The MediaCommons editorial board is going to be holding its first meeting at the end of March, spending a day and a half discussing a number of the significant issues involved in the startup of this network. Avi and I (along with our friends at the Institute for the Future of the Book have a sense of what some of those issues are: the kinds of features we’d like to develop, for instance; our workflow model; the open review process; the role of the editorial board; the institutional connections that we might develop. In short, we want to spend time with the board thinking about what it is we’re making here, and how we should go about it.

But we’re crucially invested in ensuring that MediaCommons is not simply used by a lot of scholars, but that it develops in concert with the needs and desires of those scholars, and thus that we build our human network at the same time we’re building our digital network. To that end, we want to open our agenda for discussion here, both amongst the board members and amongst any other interested parties, any network member who wants to contribute to the direction we’re moving.

We’d love for this discussion to be as wide-ranging as possible, and so we’re going to open with some extremely general questions: What were your initial thoughts when you first heard about MediaCommons? What hopes and desires do you have for the project? What would you like MediaCommons to become? What kinds of issues do you see the network facing as it develops?

What we’d like to do, ideally, would be to collect as many issues as possible, and then to take on those issues one at a time here on the blog, ultimately using these discussions as a means of setting the agenda and defining the issues for the editorial board meeting.

So what are your desires, and your concerns? What should we discuss?

Recently, we’ve been having some discussion about our current Fair Use statement, reprinted below:

MediaCommons is a strong advocate for the right of media scholars to quote from the materials they analyze, as protected by the principle of “fair use.” If such quotation is necessary to a scholar’s argument, if the quotation serves to support a scholar’s original analysis or pedagogical purpose , and if the quotation does not harm the market value of the original text - but rather, and on the contrary, enhances it - we must defend the scholar’s right to quote from the media texts under study.

In particular, the bolded text has come under some scrutiny. The debate has centered on two equally important questions:

1) To what extent are we either harming or protecting our rights through the inclusion of this statement, and,

2) To what extent are we actually challenging the interpretation of fair use through its inclusion?

Bob has advocated that we not validate the notion that market value — either positive or negative — should play any part in claiming the right to fair use. Ben also thinks this is the bolder position to take.

Kathleen not only pointed out that the effect on market value is one of four criteria recognized under copyright law for determining fair use – and thus by claiming our non-detrimental impact we are protecting our claims - but she also argued that MediaCommons should actively promote the idea that academic criticism - by actually calling attention to particular media texts - (potentially) enhances their market value.

The actual statute states that in judging whether fair use can be invoked, one of the factors to be considered should be “the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work”. In our rewording, we emphasize the contrary notion of increased value through reproduction for the sake of public criticism as a direct challenge to the short-sightedness of those too quick to claim copyright violation.

While I agree that these public criticisms may in fact increase interest – and possibly value – for some of the materials being discussed, I wonder if our challenge needs to be directed toward expanding the taken-for-granted definitions of the statute’s stipulated terms “effect” and “value”; extending these beyond – while not entirely dismissing – the realm of the economic. New ways of understanding and critically engaging with media certainly can affect the market for and value of the texts being discussed, but the degree to which media literacy effects an audience’s appreciation for a given text and the cultural values they assign said text cannot — and should not — be transparently overlaid on top of its economic value.

This week’s In Media Res line-up:

Monday, February 26, 2007 – Shawn Shimpach (University of Massachusetts Amherst) presents:
“Too Much? The Reality of Real Estate”

Tuesday, February 27, 2007 – Michael Newman (University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee)
presents: “Indie Volkswagens on Screens Big and Small”

Wednesday, February 28, 2007 – Sangita Gopal (University of Oregan) presents: “Beauty and the Boast”

Thursday, March 1, 2007 – Kyle Nicholas (Old Dominion University) presents: “Gay or Just ‘Gay’ on the Sarah Silverman Program

Friday, March 2, 2007 – Patrick Burkart (Texas A&M) with Brother Russell
present: “The Home-Taper Underground”

Please check out these wonderful contributions and offer your thoughts via
a comment.

The makers of the independent feature film, Four Eyed Monsters have put together a sharp and concise open-source video arguing in support of net neutrality.

Save the Internet | Rock the Vote

The video was produced under a Creative Commons license and the video makers have invited others to respond by making their own video responses or by downloading the current edit of the video. Interesting stuff.

Friend and Colleague Jason Mittell got schrift in today’s NYT article about Middlebury’s History department ban of Wikipedia as a source for their papers. He blogs about it here and notes

If you’re in the Middlebury area and want to hear more, come to the event on Monday Febrary 26 at 4:30 in Library 201: “What is the Wikipedia in Higher Education?”, featuring myself and History professor Amy Morsman.

