One issue that comes up immediately is the difference between the knowledge economy of the academy and the larger Canadian knowledge economy. There are points of overlap, certainly, but they function according to different rules.
The academy is a citation economy -- we're rewarded for copiously pointing to earlier sources and recontextualizing their worth in terms of the present milieu. Zizek -- after Deleuze -- argues that really, this process of locating something in the past and and recontextualizing it in the present is the origin of anything New. Knowledge creation always involves the repetition of something that could have happened but was betrayed be the actual course of history, and therefore remained in embryonic form.
Though there aren't really specific exceptions in current Canadian copyright law (as there are in the States) that make academic use of copyrighted cultural objects easier, we have a fairly wide berth in our daily practice of teaching and research (but only as long as we don't draw attention to what the daily practice of scholarship entails -- plenty of it is technically enfirngement, e.g. showing video clips in class without clearing them through the library, photocopying articles for students that they could obtain through library resources, etc.). It would be good to see exceptions for academic use enshrined in new copyright legislation, but there's nothing helpful in Bill C-32, so I assume that we'll be stuck in a sort of "don't ask, don't tell" regime of daily academic practice for the foreseeable future.
Problems arise at the points where the citation economy overlaps with the larger cultural economy, because the popular (and somewhat Romantic) belief is that ideas emerge ex nihilo and fully-formed, without any debt to tradition, and that all uses of such ideas should be remunerated.
As Siva Vaidhyanathan pointed out in Copyrights and Copywrongs, our major mode of cultural production (bricolage) is now entirely at odds with our common-sense belief that the intent of copyright is to wring every last cent of revenue out of the cultural objects that we (or our ancestors) created. Over the last decade, Lessig, Vaidhyanathan, Geist, Coombe et. al. have been at pains to demonstrate that this was not the intent of the creators of copyright, that it was invented as an artificial right granting a short-term monopoly to creators in order to provide them with enough time and enough money to create something else rather than sit back and realize profits from one object on perpetuity. Short-term copyright was designed to drive the creation of knowledge, in other words, but this is not what it does now. What copyright does now is encourage "individuals" (including, and especially, corporations) to corral as many copyrights as they can into a silo and then charge as many people as possible for their use.
I'm a pragmatist. I'm pretty sure that the two best things that could happen to encourage knowledge creation (shorter copyright terms and exceptions for academic use) are off the table right now for political reasons. So: in a cultural moment when it's pretty clear that copyright terms aren't going to get shorter, and that there aren't going to be any exceptions in copyright law for academic use, the only pragmatic course of action is to begin to think about how academics can use copyright to enforce the circulation of our work rather than to limit it. This is what public licensing (e.g. Creative Commons or the General Public License) does: it attaches a series of clauses to a copyrighted object that insist that people who make use of that object to create something must also release their creations under a public license so that others can do the same. Open access journals, knowledge repositories at universities and other venues that use public licensing are also vitally important.
The reason is that one of the keys to sustaining knowledge in a digital economy is to *circulate* it. We're living in an age of digital incunabula. New storage media and storage protocols emerge almost as quickly as the ones that we had thought were working just fine are abandoned. Much of what we produce for the next few decades, at least, will be lost forever, largely because there's an enormous profit to be made by companies that can develop near-monopolies on media formatting, forcing other alternatives (including their own earlier products) into the dustbin of history. The only way around this situation for academics is to commit to open protocols and open venues, so that knowledge can be included in as many different kinds of containers as possible. We're engaged in a gamble with posterity, and limiting ourselves to one technology or one repository for our research makes little to no sense at all.
It's important to emphasize, then, that the interests of academics engaged in knowledge creation and sustenance are markedly different than those of for-profit business. The increasingly popular paradigm of "knowledge work" (see esp. Liu, and Mosco & McKercher) tries to proceed as if there is no difference, and that the academy and business are both interested in the process of continuing education in the same ways, but it's simply not the case. The success of open source models in some contemporary businesses (mostly in the IT sector) means that there are some like-minded entities outside the academy, but at this stage, there simply aren't enough of them. We need to be thinking about educating not just our students about the importance of circulating knowledge, but members of the private sector, and government bureaucrats as well.
Moreover, there's still substantial resistance to open content practices inside many parts of the academy. Even at schools like Concordia, which officially endorse open access, publishing in for-profit international peer-reviewed journals still counts for more than publishing in open content journals (which are few and far between). Universities that really want to stand behind notions like open access need to consider what this means in terms of criteria for achieving tenure, merit and other institutional forms of reward.
(On behalf of Darren Wershler)
No comments:
Post a Comment