Hemmungs Wirtén
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| Eva Hemmungs Wirtén is Professor in Library and Information Science (also Associate Professor [Docent in Swedish] in Comparative Literature) at Uppsala University. Her research is focused on the history, theory and philosophy of intellectual property and the public domain. She is currently developing an international research network dealing with Culture, Creativity, Copyright (CCC) based at Uppsala University. She is also working on a new book, preliminarily entitled ''Libratory Life: Law and the Unmaking of Knowledge, 1976-2006'', where she highlights the impact of intellectual property in research and higher education. Eva is also a member of the working group on policy in the COST Action A 32 on “Open scholarly communities on the web” and sits on the board of the newly initiated Swedish research observatory on cultural policy SWECULT. | Eva Hemmungs Wirtén is Professor in Library and Information Science (also Associate Professor [Docent in Swedish] in Comparative Literature) at Uppsala University. Her research is focused on the history, theory and philosophy of intellectual property and the public domain. She is currently developing an international research network dealing with Culture, Creativity, Copyright (CCC) based at Uppsala University. She is also working on a new book, preliminarily entitled ''Libratory Life: Law and the Unmaking of Knowledge, 1976-2006'', where she highlights the impact of intellectual property in research and higher education. Eva is also a member of the working group on policy in the COST Action A 32 on “Open scholarly communities on the web” and sits on the board of the newly initiated Swedish research observatory on cultural policy SWECULT. | ||
| - | =Abstract= | + | ==Abstract== |
| As a result of the digital revolution and the ever-increasing use of the internet, discussions around the conflict between copyright and the public domain are more prevalent than ever before. While these discussions have been hotly debated by legal scholars and in blogs and online forums, Terms of Use is one of the first books to concentrate on the conceptual foundations of the public domain.Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Eva Hemmungs Wirtén reveals the nineteenth-century origins of contemporary phenomena such as blogs, wikis, the 'Creative Commons,' as well as the 'Open Source' and 'Open Access' movements. Hemmungs Wirtén examines topics as diverse as the pharmaceutical uses of plants, the patenting of DNA sequences, and Disney's reworking of Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Books in order to provide a frank theoretical discussion of how nature and culture have been transformed into intellectual property.Timely and provocative, Terms of Use will challenge and inspire readers by providing an original and innovative approach to the understanding of the public domain and its origins. | As a result of the digital revolution and the ever-increasing use of the internet, discussions around the conflict between copyright and the public domain are more prevalent than ever before. While these discussions have been hotly debated by legal scholars and in blogs and online forums, Terms of Use is one of the first books to concentrate on the conceptual foundations of the public domain.Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Eva Hemmungs Wirtén reveals the nineteenth-century origins of contemporary phenomena such as blogs, wikis, the 'Creative Commons,' as well as the 'Open Source' and 'Open Access' movements. Hemmungs Wirtén examines topics as diverse as the pharmaceutical uses of plants, the patenting of DNA sequences, and Disney's reworking of Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Books in order to provide a frank theoretical discussion of how nature and culture have been transformed into intellectual property.Timely and provocative, Terms of Use will challenge and inspire readers by providing an original and innovative approach to the understanding of the public domain and its origins. | ||
| - | =Summary/Reviews= | + | ==Summary/Reviews== |