Since I am nowhere near Vermont these days allow me my two cents: Wikipedia is a great resource to begin any research on contemporary popular culture. There, I said it. When I tell students that if they want to study something like Podcasting I always say, “begin here, don’t end here.” Same for video games, hip-hop, etc. And there is a simple reason for this. Like an encyclopedia it is meant to be a “jumping off” point. Unlike traditional encyclopedia of all types, you get in-depth entries on Katamari Damacy, Dj Drama and Bratz. Because popular culture is so ephemeral and traditional, expert-oriented publishing moves so slowly by comparison, the Wikipedia because a repository for all kinds of fads and new cultural movements. Take, for example, the Marc Maron Show, a show that ran off and on for about two and a half years as a syndicated radio program on Air America Radio. Here’s some of the detail that that now-cancelled program has in its Wikipedia entry,

Regular Features
Marc Maron’s Short Order News - Maron’s take on the day’s news; airs at the top and bottom of the show
Dick (as in Cheney) of the Day - the most reprehensible person of the day as chosen by Maron; airs at the bottom of the show
Liberal Confessional - Maron and callers confess their less-than-progressive moments
Wheel of Anger - Rants by Earl Weekly Remembrances with Mort Mortensen - Earl disrespects the recently dead
Movie reviews with Svetlana, the Russian prostitute - contributor Iris Bahr.

Not bad and I defy anyone to find an entry about this show in any number of encyclopedia of American popular culture.

Which brings me back to the initial banning by the History department. I can understand it to a certain extent. You may be teaching about events that have been mulled over for several hundred years and your profession has developed a set of methods and databases that are quite refined. Wikipedia looks like a poor place to start in comparison and you are sick of “collective amateur efforts” being utilized over the many collective efforts of trained professionals. But those of us who study mass media and popular culture don’t have that luxury. There just isn’t the tradition surrounding our field, yet. So the Wikipedia looks like an opportunity to build something new, which is what we are up to! It hardly beats a day in the archives, reading old trades or even a solid book. But man, am I glad someone has made and is working on an extensive entry on Art Bell, a broadcaster who I hope to never forget.

The preceding was crossposted at my blog…

Monday, February 19, 2007 -Jane Park (University of Oklahoma) presents:
“‘But Does He Know How to Wind You Up?’ Gwen Stefani Samples The Sound of Music”

Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - Jeremy Butler (University of Alabama) presents:
“The Sitcom’s Death, the Zero Degree of Style”

Wednesday, February 21, 2007 - Cynthia Fuchs (George Mason University) presents:
“‘Un- De- Re- classified’: Adel Hamad’s case goes to YouTube”

Thursday, February 22, 2007 - Sharon Shahaf (University of Texas at Austin) presents:
“(Israeli) Hip-Hop vs. the (Israeli) Ballet establishment - A Post-Zionist Dance-off on ‘Israeli So U think U can Dance!’”

Friday, February 23, 2007 - Alan McKee (Queensland University of Technology) presents:
“Previously on Buffy”

Apropos of our post (and Jeremy’s reply) below on the conflicting set of interests surrounding current fair use provisions for scholars on many video sharing services, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports today on one scholar’s challenge to YouTube’s restriction of fair use. Wendy Seltzer, a visiting assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School and former lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, recently received a DMCA takedown notice from the service after she posted, for classroom use, a brief clip containing the copyright warning that the NFL attached to the broadcast of the Super Bowl.

Seltzer, for her part, is fighting back. But the ironies involved in the supposed copyright violation resulting from the reproduction of a copyright notice are too rich not to notice.

On legal grounds, the biggest threat to fair use in the U.S. is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). But on practical, logistic grounds, the biggest threat to fair use is digital rights management (DRM) run amok on music and video media. That’s why many of us sat up and took notice when Steve Jobs (somewhat hypocritically) called for an examination of DRM and suggested the possibility of abolishing it.

This did not sit well with Fred Amoroso, CEO & President of Macrovision Corporation, a company that has been marketing DRM crap… er… “solutions” for decades. He fired a salvo back at Jobs that was a model of PR double-speak. This did not sit well with John Gruber of Daring Fireball, who offered a “Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Macrovision CEO Fred Amoroso’s Response to Steve Jobs’s ‘Thoughts on Music’“. It includes this helpful translation:

Well maintained and reasonably implemented DRM will increase the electronic distribution of content, not decrease it.

Translation: I am high as a kite.

Henry Jenkins has a new article in this morning’s Chronicle of Higher Education, suggesting the ways that the field of media studies needs to shift in the face of the increasing penetration of the read/write web (the link above should be good for the next few days, after which time I’ll hope that the article has been moved to the free side of the Chronicle website.)

I’d like simply to open the floor to reactions and discussion. What do you make of Jenkins’s arguments? And how might MediaCommons figure into the future that Jenkins projects?

This week’s In Media Res line-up:

Monday, February 12 — Tim Havens (University of Iowa)
Tuesday, February 13 — Louisa Stein (San Diego State University)
Wednesday, February 14 — Joshua Green (MIT)
Thursday, January 15 — Laurie Ouellette (University of Minnesota)
Friday, February 16 — Chuck Tryon (Fayetteville State University)

Please check out these wonderful contributions and offer your thoughts via
a comment.