Blogorrhea Junior

Blogging, Aggregators & Copyright

Copyright issues: they just never go away. Remember that new blog I started, the one called Dowsing? Boy, what a headache that turned into. Don't get me wrong: I love writing the blog. It's fun to have a personal journal again, a place where I can write merely for the purpose of expressing my thoughts—with the usual writer's eye to mining those posts for use elsewhere, which is why I went to the trouble of putting a clear copyright statement on it. This blog only has a Collective Commons copyright, stating that people are free to use the content, unaltered, for non-commercial purposes. I'm happy to have people subscribe to the feed, link, quote, or use the content for educational purposes. What I almost always protest is people just posting my content to draw traffic to their site, which may or may not have anything to do with book arts. Write your own damn content then. Don't steal from others.

So Dowsing, simply by virtue of its name, has ended up in the aggregate feed for a site called "Life Technology™. They sell pseudo-scientific, New Agey crap like Tesla oscillation fields, alchemical compounds, and Atlantean crystals (!! No, seriously!). So it's rather ironic that they're using my content on their site, since what Dowsing is all about is freedom from bad science and superstition. I've got hardly any hits on Dowsing, which I really don't care about in that sense. People will find it and read it if they're interested. It's as much for me as it is a public endeavor. So when I found Life Technology™'s URL in my stats, I was curious, and then I was pissed off.  But I'll let you read the exchange; here's what I wrote to them yesterday:

I notice that the content on your site is protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright act. Guess what? So is mine. Please stop lifting content from my blog, Dowsing (http://leekottner.typepad.com/dowsing/), to use on your website as its purpose is antithetical to everything on your site. You have no less than a dozen posts from my blog on your dowsing page (http://www.lifetechnology.org/dowsing.php). Please remove them now or I will be filing a complaint with your ISP and website host.

Sincerely,

Lee Kottner

And here's the nice little note I got in return this morning:

dear lee,
our news headlines at www.lifetechnology.org/dowsing.php are used according to fair use provisions and are intended to direct people to relevant sites.

you can read more about the fair use policy at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

we have not published your articles, only headings with links to your articles at your own blog.

if we were breaking copyright provisions as you claim then most sites on the web would also be breaking the rules but that is not the case.

this law has been tested in court many times and rulings have universally been in the favour of the blogger.

thank you
kirsty

Are you laughing yet? I was. Wikipedia, huh? Here's my reply:

First of all, Kirsty, this is a very flimsy and erroneous argument, and you have picked the wrong person to use it on. I've written a series of posts on copyright for artists on another blog, so I'm fairly well educated about it. Find yourself a better source than Wikipedia. Try the U.S. Government copyright office instead.

As one of the intellectual property lawyers I spoke to said, "fair use only earns you the right to go to court." Fair use is in the eye of the copyright holder, who is much more likely to be favored in a court case than the person in violation; there is no hard and fast rule about proportion or magic number of words that the user may interpret for their own purposes. You are not using just the "headlines" from my posts; you are using much of the introductory paragraph. The feed from yesterday's post (7/02 "It's Just That Simple") uses almost the entire post, since it was a short written introductory paragraph with a video attached. The fact that you have selections from more than half of my posts would probably count against you too. I've become a major source for that particular feed, simply because my blog is called "Dowsing." As of this date, there are only 30 posts on my blog. 13 of those posts appear in some form on your page. That's a high proportion of content.

 

Fair use usually holds up best in court when it is used for educational purposes, in a classroom, or by artists. Your site is clearly primarily a commercial endeavor, not a news and information aggregator, and you are using my content to draw commercial traffic to your commercial site. Either you offer me a fee for the use of my content in this way, since you are clearly using it in a commercial manner, or you are in violation of my copyright, which states that my content cannot be used for commercial purposes unless I agree to it. I have not agreed, so you're in violation.

 

If you'd like a clear run-down on "fair use" you can find it here, at the U.S. Government copyright office site: http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html. It clearly states that commercial use has less protection than non-profit or educational uses. It also clearly states that the safest course is always to get permission, which you have not done. Here are some of the uses which have generally been considered "Fair use" in the past.

 

The 1961 Report of the Register of Copyrights on the General Revision of the U.S. Copyright Law cites examples of activities that courts have regarded as fair use:

quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment; quotation of short passages in a scholarly or technical work, for illustration or clarification of the author's observations; use in a parody of some of the content of the work parodied; summary of an address or article, with brief quotations, in a news report; reproduction by a library of a portion of a work to replace part of a damaged copy; reproduction by a teacher or student of a small part of a work to illustrate a lesson; reproduction of a work in legislative or judicial proceedings or reports; incidental and fortuitous reproduction, in a newsreel or broadcast, of a work located in the scene of an event being reported.

 

None of these fit your case. In your reply, you state: "this law has been tested in court many times and rulings have universally been in the favour of the blogger." Guess what? You're not the blogger here. I am. You are the aggregator. The Associated Press has recently sued a news aggregator over just this issue. You can read about it here: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071010-associated-press-sues-news-aggregator-for-licensing-failure.html

Secondly my site is not a "news" site nor is it relevant to your content; it is not about the paranormal, or dowsing, and is in fact, in part about real science, not the fake kind you're selling to gullible seekers. Now, if you'd like to see a totally scientific debunking about every one of your products appear in that "news" feed from my site, I'll be happy to oblige. It happens to fit my subject matter pretty tidily. I also happen to know a couple of well-respected science writers (and physicists) who'd be happy to pitch in, I'm sure.

