I'm not sure how to start this, because I don't want to come off like I'm spoiling for a fight, but I think perhaps I've become a little fed up with Mr. Ellis' rhetoric and attitude. He just posted a message to Bad Signal which, from context, I can only assume is in reaction to a paper he heard or an article he read. He doesn't actually provide the source, which is ironic, because the original text is about copyright, but Ellis' response has more to do with citation.
Here's what he said:
* It occurs to me that, should you imagine a black-and-white
comic book without ever having seen one, you would not
imagine it having a colour cover.* Hauntology on paper: at the ends of long corridors,
black-and-white illustrations from pulps and penny dreadfuls,
distorted by age and photocopier to emulate crackle in
audio. Ghost stories haunted by the ghosts of old ghost
stories, 21st Century London haunted by woodcuts of
19th Century London reflected in windows and puddles.* I'm sorry, small beady-eyed insipid man with a baby
hard-on for Marxist theory, but I'm pretty sure that when
Burial recorded "Raver" he wasn't conducting a critique
of modern capitalism. Not everything is a market. To
attempt to capture the ghost of a scene is not an
expression of the chains of the dominant ideology,
and neither are field recordings of London at 3am. Also,
you have the voice of a eunuch meerkat, the physical
presence of a sparrow fart at dawn, and you have
cunts for eyes.* The creative commons is all around us. Any creative mind
reaches a point where it realises that its work is part of an
ongoing cultural conversation.* We are all the product of -- at the head of the notional
genestream of -- generations upon generations of culture.
We all take from what's around us to make our art. We
engage in the conversation. Raise our voices. And we
identify our voice with a copyright mark. That isn't some
hideous, stultifying lock on the culture. The commons
*is* the cultural conversation. You want to join in? Get
up on your hind legs and do it. Get your own copyright
mark. So the next person along knows that they have
to speak for themselves and identify their voice, rather
than using your words and pretending it's them.* If the fact that Mickey Mouse will be under copyright
control for the next thousand years really bugs you?
Kill yourself. You're no use to me or anyone else.
It's fun when things drop out of copyright, sure. But
it's not *important* to the process of creation. I could
easily cause to be created illustrations in the styles of
penny dreadfuls and woodcuts to achieve the same
hauntological effects. It's just a way to instantiate
an idea. I'm not going to roll on the floor and curse
Western society for a cultural jailer because it turns
out someone still has the rights to the illustration for
an old MR James story or something. The world is
not broken because you can't make your own Mickey
Mouse cartoons (and frankly, if you could, YouTube
would already be broken under the weight of LOLMickeys
and Mickey Mouse Buttsecks and WineMickeyMouse
videos).* If you really need some legal language to help yourself
feel good about the state of being a 15 year old in an art
class making a collage out of newspaper clippings... well,
great. That was great fun when we were 15, right? But
listen. The mark of being an adult is to internalise our
influences and express them through our own personalities
and filters. The last thing our culture needs is a licence
to be 15 forever.
I think I see his point, that copyright can't stop all of the reative things that we can do with other peoples' ideas. Ellis' own work is full of echoes of other stories and characters, so thinly disguised that it's clear that the game is identifying them and reading for a commentary on them. That's the whole premise of Planetary, for example, and without knowing Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '73, Transmetropolitan starts to make very little sense around two-thirds of the way through.
However, Ellis makes one serious judgement error when he describes copyright as a way to identify a creative voice. That's not what copyright does. Copyright is quite literally the right to copy. That's why they call it that. That's what it was invented to do, to protect the economic interest of publishers. The most valuable copyright in England in the Renaissance, for example, was the Bible, and all copyrights were in perpetuity, from what I've read. What he's actually talking about is citation, naming your sources. It's worth noting just how much the idea of citation has flourished on the internet, where linking is easy, and it's ironic that the internet is the place where the whole concept of copyright has been called to question in a forceful way.
It's also worth noting that in academic research, which Ellis seems to dislike (although I could be wrong), citation is taken very seriously and copyright is looked on with some degree of suspicion because it seems to function as a way for corporate entities to take control of things created by individuals. Insert long angry rant about civil law here.
Copyright is not actually a necessary part of the kind of citation that he's talking about, although it can be designed to either aid or hinder it. In fact, the internalisation that he mentions runs counter to the practise of citation because once you internalise an idea, it's harder to differentiate it from your own ideas. That's why academics try to be rigorous about citation. It's easy to forget what belongs to whom. Copyright doesn't necessarily identify the creator. More often than not, in popular entertainment, it identifies who paid for the creator's time and effort.
So I think Ellis' argument is just plain wrong, frankly; he's mistaken copyright for citation. And without putting to fine a point on it, it also seems to me that it's the behaviour of a 15-year-old to viciously and personally attack someone using misogynistic objectification, even if you also engage with their argument in the process.
Posted by orion at May 18, 2008 6:08 PM