# **EDITED BY JANIS JEFFERIES AND SARAH KEMBER**

**Whose Book is it Anyway?**

*Whose Book is it Anyway?* is a provoca� ve collec� on of essays that opens out the copyright debate to ques� ons of open access, ethics, and crea� vity. It includes views – such as ar� st's perspec� ves, writer's perspec� ves, feminist, and interna� onal perspec� ves – that

**A View from Elsewhere on Publishing,**

The diverse range of contributors take various approaches, from the scholarly and the essayis� c to the graphic, to explore the future of publishing based on their experiences as publishers, ar� sts, writers and academics. Considering issues such as intellectual property, copyright and comics, digital publishing and remixing, and what it means (not) to say one is an author, these vibrant essays urge us to view central aspects of wri� ng and publishing

*Whose Book is it Anyway?* is a � mely and varied collec� on of essays. It asks us to reconceive our understanding of publishing, copyright and open access, and it is essen� al reading for

As with all Open Book publica� ons, this en� re book is available to read for free on the publisher's website. Printed and digital edi� ons, together with supplementary digital

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**EDITED BY JANIS JEFFERIES AND SARAH KEMBER**

**Copyright and Creativity**

are too o� en marginalized or elided altogether.

anyone invested in the future of publishing.

Cover image: Photo by Toa He� iba on Unsplash at: h� ps://unsplash.com/photos/DakD� DHMSA

material, can also be found at www.openbookpublishers.com

in a new light.

Cover design: Anna Ga� .

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**OPEN ACCESS**

# **Whose Book is it Anyway?**

# A View from Elsewhere on Publishing, Copyright and Creativity

Whose Book is it Anyway?

**JANIS JEFFERIES**

**AND SARAH KEMBER (EDS.)**

**OBP**

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# WHOSE BOOK IS IT ANYWAY?

# Whose Book is it Anyway?

A View from Elsewhere on Publishing, Copyright and Creativity

> *Edited by Janis Jefferies and Sarah Kember*

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# Contents

**Janneke Adema** is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University. In her research, she explores the future of scholarly communication and experimental forms of knowledge production, where her work incorporates processual and performative publishing, radical open access, scholarly poethics, media studies, book history, cultural studies, and critical theory. She explores these issues in depth in her various publications, but also by supporting a variety of scholar-led, not-for-profit publishing projects, including the Radical Open Access Collective, Open Humanities Press, and Post Office Press (POP).

**Alison Baverstock** is a publisher and pioneer of publishing education and profession-orientated education within universities. She co-founded MA Publishing at Kingston University in 2006 and has researched and written widely about publishing. *How to Market Books*, first published in 1990 and now in its seventh edition, has been widely licensed for translation and is an international bedrock of publisher education, within both the academy and the profession. She is a champion of the widening of literacy and the value of shared-reading: Well Worth Reading won an arts and industry award and since then she has founded both www.readingforce.org.uk and The Kingston University Big Read, which won the 2017 Times Higher Award for Widening Participation. In 2007 she received the Pandora Award for a significant contribution to the industry.

**Michael Bhaskar** is a writer and publisher based in London and Oxford. He is co-founder of Canelo, a new digital publisher, and Writer in Residence at DeepMind, the world's leading AI research lab. Previously he has been a digital publisher, economist, agent and start-up founder amongst other things. He is author of *The Content Machine* (2013) and *Curation*: *The Power of Selection in a World of Excess* (2016) and is co-editor of the forthcoming *Oxford Handbook of Publishing* (2019). He regularly speaks and writes about the future of publishing, media, culture and society.

**J. R. Carpenter** is an artist, writer, researcher, and lecturer working across print, digital, and live performance. Her pioneering works of digital literature have been presented in journals, museums, galleries, and festivals around the world. Her recent web-based work *The Gathering Cloud* won the New Media Writing Prize 2016. A print book by the same name was published in 2017. Her debut poetry collection *An Ocean of Static* (*Penned in the Margins*) was highly commended for the Forward Prize 2018.

**John Cayley** is a writer, theorist, and pioneering maker of language art in programmable media. Apart from more or less conventional poetry and translation, he has explored dynamic and ambient poetics, text generation, transliteral morphing, aestheticized vectors of reading, and transactive synthetic language. Today, he composes as much for reading in aurality as in visuality. *Grammalepsy*: *Essays on Digital Language Art* was published in 2018. Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University, he directs a graduate program in Digital Language Arts. https://programmatology.shadoof.net

**Ronan Deazley** is the Professor of Copyright Law at Queen's University Belfast. His current research addresses the way the copyright regime impacts how memory institutions enable access to and use of our shared cultural heritage, online and across borders. In addition, he develops copyright education tools and materials for cultural heritage practitioners, information and media professionals, students and the wider public. He was the General Editor of the *Copyright User* initiative between 2013–2016 (copyrightuser.org), launched the *Copyright Cortex* in June 2017 (copyrightcortex.org), and is the co-creator of *The Game is On!* (2015–2018) an award-winning series of six animated films exploring copying, creativity and limits of lawful appropriation and reuse.

**Simon Groth** is a writer and editor whose works include *Off the Record*: *25 Years of Music Street Press* (with Sean Sennett, 2010), *Hunted Down and Other Tales* (with Marcus Clarke, 2016), and *Infinite Blue* (with Darren Groth, 2018). With if:book Australia, Simon created a series of awardwinning experimental works including the 24-Hour Book, live writing events at writers festivals around the world, and works of literary remix. His reporting on digital publishing has seen him travel the globe to discuss and explore the challenges and opportunities for writers and readers in a digital world. He is currently an editor at The Writing Platform.

**Daniel C. Howe** is an artist and coder whose work focuses on the relationships between networks, language and politics. His hybrid practice explores the impact of computational technologies on human values such as diversity, privacy and freedom. He has been an opensource advocate and contributor to dozens of socially-engaged software projects over the past two decades. His outputs include software interventions, art installations, algorithmically-generated text and sound, and tools for artists. He currently serves as Associate Professor in the School of Creative Media Hong Kong.

**Janis Jefferies** is professor emerita of Visual Arts, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. She has edited numerous books and chapter contributions on textiles, technology, performance and practice research, most recently *TECHSTYLE Series 2.0: Ariadne's Thread* (2017) and *A Reader TEXTYLE 2.0 FabPublic, Talking about Textiles, Community and Public Space both for CHAT/MILL6 Foundation. Hong Kong* (2018). The Enchantment of Textiles research project with Professor Barbara Layne, Concordia University documents twenty years of their collaborative, textile and technology based research. The exhibition will be shown at the ASM Expression Gallery. Art Science Museum, Singapore in 2019. She is contributing 'Art, Craft & Design technologies' to Charlie Gere and Francesca Franco's three-volume *Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of New Media Art*, to be published in 2022.

**Danuta Kean** writes for *The Guardian* and is books editor at *Mslexia*. She has edited three reports on diversity within UK publishing, including *Writing the Future* (2016) and *Free Verse* (2006), which have resulted in

significant initiatives to improve inclusivity within the worlds of poetry and books. In 2017 she edited *Centre Stage* for the Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation, which has also led to significant initiatives to improve diversity within the theatrical professions. She is a regular speaker on the radio and at festivals, revealing the inner workings of a trade that seems opaque to many, and has taught publishing and journalism on the Creative Writing MA at Brunel University.

**Sarah Kember** is a writer and academic. She is Professor of New Technologies of Communication at Goldsmiths, University of London and Director of Goldsmiths Press. Her work incorporates new media, photography and feminist cultural approaches to science and technology. Publications include a novel and a short story *The Optical Effects of Lightning* (2011) and 'The Mysterious Case of Mr Charles D. Levy' (2010). Experimental work includes an edited open access electronic book entitled *Astrobiology and the Search for Life on Mars* (2011) and 'Media, Mars and Metamorphosis' (*Culture Machine*, Vol. 11). Recent monographs include a feminist critique of smart media: *iMedia*: *The Gendering of Objects*, *Environments and Smart Materials* (2016) and, with Joanna Zylinska, *Life after New Media*: *Mediation as a Vital Process* (2012). Sarah co-edits the journal *Feminist Theory*. Previous publications include: *Virtual Anxiety. Photography*, *New Technologies and Subjectivity* (1998); *Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life* (2003) and the co-edited volume *Inventive Life. Towards the New Vitalism* (2006). Current work includes a novel, provisionally entitled *A Day in The Life of Janet Smart*. With Janis Jefferies, Sarah Kember was co-PI of an RCUK funded project on digital publishing ('Whose Book Is It Anyway?' 2012–2016), part of CREATe (Centre for Creativity, Copyright, Regulation, Enterprise and Technology).

**Smita Kheria** is a Senior Lecturer in Intellectual Property Law at the University of Edinburgh. She is also a member of SCRIPT, a law and technology research centre in Edinburgh Law School. She combines legal expertise in copyright and related rights with socio-legal research on intellectual property law in the real world. Her research has examined how copyright intersects with the everyday lives and creative practices of digital artists, online creative communities, arts and humanities researchers, and professional creators and performers. Smita was PI on two RCUK funded projects (Copyright and Individual Creators; Copyright policy and Creators' Organisations) as part of CREATe. She is a co-author of the textbook *Contemporary Intellectual Property: Law and Policy* (2013, 2016, 2019). She promotes IP awareness through speaking to creative communities and is active in public engagement events (Edinburgh Festival Fringe shows 2017–2019).

**Jason Mathis** is a Calgary-based artist whose work focuses primarily on comics. He studied at the Alberta College of Art & Design for his BFA, and at the Glasgow School of Art for his MFA. Jason's work can be found in small-press publications across North America and the UK. He also paints occasionally and loves to cook.