Section 1204 sets out a hefty penalty for copyright infringement: 

§ 1204. Criminal offenses and penalties

(a) GENERAL  Any person who violates section 1201 or 1202 willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain

(1) shall be fined not more than $500,000 or imprisoned for not more than 5 years, or both, for the first offense; and

(2) shall be fined not more than $1,000,000 or imprisoned for not more than 10 years, or both, for any subsequent offense.

I went to the trouble of clearly marking this site as copyrighted because I intend to use some of the posts in a non-fiction book. Your publication of them without my consent and without a fee injures me as an author and I think a court would side with me on this. Do you really want to risk a half-million dollar fine on this? And that's not counting the $100,000 for each infringement, i.e, each separate use of one of my posts. That's well over a million dollars in fines should it reach the maximum. Not to mention jail time.

Care to risk it?

Sincerely,

Lee Kottner

Oddly enough, within an hour of receiving this, the feed from the news pages disappeared from their site. I suspect there is some serious editing of the spider going on.

UPDATE: Then the feed came back, and I began plotting with Jen to do the debunking posts, but this morning, I got a little note from their "legal counsel":

Dear Lee,

Thank you for your bringing your DMCA related concerns to our attention.

 

Life Technology acts as a news aggregator to provide news stories for the purpose of disemmination [sic] of news in categories that are relevant to our website. Dowsing is one such area that we are involved in. You will find many bona fide articles about dowsing at our website and blog. Despite what you seem to believe, our news stories are offered for educational purposes.

 

We are not guilty of publishing your work for our commercial gain nor have we acted in bad faith.

 

From a legal perspective, an infringement case would be very weak. There is strong argument for a fair use defense here. The brief exerpts [sic] of your work posted by ourselves are not stifling demand for your work. We are actually creating demand, not decreasing demand by providing links to the original work. Further, posting excerpts of the articles and linking to the original facilitates and invites critical discussion of the content, one of the primary reasons for the fair use defense.

 

You could not use the argument that we are diminishing the value of your work by disseminating copyrighted work prior to the publication of a book if you are publishing these exerpts into the public domain yourself.

 

Links are the currency of the internet. Instead of harassing bloggers etc., you should be praising them for bringing people to your content. It's a very poor business decision to ask people not to facilitate access to your product.

 

We are aware of the recent filing where Associated Press is suing a news aggregator on the same grounds. We feel that this even marks an unfortunate event in the history of the internet and free speech.

 

We have temporarily removed the offending page dowsing.php pending the outcome of The Associated Press versus Moreover technologies lawsuit and further clarification of DMCA law.

 

Thank you.

Joshua Silverberg, Legal Counsel Life Technology

Here's my reply:

Dear Joshua,

You've got an interesting interpretation of "public domain" if you think that anything on the internet is in it and thus fair game. Despite how "educational" a service you think your links provide, there is no escaping the fact that LifeTechnology is a commercial site selling goods. Your "news" feeds are merely a service; they are part of your advertising strategy, one I've employed myself in designing websites. Calling yourselves "bloggers" is disingenous and untrue. When my site provides a large proportion of your content for one of those feeds, you should be paying to use my material. I don't work for free. The harm is not in the linking, it's in the amount of material used, and the fact that my content is thus associated with a non-scientific site which lessens the value of my work. But I'll keep in mind the "increasing critical discussion" part if you start posting my material again. You won't mind me debunking the products because that will be educational. Some of my real scientific blogging friends were very excited about the prospect.

The upshot is is that you've removed the feed, and I'm happy with that.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Sincerely,

Lee Kottner

I'm not normally in favor of bullying people with the DMCA. Big corporations have made a bad habit of using it to intimidate perfectly legal uses of their content, so they can control all the money. I was happy to see The Naked Cowboy win the right to sue M&M Mars for misuse of his image for that reason. As a teacher, I'm all for fair use. But as a writer, I'm also all for being paid for your work and for having it appear only where you want it to. There's a thin and badly defined line between fair use and exploitation.

In this case, there's also the issue of guilt by association. As a writer, I do not want to be associated with any entity that sells the kind of pseudo-scientific crap this site sells. This is a list of their other "news" feeds, most of which I have a lot of objections to:

Kabbalah Radionics Magick Radiesthesia Homeopathy Alternative Health Mercola Jeff Sutherland PRWEB NLP Hypnosis Orgone Orgonite Rife Psychotronics Psionics Illuminati Alchemy Ormus Free Energy Alternative Science Spirituality Huna Metaphysics Occult Witchcraft Health Spirit Conspiracy Herbal Medicine Dowsing Healing Seduction Rosicrucian Paranormal Philosophy Technology Science Paganism Wicca Time Travel Feng Shui Atlantis UFO Scientology Zappers Cloudbusters Nikola Tesla Grimoires Chemtrails Manifesting Yoga Astrology Psychic Powers Xtrememind Forum

I hate to see yoga, spirituality, metaphysics, health, philosophy, technology, science, and Nikola Tesla lumped in with Atlantis, UFOs, Scientology, Orgone, Alchemy, and the Illuminati. Some of these things are not like the others.  I  suspect it was at least as much the threat of debunking as it was the legal talk that led to the sudden demise of the news feed. People have a right to believe whatever they like, but they also have a right not to be forced to associate or have their work associated with causes or ideas they don't condone. And control of your own intellectual work trumps, every time, the notion that information wants to be free.

