Kerr on Interpreting the Rapper in an Internet Society

Andrew Jensen Kerr, Georgetown University Law Center, is publishing Rap Exegesis: Interpreting the Rapper in an Internet Society in the Columbia Journal of Race and Law. Here is the abstract.

The Law and Literature movement has had limited influence on the work of lawyers and judges. But a rap lyric’s dual quality as aesthetic and “truth” document makes it uniquely amenable to literary interpretation. The competing problems: lyrics are meant to be heard and not read, and the ambition of the contemporary rapper is no longer to be didactic or suggest authenticity. The #rapgame has changed. I argue the internet rapper is the paradigm of creative identity. The guiding questions for this Article are how the law should respond to the individual who lives life as art, and if the social knowledge project will lead to the crowdsourcing of hermeneutics of both rappers and legal texts.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

A New Book on Speech: Barendt On Anonymous Speech: Literature, Law and Politics

Eric Barendt has published Anonymous Speech (Hart Publishing, 2016). Here is a description of the book's contents from the publisher's website.

Anonymous Speech: Literature, Law and Politics discusses the different contexts in which people write anonymously or with the use of a pseudonym: novels and literary reviews, newspapers and political periodicals, graffiti, and now on the Internet. The book criticises the arguments made for a strong constitutional right to anonymous speech, though it agrees that there is a good case for anonymity in some circumstances, notably for whistle-blowing. One chapter examines the general treatment of anonymous speech and writing in English law, while another is devoted to the protection of journalists' sources, where the law upholds a freedom to communicate anonymously through the media. A separate chapter looks at anonymous Internet communication, particularly on social media, and analyses the difficulties faced by the victims of threats and defamatory allegations on the Net when the speaker has used a pseudonym. In its final chapter the book compares the universally accepted argument for the secret ballot with the more controversial case for anonymous speech. This is the first comprehensive study of anonymous speech to examine critically the arguments for and against anonymity. These arguments were vigorously canvassed in the nineteenth century – largely in the context of literary reviewing – and are now of enormous importance for communication on the Internet.

 

Oh, That Anne Shirley

Two articles on IP rights and Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables have crossed my desk recently. First is

Andrea Slane, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Legal Studies, Guarding a Cultural Icon: Concurrent Intellectual Property Regimes and the Perpetual Protection of Anne of Green Gables in Canada, forthcoming in the McGill Law Journal. Here is the abstract.

The article examines problems for the public domain raised by the ongoing intellectual property protection afforded to the classic Canadian children's novel Anne of Green Gables. The author suggests that three conceptual difficulties in distinguishing between different intellectual property regimes have allowed the owners of rights in the novel wider and longer protection than they should enjoy: 1) confusion between concepts of source in copyright and source in trade-mark; 2) confusion between an author's moral rights and personal reputation in copyright and goodwill in trade-mark; and 3) willingness to grant public benefit to public authorities seeking official marks protection without consideration of the public interest in limited copyright terms.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

The second is

Cecily Devereux, University of Alberta Department of English and Film Studies, "Not a 'Usual' Property": A Hundred Years of Protecting Anne of Green Gables, 7 Law, Culture, and the Humanities 121 (February 2011).

Why might redhaired, freckle-faced Anne still be controversial, especially after a hundred years? Because the Montgomery heirs and the Prince Edward Island Provincial government jointly own the rights to the trademark (they administer it through the Anne of Green Gables Licensing Authority), and they guard those rights. Creators of a website established in 2008, Anne's Diary, began using images of Anne without permission. The creators billed it as "the most secure website for children in the world," and it certainly boasted many security features, including a fingerprint reader and registration papers. The problem was that it used the Anne of Green Gables trademark and image (friendliness, security, safety, home) without a license, although the creators apparently tried to get permission. The PEI government and its attorneys began to investigate, according to the Canadian Trademark Blog.  I clicked on a number of the links at Anne's Diary, none of which seem to work now, and the girl's image now on the home page, while redhaired and straw-hatted, does not really resemble Anne Shirley.

Open Access To Law and Humanities Writings Via WikiSource

Timothy K. Armstrong, University of Cincinnati College of Law, has published "Rich Texts: Wikisource as an Open Access Repository for Law and the Humanities," as University of Cincinnati Public Law Research Paper No. 10-09. Here is the abstract.

Open access to research and scholarship, although well established in the sciences, remains an emerging phenomenon in the legal academy. In recent years, a number of open access repositories have been created to permit self-archiving of legal scholarship (either within or across institutional boundaries), and faculties at some leading research institutions have adopted policies supporting open access to their work. Although existing repositories for legal scholarship represent a clear improvement over proprietary, subscription-based repositories in some ways, their architecture, and the narrowly defined missions they have elected to pursue, limit their ability to illuminate the ongoing dialogue among texts that is a defining characteristic of scholarly discourse in law and the humanities. One of the wiki-based projects operated by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation--the Wikisource digital library - improves upon the shortcomings of existing open access repositories by bringing source texts and commentary together in a single place, with additional contextual materials hosted on other Wikimedia Foundation sites just a click away. These features of Wikisource, if more widely adopted, may improve academic discourse by highlighting conceptual interconnections among works, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, and reducing the competitive advantages of proprietary, closed-access legal information services.