Tue 29 Apr 2008

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 2:15 am and is filed under AAA, Open Access Open Source, Websites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “American Ethnography, the AAA, and the Public Domain”

1. April 29th, 2008 at 4:19 am
   Strong says:
   

   Wow

   AMERICAN Ethnography is a stranger in a 1972 Riviera, sunburst yellow banged up and dirty, raving coffee madness cruising Main Street of the quiet desert town at 15 miles an hour, hair like a sleep deprived Augustus Caesar, taupe pinstripe two-piece suit with a three button jacket and open white shirt, French cuffs and pocket square folded Presidential, argyle socks in brogue tan loafers, on the passenger seat a saddle brown croc skin flap-over briefcase, reaching down with the right hand to open it, left hand clutching the gold plated chain steering wheel, one smooth movement, grabs a pile of handbills, leans over to the rolled down passenger seat window and throws the flyers out of the car with nothing more than a “here” and a slight nod, then accelerating as papers rain down on confused bystanders in a trail of methanol fumes and wasteland dust, for a second they all freeze in place, then bending down with hands in pockets, nonchalantly trying to read without touching—spirit-duplicated notepad sheets with academic sleaze, intellectual obscenities and savage science, crude drawings of voluptuous women and demonic beasts, backmasked poems from another dimension—yes, it’s wop bop a loop a lop a lop boom bam reversed and inside out as the car makes a sharp turn onto the highway at the end of the street, screeching tires leave gravel and hit dry asphalt, the driver slowly tilts his head back, loosing himself in the souped-up rumble of the eight cylinder engine. “Don’t follow leaders!” He’s talking to himself. “Watch your parking meters!”

2. April 29th, 2008 at 7:02 am
   Ken Wissoker says:
   

   Good question about public domain! You would think the copyright would revert to the author, so that if Sahlins published part of Stone Age Economics in AE (I’m making this up, I don’t have my copy here) that the copyright for his essay goes back to him.

   I suppose it would depend on the agreements AE used for authors at that time, but unless all rights were permanently given to AES, they should be with the authors.

   Anyone know more about this?

   Ken

3. April 29th, 2008 at 11:15 am
   Martin says:
   

   Rex,
   When you write “it will also be interesting to see if subscriptions to AAA journals are affected,” I assume that you mean affected in a negative way. However, it could also be that this affects subscriptions to AAA journals in a positive way, right? That could, after all, be the effect of enabling, like you write, “everyone to learn about anthropology as a discipline.” And like I noted earlier (on antropologi.info): AAA wouldn’t sue anybody for trying to make them look interesting and attractive, would they? (I should, of course, say “even more
   interesting and attractive” ...)

   My simple thought was that it would be nice for everyone, perhaps particularly in these times, that more people had access to and interest in material about cultural relativism. Using those texts on American Ethnography, I figured, would be good for anthropologists, and for the AAA … nay the world.

   As for “a little more specification of what ‘public domain’ means” I am hoping that public domain is not a term with restrictions on it! As in “you can use it as you please, but only if you are going to use it in a pamphlet which you will not distribute.” I was of the impression that public domain is public domain, period, but perhaps that is just my naive and wishful thinking.

4. April 29th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
   Rex says:
   

   Martin writes: “AAA wouldn’t sue anybody for trying to make them look interesting and attractive, would they?”

   That’s a very kind thing to think about AAA

   IANAL, but in the US ‘public domain’ is the legal status things have when they have no copyright holder (when the copyright expires, for instance). But what they appear to be doing is licensing pre-1964 work for further use. But what is the nature of that use? Could we sell AAA content? Must derivative works (i.e. JSTOR PDFs) be released under a similar license? I wish they had used a CC license or something. Although I doubt it will come to this, posting that sort of vague language is the sort of thing that opens the door to controversy.

   Ken’s point is also an interesting one – in many ways this is a sort of benevolent paternalism that benefits the public but which ultimately continues to give AAA power over content that others (i.e. authors) have actually written.

Leave a Reply