Several weeks ago, flustered Minister of Industry Jim Prentice warbled a variation on that discourse kill switch installed in every Conservative’s frontal lobe, “The market will take care of it,” before hanging up on Jesse Brown of CBC’s Search Engine. Prentice has no doubt been destabilized by the public’s front-page interest and concern over the currently tabled Bill C-61 to amend Canada’s copyright act. The bill, as it stands now, will stifle web and tech innovations and open all of us up to rapacious lawsuits. That’s why the 2008 Scream Literary Festival organizers, with their theme of “Copyright, Collaboration, and Appropriation,” are positioned as the lucky shits of the year. (Full disclosure — I too, am a lucky shit as I’ll be performing at the festival’s keynote panel discussion.)
“The irony that bad copyright law may prove our key to success is not lost on us,” festival director Bill Kennedy admits to me. As to why the theme was chosen, Kennedy, also a web developer answers, “The debate seems largely commercial, with people presenting their arguments in business terms. This is understandable — the information economy is suffering for viable business models, and people are looking to copyright legislation to sort it all out. What’s missing is the artistic perspective. While the debate rages, artists are blithely stealing. Fans are writing stories featuring trademarked characters. People are creating art out of other people’s stuff.”
To that end, events over the next two weeks will feature everyone from Kenneth Goldsmith (pictured) — founder of Ubu.com and the man responsible for you being able to watch Fluxus movies at work — to poet M. NourbeSe Philip, who in her upcoming book Zong! uses only words from the transcripts of a centuries-old British court case against a ship captain to tell the story of murdered slaves. In addition, Kennedy’s programming took an open-ended approach to the theme. “Most of our nights are less about hardcore art-theft, and more on the collaborative nature of art itself. Stealing is just one form of collaboration. The collaborative side of the festival is about artists working with other artists.”
In a grander sense, collaboration is something the public partakes in daily through the networked technologies that literally run our lives. “The information economy as a whole,” Kennedy muses, “has altered the way we live our lives so profoundly that it generates a deep cultural anxiety. The game has changed but its rules haven’t, and everyone is just trying to madly catch up to what’s going on”
That the architects of Bill C-61 did not expect the public to be as savvy about these issues as they turned out to be is a shocking oversight. As Kennedy points out, “Piracy has become a crime like speeding — everybody is doing it, and in many ways the efficiency of our highways rely on it.”