Prefacing Interaction: Copyright And Remix In Online Digital Literature

1 Jim Barrett HUMlab/MoS Umeå University

Prefacing Interaction: Copyright and Remix in Online Digital Literature Abstract: Copyright constructs interaction with digital literature by defining responses to texts. These responses are those desired by textual authorities (publishers, authors, archivists, distributors). Often contrary to copyright, a form of text interaction termed remix is made possible by the digital materials of the text. To what overall degree the authority to remix a digital text is assigned to its respondents is actual interactivity. The material interactivity of a text (remix) and the legal definitions for response (copyright) must both be accounted for if digital text interaction is to be understood. In this paper I explore copyright prefacing and remix in six online works of digital literature. The reading of remix possibilities against laws of copyright affords an image of digital text reception that is often quite contrary to definitions provided by copyright law and associated authorized cultural production.

The six texts discussed in this paper are all accessible via the internet but are not necessarily stored on the World Wide Web. They are distributed as a CD-ROM from a website, as BitTorrent files, as Flash based websites or as a custom coded web log (blog). Having obtained an example of each of the texts copies were made of the copyright agreements for close reading. In contrast to the multimedia nature of the corpus texts, copyright agreements for digital texts are consistently presented as written texts and are highly reminiscent of print media. Through a comparative reading of each of the six copyright agreements they are classified under four particular types. These are End User Licence Agreement (EULA), Creative Commons (CC), all rights reserved © and the automatic copyright of the Berne Convention (Berne). When read under the concept of implied response to the text there is little difference between the contract of EULA, the CC and © copyright agreements. However, the Berne Convention with its absence of any sort of copyright statement, while still under copyright, can be read as implying the materials of the text guide response. The term remix is the “transfigurative appropriation of older materials” and is found in all areas of cultural production. 1 In digital literature remix is performed in the responses made to the text and in the creation of the text in the hands of its authorities. Clicking to open a text window or playing a sound file has the potential to remix older components of the text into new combinations. In each of the corpus texts there are easily 1

Richard Shusterman. “Rap Remix: Pragmatism, Postmodernism and Other Issues in the House” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 22, No. 1 (autumn 1995) pp 150-158 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1995) 154.

2 identifiable elements taken from older text materials and remixed into the fabric of the digital text. Some include Texts (Copyright)

Source Texts

Alleph

Last Meal Requested

Egypt: The Book of

(Berne)

©

Going Forth by Day

Blade Runner. Lord of the Rings. Meet the Parents. Good Will Hunting. The Ref. The Shawshank Redemption. Texts by Maqapi Selassie, Farid al Din Attar, Amjad Hussain Shah and Irvine Saunders. Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor

Afghanistan Revealed. Black Eyed. Death Letter. FBI Files. Hitler’s Henchmen. Made in USA. The Nazis: A Warning from History. The Peoples Century. South Central Inside Voices. The Spanish Inquisition. Without Sanctuary, Iraqcenter, Lantos Briefings Halabjah. Afghan Women under Tyranny Amateur video of Rodney King beating by LAPD.

Computerized (Axial) Tomography (CAT) scans

(Berne) The Egyptian Book of the Dead. Death on the Nile. Death Comes as the End. Ambient Egypt: Sounds from Ancient Sources. Papyri from the Egyptian Museum. The myth of Osiris The Bride of Abydos Biographies of Flinders Petrie, Howard Carter and Amelia Edwards. Songs of Umm Kulthum.

Ftrain

Façade

Dreamaphage

©

(EULA)

(CC)

The Bible. Quoted conversations. Newspaper articles/headlines. Wikipedia. Emails. Song lyrics. Weekly review column from Harpers Bazaar. Photos. Radio broadcasts. Texts by Frank Ford, Herman Melville, Jim Hightower, John Kenneth Galbraith, Peter Van Sommers, Benjamin Franklin, W.B Yeats, Jorge Luis Borges. Record of Congress.

Over 2500 joint dialog behaviors. 27 narrative beats. 32 global mix-in progressions. 3 autonomous mix-in behaviors. Five separate soundtracks. Narrative and visual elements from Optic Nerve, Eightball, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe? and Roy Liechtenstein’s Modern Room (1961).

Satellite Images.

Computerized (Axial) Tomography (CAT) scans Medical textbooks. Hospital records Old photographs. Home video film. Technical diagrams. Poetry of Erica Ghersi.

