Introduction to the conference on NPR
via NPR:
Listen to an introduction to the COMEDIES conference on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show: "Property Values", Thursday, April 27, 2006, with Art Spiegelman, Siva Vaidhyanathan and Jonathan Lethem.
more about the conference, via NYIH:
Panelists, in addition to organisers Lawrence Lessig , Robert Boynton and Institute director Lawrence Weschler will include:
Photographer Susan Meiselas
Painter Joy Garnett
Novelist Jonathan Lethem
Comix artist Art Spiegelman
Essayist Geoff Dyer (Out of Sheer Rage, The Ongoing Moment)
Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris
Joel Wachs, head of the Andy Warhol Foundation
Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit
NYU's Siva Vaidhyanathan (Copyrights and Copywrongs)
Essayist Lewis Hyde (The Gift, Trickster Makes This World)
NYU's Lawrence Ferrara, expert on musical issues
Carrie McLaren of Stay Free
James Boyle, of digital environmentalist movement (Shaman, Software, and Spleens) and othersSome of the most contentious issues bedeviling cultural life today are increasingly coming to revolve around the question of what proper deference ought to be paid to the notion of intellectual property. Just what is copyright, what is its point, who is it designed to protect (individual creators and their legatees, be they individual or corporate, and necessarily to the same extent?) and what is it designed to foster (the most thrivingly fertile intellectual community and intercourse possible?)? How might such objectives, thus stated, be internally at odds, and how might such tensions in turn be resolved? What sorts of product ought to be copyrightable and for how long? To what (increasing?) extent is the cultural/intellectual commons being divied up, fenced off into ever more diminutive swaths of barbed and monetarized terrain? And what exceptions ought to be made to this tendency? What is "fair use" and how ought it to be extended (and perhaps expanded)? How do all these issues play out across different media-textual (books and magazines), visual (photos, paintings, films), and aural (musical)? And to what extent are rampaging developments on the cyberfront expanding or constricting all possibilities in this regard?
The last weekend of this coming April (April 28, 29, and 30), the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU will be bringing together practioners and artists (many from among the ranks of its own distinguished fellowship), along with lawyers, judges, historians, theorists and philosophers, in order to explore various aspects of these questions. Robert Boynton of the NYU Journalism faculty, one of the principal chroniclers of developments in this field, and Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University, arguably the field's most dynamic activist, are collaborating in helping to convene and steer the conference.
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