This piece in the Guardian breaks down Radiohead's possible profits from In Rainbows - an album that allowed fans to name their own price.

Some years ago, William Fisher of Stanford University published some interesting data on the cost structure of CDs. According to his figures, the retailer's slice of the CD is 38 per cent, while distributors take 8 per cent and marketing another 8 per cent.

The artist, in contrast, typically gets only 12 per cent and the music publisher 4 per cent. So the maximum Radiohead would get from a conventionally marketed CD priced at £8 is actually £1.28 - which, coincidentally, is almost exactly what Comscore thinks they got from their online experiment.

A couple of new(ish) stories about plagiarism and Wikipedia. They involve some folks using content from Wikipedia without attributing.

First, a book that uses verbatim text from Wikipedia.

Second, Baidu is a Chinese internet company that is one of Wikipedia's biggest intellectual property challenges. Because Wikipedia is banned in China (you know, because it acknowledges that people were killed in Tiananmen Square), Baidu has its own open-content encyclopedia called Baidu Baike. The problem is that they take a great deal of their content straight from Wikipedia without attributing it.

Wikipedia is published under the GNU Free Documentation License, which means that anyone is free to use the content so long as they attribute it. The Wikimedia Foundation hasn't sued anyone yet, and I doubt they ever will.

So, I've been writing away at this chapter on intellectual property and Levinasian ethics, and I've stumbled upon some ideas that actually might not suck. Here is the opening to the chapter as it stands now...two quotes by way of epigraph followed by a few paragraphs...

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Chapter 3 – ‘Like a Thief’: Hospitality, the Commons, and Intellectual Property

An ambivalence that is the exception and the subjectivity of the subject, its very psychism, the possibility of inspiration: to be the author of what was, without my knowledge, inspired in me—to have received, whence we know not, that of which I am the author. In the responsibility for the other, we are at the heart of this ambiguity of inspiration. The unheard-of saying is enigmatic in its an-archic response, in my responsibility for the other. This ambiguity within the subject is the trace of the infinite, alternately beginning and intermediary, the diachronic ambivalence that makes ethics possible.
—Emmanuel Lévinas, “Truth of Disclosure and Truth of Testimony”

A lot of the great art of the past is the work of multiple hands, though there may only be one name on the wall next it in the museum.
— Paul Graham, Hackers and Painters

I've been kind of (not kind of...I've been struggling) with how to ground the dissertation chapter I'm currently working on. It's about how Wikipedia refigures intellectual property. This, in itself, is not a new insight. However, I'm hoping I can open up some new questions by bringing a Levinasian/Derridan ethics to conversations about intellectual property. The general thrust of the argument:

Wikipedia offers a kind of hospitality that a print encyclopedia does not; This hospitality means that it's difficult for anyone to claim ownership over the text (Wikipedia is a commons); A textual commons implicitly (or, possibly, explicitly) recognizes the primacy of the Other in any writing situation. That is, it recognizes that I am not the source of my text and that I cannot lay claim to it. It is a citation of previous texts, and it will be taken up by others and used in different ways. The origin of "my" text is in now way "me."

Now, I'm starting to think that a way to ground this theoretical discussion is in a comparison of Wikipedi and Larry Sanger's Citizendium project. Citizendium requires users to "fess up" and give their real names - no pseudonyms. One way that Citizendium sets itself apart from Wikipedia is by calling itself "Wikipedia for grown-ups":

Martha Groom, a professor at University of Washington Bothell used Wikipedia to rethink the research paper. She had students either create or revise an article, and she built some other assignments around it (pre-writing, a reflective essay, etc.)

It seems to have gone over well. Only one student over two semesters reported a "negative" experience (not too many details here...), and there were some minor issues with "rudeness" on the part of Wikipedians. This isn't too surprising. Others have reported this in the past - some Wikipedians guard their territory very aggressively. Some of the articles were deleted and others were incorporated into existing articles.

Overall, this seems like a well-designed assignment. Students participated in a tutorial and were tasked with learning how the community worked prior to writing anything. One student remarked about how "real" the experience seemed (this quote is included in Groom's PowerPoint presentation):

“This assignment felt so Real! I had not thought that anything I wrote was worth others reading before, but now I think what I contributed was useful, and I’m glad other people can gain from my research.”

While this is a great response, it signals to me that we really have cut off writing from "the wild" (as Ed Hutchins might say). Why is the "school paper" so "unReal" and not worth reading. What purpose does student writing serve if they envision it as having an audience of one (teacher)?