[Cross posted at Dowsing]

No Longer a Michigander or, American English

Well, it looks like my going-on-25-years in New York City has finally eradicated my Midwestern accent, or so one of those online tests says. I am now not from anywhere. I am the woman without a region, a citizen at large. My mother always insisted that while my dad spoke unadulterated Pittsburghese with an associated creole of Kottnerisms, what she spoke was "American English," the equivalent of BBC English. Hawgwash. Newscaster English, especially in Britain (though here too) is completely artificial and unregional purposefully, to make us all seem more homogeneous and heterogeneous than we are.

I've been thinking about language, especially spoken language, quite a lot again since I started tutoring, since spoken language plays such a large role in how well one writes. I tell some of my students to read their papers aloud to themselves and they will hear where commas go, where periods belong. This only works with some of them, though, either because they come to English as a second language and the rhythms of their first one are different and still overlay their second language, or because their reading skills are so poor that they read word by word rather than phrase by phrase. So the rule I learned—that you insert a comma where you take a breath or where you naturally pause—doesn't work for them. Then we have to fall back on rules and examples, which, frankly, I hate.

I hate it because it's an artifical way to learn a language, any language, even your own. Nobody makes conscious grammatical decisions, when speaking, about what tenses to use, or is that noun plural or singular so what should the verb be? Being able to hear what sounds correct in grammar is more important, I think, than being able to explain or even understand why. Accept that these are the agreed-upon, arbitrary rules of a language, and then learn the way it sounds. Grammar is often like gravity: it just is. Nobody knows why it's this way, but when the rules were codified (thanks, Sam Johnson) somebody often just decided it sound better this way. Let me repeat that: Somebody decided it sounded better this way. As with history, the winners write the stories, and the educated elite codified the "correct" language. It's another manifestation and tool of class and regional snobbery.

I think fondly of the early anarchy of English spelling and sentence structure around Caxton's time. It must have made reading harder, but then, so few people did it. But it made the language rich: rich in accents, in words, in metaphors and images. The other day, one of my students accidentally made an absolutely beautiful, metaphoric line by using a word that sounded very similar to the one she really needed. I wanted to steal it from her, it was so gorgeous. But she's a poet too, and I restrained myself, after pointing it out to her. I hope she squirrels it away for later use. Happy accidents like that don't happen very often.

Or maybe they do, if you're listening for them. I've been riding the bus back and forth to CNR since it's a straight shot down Westchester Ave. from my place. A lot of kids of all ages ride the bus, too, and if you're a language junkie, kids are where the verbal mescalin and speedballs are. The neologisms alone, some as ephemeral as mayflies, are worth putting up with the hormonal teenage noise. But it's the little kids who come up with the metaphoric gems. One little boy, who insisted on sitting in his seat completely upside down, regaled his mother with a litany of metaphors so stunning (and so exasperating and tiring to her, poor bun) that I had to get out my notebook to write some of them down. Here's a couple: The sky is a sweater. The earth is a gun. These followed by "Mommy, I'm too much." And he was. If only he knew how he was too much. It was a spoken word jazz improv and the kid was freebasing language.

That kind of language is infectious (unless you're a tired mom with a hyperactive kid). And you only hear it if you listen carefully to everyday life. The sanitized language of TV doesn' t have it. And when I say sanitized, I mean it. Think we don't have censorship in this country? Try saying fuck—a word so overused it has all but completely lost its shock value—on network TV. There are few regional accents, not much slang, and no poetry. Listening to American and British newscasters, you'd think we were all one. Not hardly. Even Midwesterners are not all one.

I've forgotten how strong that Michigan/Ohio/Indiana/Wisconsin accent can be; only a visit from my cousins recently reminded me. Their round vowels kept blinking "not from here." Stay in one place long enough, no matter how different from your own, and the language starts to rub off on you. Certainly the local lingo does. I now call carbonated soft drinks "soda" instead of "pop" while I'm standing "on" line instead of "in" line. (Perhaps this is why New Yorker's queue up so badly while waiting for the bus: nobody can find the invisible line we're supposed to be standing on.) I have also learned to speak Starbuckian while here, though not through any real effort, just out of repetition and necessity. The natives don't understand you otherwise. And apparently, I have lost my accent, such as it was.

My English friend Helen, who lived in the States for a long time while pursuing a doctorate, lost a great deal of her plummy accent while she was over here and sounded almost American. Having been back home for a good 20 years now, though, her clipped, Oxbridgian accent is thick enough to spread on a muffin. And her grammar is far more precise and exacting (and British) than mine will ever be (for which I am secretly grateful).

But knowing how a language sounds can save you more than grammar grief. It teaches you to spell. One of the most useful things I ever learned, besides how to diagram sentences, was phonics, and how to break words up into syllables. If you know the sounds of the phonemes, what a morpheme is, and where to break a syllable, you're pretty much set.

Or so you'd think. Maybe I'm just a word junkie. There was a really fascinating discussion on my flist at LJ (friends locked, so I can't give you the link) where I contributed something about intuitive learning. Someone replied that although she read a lot, this had never worked her. Which, of course, it doesn't, and I'm just extrapolating my experience onto others. Bad me, no biscuit. I think it's being a word junkie that made me more attuned to how language works, both in writing and spoken forms. I've always loved the sound of words. Some of them almost have texture to me, or color or flavor. I have a definite preference for what I think of as "hard" consonants, especially K and G and T, and though I like the word fricative as a word the sounds defined as such don't do much for me. I like knowing the etymology of words, and knowing what their roots mean in the language we stole them from (usually Greek or Latin), which makes it easier to parse out the meaning of similar words, e.g. photon, photography, and photosynthesis all have to do with light. But I don't think learning to listen or to read well hurts either.

