1,721,049 research outputs found
The Stolen Poem of Saint Moling
No full textIt’s a truism of copyright scholarship that the modern concept of the author didn’t exist until the modern era. The medieval and Renaissance author was a vehicle for the text, but the modern author is the creator of the text. And in the eighteenth century, the Romantic movement transformed authorship into self-expression. This individualization of authorship enabled the creation of copyright. While the printing press made commercial publishing possible, the modern concept of the author created “literary property.” But is the truism entirely true? The concept of the author has certainly changed over time, and taken different forms in different places at different times. But is the modern concept of the author truly unique to the modern era, or does it merely reflect a particular literary economy? In other words, did our concept of the author create our literary economy, or did our literary economy shape our concept of the author? Surely, the answer is a bit of both. But a medieval Irish legend at least suggests that the modern concept of the author is only a particular expression of an economic phenomenon. This article uses an episode from the B—rama, a twelfth-century Irish legend written in Leinster, to reflect on the concept of literary ownership in medieval Ireland. Saint Moling composed a praise-poem for the High King of Tara, in order to convince him to lift the b—rama or cattle-tax levied on Leinster. Moling’s reciter Tollchenn stole ahead and presented the poem to the king as his own, and when Moling arrived, the king accused him of plagiarizing the poem. Moling ordered Tollchenn to recite the poem again, but he could not, proving that Moling was the author. While the story has no basis in historical fact, it reflects the concept of literary ownership at the time it was written. The currency of the poet was novel poems, which they composed and recited for kings. Accordingly, poets needed to be able to claim ownership of the poems they composed, in order to claim the value of those poems. By contrast, other genres of literary works were often unattributed or attributed to historical figures, presumably because they lacked economic value as literary works. This suggests that the attribution and the concept of literary ownership were a function of economic interests.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/lawfac_book/1032/thumbnail.jp
On the Origins of the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema
Full text linkIn this article, the Author explains the origins of The Robert Beck Memorial Cinema (RBMC), a microcinema located in New York City. The idea was to show movies that no one else could or would
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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After Copyright: Pwning NFTs in a Clout Economy
Full text linkCopyright is a means to an end, not an end in itself. We created copyright because we wanted to encourage the creation and distribution of works of authorship, not because we wanted to enable copyright owners to control the use of the works they own. We stuck with copyright because it was the best tool we had, despite its flaws. Was copyright ever efficient? No. But marginal improvements matter.
Technology has changed the copyright calculus. Distribution of works of authorship gradually got cheaper and cheaper. And then the Internet made it free. But creation remained costly, even though technology helped make it easier. For better or worse, copyright was still our best way of encouraging authors to create new works, by enabling them to claim some of the economic value of those works.
Of course, copyright was always a compromise, with many flaws. First, it’s overbroad. While many authors rely on copyright, many others don’t—but copyright protects their works anyway, even if they don’t want it. Second, it’s overlong. Copyright protects works far longer than necessary to encourage their production, and keeps forgotten works out of print. Third, it’s inequitable. By design, copyright only benefits commercially successful authors. And finally, it’s inefficient. Most of the benefits of copyright go to publishers rather than to authors.
There’s gotta be a better way. And maybe there is.
The market for non-fungible tokens, or “NFTs,” enables authors to sell their works without relying on copyright at all. An NFT is a transferable cryptographic token. Authors can create NFTs that represent “ownership” of their works and sell those NFTs to collectors. The NFT market recognizes the owner of a “legitimate” NFT of a work as the “owner” of the work, even though NFTs typically don’t convey copyright ownership of the work. I call this “pwnership,” because it consists of “clout,” rather than control. NFT owners don’t need copyright, because pwnership depends on the endorsement of the author, rather than control of the use of the work. In fact, NFT owners encourage others to use the work, because popularity increases the value of pwnership.
Essentially, NFTs allow authors to profit from creating works of authorship without having to control their use. If the potential profit from selling NFTs alone is large enough to encourage authors to create works, then authors don’t need copyright anymore. And if authors don’t need copyright, no one does. In theory, NFTs could finally make copyright obsolete.
Works of authorship are inherently public goods. As Stewart Brand famously observed, “Information wants to be free.” And for most of human history, information was at least nominally free, albeit profoundly costly to obtain. While mechanical reproduction made information far less expensive, it also made the cost of creating and distributing information far more salient. Copyright was the kludge we invented to solve that welcome new problem. We had to destroy free culture in order to save it. Maybe NFTs will enable us to finally dispense with copyright and make information free again
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
Copyright in Pantomime
Full text linkWhy does the Copyright Act specifically provide for the protection of “pantomimes”? This Article shows that the Copyright Act of 1976 amended the subject matter of copyright to include pantomimes simply in order to conform it to the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works. It further shows that the Berlin Act of 1909 amended the Berne Convention to provide for copyright protection of “les pantomimes” and “entertainments in dumb show” in order to ensure copyright protection of silent motion pictures. Unfortunately, the original purpose of providing copyright protection to \u27“pantomimes” was forgotten. This Article argues that copyright protection of pantomimes is redundant on copyright protection of “motion pictures” and “dramatic works, “ and reflects the carelessness of the drafters of the 1976 Act
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