This story from Wired Campus today (Tuesday September 13 2011) got me thinking about open resources, open publishing and Roland Barthes. The story of how the Authors Guild intends suing five US universities and Google rapidly overtook the original news that Duke and Google had joined forces to publish books in a digital repository. Good, I thought at the time. But Scott Turow's formidable language "These books ... are now at needless, intolerable digital risk" got me thinking further. "Intolerable risk"? Intolerable? Are open resources now not to be tolerated?
Like a good scholar, I tried thinking from another angle, from the point of view of a lawyer representing scores of outraged authors and objectively I could see the problem. If these authors had not given permission, then this was, I suppose, theft of a sort. So now I'm torn between wearing my social justice hat and saying ra-ra for open publishing, for Duke and for Google ,and wearing my academic's cap and tut-tutting over flagrant abuse and injustice for authors. Hmmm.
And then along came my memory of Roland Barthes and his famous essay, The Death of the Author. So perhaps what we now have is a case of The Death of the Author Revisited. Barthes suggested that the author was dead because s/he didn't really exist in the first place. There is nothing new under the sun, said Barthes, well, no, not really, he didn't say that, it was Shakespeare, no, oops, it's from Ecclesiastes, ie the Bible ["What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun"], but I was close, because Shakespeare is often the source of the most quotable quotes. What Barthes was suggesting was that all ideas, all creative thoughts are floating in a delightful sea of intertextuality. When we think we are creating a text, we aren't at all, because we are dipping our creative fingers into the sea and hauling out a pre-existing idea (okay I am really simplifying Barthes here, but bear with me). What we have are texts, not authors, so, the author is dead.
Now, with this latest catastrophe, we have a number of authors howling about having their creations being made openly available in another sort of web, the wonderful internet with its rich range of possibilities to create a brave new world. Why are they howling? Well, stoopid, because they earn money from royalties, so we are taking away their livelihood.
Which brings me to the BIG question. Are we staring at an imminent future where writers cannot earn money from their writing? If so, and this is a distinct if distant possibility, we will no longer have a profession based on authorship. Instead, the idea of the single and singular author will dissolve (yes, Roland, you were right) into a more socially distributed model of shared authorship and we will be left with authors who write for love.
#change11
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/authors-guild-sues-hathitrust-5-universities-over-digitized-books/36178?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Like a good scholar, I tried thinking from another angle, from the point of view of a lawyer representing scores of outraged authors and objectively I could see the problem. If these authors had not given permission, then this was, I suppose, theft of a sort. So now I'm torn between wearing my social justice hat and saying ra-ra for open publishing, for Duke and for Google ,and wearing my academic's cap and tut-tutting over flagrant abuse and injustice for authors. Hmmm.
And then along came my memory of Roland Barthes and his famous essay, The Death of the Author. So perhaps what we now have is a case of The Death of the Author Revisited. Barthes suggested that the author was dead because s/he didn't really exist in the first place. There is nothing new under the sun, said Barthes, well, no, not really, he didn't say that, it was Shakespeare, no, oops, it's from Ecclesiastes, ie the Bible ["What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun"], but I was close, because Shakespeare is often the source of the most quotable quotes. What Barthes was suggesting was that all ideas, all creative thoughts are floating in a delightful sea of intertextuality. When we think we are creating a text, we aren't at all, because we are dipping our creative fingers into the sea and hauling out a pre-existing idea (okay I am really simplifying Barthes here, but bear with me). What we have are texts, not authors, so, the author is dead.
Now, with this latest catastrophe, we have a number of authors howling about having their creations being made openly available in another sort of web, the wonderful internet with its rich range of possibilities to create a brave new world. Why are they howling? Well, stoopid, because they earn money from royalties, so we are taking away their livelihood.
Which brings me to the BIG question. Are we staring at an imminent future where writers cannot earn money from their writing? If so, and this is a distinct if distant possibility, we will no longer have a profession based on authorship. Instead, the idea of the single and singular author will dissolve (yes, Roland, you were right) into a more socially distributed model of shared authorship and we will be left with authors who write for love.
#change11
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/authors-guild-sues-hathitrust-5-universities-over-digitized-books/36178?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
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