White Rabbit Syndrome

As you've no doubt noticed, the book arts posts have been pretty slim around here of late. I promise to change that, soon. I wrote most of April's posts a month ahead of time, but have been doing May's very piece-meal, which means I've been writing what I know for the last month, the result of which is you get a lot of posts about writing, not so many about book arts.

The truth is, the book arts posts, though short, take a lot of time to research, if I want to make them interesting and substantive and not just repeat what everyone else is posting. So it involves combing through both numerous Google alerts, and my ever-growing list of blogs, something that can easily take most of the day, then writing the artist for permission to use an image, and learning more about them. This weekend (Memorial Day here in the States) I plan to spend some time in the evenings catching up on my reading and flagging stuff to write about. I'm equally backed up on my emails. But in addition, I have readings for my upcoming class to plan and syllabi to finish, and, and, and . . .

You get the idea.

This makes me feel a bit like Lewis Carroll's White Rabbit: "Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!" Fortunately, most of the book arts stuff I tend to write about isn't time sensitive. I just have to sound like I know what I'm talking about. You know, it's said that the best way to know something is to have to teach it, and it's true. I'm continually getting a good education in book arts and techniques by writing about it here.

"So remember what the Dormouse said: 'Feed your head! Feed your head!'"

Teaching and Writing and Teaching Writing

You wouldn't know it, but I've been elbow deep in student papers for the past month. Thankfully, I have not had to grade them, only help students with them as a tutor in the writing center. It's both soul-filling and appalling work. The students are what make it soul-filling: they're mostly adult women coming back to school at a non-traditional age, and so very driven and highly motivated to succeed. They want help, they want to learn, they want that piece of paper that's the prize, that they hope will better their lives and give them more income, make their parents proud and inspire their children. They're the best kind of student you can ask for; a teacher's dream.

What's appalling is how the educational system has failed them. Few of them come in with a good grasp of grammar, even something basic like verb tenses, and subject-verb agreement. Many don't understand what the basic units of a sentence are. The subject-verb-object construction is really complex and confusing to them. Part of that is the lack of nomenclature: we don't share a common language about the intrinsic parts of language, because somehow many of them got out of elementary school without even understanding the difference between a noun and a verb. They have never diagrammed sentences, learned to spell phonetically, or break words into syllables. They don't read aloud or do so poorly and can't hear where a comma would go, where their breath tells them it would go. I'm led to wonder what the hell they were taught, when I was learning all these things back in 2nd and 3rd grade. Whatever it was, it was neither successful nor useful, and I doubt this was entirely the students' fault. It's an all-too-typical complaint from college teachers of all stripes, but there's nothing to be done about it at this level, for these students, but help them catch up and fume privately about shortchanged public schools, underpaid teachers, crowded classrooms, lack of materials, and an indifferent public.

The other appalling part is the stories they have to tell in their papers. Far too many of them are absolutely heartbreaking: domestic violence, drug addiction, mental illness, an HIV diagnosis, chronic health problems, children lost to the streets, drive-bys, cheating men, abusive parents, gunned-down friends and family, immigration struggles, nights in jail. And yet they're here, bootstrapping themselves up out of whatever it was they went through, clawing their way out of bad relationships, low-paying jobs, single parenthood, abandonment, indifference. They abso-fucking-lutely amaze me—not that they can do what they're doing, but that they decided, themselves, to believe they could change their lives, then went and did it. And nothing, but nothing is getting in their way.

I haven't done this kind of one-on-one tutoring in a long time, and when I signed on, I wondered if it would spark my own writing the same way teaching a structured course always has in the past. The answer is yes. In part, it's because of these women fearlessly telling their stories, claiming their history, and spelling out their plans to rise above it. Not to sound trite, but it's like watching Oprah for three hours a day, three days a week. All this courage and determination uplifts me and makes me once again realize how charmed my life has been, how privileged (to use a word that was recently hurled at me like a curse), and how easy. I am lucky, lucky, lucky. Maybe this is why teaching feels so right to me. I've always believed in the "teach a man to fish" philosophy and I know how to fish: what better way to share my luck and my privilege? It also deeply appeals to the feminist in me. CNR is primarily a woman's college like the one I went to, and I deeply believe, as my mother did, that education and economic independence are the best things you can give a woman to improve her life.

I realize what I have in the writing center is a self-selecting population of students who aren't shy about asking for help, and aren't too proud to take it. I'm sure CNR, like all schools, has its share of slackers who don't really know or care what they're doing there, who prefer to coast along on the financial aid, thinking it's a good scam. I think there may be fewer of them than I'm used to because this is such a focused program (it's mostly health services students). My upcoming classes will probably have the usual bell-curve mix of ability and motivation, although that too is different when you're teaching an elective.

I'm really looking forward to teaching an entirely new class and a new genre of writing than I've taught before, especially something that I did myself for years: journaling. I see journals as a strange mix of personal and public, imaginative and factual, creative and disciplined. None of these attributes are mutually exclusive, but they don't often blend the way they do in a journal. I know that I would not be the person I am without the reams of paper I consumed in introspection, in analyzing relationships, in thinking about what to do with my life, or what was going wrong with it. It's a luxury that many people don't have, and even fewer realize they can make work for them. It's a fine way to teach writing, too, I think, because there are so many ways to make journals work. There are few rules, and much room for exploration of form and to learn how to clarify ideas and tell a story.