| In Terms of Use, Swedish scholar Eva Hemmungs Wirtén seeks to deepen our understanding of issues surrounding the Internet, digitization and the public domain. These issues are most often discussed today in legal terms, making the public domain “a lawyer-free zone remarkably crowded with lawyers.” The author instead chooses a “stubbornly historical” path, exploring what meanings the public domain and the commons, as well as intellectual property rights and copyright, accrued through time. | In Terms of Use, Swedish scholar Eva Hemmungs Wirtén seeks to deepen our understanding of issues surrounding the Internet, digitization and the public domain. These issues are most often discussed today in legal terms, making the public domain “a lawyer-free zone remarkably crowded with lawyers.” The author instead chooses a “stubbornly historical” path, exploring what meanings the public domain and the commons, as well as intellectual property rights and copyright, accrued through time. | ||
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| from:http://www.universityaffairs.ca/who-owns-the-jungle.aspx | from:http://www.universityaffairs.ca/who-owns-the-jungle.aspx | ||
| - | =Sources= | + | ==Sources== |
| - | ==[http://www.universityaffairs.ca/who-owns-the-jungle.aspx Who Owns The Jungle]== | + | ===[http://www.universityaffairs.ca/who-owns-the-jungle.aspx Who Owns The Jungle]=== |
| - | ==[http://www.gmj.uottawa.ca/0901/v2i1_bannerman_e.html The Ins and Outs Of Public Domain]== | + | ===[http://www.gmj.uottawa.ca/0901/v2i1_bannerman_e.html The Ins and Outs Of Public Domain]=== |
| - | ==[http://www.newinfluencer.com/mediapedia/Cultural Imperialism]== | + | ===[http://www.newinfluencer.com/mediapedia/Cultural Imperialism]=== |
| - | ==[http://www.ralphmag.org/AD/schiller.html Herbert Shiller Theory]== | + | ===[http://www.ralphmag.org/AD/schiller.html Herbert Shiller Theory]=== |
| - | ==[http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/15478/1/Cultural_industries_and_cultural_policy_(LSERO).pdf Cultural Industries and Cultural Policies- Hesmondalgh]== | + | ===[http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/15478/1/Cultural_industries_and_cultural_policy_(LSERO).pdf Cultural Industries and Cultural Policies- Hesmondalgh]=== |
| - | ==[http://vimeo.com/album/1716221 Lecture With Eva Hemmungs]== | + | ===[http://vimeo.com/album/1716221 Lecture With Eva Hemmungs]=== |
| - | ==[http://books.google.ca/books?id=DBsFXPewfXAC&pg=PA530&lpg=PA530&dq=hackers+of+the+twenty+first+century&source=bl&ots=KhoKYMlMS4&sig=iT4VSGlZnIHEI-PAVC_5h-iz-XY&hl=en&ei=-FjJToLsAsL00gHEmuwZ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&sqi=2&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=hackers%20of%20the%20twenty%20first%20century&f=false Critical Pedagogy in the Twenty-first Century]== | + | ===[http://books.google.ca/books?id=DBsFXPewfXAC&pg=PA530&lpg=PA530&dq=hackers+of+the+twenty+first+century&source=bl&ots=KhoKYMlMS4&sig=iT4VSGlZnIHEI-PAVC_5h-iz-XY&hl=en&ei=-FjJToLsAsL00gHEmuwZ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&sqi=2&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=hackers%20of%20the%20twenty%20first%20century&f=false Critical Pedagogy in the Twenty-first Century]=== |
| - | ==[http://www.thisislocallondon.co.uk/indepth/features/9304713.HISTORY__The_Loughton_lopper_who_saved_Epping_Forest/ The Loughton lopper who saved Epping Forest]== | + | ===[http://www.thisislocallondon.co.uk/indepth/features/9304713.HISTORY__The_Loughton_lopper_who_saved_Epping_Forest/ The Loughton lopper who saved Epping Forest]=== |
| I think it would be a good idea to ask the prof for his paper that he shared with us in class today as a source. He also provided good quotes from Herbert Shiller and David Hesmandalgh pertaining to our chapter which I put under sources. | I think it would be a good idea to ask the prof for his paper that he shared with us in class today as a source. He also provided good quotes from Herbert Shiller and David Hesmandalgh pertaining to our chapter which I put under sources. | ||
Revision as of 10:07, 21 November 2011
About the Author
Eva Hemmungs Wirtén is Professor in Library and Information Science (also Associate Professor [Docent in Swedish] in Comparative Literature) at Uppsala University. Her research is focused on the history, theory and philosophy of intellectual property and the public domain. She is currently developing an international research network dealing with Culture, Creativity, Copyright (CCC) based at Uppsala University. She is also working on a new book, preliminarily entitled Libratory Life: Law and the Unmaking of Knowledge, 1976-2006, where she highlights the impact of intellectual property in research and higher education. Eva is also a member of the working group on policy in the COST Action A 32 on “Open scholarly communities on the web” and sits on the board of the newly initiated Swedish research observatory on cultural policy SWECULT.
