Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Drop that quotation/sample/collage, sir! An enlightening, amusing, and frightening look at how the growth of intellectual property law is making us all less free to say and think what we want.
In 1998 university professor and professional art prankster Kembrew McLeod trademarked the phrase "freedom of expression" as a joke, an amusing if dark way to comment on how intellectual property law is increasingly being used to fence off the culture and restrict the way we're allowed to express ideas. But what's happened in recent years to intellectual property law is no joke and has had repercussions on our culture and our everyday lives. The trend toward privatization of—melodies, genes, public space, the English language—means an inevitable clash of economic values against the value of free speech, creativity, and shared resources. Our irreplaceable cultural commons is being sectioned up and sold off to the highest bidders and the most aggressive litigators.
In Freedom of Expression®, Kembrew McLeod gathers topics as diverse as hip-hop music and digital sampling, the patenting of seeds and human genes, folk and blues music, visual collage art, electronic voting, the Internet and computer software. In doing so, he connects this rapidly accelerating push to pin down everything as a piece of private property to its effects on music, art and science.
In much the same way Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation tied together disparate topics to paint an alarming picture of the food industry, and written in a witty style that brings to mind media pranksters like Al Franken, Ken Kesey, and Abbie Hoffman, Freedom of Expression® uses intellectual property law as the focal point to show how economic concerns are seriously eroding creativity and free speech. It’s later than we know.
Amazon.com Review
What if George W. Bush's much ballyhooed "ownership society" were taken to an illogical extreme, so that each of us owned a phrase or a sound or a gesture that would generate a little income every time it was used? Of course, we could trademark all the catchphrases we like (as, for example, Donald Trump has with The Apprentice's tagline "You're fired"), but most of us are in no position to collect. Corporate entities, however, are capable and quite willing to claim ownership of what until recently would have seemed to be public property, to dangerous ends, argues Kembrew McLeod. The University of Iowa communications professor explores the clash between free speech and intellectual property law in this absorbing and unsettling expose. McLeod eschews the role of the detached observer in favor of a more indignant and even angry voice; indeed, he's trademarked the phrase "freedom of expression" to hammer home his point and makes no secret of his contempt for "overzealous copyright bozos" and their ilk. Trends in intellectual property rights and the free exchange of ideas are serious business, however. The author supports his concerns with an array of examples, from the ridiculous (Fox's attempt to punish comic Al Franken for his satirical use of their "fair and balanced" motto) to the alarming (corporate agribusiness's development of "terminator technology" that makes patented seeds sterile after one planting). McLeod, who's written extensively elsewhere about music, uses pop culture as a jumping-off point, but deftly ties together the legal threads that hamstring authors, recording artists, and filmmakers with their working scientific and agricultural counterparts. Indeed, McLeod deserves special kudos for demonstrating that the same forces that can be used to crush the seeds of creativity can also be used to literally smother the seeds of life. --Steven Stolder |
