraft: Overdeath to Band Bastille 2.

While we're on the topic of Band Bastille 2, it would be a crime not to mention how good he is at it. He's sunk hundreds of hours into the game, primarily playing the Assassin class. With how much he plays the game, you'd think he would be a world-class Assassin player. And he is. Of course, it's not all sunshine and rainbows for Mun-dee. There is this one player. This one infiltrator main, who just seems to be in every single one of his matches, who's just his worst enemy. They despise each other.

Just because he decided to stream on Twitch, but because of his often disappearances, you'll never know when he streams. In addition to the shite streaming schedule, he doesn't have any way of communicating with his viewers. No webcam, no microphone, nothing. But strangely everyone just loves his hours-long headshot streaks.

Over in England, he was supposed to have come in from the start of the term, but he just hasn't. People only know that he even exists because his name's on all the registers, and the form he's supposed to be in, 10L has been dragged to the bottom of the attendance leaderboard all because one person isn't in!

GCSES:

Trilogy

French

Geography

History

ICT

Relationships:

Jeremy 'Scout' Sullivan: They're supposedly in the same form, but no one's seen Mun-dee.

Jane 'Soldier' Doe, ??? 'Pyro' ???, Tavish 'Demo' Degroot, Mikhail 'Heavy' Ivanov, Ludwig 'Doc' Koch, ??? 'Spy' ???, ??? Pauling: They only know of him through Scout's complaining.

Dell 'Engineer' Conagher: They don't know each of other at all.

[grace-bloomer-art]

Final Major Project Evaluation Foundation Diploma In Art and Design Grace Bloomer Pathway: Photography and Illustration To be able to submit a personal Statement Of Intent To understand the importance of contextual references To know how to solve problems by applying knowledge and experience To be able to prevent a Final Project Final Major Project Evaluation: 'Life Cycle' Throughout the course I've always gone back the words 'sequence, multiple and communication', I found a passion in the Human and Animal anatomy after previously exploring them in Paris In The Park, I wanted to expand my ideas further in Final Major Project. After exploring my ideas further I realised that they werent going as far as I expected which made the beginning of the project hard and difficult for ideas, however I decided the widen my knowledge on Natural Forms, mostly shells. To gather more research and understanding of natural froms, I became inspired by a netflix series called 'Our Planet' to explore environmental issues that we face and the problems that happen in the ocean, this is why I chose to do natural forms. I felt obliged to do something to raise awareness of the major changes the planet faces. I began by completing lots of research into shells, the ocean and plastic and its part that it plays in the marine life. This research continued into reading several news articles, gathering facts about the amount of plastic put in the ocean. These facts and figures that saw shocked me and made me more determined to project my view on the situation, also they equipped me with further facts about plastic pollution and ocean conservation, but also provided me with beautiful imagery of marine life and its environment. During my research I found that the vibrancy of the plastic matched the bright inviting colours of the marine life. I continued to experiment with ways I could present my work through the result I found. I researched an artist such as Damien Hirst and 'The Day Of The Dead' as they use bright, vibrant and fluorscent colours, Damien Hirst explores the ways in which he can express life and death through vibrant colours and diamonds his 'For the Love God' skull piece inspired me to make my project beautiful but provide a big statement. I also researched Roger Ackling as he makes sculptures from man-made materials, he also reuses materials and natural lighting to crave lines on the wood he collects. Another artist that played a big part in my research were Tim Noble and Sue Webster, they created sculptors from reuse materials which made shadows of people. The use of reuse used material was going to be one of the main focuses in my exhibition, the use of plastic is going to be present in my sculptors as 'Environment' is going to be the main focus. I spent the first half the project experimenting with imagery, materials adn techniques often referring back to previous stges of the course and retry old experiments and change them to relate to my project. I really enjoyed doing the experiments as I found new ways to work for example using plaster, I'd never used that before and its made want to expand more into sculpture, I took part in several group critiques as well as a class critiques which helped me generate more ideas and made me re-evaluate my techniques. They also proivde me many new experiments which didn't turn out as successful, to say to the brief I began having discussion with students who worked different to me to gain a variety of feedback and advice. I hadn't had much experince with a daily journal, but it became like a diary to me as it was somewhere I could document to my work and my thoughts on whether I was successfull on my goals. I took a trip away to Scarborough to see the ocean to condition it was in, as I the shells piled up on the beach I began to realise that I want my sculptures to look like that, the bright colours were used to ephasied the bright colours of the marnie life. The shells I created were made from plaster and a few made from bubblewrap to give it texture. Setting up and preparing for my exhibtion was one of the most time consuming things, as I had to paint the walls and floor black several times, I spent time before experimenting with the composition of my shells which I placed in the middle of the floor. I wanted the main attraction for the audience to be the brightly coloured shells, as well as the photographs I took of them outside. Overall, I am very happy with the result of my exhibition. I feel like I have been able to use found materials to create a piece that raises the awareness of plastic pollution in our oceans and the effect it has, I also believe that I was able to express to beauty of the marine life along with the ugliness of the plastic thats ruining the planet and that the piece is making a big statement. To conclude, I feel very lucky that I had the oppurtunity to be a part of this course, and I feel like I have grown as an artist and a person. I have found different ways to work in my practice with most help I've had in my life, I can honestly say this year has been the best year of my education by far. Extended Bibliography https://www.artworksforchange.org/portfolio/tim-noble-and-sue-webster/ https://recyclenation.com/2015/01/tim-noble-sue-webster-shedding-light-grungy-garbage/ http://www.damienhirst.com/ https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/damien-hirst https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/christian-boltanski-2305 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Attenborough Paris- Catacombs Films Coco Our Planet Blue Planet https://www.jackson-pollock.org/ Books- 1000 Degrees Deyrolle Radio Times Independent Jack Hulme- A photographic memory Visits The Hepworth Yorkshire Sculpture Park Leeds Art Gallery Brockerdale Woods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olek_(artist) http://www.bluebowerbird.co.uk/info.htm http://www.michelle-reader.co.uk/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/annette-messager-2670 https://www.leosewell.net/ https://www.textileartist.org/10-contemporary-embroidery-artists