In short, I think it's going to be a good class. I'll keep you posted. My first class (tentatively) meets June 3rd.

Know Yer Poets!

I am somewhat embarrassed by my score on this. All I can say in my defense is that one of them was actually right, except I used the poet's initials instead of his full name, one I couldn't think of though I do know it, and one I had right at first and then changed it. D'oh!  The other two are just plain wrong. So my real score is more like 80%. I missed a dead Roman and a dead Japanese. And the Roman would have been obvious if I'd thought about it. The Japanese haiku master, not so much. Take it yourself:

Who Am I? Poets Score: 50% (5 out of 10)

I am also shocked, shocked I tell you, that my stats have plummeted by 50% this month since I focused on poetry! What's the matter with you people? Books and poetry go together like toast and jam!

V-Day, Ten Years On ({})

It's also Women's History Month, a cause even nearer and dearer to my heart than poetry. This year, V-Day is the tenth anniversary of the first performance of Eve Ensler's ground-breaking "The Vagina Monologues," which is now performed all over the world as a fundraiser for local anti-violence groups, crisis centers, shelters and more. Here are a couple of sobering reasons why, from Feminist.com:

• In the National Violence Against Women Survey, approximately 25% of women and 8% of men said they were raped and/or physically assaulted by a current or former spouse, cohabiting partner, or date in their lifetimes. The survey estimates that more than 300,000 intimate partner rapes occur each year against women 18 and older.
• One out of every six American women have been the victims of an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime. (Prevalence, Incidence and Consequences of Violence Against Women Survey, National Institute of Justice and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1998)
• Factoring in unreported rapes, about 5% - one out of twenty - of rapists will ever spend a day in jail. 19 out of 20 will walk free. (Probability statistics based on US Department of Justice Statistics)

I've been lucky, but many of my friends have not. One was raped in childhood, another gang-raped in college (and still suffers Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from it), a third was date-raped as adult and another as a college student, another was abused by her live-in boyfriend and had to flee with nothing but the clothes on her back, another fought off her attacker when she was traveling abroad by herself. My mother was sexually abused by one of her own brothers. That's seven women already, just in a group of, oh, maybe 30 friends. Not everyone tells and not everyone reports it to the authorities, so I wouldn't be surprised if this were merely the tip of the iceberg among my wide circle of friends. Saddened, but not surprised.

If you've been or are being abused, sexually or physically or emotionally, tell someone. Tell a co-worker, tell your boss, tell the HR person at work, tell a cop, tell your best friend, tell your health-care provider, tell your minister or pastor or priest or the person who sings next to you in the choir. If none of those work for you, call here, for free:

National Domestic Violence Hotline: 800-799-7233

Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN): (800) 656-HOPE
    24 Hour Confidential Rape Hotline.

National Victim Center: 800-FYI-CALL (394-2255)
    Operating 8:30AM-5:30PM EST, the NVC hotline helps locate assistance in your community
    if you have been the victim of a violent crime.

You have nothing to be ashamed of. Your abuser does.

When the Democratic campaign first turned into a race between Obama and Clinton, I remarked to a friend that we're likely to have a black president before we'll have a woman president. Knowing what a feminist I am, she seemed shocked. But in this country, where 19 out of 20 rapists go free—in part from underreporting, in part from lack of convictions and outrageous sentences—it's still okay to yell "iron my shirts!" to the woman, but not to the male descendant of slaves. We are half the population of this world, and nowhere, not even in the U.S., are woman truly valued for anything but their cunts or protected equally under the law. We are still taught to be ashamed of our bodies, taught that our sexuality is shameful, taught that we are never good enough the way we are. Or, as NOW's Women's Rights Manifesto puts it:

Because woman's work is never done and is underpaid or unpaid or boring or repetitious and we're the first to get fired and what we look like is more important than what we do and if we get raped it's our fault and if we get beaten we must have provoked it and if we raise our voices we're nagging bitches and if we enjoy sex we're nymphos and if we don't we're frigid and if we love women it's because we can't get a "real" man and if we ask our doctor too many questions we're neurotic and/or pushy and if we expect childcare we're selfish and if we stand up for our rights we're aggressive and "unfeminine" and if we don't we're typical weak females and if we want to get married we're out to trap a man and if we don't we're unnatural and because we still can't get an adequate safe contraceptive but men can walk on the moon and if we can't cope or don't want a pregnancy we're made to feel guilty about abortion and...for lots and lots of other reasons . . .

We are part of the women's liberation movement.

This is why V-Day is so important and Women's History Month is so important. Speaking out together gives other women courage and strength and makes us realize we're not alone. Support your sisters. There have already been several performance of "The Vagina Monologues" in the city this year. If you missed them, Baruch College is holding a benefit performance on March 26 at 7 PM here:

55 Lexington Ave (@25th street)
New York New York 10010
Phone: 917-592-4107
Enter the main college building and ask for the Engelman Recital Hall, which will be to your right, 2 flights down by elevator. Doors open at 6:45PM. You must purchase tickets ahead of time.

Go here to find a performance near you. Take your daughter, your mother, your sister. More importantly, take your husband, your son, your brother, your father, and start a dialogue. It might help stop future violence against women.