**Louise O'Hare** founded the London Bookshop Map in 2011 as a project to disseminate new writing by artists, and has commissioned works by Dora García, Holly Pester, Katrina Palmer, Hannah Rickards, and Camilla Wills. She co-ran Publish and be Damned from 2011–2013, and in 2014 set up Three Letter Words, an arts commissioning agency and charity. In 2015 she curated an exhibition reflecting upon Todd Haynes' 1995 film 'Safe' at HOME, Manchester (with Sarah Perks). O'Hare has worked as an editor at Afterall (2013–2016) and a lecturer at Central Saint Martins (2011–2017). She received her Masters in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art (2010), and is currently completing a practice-based Fine Art PhD at Northumbria University titled *Centrefold*  (*1974*) *— A Memoir*. Her research interests include gossip, feminist art histories, self-publishing, the politics of care, and pornography.

**Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg** is a research affiliate at The University of Sydney's Conservatorium of Music, PARADESIC archives. Her research interests include Australian Aboriginal Choral singing, the anthropology of religion and the relationship between music, health and wellbeing from an ethnomusicological perspective. She is currently an ambassador on the EU Horizon 2020 FREYA project, exploring the uses of persistent identifiers in digital scholarship for arts and humanities. Muriel is also a Researcher Development Manager (strategy) at the University of Sydney. ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2337-7962

**Sophie Rochester** is the founder of The Literary Platform, a specialist digital publishing organisation. She was also founder of the Fiction Uncovered Prize, co-founder of The Writing Platform and co-author of *The Publishing Landscape in China*. She has been a speaker on digital publishing at TOC New York, the Frankfurt Book Fair, Bologna Book Fair, Editech Milan, British Council Crossing the River conferences in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. She is also a visiting lecturer at the London College of Communications MA in Publishing and UEA's MA in Creative Writing.

**Joseph Turcotte** holds a PhD from the York & Ryerson Joint Graduate Program in Communication & Culture. His research and policy analysis focusses on the political economy and social impacts of intellectual property (IP), innovation, and the knowledge-based economy. He researches and publishes extensively on how IP, knowledge/ information and data are developed, managed, and commercialized in the knowledge-based, digital economy. He is currently the Innovation Clinic Coordinator at IP Osgoode, Osgoode Hall Law School's Intellectual Property & Technology Law Program.

**Eva Weinmayr** is an artist, educator, researcher and writer based in London and Gothenburg. She investigates in her work the border crossings between contemporary art, radical education and institutional analysis by experimenting with modes of knowledge formation. In 2009 she co-founded AND Publishing, a feminist publishing platform and collaborative practice based in London. Recent projects include 'Boxing and Unboxing' at Marabouparken Konsthall Stockholm (with Rosalie Schweiker), 'The Piracy Project' an exploration of the philosophical, legal and social implications of book piracy (with Andrea Francke) and 'Let's Mobilize: What is Feminist Pedagogy?', an ongoing collective experiment with queer and feminist pedagogies (Valand Academy working group). Books include (*Pause*) *21 Scenes Concerning the Silence of Art in Ruins* (2010) and *Downing Street — Help! David Cameron Likes My Art* (2015). She is currently conducting a practice-based PhD on the micro-politics of publishing at Valand Academy in Gothenburg, Sweden.

# Introduction: Whose Book is it Anyway? A View from Elsewhere on Publishing, Copyright and Creativity

*Janis Jefferies and Sarah Kember*

This anthology offers an approach to publishing that does more than ask if current copyright frameworks are fit for purpose in a digital age. It opens out the copyright debate, first to questions of open access, ethics and creativity and second to views from elsewhere — artist's perspectives, writer's perspectives, feminist, and international perspectives that are too often marginalized or elided altogether. The book investigates the future of publishing in the digital age, in particular the role of access, ethics and creativity and their relation to copyright within or from the perspective of creative practice. Contributions were commissioned as part of our role in CREATe (Centre for Copyright, Regulation, Enterprise and Technology)1 and include publishers (such as Michael Bhaskar, co-founder of Canelo), industry experts (such as Sophie Rochester, founder of The Literary Platform and Yodomo), academics (including legal scholars Ronan Deazley and Smita Kheria as well as arts and humanities scholars such as Janneke Adema and Eva Weinmayr), writers (such as the poet John Cayley) and artists (including J. R. Carpenter).

1 http://www.create.ac.uk/research-programme/theme-4/wp4d-whose-book-is-itanyway-ip-collaborative-business-models-and-questions-of-ethics-and-creativityin-digital-publishing/

*Whose Book is it Anyway*? follows the trajectory of a four-year research project conducted through a series of workshops held at venues ranging from Nesta, the London Book Fair and the British Library to *The Guardian* and the V&A. The research was predicated on what is colloquially termed the 'copyfight', brought into focus by UK reforms in intellectual property (IP) and open access2 and producing something of an impasse or standoff between those in the publishing industry who are concerned to retain, or even strengthen copyright in a digital context and, on the other hand, the technology industry and its advocates in government who regard intellectual property rights as more of an impediment than an incentive to innovation and economic growth.

We began by examining a range of hopes and fears concerning the extent to which the UK copyright framework (prior to the implementation of the proposed reforms)3 was considered fit for purpose in relation to writing and publishing in the digital age. Our concern was to frame these hopes and fears through what Raymond Williams terms a 'structure of feeling' about technology.4 In other words, there seemed to be a degree of consensus that digital technology is a game changer in publishing, whether those changes were positive or negative with respect to copyright. The question concerning technology, and particularly technology as an agent of change, is almost as fraught as the question concerning intellectual property as an agent of creativity. The concept of technological determinism encompasses the possibility that technology causes, or conversely, is the effect of wider social and economic changes. As a causal agent, technology

2 The context for this research project, which ran from 2012–2016 was provided by proposed reforms by Professor Ian Hargreaves (May 2011) and Dame Janet Finch (June 2012), 'Digital Opportunity. A Review of Intellectual Property and Growth' https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/ attachment\_data/file/32563/ipreview-finalreport.pdf; 'Accessibility, Sustainability, excellence: How to Expand Access to Research Publications' (Report of the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings), https://www.acu. ac.uk/research-information-network/finch-report-final

3 See 'Exceptions to Copyright: an Overview', Intellectual Property Office report, October 2014. This report summarises what has changed with respect to caricature, parody or pastiche; quotation; research and private study; text and data mining; education and teaching; archiving and preservation; public administration; accessible formats for disabled people, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/ government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment\_data/file/448274/Exceptions\_to\_ copyright\_-\_Guidance\_for\_creators\_and\_copyright\_owners.pdf

4 Raymond Williams, *The Long Revolution* (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961).

sits in the middle of the copyfight, both maintaining, and effectively negating opposing viewpoints. We might point to a consensual technological determinism that both undermines and structures the opposition between a culture that is free (and freely shared) and one that is, necessarily, proprietorial. The consensus sounds something like this: in the digital era, copyright is broken and must therefore be fixed. Either copyright is broken and it must be reformed and reinforced or it is broken and must be rendered redundant or reduced through a number of exceptions. What maintains the consensus is an ontology of the digital *as* copying, sharing, openness and re-use — the idea that the Internet particularly is all about, or just *is* sharing, whether that takes place person to person or from many to many. Either we go with the very nature and being of technology or we take tougher steps to guard against it. However, it might be more useful to think less about the essence of technology and more about its affordances — the types of activity and behaviour that it, along with other forms of agency, both enables and constrains. The affordances of digital technology are less monolithic than its alleged essence. They might, for example, be about both owning and sharing cultural content and they are certainly not reducible to economic growth.

The technological consensus concerning the need for copyright reform dilutes the apparent conflict of the copyfight and, more importantly, depoliticizes the current debate about publishing. Taken together with the related agenda for open access reform, the question of copyright in a digital age delimits what can be said and done with respect to academic publishing, at least. In a closed workshop that took place at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2014, a small group of academic publishers, together with artists involved in publishing experiments, examined some of the issues that might, but at the time did not impinge on UK policy. These included questions about ethics and responsibility in publishing as well as issues about creative invention, experimentation and intervention that cut across, or combine with a neoliberal agenda solely focused on innovation. The workshop also considered the conditions of possibility or the social and political context surrounding publishing activity and underlying issues of scholarly practice, such as peer review, citation and free labour that are political in the sense that they adhere to existing divisions in gender, race, class and career stage.

It is interesting to note that the College Art Association (CAA) in the US commissioned a report on Fair Use, which was then published as a Code of Best Practice in Fair Use for the Visual Arts in 2015. The Associate Acquisitions Editor at MIT Press, Victoria Hindley, was sufficiently motivated to work with her colleagues to pursue a fair use initiative of their own. With support from the Executive Editor, Press Director and legal counsel Hindley helped to define a progressive position in support of responsible fair use. MIT Press has developed proposed new contract language in support of a position that no longer requires authors to indemnify the press when they have made a reasonable good faith determination of fair use; and, to further empower artists, the press has crafted permissions guidelines that take advantage of the CAA Code and refers authors to it. Martha Rosler, whose 'Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful 1967–72' is in the TATE's collection, has for many years incorporated into her work images circulating in what she has called the public sphere of mass media, including newspapers, magazines, and television, without considering copyright. Since Rosler is a leading contemporary critical voice within feminist discourse, processes like hers, as for many artists, constitute an essential form of critique and a means of inviting the reader/viewer to rethink the boundaries between the public and the private, the social and political.

In his contribution to this volume, Ronan Deazley draws our attention to commercial journal publishers that profit enormously from academic free labour (writing, editing, peer reviewing) and then refuse to implement copyright exceptions, for example, concerning the use of comic art within a piece of comic scholarship. The same publishers, we might add, may also be levying article processing charges for the privilege of publishing open access. As Deazley suggests, one option available to authors is to withdraw their labour. That labour might then be redirected towards more ethical, responsible and inventive publishers, including, among the workshop discussants, *Ada. A Journal of Gender*, *New Media and Technology*, Mattering Press, Mute Publishing and Goldsmiths Press.

