Chapter 1 1.1 Where is the author? There is a strange irony in the term author. In most usages across the world, the “author” is a common sense and an obvious term. An author is a person who writes something. However, the literary theories sought to address the complex process of creation. Thus, often deeply metaphysical concepts, the positions and discourses around the author have vacillated across centuries and across…
Mumbai : December 8 – 10, 2010 @ Alliance Francaise New Delhi : January 20 – 22, 2011 @ Alliance Francaise FLASHPOINT Human Rights Film Festival brings together eight extraordinary films from around the world that deal with human rights issues at macro as well as micro level; from global concerns to indigenous issues. These films urge us to reflect, react, revolutionalize and act as a ‘flashpoint’ to usher in…
Chapter 2 2.1 The Copy, Knowledge and The Author Knowledge and the Internet: The shifting author In this chapter we question the notions of the fixity of the author through the tropes of knowledge and the circulation of information flows. How can the position of the author be validated in the current times of increased fluidity, when the binaries of the author /reader/consumer are increasingly under question? Lawrence Liang’s article…
Chapter 3 3.1 Film Authorship: Collective or Collaborative Marjut Salokannel in an essay titled “Film Authorship in the changing Audio-Visual Environment“, says that cinema has been continually confronted with the problem of determining who the actual author of a cinematographic work is. Salokannel discusses the notion of film authorship as a shifting boundary between film aesthetics and legal discourses relating to the authors’ rights. The boundaries have also differed according…
Chapter 4 [19] 4.1 Myths of Copyright Soon the Indian Music Industry will be out of sight, there will be a cultural blackout and consumers will no longer be able to listen to music, virtually. That is what the Indian Music Industry – IMI, joining hands with the police and researchers, tried to convey to consumers and media persons this past week as it held a conference to highlight the…
Chapter 5 Art and Law: An exclusionary discourse Copyright has become a deeply contested issue in the art world: an issue that artists, gallery owners, curators and museum staff are forced to confront everyday. During the 1990s, there has been a tremendous abundance of copyright disputes involving leading contemporary artists and artists’ estates. We shall explore this chapter primarily through the visual analyses of some cases of so-called “infringements”. In…
Chapter 6 6.1 A story of Power: Digital Technologies It is almost a truism to state that digital technologies have created a revolution of sorts. They have allowed entrepreneurs to build empires out of fibre and thin air and to establish these empires in a realm without rules. They have challenged Governments and their traditional authority-not by design or intent but purely as a result of technological accident. Because digital…
“Intellectual Property is the oil of the 21st century,” claimed Mark Getty, chairman of Getty Images, one of the largest Intellectual Proprietors of the world. It was in response to this view of “owning” a rather intangible and hallucinatory kind of property that two Berlin based artists- Jan Gerber and Sebastian Lutgert developed a unique kind of movie database called 0xdb.org, based on the idea that file sharing can be…
Susmit Sen, guitarist, music composer and performer, co-founded the well known fusion band Indian Ocean with lead vocalist Asheem Chakravarty in 1990. Indian Ocean has been a pioneer in many fields when it comes to music. Over the years Susmit and others in Indian Ocean has been through numerous experiences with the music “industry” in their attempt to get their music to the audience. Susmit shares some of his experiences and thoughts on ownership, tough…
Hindi (subtitled in English), 75 min, 2010 Meetho Pal is a portrait of Anuradha Saigal, a third generation descendent of a Nepalese family that established base in India more than 300 years ago. As a young girl in British India, she travelled widely, initially for her education and later for her work with the Indian National Congress. The film chronicles her journey from spirited youth to devoted family life as…