Abstract
As a result of the digital revolution and the ever-increasing use of the internet, discussions around the conflict between copyright and the public domain are more prevalent than ever before. While these discussions have been hotly debated by legal scholars and in blogs and online forums, Terms of Use is one of the first books to concentrate on the conceptual foundations of the public domain.Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Eva Hemmungs Wirtén reveals the nineteenth-century origins of contemporary phenomena such as blogs, wikis, the 'Creative Commons,' as well as the 'Open Source' and 'Open Access' movements. Hemmungs Wirtén examines topics as diverse as the pharmaceutical uses of plants, the patenting of DNA sequences, and Disney's reworking of Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Books in order to provide a frank theoretical discussion of how nature and culture have been transformed into intellectual property.Timely and provocative, Terms of Use will challenge and inspire readers by providing an original and innovative approach to the understanding of the public domain and its origins.
Summary/Reviews
In Terms of Use, Swedish scholar Eva Hemmungs Wirtén seeks to deepen our understanding of issues surrounding the Internet, digitization and the public domain. These issues are most often discussed today in legal terms, making the public domain “a lawyer-free zone remarkably crowded with lawyers.” The author instead chooses a “stubbornly historical” path, exploring what meanings the public domain and the commons, as well as intellectual property rights and copyright, accrued through time.
But rather than offer a sweeping intellectual history, she narrows her focus to case studies involving the actual jungle – a decision that she admits readers may find “arbitrary if not downright bizarre” – and the British Empire in the Victorian era. This allows her to examine the commons in reference to imperialism and the jungle as a site for the mining of resources. So, there is a chapter on plants (such as the cinchona tree, the source of quinine) and how the science commons model developed in the North exploited the South. Control of biological diversity has swung to the nation state in recent decades, which raises its own problems, such as more restrictions on use of biological resources by indigenous people. There is a chapter on jungle animals, which were broadly conceived of as useless in the wild and having value only if available for visual spectacle, whether in zoos or stuffed. This takes Dr. Hemmungs Wirtén to modern-day museums and art galleries that commit “copyfraud,” claiming copyright when reprinting works that are actually in the public domain, such as Henri Rousseau’s jungle paintings. The final chapter considers the route from Kipling’s The Jungle Books to Disney’s The Jungle Book, and holds up Disney both as an exemplar of the cultural value of appropriating existing works and as the godfather of copyright litigation.
The public domain today, the jungle and imperialism, the history of intellectual property rights – that’s a lot to cover in 159 pages. Imposing the jungle into the book’s fabric causes particular problems. The 19th-century case studies occupy too much text, resulting in abrupt end-of-chapter transitions to the 21st century. Most puzzling of all, the book’s subtitle actually negates one of the book’s central arguments. Whereas Dr. Hemmungs Wirtén seeks to reclaim the jungle as a site used historically for appropriating biological and cultural resources of value, Negotiating the Jungle of the Intellectual Commons simply reinforces the longstanding metaphor of the jungle as a dark and dangerous place that must be slashed through.
Despite these problems, Terms of Use is a book hard not to like. It is written with real brio, and the author’s untiring effort to squeeze more research, more 19th- and 21st-century connections, more analysis onto every page is quite winning. (And there are worse things to be said of a book than that it could have been twice as long.) There are fascinating asides relating to the longstanding peasant right to gleaning (the collecting of stray grain missed during harvest); the Prince of Wales’s 9,000-person hunting party in India in 1876; and the rationing of Disney cartoons by 1970s Swedish television to one hour per year, on Christmas Eve. More centrally, Dr. Hemmungs Wirtén in conclusion makes a compelling case that copyright, originally designed to reward creativity and so spur innovation, is now too often used to hinder innovation. Letting ideas travel in the public domain, on the other hand, allows for their free exchange and particularly encourages the “after-thinking” about existing ideas that is essential in producing new ones. Though it can be difficult to retrace how the book came to that conclusion – is the Victorian jungle, free to all (British), a model for the intellectual commons, then? – Terms of Use is indisputably provocative. Like the commons itself, it lends itself to after-thinking.