[archiveacademics]

Tags, Terminology, and Tropes

So let’s talk tags.

No, not gang tags. Tags on fanfic. 

If you’ve interacted with fanfic, or even just fandom at large, you’ve likely experienced tags. Hell, if you’ve used Tumblr or Twitter or I think even Facebook at this point, you’ve experienced tags. Tagging is, by now, a digital way of life, a way to organize the chaos that is this giant cultural archive and project of capitalism that we call the internet.

So. Why are tags important?

I’m glad you asked, hypothetical reader! Tags are important for a number of reasons. For one, they allow others to find your fanfic. Whether you read on Tumblr, Wattpad, or AO3, there are thousands upon millions of stories to wade through and it can be hard to find exactly what you’re looking for. Hence, tags.

Fansplaining has a great episode called “Cataloging Fandom” where they discuss tags from an academic standpoint. If you’re into that sort of thing definitely check out that episode. Meanwhile, Tumblr user salt-of-the-AO3 has a great post explaining the who, what, when, where, and why of tagging. It’s a great starting point if you’re just learning about tags. They even have a list of tags to get you started, whether you’re writing something and want to post it or looking for something new to read.

Say, for instance, you want to read a story about Harry Potter. You type “Harry Potter” in the AO3 search bar. But wait!

You don’t have the time, much less the energy, to wade through over 240,000 stories. So maybe you decide to narrow it down a little. You still want to read Harry Potter, but maybe you want to focus on Draco Malfoy, because you’ve got a thing for bad boys.

Yeesh. That’s better, but still not great. So now you’ve got to decide: do you want to read a Draco love story or a Draco adventure? Since you’re a hypothetical construct and an extension of myself right now, you want to read a love story. Results for “Draco Malfoy, romance”?