Based on this and other workshops, our research suggested that the reform agenda in the UK limited publishing praxis and, while creating polarized, ideological stances, effectively neutered any meaningful political engagement — for example, about whether culture and knowledge should be publicly or privately owned — by means of a technological consensus. Where copyright reform required critique, critique tended to be subsumed within pro- and anti-reform stances. The value of critique lies in its ability to indicate a way through such dialectical structures. In our case, it was brought to bear on the impasse, the somewhat asymmetrical standoff in the relation between publishers and, specifically the Publishers Association (anti-reform) on the one hand, and the technology industries, specifically Google on the other. Publishing is represented at government level by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). The technology industries are represented by Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS). A 2013 DCMS report entitled 'Supporting the Creative Economy' rejected the proposal for reforms set out by Professor Ian Hargreaves, and not only lamented the UK government's favourable response to the proposal, but accused it of letting the tech industry, Google in particular, in through the back door:

Following all the evidence we have received, we think Hargreaves is wrong in the benefits his report claims for his recommended changes to UK copyright law. We regret that the Hargreaves report adopts a significantly low standard in relation to the need for objective evidence in determining copyright policy. We do not consider Professor Hargreaves has adequately assessed the dangers of putting the established system of copyright at risk for no obvious benefit. We are deeply concerned that there is an underlying agenda driven at least partly by technology companies (Google foremost among them) which, if pursued uncritically, could cause irreversible damage to the creative sector on which the United Kingdom's future prosperity will significantly depend.5

Rather than aligning our CREATe project with either BIS or DCMS, pro- or anti-reform agendas, we sought to develop a critical framework based on the testimony of artists, writers and academics as well as publishers, agents and technology developers. Our aim was not to balance the debate as much as to open out the reform agenda and signal the possibility of moving beyond technologically deterministic hopes and fears as well as simplistic ideological divisions between a notion of free culture or knowledge and one that is proprietorial.

5 House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee, *Supporting the Creative Economy*: *Third Report of Session 2013–2014*, Vol. I (London: The Stationery Office Limited, 2013), pp. 4–5, https://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/ cmselect/cmcumeds/674/674.pdf

The problem with our initial question — about whether the UK copyright system was fit for purpose in a digital age — was that it had the capacity to reinforce rather than challenge existing ideological divisions. It could produce arguments in favour of change and also some defensive, 'no change needed' reactions. We commissioned a series of position papers (see appendix) that demonstrate that this polarization did not always occur, but by reframing the initial question, posing it more in terms of how writers and artists may eat, we strove to avoid false dichotomies and the worst pitfalls of a technological imaginary. We also wanted to question the alignment between creativity and economic growth that had been so clearly signalled in the first phase of the research, avoiding, as much as possible, the opposition between a neoliberal and romantic reading of creativity and instead asking artists, writers and publishers to reflect on the always antagonistic but never purely oppositional relation between writing for love and writing for money.

Financial incentive is one of the key assumptions underpinning intellectual property laws. That remains the case even as those laws become subject to reform. Hargreaves recognizes that rights that 'support growth by promoting innovation through the offer of a temporary monopoly to creators and inventors' might also 'stifle growth where transaction costs are high or rights are fragmented in a way that makes them hard to access'. If the problem with IP is that it fosters a closed market dominated by established players in technology and content, the solution, he suggests, is to redesign IP in order to facilitate a fairer, more transparent, more open and competitive market that encourages new entrants and enables rather than constrains further innovation. The solution to piracy in a digital world 'where copying and distribution are more or less free', is not, for Hargreaves, copyright enforcement as much as a modernization of copyright law that encourages 'open and competitive markets in licensed digital content'.6 It is clear that Hargreaves' reforms are oriented towards the technology industries, but he applies the same principles to publishing and the so-called 'creative industries' because he recognizes their economic value.7

6 Hargreaves, 'Digital Opportunity', p. 10.

7 Ibid., p. 3.

The assumption that creators are predominantly if not exclusively motivated by economic rights and financial reward continues to be held at policy level despite a number of academic studies that have subjected it to critical examination.8 Where Ruth Towse underlines the importance of moral rights, Schlesinger and Waelde, starting from the observation that 'both policy and law have relatively little engagement with most cultural work and what makes it tick', examine the relevance of the rights regime for how dancers and musicians make a living.9 Focusing on portfolio work undertaken in conditions of relative economic precarity, they emphasize 'the trade-offs made between making money through commercial activities and making little or none through the pursuit of creative and aesthetic goals'.10 On the basis that this trade-off applies to writers as much as dancers and musicians, and bearing in mind the fall in author's earnings — a drop of 19% in the decade from 2005 to 2015 — we might expect the balance to be increasingly skewed in favour of non-financial incentives.11

However, as Smita Kheria shows in her contribution to this book, it is as erroneous to dismiss the idea as to assume that economic reward is what drives writers to write. As a means of securing economic remuneration, of any scale, copyright has a more complex, less 'all or nothing' role to play in creative practice. From the point of view of the writers Kheria interviewed, copyright might contribute to earnings but, just as importantly, have a symbolic role in bestowing value and recognition on writing as a way of life. The role of copyright is seen by some writers to be more important in a digital environment that simultaneously threatens and validates their rights over an original work by deeming it worthy of being shared and reused. Here, the economic rights and moral interests of individual authors are reappraised — by the authors themselves — in relation to a wider online community of

8 Ruth Towes, 'Copyright and Artists: A View from Cultural Economics', *Journal of Economic Surveys* 20.4 (2006), 569–85; Philip Schlesinger and Charlotte Waelde, 'Copyright and Cultural Work: An Exploration', *Innovation. The European Journal of Social Science Research* 25.1 (2012), 11–18.

9 Schlesinger and Waelde, 'Copyright and Cultural Work', p. 6.

10 Ibid., p. 16.

11 Johanna Gibson, Phillip Johnson and Gaetano Dimita, *The Business of Being an Author*: *A Survey of Author's Earnings and Contracts* (Queen Mary: University of London, 2015), https://orca.cf.ac.uk/72431/1/Final Report - For Web Publication.pdf

users, including users who might become the authors of secondary or derivative works such as, for example, fan fiction.

If the role of copyright in creative practice is complex in as far as it is both economic and social, pertaining to individuals and communities, to what extent is that complexity reflected in copyright reforms? UK copyright reforms subsequent to Hargreaves' review are more limited than the scope of the review would indicate.12 Centred on parody, quotation, research, text and data mining, education and teaching, archiving and preservation, public administration and the generation of accessible formats for people with disabilities, the reforms amount to a set of minimal copyright exceptions that are contained within the remit of fair dealing. Fair dealing is colloquially understood as 'fair stealing' and it is a means of preserving the principles of copyright by ensuring that the amount taken or borrowed from a work is reasonable and appropriate and the market value is not adversely affected. Fair dealing is the wiggle room within the existing UK (and Canadian) copyright system. At most, this has been extended slightly, while the system stays in place. Where copyright reforms in the UK are in themselves surprisingly conservative, the major challenge to copyright comes through related reforms in open access, which apply principally to academic publishing.

We will address the question of open access shortly, but it seems that complexity, derived from the experience of creative practitioners, along with criticality, is something of an anathema to copyright law and to the factions invested in it. Set up in order to analyse and critically investigate the case for IP reform, CREATe itself (both a research centre and a consortium of Scottish and English universities) was initially caught up in the copyright wars. In a blog published in *The Bookseller* (a UK trade publishing magazine) in 2013, CREATe director Martin Kretschmer was forced to deny an accusation by Richard Mollet, then Chief Executive of the Publishers Association, that the project was biased in favour of copyright reform.13 Kretschmer also defended the role of academic research as a way of breaking the deadlock between what he called the 'incumbents' and the 'insurgents':

12 See 'Exceptions to Copyright'.

13 Martin Kretschmer, 'Copyright Control', *The Bookseller*, 28 March 2013, http://www. thebookseller.com/blogs/copyright-control

They speak with different voices, and face different challenges. Mollet's instincts are with the incumbents, and there is nothing wrong with that. Still, incumbents need happy customers as much as anyone, and insurgents are usually much better at sensing new needs or disaffection. Where there are large swathes of unhappy customers — for example in relation to research publications (witness the data mining debate) — the reflex to reach for stronger rights and enforcement may have similar results as it did in the music industry. We don't know but we can find out. This is what research is about.

The division between incumbents and insurgents, the copyright wars themselves, are a distraction, if not from the realities of technological change and the associated shifts in consumer demand,14 then from the underlying politics of communication. This, as Sarah Kember has previously argued,15 has to do with the privatization, marketization and standardization of scholarly and creative practice; the neoliberal framing of the so-called knowledge and creative industries and the transformation of the scholar, writer and artist into the entrepreneur or the knowledge and creative professional.

Kember's position is that copyright and open access reforms mask the politics of communication in a narrative of crisis centred on technology. It is also that open access effectively delivers the 'real' copyright reforms by obliging the public sector, universities in particular, to make published works freely available for commercial use in the private sector. As the sociologist John Holmwood notes, a key problem with open access, which on one level is simply about removing price barriers to published research and widening readership, is precisely this asymmetric obligation to be open.16

The Finch report on open access, published in 2012 (the year after Hargreaves' review of IP), maintains that barriers to access, especially when research is publicly funded 'are increasingly unacceptable in an online world'. That is, they 'restrict the innovation, growth and other

14 See Google's Senior Copyright Counsel William Paltry, whose sense of these realities is very much the case for the insurgents: 'We Need to Redefine What "Copy" Means', *The Guardian*, 13 March 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/ law/2012/mar/13/how-to-fix-copyright-extract

15 'Why Write? Feminism, Publishing and the Politics of Communication', *New Formations* 83 (2014), 99–117 and 'Why Publish?' *Learned Publishing*, special issue The University Press Redux 29:S1 (2016), 348–53, https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1042

16 John Holmwood, 'Commercial Enclosure: Whatever Happened to Open Access?', *Radical Philosophy* 181 (2013), 2–5.

benefits' that might otherwise accrue.17 A concern here with public access to publicly funded research by means of 'enhanced transparency, openness and accountability' leads to an emphasis on 'closer linkages between research and innovation, with *benefits* for public policy and services, and for economic growth' [my emphasis]. Access here means access to research for industry and enterprises. The Finch recommendations in favour of gold open access publishing18 funded by author or article processing charges (APCs) plus minimal restrictions on the rights of use and re-use are now incorporated into the UK Higher Education sector.19 The changes are controversial, not least since the Creative Commons license (CC BY) mandated by Research Councils UK (RCUK) — which is now renamed as Research England/UKRI — allows for commercial reuse of research material with attribution rather than the author's permission. An alternative would be a non-commercial share-alike license (CC BY-NC-SA) or one that simply allows noncommercial users to download and share work as long as the author is credited (CC BY-NC-ND).

