[Ecommerce] Interesting New York Event: Comedies of fair use (April 28-30, 2006)

[Manon Ress]

http://www.nyu.edu/fas/institute/nyih/public/upcoming.html

The New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, in association with
the NYU Humanities Council present a weekend long symposium

COMEDIES OF FAIR U$E
A Search for Comity in the Intellectual Property Wars
Friday, April 28 through Sunday, April 30, 2006

Free and open to the public

Friday April 28, 7:30-9:30 p.m.
Hemmerdinger Hall
100 Washington Sq. East

Saturday 9:30-6:30 p.m. and Sunday 9:30-1:00 p.m.
Hemmerdinger Hall
100 Washington Sq. East

Panelists to include Lawrence Lessig, Art Spiegelman, Susan Meiselas,
Jonathan Letham, Errol Morris, Geoff Dyer, and others.

Some 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=D5s most dynamic
activist, are collaborating in helping to convene and steer the
conference.

The Friday evening session will focus on Google's highly
controversial project of digitizing the entire contents of some of
the world's greatest libraries, not necessarily with the prior
approval of the relevant copyright holders.

Saturday will see separate sessions devoted to the confounding
situations swirling around the practices, respectively, of artists,
scholars, musicians and documentary filmmakers.

On Sunday, panelists will try to see if there is some way to move
past the various impasses involved, and toward a regime of greater
comity among creators and users of intellectual property, especially
when these are often the same people in different phases of their work.

Panelists, in addition to Mr. Lessig and Mr. Boynton and Institute
director Lawrence Weschler will include:

Photographer Susan Meiselas
Painter Joy Garnett
Novelist Jonathan Letham
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 others

SCHEDULE
Please click here to download the complete schedule.

All events located in:
Hemmerdinger Hall, 100 Washinton Square East, New York, NY 10003







************************************************
Manon Anne Ress
manon.ress@cptech.org,
www.cptech.org

Consumer Project on Technology
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Tel: +41 22 791 6727

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