Ok, that’s a bit more manageable, when compared to 240,000. But it’s still a lot to sort through. So we’ll give it one last shot. Who do you want Draco to be in love with? Not Harry (that would shoot our search results up through the roof again). Not Hermione, or Ginny. You’re looking for something to read, not trying to sort through thousands of hits. So let’s go with Lavender Brown. 

Eh, good enough. You’ve got it down to under 1,500 hits. From here you can either start sifting through the results to find something you like, or you can go even more down the rabbit hole and try another search by character and event. Draco and Lavender go to the Yule Ball. Draco and Lavender at a wedding. Draco and Lavender in a coffee shop AU...

The tags are your oyster, is what I’m saying. Or the world is in the tags. Or some clever reuse of a common phrase that replaces one of the words with “tags.” 

But Chris (you hypothetically ask) what the heck is an AU?

Ah, my dear sweet hypothetical reader, I’m so glad you asked that, because it brings us to the terminology part of the post.

To start with, a fanfic writer that goes by the name of Moonbeam has a great Fanfiction Terminology master post. It covers a lot more ground than I’m going to get into today, so if you’re very curious, it’s a good place to poke around and find out what things mean. There’s also an article by Aja Romano called “Canon, fanon, shipping and more: a glossary of the tricky terminology that makes up fan culture” that’s a really good starting point for this stuff. Thirdly, the podcast Fansplaining has an episode on this topic called “~fanspeak” you can listen to. Or you can just continue reading.

Now, back to AUs.

AU stands for alternate universe. An AU usually takes the characters of a story and puts them in a new setting. There are many popular types of AUs from coffee shop AUs to high school AUs to magical AUs to either a historical or a modern AU (depending on whether the story itself is modern or historical). An AU can also change the plot of a story, taking familiar characters and sending them down different narrative paths. What if someone didn’t die like they did in the canon? Or what if they did die at a critical point? Either change could send your characters down a wildly different narrative path.

So in your hypothetical search for a story, maybe you decide you want to see Draco Malfoy the barista fall in love with Lavender Brown the Instagram Influencer who comes to his shop everyday. Or maybe you want to read a story that takes place at Hogwarts where Lavender becomes obsessed with Draco instead of Ron. Either can be considered an AU.

Now, I used a word up there that may or may not be familiar to you, depending on how deeply you live in the world of fandom. 

Canon.

Canon is the original, the progenitor, the common ancestor from which all fanfic descends. Harry Potter in all it’s seven book glory is canon. As are all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And however many there are of Angel. And all the comics... What I’m saying is, canon is the original work that fanfic is based off of. It’s the official, some might say the “real” version, but there’s a bit a value judgement there, so I wouldn’t. Anyway, that’s canon.

(If you don’t already, you’ll get why this is funny in a minute.)

The word “ship,” in the fandom sense, is short for “relationship.” In the vaunted old days of the early internet and the X-Files fandom, fans who wanted Mulder and Scully to get together began to refer to themselves as “relationshippers��� or “r’shippers”. Eventually, the term became shortened to simply “ship” and became both a noun and a verb. A ship is the pairing of characters you want to see together. To ship is to want a pair of characters to get together. 

In our hypothetical example, for instance, you ship Draco and Lavender. 

If you’re still a bit confused by the term, the podcast Fansplaining has a great article about it called “To Ship or Not to Ship,” and they also ran a survey that garnered over 16,000 responses which are gathered together and presented for your perusal here. And last but not least they produced two episodes called “The Shipping Question” and “The Shipping Answers.” 

Alright, I’m going to go through a couple more definitions as fast as I can because this post is getting long and I haven’t even gotten to tropes yet.

So, in no particular order I present...

Slash: A word used to denote a male/male pairing, original so called because of the “Kirk/Spock” fanfic of the Star Trek zine era. 

Fem Slash: Like slash, but with women. 

OTP, or One True Pairing: Your favored pairing in a fandom. 

OC, or Original Character: A character you introduce into a story. So maybe the new transfer student to Hogwarts or the new Starfleet lieutenant on the Enterprise. 

