CONCLUSIONS
Feminist Discourse of/about/around Intellectual Property
If we combine the four trends that emerge across feminist analyses of women’s work with technology and Autumn Stanley’s (1995) arguments about women’s restrictions and erasures from the legacy of intellectual property with the five examples I've briefly introduced here (Tamblyn, Gosling, Lawrence, Lenz, and Seltzer), we can see a partial but interesting collage of women making, doing, and resisting. This collage spans more than forty years and takes us from the farm to the factory to YouTube.
There are multiple ways to deploy feminist methodology, research approaches, and critical inquiry; thus, these examples and many others reveal an intertwining of women’s work and intellectual property issues. One lens that is particularly fruitful is that of public and private space. For instance, Ann Lawrence's digital-visual collage provided a commentary on bodies and writing, specifically drawn from her experiences working with a tight-knit graduate writing group. This is a space that in many ways might be marked as private. Likewise (and although there isn't time and space here to richly review the work on classroom space and public/private divides), classroom spaces are often marked as semi-private spaces. When Wendy Seltzer inserted her teaching onto YouTube and brings the effects back into the classroom, some interesting questions are raised related to public/private spaces, digital dynamics, ownership, and much more.
I want to pause specifically on Stephanie Lenz's video as emblematic of public/private complications. Today's digital tools obviously allow us to bring the “private” into the “public.” This, however, isn't a one-to-the-other transmission; rather, it is layered and shifting. A space where this becomes obvious is in the comment thread posted under Lenz's video. Although the video was published, removed, and republished in 2007, the comment thread has remained lively. The comments are incredibly interesting, in part because of the bandwidth they occupy: Some comments had to do with delight in seeing the kids playing (for example, "@marvchomer Thanks. My kids (now 6-almost-7 and 4 1/2) like to watch it when I pull it up (usually to view a comment or video response) except that Holden says he doesn't like 'that noise'"). Other comments speculated on the motives of Prince and his recording company, Universal (for example, krjawfin notes "I got the feeling the issue was with Universal, not Prince himself. And to think I almost went and bought that song when I can now listen to it for free here!!! I am joking of course"). Others supported Lenz and her video; for instance, srkennerley states, "We're talking about this case in my Internet Law class in Law school, and so I had to come check out the video. This is Fair Use if ever there was such a thing. Kudos on holding tight to your principles, even though it meant the hassle of litigation! You're a true crusader of free society."
In an earlier piece (DeVoss, 2002), I argued that computers and virtual spaces are used to reinforce the flimsy separation between public and private. In Lenz's case, I think this is still true, but another variable is added: legality and use of material. The DMCA order and claims of ownership over the song used in Lenz’s 29-second clip are, to some extent, a slap on the wrist—not only as a claim of ownership over a particular piece of music but as a reminder of where that music belongs. It belongs in the home, in private, played as a background for everyday life, but not necessarily as the soundtrack for representations of that life, and definitely not as the score for a public video.
Beyond public/private dynamics, Stanley's analysis of why women are typically invisible in historical documents related to intellectual property is another useful lens through which we can consider the ways women are authoring in digital spaces. Elsewhere in this piece, I argued that a thread that Stanley (1995) did not consider in Mothers and Daughters of Invention is that women producers/creators deliberately resist the intellectual property regime by either disrupting this system (e.g., Seltzer) or by creating, sharing, producing, and distributing outside of this system (e.g., Lenz—that is, until she was pushed into the system by a DMCA order). A lens is not a methodology, but certain feminist approaches could shed interesting light on how women navigate, negotiate within, and rupture oppressive systems. For instance, feminist technological historiography is a methodology that allows researchers to pay particular attention to the ways in which women are situated historically in regard to technological development and deployment.
Conclusions and Implications: Identity, Production, and Ownership
In this webtext, I have mentioned YouTube social networking sites generally, but there are myriad other sites that require attention and feminist analysis so that we can best understand who’s doing the posting, tagging, sharing, and storing within and across digital spaces (e.g., Wikipedia, Delicious, LibraryThing, deviantART, LiveJournal, WordPress, Blogger).
We must likewise analyze communities of practice and communities constructed in the face of the US intellectual property regime—communities like Creative Commons and ccMixter, both of which allow artists, authors, and creators to circumvent the US copyright system by constructing their own copyright protection for their work, which often invites sharing in ways the US system does not.
There is a long list of questions that research needs to address. These questions are related to intellectual property, ethics, representation, and more. Some are marginally feminist, while others are explicitly feminist; some, I would argue, require a feminist lens. A few initial questions include:
- Where are women in these spaces? Where is their work?
- How are women situating their authority and authorship?
- In what ways are they sharing—or not—their work?
- Who’s producing and sharing what media? With what conceptions of audience? With what notions of ownership?
- What sorts of identities are girls and women crafting on social networking sites? With what media? With what conceptions of audience? With what notions of ownership?
- How are these producers navigating the blurry lines between public and private on these sites? Are they attending in any way to intellectual property issues as producers and creators? That is, are they operating with a sense of copyright and ownership in and beyond the US?
- Are girls and women attending to intellectual property issues as authors and owners? That is, are they laying claim to their work before they distribute it in digital, networked spaces where information is so easily copied, pasted, downloaded, and stored?
- How has the global media data- and info-scape changed copyright in the past ten or fifteen years? How will it change in the coming years? How have and will these changes impact women?
- How can the history of women’s work with information and communication technologies help us to best chart a path for the future?
- What feminist research methodologies lend themselves to analysis of women's digital work as it intersects with intellectual property? Which methods or tools?
- And, finally, how can feminists play a larger role in shaping intellectual property understandings, approaches, and legislation?
Rhetoric and composition scholars, along with scholars across and beyond the humanities, must pay more attention to how women, specifically, are using intellectual property systems to protect their work and how they are subverting intellectual property systems as part of their work—how women are deliberately, explicitly inverting the intellectual property regime to foster more collaboration and sharing. It’s important to study the ways in which women are saying “I will not be the sole author of this. I will not be the only name attached to this project. I will not own this idea exclusively.” It is likewise crucial that we attend to the ways in which women are explicitly resisting regimes of control, especially when their work is shut down, usurped, or laid claim to.
Today, I doubt women are limited as much by the constraints Stanley (1995) noted women historically have faced. But, certainly, new limitations have emerged within digital spaces and in tandem with today’s technologies. Identifying these limitations in the constantly shifting terrain of digital media, networked spaces, and intellectual property will be tricky business, indeed—and also crucial, necessary business.
Importantly, this research will help us to address the ways in which historical practices are being remediated and rescripted in digital spaces: How women are rewriting intellectual property; how feminists are entering into the landscape of copyright control; and, importantly, what we can learn from their interventions.
index | introduction | history | stanley | digital(creation) |
digital(dangers) | ip resistance | conclusions | bibliography
dànielle nicole devoss | devossda@msu.edu