Reforms of open access are ongoing in the UK and across mainland Europe. At the time of writing, the UK is a signatory to Plan S, an initiative by the European Commission to accelerate the transition to full and immediate open access.20 What makes the UK unique is that it ties a mandate (rather than a recommendation) to the national research audit, the Research Excellence Framework (REF), making open access article (REF 2021) and monograph (REF 2027) publishing a condition of entry *without* any commitment to additional public funding. This has raised concerns for the future of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences in the UK, which receive significantly less funding than STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) fields and will face the higher costs of monograph publishing. The British Academy's position paper on open access monograph publishing raises further questions, notably about the extent to which UK academics will be disadvantaged

17 Finch, 'Digital Opportunity', p. 5.

18 The difference between gold and green open access is explained here: https://www. jisc.ac.uk/guides/an-introduction-to-open-access

19 The National Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021 mandates open access publishing for articles and conference proceedings. At the time of writing, there is very likely to be a mandate for open access monograph publishing for REF 2027.

20 https://www.scienceeurope.org/coalition-s/

by having restrictions placed on where they can publish, whether they or their institution can afford to and whether it will be feasible to collaborate with colleagues outside of the UK.21

Martin Paul Eve, an advocate of open access, or more specifically, of a re-politicized open access, still recognizes it as an instrument of neoliberalism understood as 'the practice of using the free market as the assignation of value.'22 Key traits of neoliberalism include, for Eve, a concern with quantification and measurement, the 'belief that all aspects of society are best handled on a for-profit basis through competition' and an emphasis on openness, transparency and accountability in order to facilitate quantification. The UK's open access mandate certainly highlights neoliberal values, but beyond a top-down government agenda, the values of open access remain contested by various stakeholders, with a range of library and scholar-led publishing initiatives (such as new university presses) as well as funder initiatives driving the agenda forwards.

Dissent does exist within academia. Meera Sabaratnam and Paul Kirby, for example, refer to open access as a threat to academic freedom.23 They argue that it places pressure on institutions to distribute inadequate funding (which they cannot do fairly, openly or transparently) and increases academic inequality — within and between institutions — 'by linking prestige in research and publishing to the capacity to pay APCs, rather than to academic qualities.' There is a question mark then, not only over who publishes and where, but over what is considered publishable — the kind of work produced. Academic research may very well be judged by standards other than peer review. David Berry correctly observes that open access is a disruption strategy within the UK's university sector, one that 'will have dire implications for

22 Martin Eve, 'Open Access, "Neoliberalism", "Impact", and the Privatisation of Knowledge', 10 March 2013, www.martineve.com/2013/03/10/open-accessneoliberalism-impact-and-the-privatisation-of-knowledge/ It might be argued that Eve's OLH (Open Library of the Humanities), a library subscription programme promoting open access work, is actually itself contributing to a free market in open access publishing.

21 'Open Access and Monographs: Where Are we Now?', May 2018, https://www. thebritishacademy.ac.uk/publications/open-access-monographs-where-are-we-now

23 Meera Sabaratnam and Paul Kirby, 'Open Access: HEFCE, REF2020 and the Threat to Academic Freedom', 4 December 2012, https://thedisorderofthings. com/2012/12/04/open-access-hefce-ref2020-and-the-threat-to-academic-freedom/

academic labour, thought and freedom if it is not contested.'24 For him too, it is about obtaining 'greater public subsidy for the private sector's use of university research outputs' without any reciprocal contribution. For this reason, Kember has argued that academics concerned with the politics of communication should 'open out from open access'25 and turn their attention from copyright per se26 towards the incursion of venture capital into higher education and the profiteering by, for example, academia.edu, that is already taking place in the name of openness.

Whether or not it is possible to re-politicize open access itself — and a range of scholars and publishers, many associated with the Radical Open Access Movement27 maintain that it is — or indeed whether it is possible to reverse neoliberal policies within higher education, it is possible and necessary to politicize the role of copyright and open access reform in publishing and to explore various modes and practices of critical intervention. Contributors to this volume engage these tasks in diverse ways and with very different voices and opinions. Some speak purely as creative practitioners while others, from within or outside of the academy, discuss the role of creative practice. Some contributors touch lightly on the question of copyright, extending it in relation to open access, ethics or creativity. There is not a singular argument or viewpoint here, but there is a shared sense of the value of creative practice and the importance of critical intervention in publishing. Danuta Kean, writing here, reminds us that publishing is an industry that is still somewhat self-defeating in its lack of racial diversity. Mindful of the legacy of artist and feminist publishing initiatives in the UK and internationally, we have sought the viewpoints and the investments of

24 David Berry, 'The Uses of Open Access', *STUNLAW*: *Philosophy and Critique for a Digital Age*, 16 February 2017, http://stunlaw.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-uses-ofopen-access.html

25 Sarah Kember, 'Opening Out from Open Access: Writing and Publishing in Response to Neoliberalism', *Ada*: *A Journal of Gender*, *New Media*, *and Technology* 4 (2014), https://doi.org/10.7264/N31C1V51 See also Sarah Kember, 'Why Publish?', *Learned Publishing* 29:S1 (2016), 348–53, https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1042

26 Noting that copyright and pricing mean different things to different publishers, protecting the vested interests of large commercial publishers like Elsevier while being necessary to the sustainability of small or independent publishers like Goldsmiths Press.

27 https://radicaloa.disruptivemedia.org.uk/about/

a range of different constituents in the future of academic and trade publishing.

We have organised the book into two sections. The first section extends questions of copyright to those of open access, ethics and creativity in publishing; the second looks at views from elsewhere. In Part I, John Cayley and Daniel C. Howe offer a statement (originally commissioned as one of our position papers — see appendix) by *The Readers Project*, a collective of poetic readers that emerge in relation to various texts. The text discussed and illustrated here is a poetic reading of Samuel Beckett's late novella *How It Is.* Cayley and Howe contrast their creative appropriation of Beckett's text — which runs 'counter to the customs and laws of intellectual property and defies conventions of authorship' while remaining respectful to the original work, oriented to the 'commons of language' and responsive to the evolving technologies of literary practice — with further developments in aggressive data mining, big tech and AI that no longer support those values.  Also in Part I, Louise O'Hare looks askew at copyright in Cuba through the prism of an anti-copyright art magazine. O'Hare foregrounds publishing itself as a creative practice that attends to form as well as content. Janneke Adema decouples the practice of writing from economic rights and remuneration and argues that we should think about publishing less in terms of creative autonomies — author and work — and more in terms of creative communities and relationalities in which authors and works intersect with each other in ways that are dynamic and co-constitutive. Adema's contribution resonates with that of Joseph Turcotte in Part II of the book. Turcotte maintains that IP law simply does not align with creative practice in as far as creativity is inherently relational and copyright is predicated on autonomies. Turcotte draws on a feminist critique of copyright law which argues that 'copyright is built around certain conceptions of the self, society and worth, which translate, through law, into norms about who can speak, who can listen, what can be said and with what force of authority'.28 In as far as copyright

28 Carys J. Craig, Joseph F. Turcotte and Rosemary J. Coombe, 'What's Feminist about Open Access? A Relational Approach to Copyright in the Academy', *feminists@ law* 1.1 (2011), http://journals.kent.ac.uk/kent/index.php/feministsatlaw/article/ view/7/54

entrenches liberal assumptions and social norms, feminist legal studies has looked favourably on the open access movement that appears to supersede it and has foregrounded a key intervention that replaces a copyright system based on the autonomy of author and work, with one based on relationalities between authors and works within and across specific social situations.

*Whose Book is it Anyway*? combines these more speculative perspectives on the future of copyright and the future of publishing with those that look at current practice in a historical context. Michael Bhaskar, in Part I, argues that in a digital environment in which anyone can publish and so much content is freely shared, the traditional roles performed by publishers — filtering and amplification — become more, not less important. Sophie Rochester, also in Part I, returns to the question of what motivates writers when rights-related income is falling while J. R. Carpenter, in Part II, locates writing as a creative practice within traditions such as textual appropriation or borrowing that constitute a challenge to copyright. Eva Weinmayr, along with Carpenter, offers an artist's view on copyright as a system that strives to protect rather than proliferate ideas. Weinmayr offers a review of case law in an art context while Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg, echoing Adema and Turcotte, questions copyright's ability to recognize cross-cultural co-created works in a music context. Swijghuisen Reigersberg's main contribution to this volume is to highlight the challenge that co-authorship, along with indigenous cultural and moral rights, pose to open access as well as to copyright policy.

