killing denouement

I feel very drawn to diagrams lately, and the lovely, almost extitutional scores of Italian composer, artist and filmmaker Sylvano Bussoni. And diagramming my future gutter status to boot. I’m fairly sure I want to do a PhD, if I can figure out how to acquire visas/grants. It’s a bit ways off anyway. But its gotten me thinking about the mores of intellectual property and authorship credit. How can anyone ‘own’ an idea or concept? And at what degree level is a person considered a legitimate or plausible author? How much of a difference is there between private (material) property and ‘ownership’ of original thought?. In this sense (with apologies to Graeber), it’s worth thinking about how compatible anarchism and the academy really are?

It gets further complicated with the way that universities often assert ownership over the work produced by faculty and students in their institutions. The noise of the street has an interesting post on a similar situation, where University of Michigan students are required to file their dissertations with the rather grubby ProQuest. Ze mentions seems to be hope (will even Obamanarchists ever be able to reclaim this word?) an alternative in that two Berkeley students, danah boyd and Joseph Hall, were recently able to file their dissertations under a Creative Commons license. I notice that both chose an attribution-noncommercial-no derivatives CC license, which makes me wonder about the difference between the terms ‘copyleft’ and anti-copyright. Would the latter involve not filing even a CC license, and stating all some no rights reserved? I do like that this seems to circumvent the highly problematic discourse of ‘rights’. Perhaps fittingly, it seems that anarchist anti-copyright thought extends back to Joseph Proudhon’s work, Les Majorats Littéraires. There’s also a worthwhile paper dealing with radical presses and copyright policies here.

This last Bussoti score is especially fascinating in that its title translates to “passion according to Sade”. He was supposed to be quite the Francophile, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that some of the text comes from Rennaisance-era poet Louise Labé. Strange Scores points to an intriguing ‘imaginary music’, which seems to have equally creative scores. Perhaps it will be the soundtrack to an Invisible Committee-inspired insurrection?

edit: I recently also came across an interesting post by Kevin Carson on “copyright communism“.