Illegal Literature: Toward a Disruptive Creativity

176 Pages·2015·3.031 MB·English

by  David S. Roh

Illegal lIterature
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ILLEGAL LITERATURE
Toward a Disruptive Creativity
DaviD S. Roh
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
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An earlier version of chapter 1 was published as “Two Copyright Case Studies from a
Literary Perspective,” Law and Literature 22, no. 1 (2010): 110–4 1. Reprinted by permis-
sion of Taylor & Francis Ltd., http://tandf.co.uk/journals.
Copyright 2015 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy-
ing, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Roh, David S.
Illegal literature : toward a disruptive creativity / David S. Roh.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-9575-1 (hc)
ISBN 978-0-8166-9578-2 (pb)
1. Literature—Philosophy. 2. Literature and technology. 3. Creation (literary, artistic,
etc.). I. Title.
PN45.R577 2015
801'.3—dc23 2014043041
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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CONTENTS
Prologue Between Analog and Digital Cultures vii
Introduction Accretive Genius: The Case for Disrupting Culture 1
1 Dead Authors, Copyright Law, and Parodic Fictions 26
2 How Japanese Fan Fiction Beat the Lawyers 55
3 The Open-S ource Model: Versioning Literature and Culture 96
Epilogue On Being Accused 121
Acknowledgments 129
Notes 131
Index 157
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PROLOGUE
Between Analog and Digital Cultures
i belong to a generation of scholars that could be considered
transitional; we are not quite “born digital” like our students, but neither
are we entirely analog. I confess to having had only a brief affair with
library card catalogs, as I soon moved on to green- tinted, monochromatic
library terminals; LPs, 8- tracks, and cassette tapes cluttered the house
before disappearing into the black hole of obsolescence to make way for
the now- doomed CD. But I still appreciate the tactile pleasure of holding
an LP; I miss the warm oak of card catalog cabinets; and I enjoy the musty,
sweet aroma of book stacks, even as I favor the convenience of an e- reader
while taxiing on the tarmac. Transition, as much promise as it holds, isn’t
without a sense of loss and considerable inner conflict.
During the initial turmoil wrought by the clash of digital technologies
and established artists, when it came to early encounters with unsanc-
tioned digital remixes and unauthorized distribution, I struggled with my
inclination to defend the derivative parodists and worthless infringers, for
I valued and admired individual creators—t heir respective writing personae
gave me comfort, their backgrounds enriched meaning and informed my
view of their works. Siding with the parodists and plagiarists, it was said,
directly harmed the original creators, tantamount to moral transgression.
This was a dilemma that is less apparent with every subsequent generation
of students, who demonstrate a casual insouciance to authorial rights
seemingly antithetical to the creative class. In a way, this book is my attempt
to work through the contradictory impulses of those of us occupying the
space between analog and digital.
It would be easy to dismiss one side or the other as being hopelessly
retrograde or amoral, but that’s a false binary, a culture war based on an
either– or construction that ignores the history of cultural development.
  • vii
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As I later show, these are not new or unfamiliar struggles. In the process
of writing this book, I stumbled upon two memories typical of American
adolescence—c omic books and computers—i llustrating the same tension
between the dialogic impulse of textual development and larger struc-
tural determinants, such as copyright law and information networks.
In my youth, I had an affinity for comic books, including several titles
from East Asia. Particular favorites were Korean translations of a Japanese
manga called Dragonball. Much to my confusion, I stumbled across vari-
ous Dragonball series that seemed to have wildly different approaches
toward, narratives of, and/or artistic styles for what appeared to be the
same characters. At first, I thought I was reading them out of order—s ome
must have been from future story lines that I simply hadn’t reached yet.
However, I noticed that the thematic emphases were too different or had
canonical inconsistencies—s ome focused on secondary characters, some
dwelling on more mature and serious subjects that appeared beyond the
ken of my age group, and some taking larger diegetic risks by tragically
killing off beloved characters. I began to realize that there wasn’t just one
solitary narrative universe but a multitude, with different creators and sty-
listic aesthetics. This rich multiverse was exciting and bewildering. Even
at that age, I had been inculcated with the idea that narrative threads only
came from one source or, even if they forked, would eventually collapse
into a singular thread. I had difficulty conceptualizing a textual world in
which many voices sang at different keys to make a chorus. Furthermore,
by that time, I had a vague understanding of the penalties associated with
copyright infringement, but that did little to temper my fascination with
noncanonical, multiple story lines from unauthorized sources.
It wasn’t until many years later that I connected this memory of youth-
ful confusion with what I saw as a mode of creativity lying outside the
sanctioned channels of copyright law. Because of my access to another
method and mode of cultural production, I understood the value of poly-
vocality in writing about iconic subjects. As much as I enjoyed the expanded
universe of Dragonball, on some level I knew that it was an illicit textual
pleasure unsanctioned in an American context.
Another distant memory involving the family computer emerges. The
fruit of self- indulgent pleading on my part, our first computer had hardly
a few kilobytes of memory, lacked a hard drive, and ran off MS- DOS
floppy disks. Without a network connection of any kind, it was only useful
for playing simple games, word processing, and primitive graphics. Despite
early efforts at rudimentary programming (copying BASIC programs from
viii • PROLOGUE
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the back of computer magazines), after several pages of hand coding failed
to compile, I quickly lost interest.
Several years later, its successor proved to be quite different. We upgraded
to a system with slightly more impressive specifications (including a hard
drive!), but the revelation was a throwaway item I only noticed after we’d
brought the machine home—a twenty-f our-h undred bits per second (bps)
modem. Eventually, I tumbled headfirst into the world of online Bulletin
Board Systems (BBSs), racking up enormous phone bills and driving my
poor parents mad with dial-u p misadventures.1 I was able to participate
on discussion boards, download software, and even read early fan fiction
of the Star Trek variety. BBSs eventually gave way to massive commercial
online service providers such as Prodigy, CompuServe, and the many-
headed hydra known as America Online, where I lost myself for countless
hours on the multitude of fora, chat rooms, and bizarre intersections of a
quickly burgeoning Web.
Connectivity had been the ingredient missing from my first encounter
with the terminal. Connectivity allowed my world to bloom with a wealth
of information. The computer became an entry point for the flow of in-
formation, affording me opportunities to download, install, and execute
new operating systems, applications, and utilities. I could now customize
and enhance my textual environment at will. Although this could have
happened with my stand-a lone terminal through trading programs among
informal networks of like-minded friends, that network was excruciatingly
slow and undependable. Retail proprietary programs, which for some rea-
son were packaged in enormous, colorful boxes containing a manual and
several floppy disks, were prohibitively expensive. Both infrastructural and
economic barriers precluded change. The solitary terminal existed in a
mode of stasis. Being networked granted access to a wealth of open-s ource,
freeware, or shareware programs. Suddenly my computer’s software envi-
ronment changed at a consistent pace. Of course, experimentation often
led to disastrous results, and I ended up wiping my hard drive numerous
times. But each time I blew up my operating system, I learned something
new, which I then incorporated into a fresh installation. I remained ever
on the lookout for new programs, tweaks, and hacks.
Both of these formative experiences lie at the heart of the concerns of
this book—t he law and the network as infrastructural determinants. I ini-
tially thought that I’d uncovered a novel mode of iterative creativity, but I
was wrong; it had been masked, ignored, and disavowed, but it existed
long before any intervention on my part. An American legal policy and
PROLOGUE • ix
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