Book Arts & Copyright Part IV: CBA Professional Development Seminar

As threatened promised, I attended the Professional Development Seminar on copyright last night at the Center for Book Arts in Manhattan (also browsed the galleries while I was there, but that's another post). The presenters were two lawyer/artists or artist/lawyers from Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts: Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento, Esq. (JD, Cornell, visual artist) and Kelly Kocinski, Esq. (JD, Brooklyn Law, dancer). Great presenters, great discussion, great questions by all in attendance.

Probably the most important impression of the evening was the fact that copyright is an absolute protection for the artist, but extremely fluid when it comes to the use of other people's work. Even when working with codified laws, the legal system in this country tends to work with precedent rather than absolute interpretations, and as Kelly pointed out, decisions are often made in courtrooms according to where people feel the line should be drawn, rather than by some clear-cut criterion. In other words, as Sergio said, quoting another lawyer, "Fair use buys you the right to go to court." It's not an absolutely clear defense that protects you from being sued, even in an educational setting. Here's an example from an actual case that Sergio used to illustrate how slippery and arbitrary the law can be:

An artist uses two Disney characters in his own art, placing them in, shall we say, compromising positions. Disney, of course, sues, after getting wind of it. Because the exhibition is in a small, out-of-the-way room and not seen by many people, and restricted to adult viewers, the jury decides that gives the artist's work more protection than if it were being viewed by anyone in a big public space. As one attendee said last night, that's absurd. Welcome to the wonderful world of law; check your logic circuits at the door. Because law, like art, is a human activity.

The good news is that, as an artist, copyright is a powerful protection that gives you a bundle of rights to control your own work. As a copyright holder, you have the right to

• reproduce your work;
• perform or display it publicly;
• make pictures, photos, posters, put it in a catalog; and
• make derivative works from it, among other things.

As the copyright owner, you can license others to reproduce your work, in a different form, in a limited run, for a specific purpose, and control absolutely how it is reproduced. Copyright is essentially a property right; your work is treated as a concrete asset, like your TV. If someone walks off with your flatscreen some weekend, that's theft; if someone makes use of your art, pretty much in any way, shape, or form without your permission, that's theft, too.

These rights go into effect, thanks to recent changes in the copyright law, the moment you materialize your idea. Since copyright does not protect ideas, that idea must be made into concrete material form before you can sue someone for stealing it. And it must have been made into material form before the person you're suing did so. Proving this is the tricky part.

Registration of your copyright is your best bet, because that time-stamps your creation and provides the strongest proof that yes, indeed, this was your idea first. Against evidence of a registered copyright, there's not much defense. Registration also earns you the right to automatically have your case heard in Federal Court, which saves several steps in the inevitable appeal process. So, how do you register a copyright?

First of all, that mailing it to yourself thing means nothing, apparently. It used to, but not now. Now, you must either register your copyright electronically or by hardcopy through the mail (either is fine) with the Copyright Office. Remember that just by making your idea concrete, it is granted protection. Registering it safeguards your right to control its use and reproduction and makes it easier to sue infringers. It's an easy and fairly inexpensive process, and worth doing. Your work is copyrighted from the moment the Copyright office receives your registration materials.

This is especially important if you have an on-line portfolio, because we all know how impossible it is to keep control of our work when it hits the Internet. There are two options for registering on-line work.  You can copyright and register the entire website or blog that you build, or you can register the individual works on that blog or website. You're actually better off doing the latter, because if you register the blog or website, you must re-register it every time it's updated. The expense is probably about the same in the long run, but registering the individual works will likely give you better protection.

And, dude, if you're an infringer? You better have some pretty deep pockets. Say you make Christmas cards of somebody else's work, without their permission. Each one of those cards is a separate infringement that can cost you between $10,000-$150,000 each. Yeah, each. Did I say each? So those 25 family members and friends could cost you $250,000-$3.75 million. See your life flashing before your eyes? I did.

Here's the bad news: practically any use of other people's art or text that was created since 1922, without permission, is a copyright infringement. That includes posting pictures of other people's art on your website to say, "Hey, isn't this great stuff? Go see this exhibit!"—an activity of which I am (and most of the rest of us are, too) guilty, guilty, guilty. All those Peter Calleson emails that have been making their way around the net in the guise of a "contest" at the Hirshorn (bogus, by the way)? Copyright infringement. Even though you're doing the artist a favor by providing free publicity (which is why many of them don't object), they still legally have the right to sue your butt off, just because you didn't get permission first. The sad part is (and I'm going to start doing this), all you have to do is send the artist an email and say, "Hey, I have a blog I'd like to feature your work on. Is it okay if I use one or two of the pictures from your website, and provide a link back to it?" That way, the artist has the right to say, not just yes or no, but also, "yes, but please use this photo with this caption, at this size or resolution."  Probably very few artists are going to say no, but that one who does could own you for the rest of your natural life, financially speaking, if you post their work without permission.

That 1922 date is important, and clarified something I thought I already knew. Anything made before 1922 that hasn't had its copyright renewed, is absolutely fair game, regardless of whether it's in a museum or not. What MG and I were paying the Louvre for when we used their Three Muses image, was the right to use the high-resolution image itself. If we'd gone to the Louvre and taken a picture (something most museums don't allow for precisely this reason, although you can get permission), it would be our image of that artwork and we wouldn't have had to pay anything to anybody. Museums and archives use these "official" images as a revenue stream, and you can hardly blame them for wanting a few bucks for them. So the question you have to ask yourself is whether you need to get permission for the particular image of an artwork you want to use, rather than for the artwork itself.