These are issues I've been trying to work through in a dissertation chapter on Intellectual Property. How does this notion of the "school paper" as insignificant work when modes of delivery are changing? How are particular modes of delivery linked with ideas of intellectual property? Most would acknowledge that our notions of intellectual property are changing (or are should be changing), but have we considered enough how much the fifth canon needs to change? There has been a good bit of research in rhet/comp. on delivery recently, and I'm thinking through this resurgence of the fifth canon in terms of intellectual property and what Cynthia Haynes has called (in a comment on the Blogora) the "platform" of delivery. In oral delivery, this platform is (seemingly) simple. Here "I" am...I am delivering this speech. I am present. If the authors of electronic texts cannot rest on being/essence, then they are not delivering from a platform. Instead, they are participating in an ongoing process of circulation - something John Trimbur worked through in CCC article a few years back. If circulation is the "new delivery," how are we to rethink both delivery and intellectual property? If we are re-circulating (remixing, remaking) texts, intellectual property needs to be redefined and so does delivery.

Groom's assignment is a great example of students who stepped into a process of circulation. Even those who created new articles were joining an existing conversation, and those who were editing articles were even moreso joining the circulatory system of Wikipedia. This seems to be much more useful than asking/forcing students to create from scratch. Even if we teach them that they're not starting from scratch - that they are patching together other texts, citing other sources, synthesizing information - they still think that "writing" is something they create, from scratch, ex nihilo. Electronic environments offer us some ways make it clear to students that writers never ever create something from nothing.

So, Mastercard asked indie rock sensation M. Ward if they could use one of his songs for an advertisement (actually, it wasn't his song - it was a cover of a Daniel Johnston song.) When Ward said no, Mastercard got someone else to record a similar sounding version of the song. M. Ward is not necessarily happy.

More on this at Pitchfork, but it's an interesting case. A similar thing happened to Tom Waits, and it seems to be a good example of how it's not just the amateurs that are redefining intellectual property.

The discourse of intellectual property continues to thrive. Rodney emailed me this NPR story about the transformation of 7-11s into Kwik-E Marts to promote the new Simpsons movie. I heard the story and, as Rodney predicted, was interested (in fact, I blogged last week about the Kwik E Mart promo (before the current intellectual property fight started) over at the Blogora).

The Leo Burnett ad agency (awesome website by the way) claims that their idea was stolen. LB met with Fox and pitched the idea, but Fox didn't really go for it. Months later, the idea is becoming a reality. Fox claims that the idea was "already in the works" when they met with Leo Burnett and that they had told the ad agency as much. LB is considering a lawsuit.

As NPR correspondent Elizabeth Blair explains in the story: "Who owns an idea is a very tricky question." This story definitely demonstrates the difficulty of "owning" an idea. Ideas circulate amongst people and organizations, and maybe the Kwik-E Mart idea was the result of a collaboration between LB and Fox. Either way, the important point seems to be that neither company "owns" the idea. If LB helped develop it, they probably deserve some compensation. However, this doesn't mean it's "their" idea. This is the trickiness of intellectual property. It's not property in the same way that your house or your car is property. If I own a car, it's fairly easy to understand why and how theft of that car is wrong. It's an object. It can only be in one place at a time. An idea, on the other hand, can be in multiple places at the same time. So, thinking in terms of "ownership" becomes difficult.

Of course, nothing I'm saying here is new...but maybe I can offer one new twist on the conversation. We might be better served by thinking of Intellectual Property in terms of "emergence" and complexity theory. The Kwik-E Mart idea seems to have emerged out of a complex situation involving people from Fox and LB. LB is a company offering a service, but that service is not an "idea." They are not wrapping up a box, putting their idea in it and handing it over:

(image courtest of PocketMac)


Instead, LB is offering a bunch of smart, creative people who can aid in the development of an idea. They are the Axon and Fox is the Dendrite:

(Image Courtesy of Society for Neuroscience)

The idea doesn't happen without Fox and LB collaborating, but that means that it's nobody's property. LB should be pissed, but not because someone stole their property. Rather, they should be pissed because (if in fact LB helped develop the idea) Fox is conveniently forgetting that they had some help putting this thing together. Nobody owns the idea, at least not in the same way you own an object. We might even take this discussion out of the realm of complexity theory and into the realm of (post)philosophy - the idea emerges out of the play of différance. We can try to pin down the origin all we want, but we'll always fail. Any idea emerges out of a complex situation, and this mean that no one owns it.

Isn't this a healthier (and more realistic way) of dealing with the problem of intellectual property? Notice that I haven't dismissed LB's concerns about compensation. I've merely reframed what it is that they're offering - a service rather than an object.