Taken together, these perspectives on creative practice provide a historical and critical framework for understanding and intervening in the current copyright dialectic. They demonstrate, sometimes by sharing examples of that practice (Cayley and Howe, Carpenter), sometimes from an international perspective (O'Hare, Swijghuisen Reigersberg, Turcotte and Groth) how the law has been, and is being lived with. Based on processes of appropriation, remix, 'reinterpretation, recombination and transformation', creative practices have always adapted to, worked around, and in a key sense flouted copyright law.29 This of course raises a question about whether copyright, in its current, digital context,

29 Carys J. Craig, 'Introduction — Copyright, Communication & Culture: Towards a Relational Theory of Copyright Law', *Comparative Research in Law & Political Economy. Research Paper No. 23/2011*, 2011, https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku. ca/cgi/clpe/61

*needs* to be either strengthened or loosened. If copyright has, in effect, always been messy, the final question addressed in this book is not only whether copyright ever needed to be reformed along the lines originally determined by Hargreaves and Finch, but whether it even needs to be made relational or remixed, according to the perspectives foregrounded here. Simon Groth, in our final chapter, suggests that a remixed copyright system would not be based on rights protection for the individual, presumed to be autonomous author and his or her work, but rather on a combination of mutual, author to author, author to reader rights and responsibilities for the always already remixed work. Rather than regarding remix or relationality programmatically, as the next stage in the reformation of copyright, it might be better to see it as an intervention and as antagonist: a means of re-politicizing copyright and publishing in the face of a reformist technological consensus.

### Works Cited

## PART I

# OPENING OUT THE COPYRIGHT DEBATE: OPEN ACCESS, ETHICS AND CREATIVITY

1. A Statement by *The Readers Project*1 Concerning Contemporary Literary Practice, Digital Mediation, Intellectual Property, and Associated Moral Rights

*John Cayley and Daniel C. Howe*

During an era already defined as digital, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, we have arrived at a historical moment when processes designated as artificially intelligent are engineered to work with vast quantities of aggregated 'data' in order to generate new artefacts, statements, visualizations, and even decisions derived from patterns 'discovered' in this data. The data in question may well be linguistic and, occasionally, the AI-processed outcomes may be aesthetically motivated. Thus, our brave new world contains experiments in virtual literary art, linguistic artefacts 'created' by artificial intelligence. Or, a little more accurately, we are able to read, if we want to, works of language art that have been generated by rebranded, connectionist-based machine 'learning,' by recurrent or convolutional neural networks. Who or what is the 'author' of such outcomes if we are to consider them as works of language art? The 'death of the author' or, at least, the problematic *question* of authorship was raised well before electronic literary practice appeared to

1 *The Readers Project* is a collection of distributed, performative, quasi-autonomous poetic 'readers' — active, procedural entities with distinct reading behaviors and strategies that explore the culture of reading, http://thereadersproject.org/

actualize postmodern theories in the late 1990s. Even then, works were authored by what N. Katherine Hayles now characterizes as 'cognitive assemblages' — human, medial, and computational. For these earlier works, however, their coding and its operations could be accounted for and anticipated by human author-engineers, still able to identify with their software and claim some moral rights with respect to the aesthetics of these processes.

Neural networks are not at all new. Yet with huge increases in raw computing power, and the spectacular accumulation of vast data sets, they are back in fashion and, likely, here to stay. One of a number of valid critiques of such algorithms is that they derive their patterns from the data in a manner that is highly abstract and largely inaccessible to human scrutiny, in the sense that we cannot, exhaustively, or in any detail, account for the specificities of what they produce. Thus, we might ask — in similar but differing circumstances as compared with earlier digital language art: is the language generated in this way *original*? Are we to consider an AI to be the *author* of such language?

But we must also ask: who owns the data? Who controls and benefits from its use? Answers to these questions will have momentous, potentially catastrophic consequences for cultural practice and production. The feverish enthusiasm surrounding AI seems likely to distort not only jurisprudence, but also socio- and political economic regulation with respect, for example, to the custom and law of intellectual property. If data sets and corpora are publicly available and these contain, for example, linguistic artefacts that are protected by copyright, AI processes operating on these corpora may appeal to the concept of 'non-expressive fair use.' It is presumed that the AI processes do not understand, appreciate, or care about — we might say they cannot 'read' — the expressive content of the protected artefacts in the corpora that they process. Thus the copyright holders of this content may have no claim, based on infringement, concerning whatever it is that the AI processes produce, whether or not this generates commercial or other benefits for the AI and its owners. That legal conceptions of this kind are being debated and, less often, established in court should not, in our opinion, cause us concern for the erosion of authors' rights (as subject to non-expressive fair use). Instead we should see this as a kind of retrospective justification — perhaps calculated on behalf of the beneficiaries — for land-grab, enclosure-style *theft* from and of the cultural commons, all within legislative regimes that are propping up an inequitable, non-mutual, and unworkable framework for the generative creativity that copyright is supposed to encourage. The conventional custom and law of intellectual property, we say, does not and cannot encourage such creativity once culture is subject to digitalization. Arguably, copyright law has been 'an ass' since at least the age of mechanical reproduction. These days, calling it a dinosaur is too polite; it is a transnational swarm of Jurassic-Park raptors in the service of vectoralist superpowers.2

The raptors need retrospective justification because, in the guise of the robots and spiders that scurry over the Web, for example, they undertake their activities regardless of copyright, finding whatever they find with no sense of moral rights concerning association or integrity, and effectively proceeding on the basis of something like a presumption of 'non-expressive fair use.' They, the robots, don't know what they're doing, so we all consider what they are doing to be 'OK' — copying, appropriating, and processing whatever they find, regardless of who may 'own' it in terms of copyright. And there is a lot of stuff that these robots process that is clearly and absolutely 'protected' in terms of current legislation. All blogs, for instance, whether or not copyright is explicitly claimed for them. The robots' owners may not, at first, historically, have known what their robots were doing (any more than the robots do), but this hasn't prevented them from translating such 'non-expressive fair use' into privately owned wealth, value, and power to an unprecedented extent and at historically breakneck velocities.

Compare the situation with respect to one of *The Readers Project*'s prominent outcomes. *The Project* is still squarely, for the moment, within the 'earlier' field of practice that I characterized, following Hayles, as a matter of cognitive assemblage: algorithmic cognisors working *with*

2 'Vectoralist' is the name that McKenzie Wark gave, persuasively, to a new exploitative ruling class which controls and profits from vectors of political and economic attention in a world where information is treated as a natural resource, extending earlier capitalist models and critiques. McKenzie Wark, *A Hacker Manifesto* (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), https://archive.org/ stream/pdfy-RtCf3CYEbjKrXgFe/A Hacker Manifesto - McKenzie Wark\_djvu.txt

human cognisors, the latter more or less self-conscious concerning the aesthetics, innovation, and originality of *The Project* as a whole. The installation *Common Tongues* and the artists' book *How It Is in Common Tongues* both make transgressive use of networked search services in order to produce aesthetic works of conceptual and computational literature.3 These works read and reframe Samuel Beckett's late novella, *How It Is* (1961). *The Project*'s software entities read through the work, seeking out and resolving its text into a sequence of phrases with particular characteristics. We call these Longest Common Phrases (or LCPs). Each LCP is the longest sequence of words, beginning from any specific point in the text, that can be found on the Internet, *not* written by or attributed to its author (as far as we can tell). We use Internet searches to find these phrases in other contexts, proving their continued circulation in the commons of language (an essential part of the cultural commons referred to above), unfettered by any liens of association or integrity. We then cite the web occurrences of these LCPs in *How It Is in Common Tongues*, a book released by *The Project*'s artists. In fact, we resolve the *entire* text of *How It Is* into common phrases as inscribed by thousands of other English language users. By doing so, we produce both an elegant aesthetic object and a text that reads quite differently from the original.

3 Please refer to *The Project*'s website http://thereadersproject.org, and, for further linked documentation of these works, to the ELMCIP Knowledge Base at http:// elmcip.net/node/4677 (*Common Tongues*) and http://elmcip.net/node/5194 (*How it Is in Common Tongues*). For conceptual literature see, inter alia: Kenneth Goldsmith, *Uncreative Writing*: *Managing Language in the Digital Age* (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011) https://doi.org/10.1353/jjq.2012.0020; Craig Douglas Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith (eds.), *Against Expression*: *An Anthology of Conceptual Writing* (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011); and Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman, *Notes on Conceptualisms* (Brooklyn, NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009). Computational literature does not yet have so readily identifiable apologia. However Nick Montfort, http://nickm.com, is a major exponent and the work of Noah Wardrip-Fruin, both aesthetic and theoretical, is highly relevant and significant.

Fig. 1.1. *How It Is In Common Tongues*. Image provided by the authors, CC BY 4.0.

Fig. 1.2. *How It Is In Common Tongues*. Image provided by the authors, CC BY 4.0.

This new text is constantly interrupted by reference — by distracting invitations to turn to other networked writings. As such its paratext and punctuation is entirely novel and calls attention to alternate phrasings that generate strange, new, and differently engaging prose rhythms. It is a conceptual work: a new, distinct instance of digital language art. Nonetheless, it is also exhaustively associated with the Beckett's novella. Its punctuation and annotation have been produced by algorithmic processes that transact with Internet search services in deliberate contravention of these services' terms of use. Services providers, typically and non-mutually, regulate or deny robots — programmatic or algorithmic clients — access to their hoards. We claim that the transgressive — and controversial — practices by which we have created this work are significant additions to the existing repertoire of literary aesthetic practices. The work fully acknowledges and is highly respectful of its sources. It is undoubtedly non- if not anti-commercial. It is practice-based research that has already achieved considerable pedagogical traction with scholars and students internationally. Nonetheless, it is difficult to conceive that it would be read as an entirely original work, with little in the way of a 'regular' or 'mechanical' relation to its sources. *The Project*'s position, however, is that it *is* an original work, taking phrases from the commons of language, composing and punctuating them in manner that produces an incisive work of critical language art. In any immediate or longer-term future, if the kind of algorithmic and human compositional processes that underlie this piece were denied or contradicted — either by inadequate custom and law, or by vectoralist superpowers unilaterally and arbitrarily enforcing the *force majeure* of their terms of service — this would be part, we believe, of nothing less than a more general cultural and artistic catastrophe.

