In:
Journal of Scholarly Publishing, University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress), Vol. 34, No. 1 ( 2002-10-01), p. 4-30
Abstract:
Picking up with CELJ's MLA 2000 topic on ways that the digital world is changing, and often guiding, copyright law and fair use in scholarly publishing (see JSP, April 2002), the Council of Editors of Learned Journals asked its keynote speakers for the 2001 MLA Convention to address two different faces of the ‘electronic muse.’ Patrick Harrison, who brings an expertise in law to concerns about the ramifications of the recent New York Times v. Tasini case on publishing electronic databases, discovers that at heart in the issue of copyright protection is the very definition of revision, which surprisingly has never been discussed in prior case law. What constitutes an electronic revision of a collective work such as a newspaper, magazine, or journal, and therefore a legitimate republication, according to copyright law, in electronic form such as a for-profit database? The Supreme Court came down on the side of protecting individual authors: the publication in an electronic database of a work originally appearing in a print journal or other collective work is not a revision but a new work. In stressing a text as material property at the centre of competing claims of ownership, this decision leaves open to question the status of a text's intellectual or creative relation to its community and to the common good. Ian Lancashire, a professor of poetry, has nimbly side-stepped the nettles of Net law in offering poetry for free to the world through an anthology of online poetry. His Representative Poetry Online (RPO) features over 2,500 English poems by 403 poets, nearly all in the public domain. Indeed, it is the public nature of this project, its conception of poetry and its study as a collaborative enterprise between scholarly editor and common reader, that safeguards its haven in the electronic world. This e-anthology challenges the concept of a poetic text as the product of individual genius whose access need be regulated by an elite class of academic professionals. Representative Poetry Online instead perpetuates the ‘representative’ life of poetry as belonging to the world. Existing online, this poetry is able to enter the very material lives of its readers.
Type of Medium:
Online Resource
ISSN:
1198-9742
,
1710-1166
Language:
English
Publisher:
University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress)
Publication Date:
2002
detail.hit.zdb_id:
2145365-2
SSG:
24,1
SSG:
2
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