How you use another artist's work is also important. This is where the concepts of "transformative" and "derivative" artwork come in. A derivative work is anything that uses the original artwork in full or (here's an important concept) in part, even if the rest of the work is entirely original. This includes using a chunk of text, a portion of an image, or, even (sometimes) using a particular font as your main design element. Contrary to popular wisdom, the amount you use does not matter. There's no fixed percentage of an image, video, sound clip, text, or anything else that's okay to use. There's no "100 word" limit, no "7-second" limit, no "10% limit." Juries are arbitrary creatures and they may decide that your 10-word phrase from a 85,000-word book or fractional reproduction of a postcard was too much. This is where Fair Use is so deceiving. If you use anything of another artist's copyrighted work without permission, that's infringement. End of story.

So what's this "transformative" business? A transformative work is one that takes another artist's work and alters it substantially. That modifier, "substantially," is the part that can mess you up. "Substantially" in whose opinion? First, the original artist's. If it's not a substantial enough alteration for them, they will sue you. Second, the jury's. If it's not a substantial enough alternation for the jury, they'll find you guilty of copyright infringement and you'll be out lawyer's fees ($500/hour), court costs, and a hefty fine (see above).

Obviously, this makes collage a risky business, if you're using copyrighted images. Is it derivative or transformative? Of course, if you're using ephemera produced before 1922, there's nothing to worry about. But even if you're using images you find on one of those art-for-free websites, there's usually a disclaimer that says you can't use that image in a commercial work. Whatever work you make with their free art has to also be free and available for mashup. This is the essence of several Creative Commons licenses. So again, make sure you know who owns the copyright and what the terms are before you use something. (Incidentally, there's an interview in the April 2008 issue of Mother Jones with Shepard Fairey of Obey the Giant fame in which he talks about about appropriating other people's work. It's not online yet, so I don't have a link for you.)

A kind of rule of thumb about transformative works that Sergio mentioned last night has to do with commercial versus artistic intent. Say you buy a copyrighted book and decided to rebind it as an art object. Since there's only one of them, you're probably pretty safe doing that (although theoretically, you could still be sued). But if you buy 500 copies of that book, rebind them, and resell them, that's a commercial intent that theoretically can be seen as harming the author's commercial market. If people buy your rebound book instead of 500 copies of his officially published book, that's 500 sales the author and the publisher have lost. Again, though, there is no hard and fast rule about how many is too many. It's all about perception—not yours, but the copyright holder's.

Likewise, if you took that single copy of the book and substantially altered the text in some way (blanking it out, painting it over, cutting it up, rearranging the signatures or pages or somehow making it generally unreadable) you're probably safe doing that. (Notice the "probably"; nothing is hard and fast under copyright except the ownership terms.) You've transformed the original book into an art object. Again, though, if you did this 500 times, you're still leaving yourself wide open to a civil suit, because it may still affect the author's sales (for instance, collectors may gravitate more toward your book than toward the author's first editions).

In addition, trademarks are something you may have to consider. Another example from Sergio: If I go down to Times Square and take a photo that includes the Minolta lightboard and there happens to be a Nike logo on it at the time, I have to get permission to have those trademarks appear in my photo before I can reproduce it commercially, even though I own the copyright on that image. With so many iconic buildings in the city, it's good to be aware the even architecture can be trademarked. One of the attendees last night works for DKNY and mentioned that they send umpteen bazillion dollars each year to the company that owns the Empire State Building to use its image in DKNY's advertisements. Who knew?

Similarly, if you use photographs of (living) people you need to get a release from them before you can reproduce their image for commercial purposes. This bummed me out because I took a bunch of great photos of some of the skaters at Rockefeller center yesterday and now I'm going to have to make sure none of them are recognizable. And boy is that tricky! Blurring out is one option, but don't count on distance to do it. Years ago, when I first moved here, I recognized myself on a greeting card photo taken as I was walking across Washington Square Park. It's a tiny image, but even my friends recognized it, before I did. The funny thing was, I saw the photographer at the time, too. Another of the attendees mentioned she'd seen a photo of her family on a documentary about WWII on PBS, and nobody had approached them for a release, either. She didn't care, but don't discount the fact that someone else might.

If you've been paying attention, you know that almost every statement I've made about copyright is followed by the words "without permission." That's the simple rule with copyright. Get permission. Ask the artist or writer if you can use their work. It isn't always costly and it can lead to some really great collaborations and connections. Not getting it can lead to bankruptcy and some nasty time in court. It costs you nothing to ask and it's really just common consideration. As I said in the last post, don't be evil.

UPDATE 3/22/08:

Someone in my book arts group responded to this post with the following:

If you are rebinding a book with your own, original cover artwork, but leaving
all of the pages that have any printing on them intact and in order, this is
technically not a derivative work and technically subject to the right of
sale . . .

Not true. Right of first sale applies to used books only. Anything rebound and sold as an artwork is a derivative work; it derives from the original text by using it in the rebound book. Here's the definition of a derivative work direct from the government copyright site:

A “derivative work,” that is, a work that is based on (or derived from) one or more already existing works, is copyrightable if it includes what the copyright law calls an “original work of authorship.” Derivative works, also known as “new versions,” include such works as translations, musical arrangements, dramatizations, fictionalizations, art reproductions, and condensations. Any work in which the editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications represent, as a whole, an original work of authorship is a derivative work or new version.

