Here’s a brief recap of what we covered/discussed this week and links to the prezis:
[Wednesday]
– Copyright by definition (function of copyright, what is and isn’t protected, and how the definition can lack definition)
– Brief distinction between copyright, patent, and trademark (here’s a nice, clear blog post on the basic distinctions)
– Discussion of the core tensions of the “Copyright Wars,” outlined in William Patry’s “How the Copyright Wars Are Being Fought and Why”
[Friday]
– The law/norm gap
– Technology, surveillance, and the panoptic potential of copyright laws
– Visibility as a “trap,” mental control within the panopticon
– Hegemony: working definitions
– “Blinkers” within copyright discourse: public domain, authorship, gender
– The issues with how creativity (ex. romanticized notions of autonomous authorship) and free/dom (ex. the public domain as “the positive other”) are framed on BOTH sides of the copyright debates
– The call for “critical reflexivity” when reading/writing about copyright