Headcanon: Your beliefs about the motivations of a character or potential plot points of a story that may or may not be supported by the canon (but are at least usually not actively disproved by canon).

Fluff: A fanfic that is short and sweet and not at all angsty. There’s is generally not much plot advancement but the stories are comforting and often domestic.

Crossover: Where characters from separate works are thrown together. For instance, I have a friend who writes Batman and One Piece cross over. 

Gen fic: A story without an overt romantic element. While pairings might happen they happen despite the story, not because of it. 

Filing off the serial numbers: When a fic writer scrubs their story of all recognizable copyright (names, places, vampires or wizards or whatever) in order to publish it. Think 50 Shades of Grey. 

Self insert: An original character that is obviously, consciously or not, based on the author. 

Mary Sue: A character who is “special.” The word has a pretty negative connotation these days. It’s usually a self insert character who is better and stronger and smarter than everyone around her and without whom the problem of the plot could never be solved. The line between what is or is not a Mary Sue (or Marty Sue/Gary Stu if the character is male) is pretty blurred these days, with trolls sometimes shouting that any female self insert character is a Mary Sue and thus obviously sucks. Elizabeth Minkel, of the Fansplaining podcast, wrote a great article about the issues of Mary Sue and the patriarchy and she and Flourish discussed those issues in an episode of the podcast.

There are so. Many. More. I could go on forever talking about different terms. But these are some of the big ones that I tend to throw into casual conversation, and, well, Google is your friend. If you don’t know the definition of something, look it up. I still have to do that sometimes. 

Now, let’s talk tropes!

TVtropes.com has a great explanation about what a trope is:

“A trope is a storytelling device or convention, a shortcut for describing situations the storyteller can reasonably assume the audience will recognize. Tropes are the means by which a story is told by anyone who has a story to tell...

Tropes are not the same thing as cliches. They may be brand new but seem trite and hackneyed; they may be thousands of years old but seem fresh and new. They are not bad, they are not good; tropes are tools that the creator of a work of art uses to express their ideas to the audience. It's pretty much impossible to create a story without tropes.“

Tropes in fanfic are fun. “Five Tropes Fanfic Readers Love (and One They Hate)” is a another survey run by the folks over at Fansplaining. You can read the article above or listen to the episode on the topic. They discuss the variety of different tropes that are either loved or hated by the more than 7,500 respondents to their survey. 

As TVtropes discusses, “Tropes are Tools.” They aren’t good or bad in and of themselves. They simply exist. Fanlore.com has a great list of different tropes. AU fic itself is a trope. And thus we’ve come full circle. 

Thanks for sticking with me this long, this post kind of got away from me. 

Make sure to tag your tropes, folks!

[cto10121]

don’t know where else to put my sniping over this cringeworthy essay at harper’s, so it’s going here. be warned: there will be high-level snark

‘‘If nostalgic cartoonists had never borrowed from Fritz the Cat, there would be no Ren & Stimpy Show; without the Rankin/Bass and Charlie Brown Christmas specials, there would be no South Park; and without The Flintstones — more or less The Honeymooners in cartoon loincloths — The Simpsons would cease to exist. If those don’t strike you as essential losses, then consider the remarkable series of “plagiarisms” that links Ovid’s “Pyramus and Thisbe” with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, or Shakespeare’s description of Cleopatra, copied nearly verbatim from Plutarch’s life of Mark Antony and also later nicked by T. S. Eliot for The Waste Land. If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism.”

ay ay ay ay ay what the fuck is this shit show 

so this idiot cultural conservative has obviously no idea what plagiarism means and if he thinks shakespeare ‘‘plagiarized’’ romeo and juliet from ovid’s pyramus and thisbe and even that leonard bernstein and stephen sondheim (?!!) did it for west side story. plagiarism is taking another’s words, phrases, and - with some obvious, very vast exceptions - ideas VERBATIM or with minimal deviation from the original and taking them as your own. reusing characters and tropes, especially common ones in the public domain, are NOT plagiarism.