A typical example of a derivative work received for registration in the Copyright Office is one that is primarily a new work but incorporates some previously published material. This previously published material makes the work a derivative work under the copyright law.

To be copyrightable, a derivative work must be different enough from the original to be regarded as a “new work” or must contain a substantial amount of new material. Making minor changes or additions of little substance to a preexisting work will not qualify the work as a new version for copyright purposes. The new material must be original and copyrightable in itself. Titles, short phrases, and format, for example, are not copyrightable. [my emphasis]

By simply adding a new cover (changing the format) without changing the contents (the text) you are creating a derivative work. Your cover alone is not a substantial amount of "new work" and thus is not copyrightable as your original work, because you're including someone else's text that is already copyrighted. Let me say this again:

Just buying the book does not mean you have bought the copyright, anymore than buying a copy of a movie DVD means you can re-edit and broadcast that movie (remember those FBI warnings at the beginning? Read them next time. In detail.) You may be a fabulously creative, original bookbinder, but your cover does not in any way substantially alter the contents (which is, after all, the main part of the book), and the book you produce is therefore derivative. You can't just appropriate someone else's text to bind without permission, whether you bought the book or not. Sure you can resell your previously owned used book. What you can't claim is that your covers make it a new work of art. They don't. You only own the book, not the copyright.

Why is this so hard? All you need is permission. Just. Freaking. Ask.

Part I  Part II Part III

Small Press Month/Women's History Month

Woohoo!  A whole month devoted to small presses! It seems appropriate to me that this coincides with Women's History Month, since blocking access to books and knowledge has been one of the ways that women have been and still are kept in unequal positions. The adage about keeping a woman "barefoot and pregnant" has a connotation of illiteracy and ignorance, as well as the physical limitations of caring for kids and pregnancy itself. If you're a reader, you know that books of any kind open a whole new world beyond the everyday.  For some of us, they also offer a literal escape hatch, hope that there's a way out and information about how to find the exit, or even to make one for ourselves.

It's also fitting these two celebrations coincide since so many women have had huge roles in publishing, in championing books  that may never have seen the light of day, in making sure that women's lost voices are recovered and new ones heard.

If you'd like to know more about women's literacy issues, check out Kent State's bibliography.

Here's a flyer with some of the literary events taking place this month across the country. (click to enlarge).

And a late-breaking event from the Bowery Poetry Club:

National Small Press Month Reading Marathon
Thursday, March 6, 2008
308 Bowery, New York, NY 10012
212.614.0505
7 pm to Midnight. $6.

Featuring: Eileen Myles (Wave Books), Noella Kocottomblin (Wave Books), Lynne Tillman (Soft Skull), Jen Benka (Soft Skull), Brenda Coultas (Coffee House Press), Ted Mathys (Coffee House Press), Alex Rose (Akashic Books), Camelia Entekhabifard (Seven Stories Press), Veronica Liu (Seven Stories Press), Martine Bellen (Belladonna Books), Lila Zemborain (Belladonna Books), Dan Machlin (Ugly Duckling Presse), Rachel Sherman (Open City Books), Leni Zumas (Open City Books), Sharon Mesmer (Hanging Loose Press), Marie Carter (Hanging Loose Press), Melissa Buzzeo (Leon Works), Tisa Bryant (Leon Works), Bob Holeman (Bowery Books), Paul Mills  Bowery Books), Radhiyah Ayobami (Bowery Books), Rachel Levitsky (Futurepoem Books), Erica Kaufman (Big Game Books), Corrine Fitzpatrick (Sona Books), Dedra Johnson (Ig Publishing), Grant Bailie (Ig Publishing), Camilla Trinchieri (Soho Press), Anne Landsman (Soho Press), Jason
Schneiderman (Four Way Books), David Lawrence (Four Way Books).

Small indepdendent presses are doing what the components of the big conglomerates used to do, before they were swallowed up: they're taking a chance on and nurturing new writers and minority voices in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction—something we should all support. Go to a reading. Better yet, buy a small press book or two.

Back to the Academic Trenches

Well, this will be interesting. I've just been hired by the College of New Rochelle, whose programs are now much like Chatham's but at a Catholic university, to tutor in their writing lab a couple of days a week, and possibly to teach one of the remedial classes, which may in turn lead to a more regular teaching gig. They seemed to think I was grossly overqualified to tutor in the writing center and fairly anxious to offer me an adjunct gig, which sort of surprised me. It's not like Ph.D.s aren't going begging. Hmmm.

Seems a bit more conservative than other places I've taught (not surprising, since it's Catholic). Mild dress code that the women ignore and men observe by wearing a tie. Much professor this and Dr. that in the introductions, which may be just because I'm new. But everyone seemed very friendly, and I'm older than both of the people in the department who interviewed me, which was weird.

The gig is at one of CNR's satellite campuses, this one in the South Bronx, a mere bus ride away. Very easy to get to, not horrible hourly pay (though the adjunct pay for 9 weeks pretty much sucks, as usual), and nice people. The students, I suspect, are going to be rather different from even the people I taught at LaGuardia, but most of them are adults, which is a plus. And it's a big plus to teach at a 4-year again, rather than a community college. It'll be a nice way to ease back into teaching, too. Keep you posted.

Word to Your Librarian . . .

. . . the people who really run the world, and one of the few groups, along with booksellers and the ACLU, to challenge the Patriot Act's right to spy on what you read and what you buy to read.

From YouTube, courtesy of International Journal of the Book.

And a shout-out to Gretl and Erin, my own hip librarians.