Controlling Voices: Intellectual Property, Humanistic Studies, and the Internet

184 Pages·2001·1.3 MB·english

by  Tyanna K. Herrington

Controlling
Voices

Controlling
Voices
Intellectual Property, Humanistic
Studies, and the Internet
With a Foreword by Jay David Bolter
TyAnna K. Herrington
Southern Illinois University Press
Carbondale and Edwardsville
Copyright © 2001 by TyAnna K. Herrington
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
04 03 02 01 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Herrington, TyAnna K., 1955–
Controlling voices : intellectual property, humanistic studies, and the
Internet / TyAnna K. Herrington ; with a foreword by Jay David Bolter.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Copyright and electronic data processing—United States. 2. Internet
(Computer network)—Law and legislation—United States. I. Title.
KF3030.1 .H47 2001
346.7304'8—dc21 00-056287
ISBN 0-8093-2372-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 0-8093-2373-7 (paper : alk. paper)
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. ∞
For my parents, Pat and Jack Herrington

Contents
Foreword ix
Jay David Bolter
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
Part One: The Law
1. Protective Control for Intellectual Products 27
2. Copyrights and Duties 35
3. Fair Use, Access, and Cultural Construction 59
4. Law and Policy: The Balance in Cyberspace 77
Part Two: Ideology and Power
5.Controlling Construction: The Internet, Law, and
Humanistic Studies 87
6.Controlling Ideologies: The Internet, Law, and
Humanistic Studies 112
7.The New Millennium and Controlling Voices 129
Notes 157
Works Cited 159
Index 167

Foreword
Clayton Moore was the Lone Ranger. He played the masked man for
much of the 1950s on television, providing children with what he
regarded as a role model for American justice and heroism. We need not
worry for the moment about the rightness of that model; Moore sin-
cerely believed in what he was doing, and for years after the cancella-
tion of the show, he continued to make appearances at shopping malls
and elsewhere in this role. In the late 1970s, however, the Wrather Cor-
poration, which still owned the rights to the series and the title charac-
ter, obtained a court injunction that stopped Moore from appearing in
his characteristic mask. Because Wrather was negotiating the movie
rights for a remake of the Lone Ranger—a movie that flopped at the
box office—Moore had to trade in his mask for a pair of sunglasses.
Everyone has his or her favorite example of the extraordinary asser-
tions of intellectual property that have been made in recent decades.
There was the effort by the Internet toy marketer Etoys to shut down
the avant-garde art website etoy.com, which happened to show sexu-
ally explicit art that might upset the young clients of Etoys or their par-
ents. There were attempts in the mid-1990s by the Church of Scientology
to limit criticism on the Internet apparently on the basis of the claim that
the church’s religious documents were trade secrets. (The layperson
might well be surprised to learn that a church could have trade secrets;
but as we have known since the 1920s that business is the American
religion, it is perhaps natural that American religions should also be
businesses.) Finally, there are the ongoing claims for ownership of life
forms or of the scientific characterizations of life: patented bacteria and
mice and patent claims for the human genome itself. The notion of
ownership of intellectual activity seems to be growing stronger and to
be extending to more and more domains. It sometimes seems that eco-
nomic entities in our society have the ultimate goal of copyrighting and
branding all representational practice and much of the physical world
as well. There may soon be no phrase that we can speak, no mark that
we can make on paper or a computer screen, without owing a licensing
fee.
ix