shakespeare, like virtually every writer of his time, borrowed liberally from his sources, as it was almost required for every writer to write and adapt stories already well-known and in existence. granted, shakespeare did flirt with actual legit plagiarism on the (extremely lazy) occasion, and those lines from anthony and cleopatra are the closest and most damning. but even then the wording is not exact, the purpose different, and elsewhere shakespeare did not borrow without radically transforming the material to suit his purposes. prospero’s incantation starts off like medea’s spell from ovid’s metamorphoses before it veers off into something else altogether. shakespeare also made sure to quote and honor his contemporary christopher marlowe’s famous line in his play as you like it: “dear shepherd, now i find thy line of might / ‘whoever loved, that loved not at first sight?’’’ the difference is that marlowe was a contemporary and possible friend of shakespeare, and it was his line; ovid’s metamorphoses, the greek writers and the roman writers of histories were all felt to be in the public domain, and so shakespeare didn’t feel the need to give attribution.

even if such a case for plagiarizer!shakespeare can be proved, we would have to keep in mind that he lived in a time without copyright and with the very common practice of borrowing from existing stories, to the point where it was actually discouraged to write original characters. stories from greek and roman mythology and history were fair game, and even other playwrights’ plays could be revived and re-adapted again, as hollywood does now. apart from his sources, shakespeare actually quoted and appropriated little; his words are his own, and they’re damn fine ones indeed.

this author trivializes and misunderstands plagiarism to an impossibly ignorant extent, to the point of denying shakespeare and bernstein/sondheim their creative due as artists simply because the plot and story they used are not original to them. west side story is not the same as romeo and juliet, even if it did no more than change the settings and the character names (hell, it even did more than that), and never will be. hell, presgurvic’s roméo et juliette, another musical adaptation which keeps not only the story, but the same characters, and comes even closer to being a straight adaptation of the play than west side story, is still not the same as shakespeare’s play. moreover, shakespeare’s play is completely different from pyramus and thisbe; his source was actually arthur brooke’s poem ‘‘tragedie of romeus and juliet’’ with mostly the same characters and names. even then there are vast, deep differences; you would never, in a million years, confuse the two. 

‘‘The Walt Disney Company has drawn an astonishing catalogue from the work of others: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi, Song of the South, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Robin Hood, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, Mulan, Sleeping Beauty, The Sword in the Stone, The Jungle Book, and, alas, Treasure Planet, a legacy of cultural sampling that Shakespeare, or De La Soul, could get behind. Yet Disney’s protectorate of lobbyists has policed the resulting cache of cultural materials as vigilantly as if it were Fort Knox — threatening legal action, for instance, against the artist Dennis Oppenheim for the use of Disney characters in a sculpture, and prohibiting the scholar Holly Crawford from using any Disney-related images — including artwork by Lichtenstein, Warhol, Oldenburg, and others — in her monograph Attached to the Mouse: Disney and Contemporary Art.’’

i’m not a big fan of disney’s lawsuit-happy antics either, buddy, nor of the disney company in general, but they are well within their rights to sue if they see probable cause of plagiarism. their snow white is a particular kind of snow white, their cinderella their own particular cinderella. if another work were to come along with a snow white with short dark hair, a yellow dress, thirteen or fourteen years old, who sings to the tunes of harold arlen or whatever, then disney does have the right to have a finger on their lawyer call lines. you may have a point about copyright being a little too strict, with only instances of satire, parody, or educational purposes protected. but then again, we do have fanfiction that is published with no problem and legal impediment, thousands of them. what more do you want? (an explicit clause protecting transformative works? maybe.)