from:http://www.universityaffairs.ca/who-owns-the-jungle.aspx
Sources
Who Owns The Jungle
The Ins and Outs Of Public Domain
Imperialism
Herbert Shiller Theory
Cultural Industries and Cultural Policies- Hesmondalgh
Lecture With Eva Hemmungs
Critical Pedagogy in the Twenty-first Century
The Loughton lopper who saved Epping Forest
I think it would be a good idea to ask the prof for his paper that he shared with us in class today as a source. He also provided good quotes from Herbert Shiller and David Hesmandalgh pertaining to our chapter which I put under sources.
Chapter 1: 'From Time Immemorial': Customary Rights, Rites of Custom
Primary Argument
Chapter one underlines the historical and theoretical principles which help to shape current understandings of the public domain. The primary argument surrounds the struggle over the right to culture-- is it a common good or a commercial product? This chapter highlights a tremendous tension and struggle over the notion of culture. Is it a communally held activity of individuals and groups or is it a commerce in which industries employ individuals in the production of various things? Is it a common good for all or is it a business where those who can afford it can access it? The chapter highlights how the term 'enclosure', once understood as fencing in public property (the commons), remains prevalent within society today. From this chapter, we learn how yesterday’s 'digging' and 'grazing' became today’s 'googling' and 'sampling' and how the commons and the public domain contribute to such radical transformations.
Circulating Conchona
Concept of Biopiracy
Definition: The use of wild plants by international companies to develop medicines, without recompensing the countries from which they are taken.====
Example
~Opium vs. Morphine: Opium comes from the poppy plant and Morphine comes from raw opium. Morphine is primarily used to treat both acute and chronic severe pain. (ex. Labor pains) Negative uses are mainly addiction and drug abuse.
~Without restrictions on this drug, people could use this plant/opium for wrong reasons and cause danger to themselves. This goes against the universally accepted concept of common heritage of mankind because this plant can not be available to anyone for several reasons.
Further Reading
Key Questions/Study Guide
Links
Chapter 3: 'Telegraphic Adress "The Jungle," 166 Piccadilly': Taxidermy and the Spectacle of the Public Sphere
Primary Argument
...Important to remember, Humans make culture! Therefore culture is human. However, is culture free?
Primary Sources
Critiques
Further Reading
Key Questions/Study Guide
Links
Chapter 4: 'I Am Two Mowglis': Kipling, Disney, and a Lesson in How To Use (and Abuse) the Public Domain
Primary Argument
Primary Sources
Critiques
Further Reading
Key Questions/ Study Guide
Links
Conclusions
More Publications From The Author
Terms of Use: Negotiating the Jungle of the Intellectual Commons (forthcoming, University of Toronto Press, September 2008).
No Trespassing: Authorship, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Boundaries of Globalization (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 2004).
“’Don’t Fence Me In’: Travels in the Public Domain ,” New Directions in Copyright Law, vol 6. Ed. Fiona Macmillan. (London: Edward Elgar, 2007).
“The Global Market 1970-2000: Producers,” Blackwell Companion to the History of the Book. Eds. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (London: Blackwells, 2007).
“Litteraturens Lag: att forska om upphovsrätt (tvärvetenskapligt).” Tidskrift för Litteraturvetenskap 3-4, 2006.
“Out of Sight and Out of Mind: On the Cultural Hegemony of Intellectual Property (Critique).” Cultural Studies 2-3, 2006.
“Life, Liberty, and the Relentless Pursuit of Ownership: The ‘Americanization’ of Intellectual Property Rights," American Studies in Scandinavia, vol 35, no 2, Fall 2003.
Global Infatuation: Explorations in Transnational Publishing and Texts. The Case of Harlequin Enterprises and Sweden (Uppsala: Publications from the Section for Sociology of Literature at the Department of Literature, Uppsala University, 38, 1998).
Notes and References
Hemmungs, W. E., & Hemmungs, W. E. (2008). Terms of use: Negotiating the jungle of the intellectual commons. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
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