Moreover, in installations of *Common Tongues*, LCPs from a section of *How It Is* are used to discover and present, as textual collage, *additional* human-selected contexts for these LCP phrases, additional aesthetic language composed neither by Beckett, nor by *The Project*'s artists. These selections are quasi-algorithmically hand-stitched together (human authors editing generated text), maintaining syntactic regularity such that a new text is formed: one for which algorithmic processes guarantee that *none* of the constituent language is authored by the text's makers. This text has its own significance and affect, though generated in regular relation with Beckett, and with hundreds of other writers. It could not have been made without the digital, without algorithms. It could not have been made without the writing of many others. As a creative work, it runs counter to the customs and laws of intellectual property and defies traditional conventions of authorship, yet it is clearly a critical and aesthetic response to the evolving circumstances of linguistic and literary practice. This is, we believe, another way of saying that it has value. But how should we recognize and preserve this value? How will we protect it from traditional literary estates and the aggressive cultural vectors that threaten? In the current historical moment, *The Readers Project* believes, we must allow interventions such as *How It Is in Common Tongues* to exist in the world of language art alongside conventional forms from the world of letters, and also in relation to commensurate works embraced and lauded by the visual and conceptual art worlds. Christian Marclay's *The Clock* comes immediately to mind, recently proclaimed as a 'masterpiece' and newly on show in Tate Modern as of autumn 2018.4

We argue that the existing custom and law of intellectual property is unable to comprehend or regulate a significant proportion, if not the majority, of contemporary literary aesthetic practices; not only the productions of conceptual and uncreative writing but also, for example, compositional practices of collage, which writers have always deployed, but which have been fundamentally reconfigured by instant networked access to material — much of it 'protected' — amenable to 'cut and paste.' In circumstances like these, the custom and law of intellectual property reveals itself to be irremediably flawed. We claim that the types of processes and procedures implemented in *The Project*  show how literary practices have been so altered by digital affordances and mediation that the fundamental expectations of human writers and readers — regarding their roles, their relationships to one another and to the text that travels between them, and the associated commercial relationships — are changed beyond easy recognition, and beyond the scope of existing custom and law. *All* practices of reading and writing are now inextricably intertwined with their network mediation — the Internet and its services—and so the questions and conflicts surrounding

4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Clock\_(2010\_film)

copyright and intellectual property have shifted from *who creates and owns what*, to *who controls the most privileged and profitable tools for creation and dissemination*. *The Readers Project* works to address this new situation and highlight its inconsistencies and inequities.

Network services have arisen that allow practices of reading and writing to be automatically and algorithmically captured, processed, indexed, and otherwise co-opted for the commercially-motivated creation and maintenance of vectors of attention (advertising) and transaction (actual commerce). These vectors are themselves, as the results of indexing, processing, and analysis, fed back to human readers and writers, profoundly affecting, in turn, their subsequent practices of reading and writing. In cyclical fashion, reading and writing is fed back into the continually refined black boxes of proprietary, corporate-controlled, algorithmic process: the 'big software' of capture, analysis, index and so on. This is the grand feedback loop of 'big data,' encompassing and enclosing the commonwealth of linguistic practice. As a function of proprietary control and the predominance of neoliberal ideology amongst its supermanagers, this system is regulated by little more than calculations of the marginal profit that the vectoralist service providers derive. And now, as noted above, the 'black boxes' are filled with inscrutable, energy-consuming, waste-generating, expensive AI.

In the perhaps naïve belief that we might all benefit, human readers and writers have willingly thrown themselves into this artefactual cultural vortex. Is it too late now to reconsider, to endeavour to radically change both the new and traditional institutions that allowed us to enter this maelstrom? Or have inequalities in the distribution of power over the vectors of transaction and attention — commercial but especially cultural — simply become too great? This power was acquired far too quickly by naive and untried corporate entities that still remain largely untried and unregulated, though they are, perhaps, far less naïve than they once were.5 Huge marginal profits allow the new corporations to acquire, on a grand scale, the estates of conventionally licensed intellectual property along with the interest and means to conserve them, via both legal and technical mechanisms. In a particularly

5 See John Cayley, 'Terms of Reference & Vectoralist Transgressions: Situating Certain Literary Transactions over Networked Services', *Amodern* 2 (2013), [n.p.], http://amodern.net/article/terms-of-reference-vectoralist-transgressions/, https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501335792.ch-012

vicious aspect of this cycle of wealth-and-power aggregation, these same mechanisms remain wholly inadequate to the task of regulating the culture and commerce of networks, clouds, and big data: the very culture and commerce that grant big software their profits. The raptors are out of the park.

### Works Cited

# 2. London-Havana Diary: Art Publishing, Sustainability, Free Speech and Free Papers1

## *Louise O'Hare*

#### *May 2018, London*

I've been prompted to sign off the essay about art publishing in Havana that I wrote for this anthology over two years ago, but I can't bear to do it. In part because the world seems so changed, and changing, in part because I am. I read in the essay a false confidence. Not that my report was proved incorrect, but that in attempting an overview, the writing failed to address its own relationship to the issues — of self-censorship, institutional power, and control of access to knowledge — that it purported to discuss. London on Havana. Had I forgotten that the exchange was supposed to go both ways?

I come across something written in 1994 by Coco Fusco, and wonder if her approach might offer a formal solution — a way to acknowledge the limits of my perspective and unpick some of the bias of much Anglophone reporting on Cuba. Fusco describes herself as a Cuban-American artist and writer, 'the daughter of a Cuban who emigrated to the US in 1954, and was deported in 1959 shortly after the triumph of

1 This chapter is an excerpt from an ongoing research and writing project titled *Centrefold 1974*: *A Memoir*, a practice-based Fine Art PhD at BxNU Institute of Contemporary Art, BALTIC 39, Northumbria University, 2014–2018.

the revolution.'2 Titled 'El Diario de Miranda / Miranda's Diary', Fusco's text describes her experiences travelling, and writing about Cuba, and how these have inflected her understanding of herself as 'a child of the diaspora'.3 It is a story of menacing uncertainty, gathering unverifiable reports of delays, threats, and surveillance. It's a story of letters received, refused visas refused, and quiet conversations, and covers dates just prior to and during the 'special period' — the euphemism for the economic crisis in Cuba that was precipitated by the continuing US trade embargo, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Comecon. Fusco explains that she gathered recollections and put them in a nonlinear form to 'find the logic that links disparate events'. Of course that logic is entirely her own.

I visited Havana in May 2015 when the first flights from New York were arriving, which provoked in me a tourist's wistfulness for idiosyncrasies—the imagined authenticity of Cuba's isolation; alongside perhaps less patronizing fears of the growing impact of tourism and deregulation of the economy on the island, and excitement about what new connections and collaborations might be possible now that an end to the US embargo looked to be in sight. I was there to discuss the idea of setting up of an artist's magazine, a project that would require us to consider limits to free speech, as well as the models available for sustaining such a venture, alongside questions of what a magazine as a discursive platform or space might be — something further complicated by the fact that this would be a post-internet project operating in a place with limited broadband coverage.

Shifting between London and Havana, this diary will touch on intellectual property as part of a broader reflection upon limits to free speech and access to information. I'll touch on the impact neoliberal approaches to education, and arts funding, have on freedom of speech

2 Coco Fusco, 'El Diario de Miranda/Miranda's Diary', in Carol Becker (ed.), *The Subversive Imagination*: *The Artist*, *Society and Social Responsibility* (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 96, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315021317. The diary details the period 1986–1993. Coco Fusco describes the children of her generation as those who 'didn't choose to leave or stay' and 'are traitors to the exile community's extremists', and 'ungrateful' to their parents, 'who saved us from the Caribbean "gulag"' (p. 97). The final diary entry (dated 'August 1992') reads: 'I receive word from *Third Text* that they cannot publish this piece as I have written it […] all the names must be removed, and that all personal information about my experiences in Cuba must also be excised' (p. 110).

3 Ibid., p. 97.

and access to information in London, and I'll consider some attempts to cope with this reduced ability to share knowledge — two small scale projects (initially set up in the US) that use online platforms to gather supportive communities to enable new research and writing. These tactics — proposed by the digital library aaarg.org and the Publication Studio network — are placed alongside *El Paquete Semanal* (*The Weekly Package*) a cross-country file-sharing operation sometimes described as the 'Cuban internet'; discussions of the way the Cuban state tolerates piracy; and my experiences as an art worker and activist in the UK. In this I refuse to implement a boundary between political, and artistic work, gathering observations about the potential of Web 2.0 for communitymaking, creative practice and grassroots democratic change.

#### *June 2015, Gatwick*

No one stops me at the gate.

I was born in Bristol and am returning home from three weeks working with Cuban artists and writers discussing the potential for setting up a Havana-London magazine, featuring works by artists based in both cities, and translated into Spanish and English. Meetings and discussions around the idea were part of 'Hors Pistes: La Primavera del Amor', an events, residency and exchange programme organised by French-Canadian curator Catherine Sicot, and taking place in Havana around the 12th Havana Biennial.4 The Havana Biennial takes place every three years, not two — organised by curators at the public gallery Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam and funded by the state, it either doesn't have the resources or the inclination to chase the same pace as the rest of the sponsored, patronised, industry of the international art world.5

4 Curated by Catherine Sicot, 'La Primavera del Amor' (Spring-Summer 2015) was 'a platform for artistic development and production, international and local networking, and community outreach in Havana and suburbs.' The programme reflected upon 'identity, gender and sexuality and its relationship to media and technology', through publishing projects, film premieres, performances, workshops and panel discussions. For more information see: https://elegoa.com/en/content/ la-primavera-del-amor

5 The biennial is funded by the state, while contributions from foreign governments cover the inclusion of artists from their countries.

It seems important to start with my white tourist body — the limits of my experience in relation to state bureaucracy. I'm officially returning from a holiday: Catherine advised that she was not able to arrange an artist's visa, as the programme itself was not officially recognized.