‘‘Kenneth Koch once said, “I’m a writer who likes to be influenced.” It was a charming confession, and a rare one. For so many artists, the act of creativity is intended as a Napoleonic imposition of one’s uniqueness upon the universe — après moi le déluge of copycats! And for every James Joyce or Woody Guthrie or Martin Luther King Jr., or Walt Disney, who gathered a constellation of voices in his work, there may seem to be some corporation or literary estate eager to stopper the bottle: cultural debts flow in, but they don’t flow out. We might call this tendency “source hypocrisy.” Or we could name it after the most pernicious source hypocrites of all time: Disnial.’’

every writer, without exception, is influenced by the books and authors they read and love. what do you mean, a writer that likes to be influenced??? yeah, of course you have your heroes, your inspiration, your heartloves. of course, writers are proud and happy to talk about other writers and artists that they like and have inspired them. that doesn’t mean an artist should give up the right for their work to be dealt with in their own terms, to be judged on its own merits or demerits, as it were. what is with this conservative obsession with influence???? first harold bloom, and now this. it’s a religious thing, i know, but...just calm down! you may believe angels and demons exist and they are messing with your little head all you want, but don’t expect me to swallow that shit, buddy. 

‘‘The power of a gift economy remains difficult for the empiricists of our market culture to understand. In our times, the rhetoric of the market presumes that everything should be and can be appropriately bought, sold, and owned — a tide of alienation lapping daily at the dwindling redoubt of the unalienable. In free-market theory, an intervention to halt propertization is considered “paternalistic,” because it inhibits the free action of the citizen, now reposited as a “potential entrepreneur.” Of course, in the real world, we know that child-rearing, family life, education, socialization, sexuality, political life, and many other basic human activities require insulation from market forces. In fact, paying for many of these things can ruin them. We may be willing to peek at Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire or an eBay auction of the ova of fashion models, but only to reassure ourselves that some things are still beneath our standards of dignity.’’

nice try, buddy, but art =/ economics. it’s one thing to detest, as i do, the erosion of social safety nets, the toxicity of laissez-faire economics that demands corporations be not held accountable at all even if they kill people by polluting rivers or making inferior products, and an ideology that insists federal government should butt out of doing what it should very well be doing - protecting the majority of people from the interests of few. we are living in a capitalist hellscape, no doubt about that

but it’s another thing to deny that because all art is derivative (which is itself a fallacy) the artist therefore relinquishes his or her right to profit from that art and not have some unscrupulous individuals claim credit for that. that won’t fly, buddy. you are making what i would call the transference or epistemological fallacy - using the ideas of one episteme or area of knowledge and applying them to another. i’m as socialist as you can be, but cultural marxism is silly and bankrupt and has always been. this is sloppy thinking at best, ideological sabotage at worst. 

‘‘Nearly any commons, though, can be encroached upon, partitioned, enclosed. The American commons include tangible assets such as public forests and minerals, intangible wealth such as copyrights and patents, critical infrastructures such as the Internet and government research, and cultural resources such as the broadcast airwaves and public spaces. They include resources we’ve paid for as taxpayers and inherited from previous generations. They’re not just an inventory of marketable assets; they’re social institutions and cultural traditions that define us as Americans and enliven us as human beings. Some invasions of the commons are sanctioned because we can no longer muster a spirited commitment to the public sector. The abuse goes unnoticed because the theft of the commons is seen in glimpses, not in panorama. We may occasionally see a former wetland paved; we may hear about the breakthrough cancer drug that tax dollars helped develop, the rights to which pharmaceutical companies acquired for a song. The larger movement goes too much unremarked. The notion of a commons of cultural materials goes more or less unnamed.”

again, this is material that would be a++ on an economics essay, but it has zero relevancy when it comes to art, which this essay insists on considering as mere cultural product, like shakespeare and tea as examples of britishness™ (never mind that if you ask shakespeare for a cup of tea, he’d ask you what is that). an art work is not quite the same as a cancer drug or public parks and schools. i agree with federal government subsidies and grants towards the arts, because it is a public good, but the key point is that the federal government doesn’t turn art itself into a public, common good; it merely gives money to institutions that in turn helps artists and gives them a financial cushion and support for their art. that doesn’t deny art from the artist and assumes that it belongs to the public without some kind of recompense or credit. all that copyright means is ensuring the artist will be properly repaid for the work and effort he or she has done. 