Each of the headline texts listed above are protected from remix by the various forms of copyright preface attached to them. Façade is introduced to the downloader by an End User License Agreement (EULA) during the setup of the software. Under the contract of the Façade EULA the implied respondent “may not modify, combine other commercial applications with, or otherwise prepare derivative works of the Software.” 2 The responses to the text implied by such an instruction defines the nature of user interaction with the text. The copyright control over Dreamaphage is asserted by the some rights reserved of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. This particular example of a CC License does not allow for derivative works (adaptations or transformations, remixing of textual components, filming or recording and recasting) but allows for free distribution and quoting under the (United States’) legal principle of fair use.3 The respondent, according to the copyright in Façade and 2

Michael Mateas and Andrew Sterne. Procedural Arts Freeware License agreement for "Façade" v1.1 There are CC licenses that allow for modification of the text. Such an allowance again implies response to the text. In the case of the example used in this paper “You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work” Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License 3

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/. Fair Use exists only in the United States of America’s Federal law and is reproducing potions of a work “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for

3 Dreamaphage can only produce variations of story or sequence within the parameters of the authored text as published by the copyright holders. They “may not alter, transform, or build upon this work”.4 This is what is commonly referred to as interactive media. The parameters of lawful response applied to Last Meal Requested and Ftrain are implied by the generic copyrighting on both texts. Last Meal Requested is copyrighted in the name of Sachiko Hayashi using the copyright symbol © combined with the author’s name and year of text creation (2005). Ftrain is copyrighted in the name of “© 19742007 Paul Ford”. The © implies an all rights reserved imposed by its authorities upon the text and responses are to be within this frame. The implications for interaction in both © texts resemble both the CC NoDerivs 2.5 and Façade EULA where co-creation outside the authored structures of the text is not legal. The texts themselves allow for a variety of responses based upon their material and configurative arrangements. Last Meal Requested can be legally responded to as an audio visual instrument for playing, as a historical documentary or as a new media art piece.5 Ftrain has thousands of links, references and content from other texts. Each point in this network is actually available to be remixed, linked to, or copied by the respondent in their coordinated movements (reading) of the authored assemblage that is the text. There are few physical barriers to the creation of derivative works from the materials of the two texts. The materials of the digital texts are the computer language codes used to create, execute and run the programs the texts are composed of. These codes are described in the splash page of Alleph as “A seeming Democracy of Choice [that] is actually an invisible hand – guiding shaping and helping.”6 Alleph does not have any formal copyright statement prefacing the text and neither does Egypt: The Book of Going Forth by Day. Both these texts are automatically copyrighted by the all rights reserved of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works as they would be if the © symbol had been applied. However, the responses to the texts that are implied by the classroom use), scholarship, or research” United States of America Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. § 107. U.S Copyright Office, http://www.copyright.gov/title17/ Accessed 17 March 2007 4 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ 5

An example of how multimedia text can be an instrument is Sachiko Hayashi’ complex playing of Last Meal Requested in a seminar presentation, Technology as Medium: Artist as Consumer at HUMlab, Umeå University May 22 2006. Streamed online at http://www.humlab.umu.se/technologymediumartistconsumer 6 Sakab Bashir Alleph_Home http://www.alleph.net/splash.html Accessed 29 July 2007.

4 absence of any formal copyright statement seem to rely upon the “invisible hand” of code. Alleph is constructed in Macromedia Flash, which formulates specific responses to the text. Flash makes it difficult to open and obtain the code for each text and segments of the text cannot be downloaded, copied or individually linked to. The material properties of Alleph protect it from copyright infringement and guides the responses made in its reception. The responses that are implied by the materials of Egypt: The Book of Going Forth by Day differ that those of Alleph in a number of ways. Egypt is made using Adobe/Macromedia Director and is distributed on a CD-ROM. All the files that make up the text are accessible, copy able and remixable. The entire text can be back engineered and rebuilt in another form with little knowledge of computer programming. While this would be an infringement of copyright, there is little in the text which addresses responding to it in such a way.

Intertextuality theories do not account for the remixing that is part of digital text reception when the respondent to the text chooses a reading path and combines the materials of the text in particular sequences. These texts are being given authority as remix texts, one example being that Alleph won a BAFTA award in 2005. At the same time they are negating the authority granted to a text under the system of copyright. For its material properties to define the responses to the text something akin to reading becomes relevant in the theorizing of digital media. If, like reading, the negotiation of a digital interactive narrative based upon the interpretation and performance of [THE LEASE RATHER THAN OWNERSHIP OF THE TEXT AS REPRESENTED IN THE EULA SUPPORTS THIS IDEA THAT EVERY READING IS A REMIX] GO STRAIGHT INTO THE 4 PREFACE TYPES…….