A Division III Presentation Benjamin Mako Hill Hampshire College

893 West Street Amherst, MA

1.0 16 May 2003 I've explained my Division III in a number of different ways to different people: I'm applying a philosophy of creativity fostered around Free/Open Source Software toward a critique of systemic control (I'll define this in a few minutes). I'm analyzing the nature of the relationship of systemic control and collaborative writing and arguing for systems of control supportive of collaborative writing processes. I'm dethroning the concept of the Romantic author. (this one makes some enemies). I did not write three Divisions III but approach the three as interrelated concepts. Technology and/as society: Separate couch cusions or one big cushion? (Sclove) Technology and/as law: DVDs and fair use. (Lessig's code) Conclusions: openness, fairness Openness and fairness aren't enough: Free Software and Open Source are the project of both by anarchists and libertarians with divergent political goals. I like control because people identify with being controlled, more than being coded. Control is not politically neutral. I present control of collaborative work in three ways: control as articulated as social forces (i.e. a Romantic conception of authorship); control as articulated as technology (you have all read plenty about this by now); control as articulated as law (which of course Lessig discusses); As control is tightened and highly individualized or centralized, there has been an extreme individualization of writing and creative work. This individualization hinders the creation of works and creates an dominant and hostile authoritarian environment for the production, distribution, and reception of ideas. I use the discussion of control to argue for a system supportive of group work and collaborative processes. I focus on literature (although I imagine that many other type of groups expression falls into this category, i.e software). 87% of industry uses collaborative writing studies have shown that people working together collaboratively produce better it's historically precedented (leads into the next bit) medieval glosses and annotations (example 1, example 2); Chinese literature (no intellectual property up until the 20th century); early on, copyright served as a powerful, but flexible entity. early American pirating; hypocrisy of Mark Twain; Wordsworth and Coleridge; editors in the twentieth century: Eliot and Pound; Carver and Lish; social changes (authorship); technological changes toward more centralized production (the invention of the printing press, the invention of mass printing); legal changes toward more individual control (copyright); The Girl Scouts of America and ASCAP trusted computing and digital rights management; Jon Johansen the DMCA and Dmitri Sklyarov this is where MC Disk Protector comes in: video this is where the (c)s on homework comes in; from 14 years in duration to life of the author plus 70; DMCA idea/expression dichotomy collapsed ("look and feel", translations);