‘‘A few years ago, the Film Society of Lincoln Center announced a retrospective of the works of Dariush Mehrjui, then a fresh enthusiasm of mine. Mehrjui is one of Iran’s finest filmmakers, and the only one whose subject was personal relationships among the upper-middle-class intelligentsia. Needless to say, opportunities to view his films were — and remain — rare indeed. I headed uptown for one, an adaptation of J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, titled Pari, only to discover at the door of the Walter Reade Theater that the screening had been canceled: its announcement had brought threat of a lawsuit down on the Film Society. True, these were Salinger’s rights under the law. Yet why would he care that some obscure Iranian filmmaker had paid him homage with a meditation on his heroine? Would it have damaged his book or robbed him of some crucial remuneration had the screening been permitted?” 

true, douchebaggy moves happen when it comes to copyright. however, i don’t really know the circumstances of salinger’s move. did mehrjui at all stole salinger’s words and phrases or stuck too closely to the original work? was this a straightforward adaptation or was something more original, transformative? i think if it was the former, permission would have to be sought and granted. still, salinger has always been weird when it came to adaptations of his works, and he is more an outlier in this than a true example. most artists are okay with adaptations so long as it honors, in some way, their original work. some give even more freedom to the filmmakers and such, knowing that adaptation into another medium is tricky enough as it is without imposing too-strict rules.

‘‘Contemporary copyright, trademark, and patent law is presently corrupted. The case for perpetual copyright is a denial of the essential gift-aspect of the creative act. Arguments in its favor are as un-American as those for the repeal of the estate tax.”

you know what i dislike most of all? when anyone claims such-and-such is un-american because x, y, and x. why isn’t this shit dead yet? we are country who literally has installed dictators and orchestrated coup d’états in other countries simply to protect corporate interests. we are a country who goes to war for every goddamn thing. we are a country literally founded on genocide. news flash, darling: evil is neither american nor un-american. it is something that exists.

‘‘Artists and writers — and our advocates, our guilds and agents — too often subscribe to implicit claims of originality that do injury to these truths. And we too often, as hucksters and bean counters in the tiny enterprises of our selves, act to spite the gift portion of our privileged roles. People live differently who treat a portion of their wealth as a gift. If we devalue and obscure the gift-economy function of our art practices, we turn our works into nothing more than advertisements for themselves. We may console ourselves that our lust for subsidiary rights in virtual perpetuity is some heroic counter to rapacious corporate interests. But the truth is that with artists pulling on one side and corporations pulling on the other, the loser is the collective public imagination from which we were nourished in the first place, and whose existence as the ultimate repository of our offerings makes the work worth doing in the first place.”

*inhales, puffs cheeks, exhales* 

again, for the dozenth time, originality, creativity =/ a work without the slightest shred of outer references, quotes, or is based on something else AND THEREFORE. it is entirely possible to be original even if your work is explicitly based on something else. a young or older person who has never read romeo and juliet can watch west side story or roméo et juliette with no loss in comprehension or enjoyment. they are different works and can be enjoyed separately. generations upon generations have enjoyed the wizard of oz without ever cracking open a page from l. frank baum’s book. yeah! try wrapping that around your pseudo-intellectual head, buddy.

i find it insulting and intellectually bankrupt to equate artists with corporations as if their ends and desires are one and the same. they are not. artists want to be compensated for their work and protect it from being stolen, the whole purpose of copyright; corporations want to make products and sell them by spending as little as possible in order to maximize profits. because corporations get huge enough to actually cause damage to the environment and to people, government is needed to curb these excesses and to regulate them. all j.k. rowling’s done is given the okay for the dubious spin-offs cursed child and fantastic beasts, and though some people (*glares*) would actually equates this to polluting a river, most sane people would understand the difference. rowling trolling with her millions isn’t the problem; businessmen with millions is. 

in sum: idiot conservative masquerading as intellectual thinks no art work is original and therefore creativity doesn’t exist and copyright shouldn’t exist and it all belongs to the all-powerful ~culture~ and the artist should just suck it up and deal with people stealing your words and if you think about it for ten seconds it makes ZERO sense and it’s unquestionably bs