#### *May 2013, London*

We have finally published an interview between Catherine, Aurélie Sampeur and Candelario, discussing LASA, their social enterprise and arts commissioning project in San Agustín, a suburb on the outskirts of Havana. I work as an associate editor for Afterall and commissioned it months ago, but there were many delays as Catherine, who is usually based in Toronto, waited for confirmation of certain details from her colleagues in Cuba.6

Six days later I receive a worried response:

Please remove the term 'post-revolution' or I will never be able to cross the Cuban border again. We are currently in year 56 of the Revolution here. It is a major faux-pas, and turns the article into anti-Castro propaganda […]. Then it is also a mistake re: the content. What I was talking about was negotiating within the structures for artistic production established by the Revolution.

I immediately log in and quickly change the text online, kicking myself for not double-checking and — probably unfairly, I can't remember who changed it — write back blaming my American managing editor for the final edit.

#### *May 2015, Havana*

My plane lands at José Martí International and I am greeted by Catherine, and Reynier Guerra Capote; a student of literature at Havana University and her assistant on the project. Catherine and I have only met in person once before, but after emailing and Skyping I feel like we are old friends.

6 Catherine Sicot, Aurélie Sampeur, and Candelario, 'Artists at Work: Laboratorio Artístico de San Agustín', in Louise O'Hare (ed.), *Afterall Online*, 23 May 2014, https:// www.afterall.org/online/artists-at-work\_laboratorio-art\_stico-de-san-agust\_n\_cuba

Later I meet Reynier for drinks in old Havana, the UNESCO heritage part of the old town where I am staying a couple of nights in an official hotel, the address a prerequisite for my tourist visa, before I'll head to rent a room with a family in Vedado, the leafy suburbs. Reynier is excited about the magazine idea, says there is nothing like it in the city, and doesn't seem very concerned about us getting into trouble. When telling friends and colleagues back home about my plans most had responded with concern: 'but there is no free press in Cuba!' Catherine too has been nervous, 'it could be considered activist', implying that the magazine could be subject to state censure and our Cuban collaborators put in a difficult situation, investigated, even arrested. However, my understanding of the constraints are that if you are not doing something counter-revolutionary, you will not be stopped. I recall Fidel's slogan: 'Within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing.'7 Are we being wilfully naïve?

#### *December 2014, Havana*

The artist Tania Bruguera attempts to restage *Tatlin's Whisper #6*  (2009) — her open-mic performance offering invited speakers 'one minute free of censorship' — at the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana. She first attempts to gain permission, is refused and then does it anyway. She is arrested and detained overnight, then released but ordered to remain in Cuba while the police decide whether to press charges.

7 *'*Unlike previous socialist societies, freedom of form was guaranteed; only freedom of content remained at issue, the parameters for which were succinctly encapsulated in Fidel's maxim "Within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing". In other words, all artwork that was not explicitly counterrevolutionary would be welcome.' Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt, 'Whose Side are You On?: A Response to Coco Fusco', *Mute*, 29 January 2015, http://www.metamute.org/community/yourposts/whose-side-are-you-response-to-coco-fusco-'-state-detention-performancepolitics-and-cuban-public'-e-flux-3

'Cuba always stood out among bureaucratic socialist countries for its rich and diverse visual arts. Though Cuban artists have never been put in a stylistic "straitjacket of socialist realism", there are however certain limitations to their freedom: "There is freedom of artistic creation as long as its content is not contrary to the revolution," states the constitution of the Republic of Cuba in chapter 5: "Education and culture".' Maciej Zurowski, 'More Glasnost, Less Perestroika: Interview with *Havana Times* Editor Circles Robinson', *Weekly Worker* 848, 13 January 2011, http:// weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/848/more-glasnost-less-perestroika/

#### *January 2015, New York*

*e-flux*, a free digital art journal based in Lower Manhattan and funded by pumping out thrice-daily press releases to its coveted art world mailing list — selling its critically engaged kudos and the use of its contacts to 'public art centers and museums' internationally8 — publishes an article by Coco Fusco from which the summary in the post above was paraphrased.

In the article Fusco points out that the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana is a restricted government space and can be considered 'the Cuban equivalent of the White House lawn'.9 The article explains that *Tatlin's Whisper* had previously been staged at the Wifredo Lam gallery as part of the 10th Havana Biennial (2009), and that the new version for the Plaza de la Revolución was given the title *#YoTambienExijo*  (#*IAlsoDemand*). The use of a hashtag is strange for a project in Cuba as most people do not have access to the Internet, and suggests it was aimed at an audience not on the island. Fusco notes: 'Bruguera's reliance on the Internet to convene the Cuban public has provoked a certain degree of skepticism from critics about her intentions', considering that Cuba 'is the country with the lowest level of connectivity in the hemisphere […] The vast majority of Cubans lack access to the Internet, cell phones, and home-based landlines.'10

#### *July 2015, London*

An email from Reynier arrives — he is wondering if I might be able to help arrange visas for a trip to the UK during his summer holidays. He was expecting to visit Catherine in Toronto but despite numerous references, including recommendations from a professor at the University of Toronto, established artists and various arts professionals, Reynier's

8 'Who uses *e-flux*? Nearly all the leading art museums, biennials, cultural centers, magazines, publishers, art fairs, and independent curators worldwide […] *e-flux* is read by 90,000+ visual arts professionals: 47% in Europe, 42% in North America, and 11% Other (South America, Australia, Japan, etc.) […]' The promotional emails are 'made free for its 90,000+ readers', http://www.e-flux.com/about

9 Coco Fusco, 'The State of Detention: Performance, Politics, and the Cuban Public', *e-flux* 60, December 2014, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/60/61067/the-state-ofdetention-performance-politics-and-the-cuban-public/

10 Ibid.

application has been rejected by Canada. His trip is suddenly cancelled, not because of Cuban restrictions, but because of unfathomable Canadian bureaucracy. I begin to look up the process on the UK customs site and reply back that I think it might be hard to organise at short notice.

#### *July 2014, London*

Caroline Woodley, Joyce Cronin and me are sitting at the outside tables of Caravan, the expensive restaurant that leases the entrance of Central Saint Martins (CSM), and eking out our coffees while we wait for an email to come through on Caroline's phone. Our office is on the top floor of the university and one of a number of rooms in the recently built art school that, rather oddly, have no natural light, and this morning we can't yet face going in. The Granary Building used to 'store Lincolnshire wheat for London's bakers', but the architects have left it difficult to differentiate from a mall: a panopticon-esque conversion with four floors of glass-walled studios overlooking a downstairs 'street' accessible past a barrier of swipe-card turnstiles.11 Wide walkways look out over a large atrium, and feature areas for students to hang out and hot-desk in — a necessity for those students the courses not allocated studios — which are valued real estate. Located in a new development area behind Kings Cross station, it is hard not to see the art school as the vanguard of north London gentrification: Google is coming; Eurostar runs out of the station; the canals are suddenly accessible; and more shops arrive each week. Once, for a freshers' fair, University of the Arts London (UAL, of which CSM is now a part) produced a series of tote-bags that said 'Lifestyle not education'. The canvas bags continue to circulate around the building, faded by washing but still appalling.

The email we are waiting for is from the Arts Council England (ACE) with news as to whether we will lose our regular funding.12

11 '[…] The Granary Building is now the stunning new home of the world famous arts college — Central Saint Martins, part of the University of the Arts London. The building has been transformed by architects Stanton Williams. While the Western Transit Shed has been converted into unique office space with shops and restaurants at street level.' — 'Historic Buildings: The Granary Building', anonymous, undated, King's Cross Development website, https://www.kingscross.co.uk/granary

12 Every three years, arts organisations that are regularly supported by Arts Council England (ACE) must reapply for National Portfolio Organisation (NPO) status.

Afterall (which produces various books series, online content, and an eponymous journal) is financed by various streams that Caroline, as publishing director, oversees, endlessly strategizes over and worries about. The bones of the organisation are covered by UAL — editors and assistants are employed as administrative staff and have contracts with the university. With the basics covered our different publishing series are paid for in different ways: *Afterall* journal for example raises enough money from advertising to just about cover its print production costs, receives a fairly negligible amount from sales (through its distributor University of Chicago press), and then covers the rest (for example writers' fees, design work, and image rights) using money from its partnerships with public art institutions internationally (curators from these benefactor institutions then joining the editorial board). We know that this mix of funding means we are seen as more 'sustainable' by ACE, less reliant on them, and paradoxically less likely to be cut.13 But still we are nervous. Solidarity disappears and I begin to envy our successful contemporaries — the other small contemporary arts organizations who have already received their news and started tweeting in relief: 'Thank you Arts Council #ACEfunding #artsfunding #npo'.

Why haven't we heard yet? The email is in Caroline's spam! We haven't been culled, but neither have we received the uplift we applied for, so we are at what ACE euphemistically calls 'standstill'. Like everyone else who has been 'successful', when inflation is taken into account over the next three years we will see our funding from ACE cut by 7.1%.14 The relief that we don't have to organize another obsequious

13 The first chapter of Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt's recent book on the cultural policy of the Cuban Revolution quotes Maria Miller's April 2013 speech stating that 'funding distributed by the Arts Council [England] should effectively act as seed funding […] giving confidence of others to invest.' (p. 7). The quote is included as part of a summary of 'Cultural Policy under Capitalism', which describes the 'detrimental effect on the cultural field' of the 'withdrawal of the state in favour of market forces' (p. 1), explaining how recent US and European policy focuses on culture's 'perceived contribution to economic recovery' while excluding art from these 'creative industries' that have 'potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property' (pp. 6–7). See Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt, *To Defend the Revolution Is to Defend Culture*: *The Cultural Policy of the Cuban Revolution* (Oakland: PM Press, 2015).

14 This is in comparison to the previous three-year period. 'The majority of organisations in the new portfolio (75 percent) have received *standstill* funding.' [my italics], 'Arts Council Announces Investment Plans for 2015 to 2018' (press release), Arts Council England, 1 July 2014; the press release has been reposted here

benefit auction, for a while at least, is palpable. We stay at the table watching the fountains, which burst out in synchronized squirts across the public-private square. Some say the water feature is designed to stop any potential student protest or gathering, but still it's fun to sit here on a sunny day and see it populated in number by screaming laughing toddlers from the estates up the road.

#### *May 2015, Havana*

Catherine films me talking about the magazine idea for one of the videos she is making about the residency program. The videos will be disseminated through *El Paquete Semanal* (*The Weekly Package*) a file sharing system that is sometimes described as the 'Cuban Internet', but could perhaps also be considered a kind of multimedia magazine. The anonymous organisers gather 2TB of material including documentaries, soap operas, e-magazines, art programmes and music videos with adverts — and then distribute them across Cuba through representatives carrying hard drives. User-subscribers then pay 2CUC (Cuban Convertible Peso) and select particular items or download the whole package for that week onto their computer or hard drive. I guess it's called the Cuban Internet because of the way it claims to be an ungoverned, un-edited space — anyone can submit content — and constitutes an archive of shared digital material. Catherine is paying 30CUC for 7 weeks' inclusion and has organized it through a friend of a friend. I gather that due to the lack of anti-government content and pornography, *El Paquete* is considered to be either self-censored or infiltrated and controlled by the government. It is not known who edits the content, but the advertising side of the operation is run by a Cuban firm called Etres, making use of changes to property law in 2011.15 The

with an incorrect date: https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/arts-council-announcesinvestment-plans-2015–2018

15 The restrictions on the sale of computers were relaxed in 2008, and since then transmission of ebooks via manual USB stick transfer has become more and more commonplace. Wikipedia states that *El Paquete* started around 2008 and Etres has taken care of its advertising since 2011, when legal property reform of private enterprise allowed Etres to charge local businesses a small fee to advertise in *El Paquete*. An article in *frieze* describes how people have claimed to be the organisers of *El Paquete* and then been discredited, suggesting it is more of a phenomenon than a singular entity, with different versions distributed in different places and run by

government has also set up its own version as an alternative—*Mi Mochila*  (*The Knapsack*) — you can download content and access this Cuban Intranet at *Joven Clubs* (*Joven Club de Computación y Electrónica*) — kids computer clubs — in cities and towns across the country.16

There is something wonderfully incongruous about the idea of a team of editors travelling the country sharing digital files — the Internet! — on foot. I don't wish to romanticise something that comes from a lack, but I wonder if this hand-held relay of information has benefits. Does it change the relationship between the users and the editors? Is it simply like the Internet before Web 2.0 or is there an opportunity for a publication to create a community of readers in a different way? If our magazine was circulated via *El Paquete*, how would we know the extent of its readership?

Later I'll be asked if the question of government infiltration affected what I said on camera, and I'll shrug: Why would it be any different from anything I ever write online, and doesn't London have the most CCTV cameras per person in the world?

#### *December 2015, London*

I have been contracted to run a module on art publishing for Central Saint Martins, and I decide to use some of the allocated teaching hours to pay speakers for events open to the public. Sean Dockray, the programmer of aaarg.org, is in London from Melbourne, and agrees to

different organisations. See 'Data Roaming', Orit Gat, *frieze*, 30 July 2016, https:// frieze.com/article/data-roaming

16 'According to the government, there are some 600 Joven Clubs, approximately one for every 18,000 Cubans. But the Joven Clubs' online access is restricted to the Cuban "intranet," which accesses only Cuban email addresses, websites and resources. The centers also offer classes in Microsoft Word and Excel, and host visits by domestic bloggers. But the emphasis is solidly on [the] "domestic." When Fidel Castro announced the creation of the centers in 1987, he envisioned them as supports for the domestic pillars of collective society: "The Joven Club of the factory, of the institutions, and the Joven Clubs of the masses, because these are the neighborhood institutions; this is the family doctor, the Cuban family computer."' — Annie Nelson, 'The View from inside Cuba's not-so-Worldwide Web', *Tech President*, 5 April 2013, http://techpresident.com/news/wegov/23702/ cuba-highly-restricted-internet-access-leaves-population-hungry-more. See also: Jason Koebler, 'Cuba's Communist Computer Clubs for Children: Photos from Beyond', *Vice Motherboard*, 28 August 2015, https://motherboard.vice.com/en\_us/ article/78xg8z/the-communist-computer-club-for-kids

a conversation event with my students at Housmans, a left-wing radical bookshop down the road from the university.17 Sean is generous with his time and ends up talking with us for hours about his intentions for the website, his surprise at how quickly it started working, and how much it relies on those who use it.

Aaarg largely consists of critical theory texts shared by hundreds of users who have started collections, suggested themes, or added to existing selections, by scanning and uploading PDFs of articles in their possession. The website functions as a private library that evolves with new areas of interest added by its members in response to their scholarship, current issues and concerns. Dockray explains to us his irritation with users who simply start uploading everything they have onto the site — such misguided generosity turns it into a pointless archive, a file-sharing dump.18 Discussing the site we start to apply models of pre-internet printed matter to this post-internet platform: talking about it as a kind of mutating anthology, or a magazine of republished materials, with an editorial-*ship* that is its readership. Understanding it as a magazine or a library seems to acknowledge the creative and caring maintenance work of the users, and of Dockray; the particular knowledge of the community of participant-librarians is crucial to the useful functioning of the site.

Aaarg.org changes its number of 'a's whenever the website address gets too well known.19 I've read that the name is the acronym of 'Artists, Architects, and Activists Reading Group',20 and notice that Dockray doesn't seem at all interested in an anti-copyright or IP stance — instead

17 'More aaaaaa: Sean Dockray in Conversation', Tuesday 8 December, Housmans Bookshop, London, event organised by Three Letter Words in collaboration with Housmans Bookshop and the 'Publishing/Writing' module, MRes Art: Theory and Philosophy, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, http:// threeletterwords.org/more-as-sean-dockray-in-conversation-housmans-londontuesday-8-december-10-30-a-m-1-00-p-m/

18 Dockray does his best to discourage the sharing of whole ebooks; he takes down material immediately if a publisher or writer complains, and emphasises that he wants the site to be used as a place to share material that is hard to find and not otherwise available.

19 'More a's?' was Dockray's response to a question about the future for aaarg from Morgan Currie, 'Small Is Beautiful: A Discussion with AAAARG Architect Sean Dockray', *Masters of Media*, University of Amsterdam, 5 January 2010, https:// mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/blog/2010/01/05/small-is-beautiful-a-discussionwith-aaaarg-architect-sean-dockray/

20 See the description here: https://monoskop.org/Aaaaarg

he is utterly focused on what aaarg provides as a collaboratively curated collection of materials, and as a way to think about the potential of pedagogy and collaboration outside expensive institutional frameworks.21 I'm performing the same function here; in this text I am advocating for the potential for aaarg to be tolerated and understood as a small library.

If you are employed as an academic, or you are a student, you can easily access university libraries and catalogues of digitised scholarly articles. However for those who have finished their formal education it is difficult to access any of this kind of material, or to find ways to connect and collaborate. For these people aaarg isn't about free access to something that might have fallen behind a paywall on JSTOR, but is rather a place to discuss ideas, to find people with the same or similar speciality interests. I've found aaarg to be particularly useful when people share items that are now out-of-print and would otherwise be completely unavailable. Visiting lecturers and artists, critics, curators, writers, poets — those in precarious creative work on the edges of academia and those who work outside it — number those who make use aaarg, contributing to it as a forum and discovering idiosyncratic selections of research.

#### *January 2016, London*

I'm writing the first version of this text and I email Reynier to ask him about his experience of IP restrictions. He replies more quickly than I expect — as a student at Havana University he has better access to the Internet than most Cubans. As well as his free education he currently receives 150MB data/month for free (an amount that has increased considerably, last year they received just 30MB).22 He and his friends

21 Later with Fiona Whitton, Dockray established the online platform the Public School (2007). A description on its website (currently unavailable but due to be updated with an archive) described the Public School as 'a framework that supports autodidactic activities.' The platform was developed as part of their work as the Telic Arts Exchange (2005–2012). See http://thepublicschool.org/

22 'But the most important vehicle for popular participation in the arts is the national system of art education that operates free of charge through primary and secondary schools, specialized art schools and high schools, university-level art education, and the Casa de la Cultura, which is an art institution present in

use Facebook on their smart phones whilst at university because the app is conveniently designed to work well with slower connections.

Reynier explains how the US blockade stops artistic exchange between Cubans and Americans — linking to an article in *Art Law Journal*, which tells the story of an American writer unable to clear copyright for a film adaptation of a popular children's book written by his Cuban friend, because to make a formal contract with the friend amounts to a transaction and is therefore illegal.23 Reynier summarises the situation:

In the early days of the Revolution the state ignored intellectual property, establishing public libraries across the country and reproducing everything they wanted for them. In the 1990s, this changed and Cuba started to conform to international law regarding copyright.24 Not that this more recent official stance has necessarily meant a strict approach in practice. For example, due to the embargo it is not possible for Cubans to buy US goods, including movies, software, or music legally. The government cannot therefore commercialise these products themselves, so they have allowed the private sector to illegally reproduce the material, tolerating piracy.

I go on to read a couple of articles that claim that both *El Paquete* and the government version, *Mi Mochila*, contain pirated American series

every municipality. The Casa de la Cultura offers free and low-cost art lessons for children and adults and provides space for exhibitions and performances. Cuba has a strong movement of aficionados that promotes and organizes artistic expression from all sectors of population, but especially youth.' Miren Uriarte, 'The Right Priorities: Health, Education and Literacy', in her *CUBA*: *Social Policy at the Crossroads*: *Maintaining Priorities*, *Transforming Practice. An Oxfam America Report*, 2002, https://www.oxfamamerica.org/publications/cuba-social-policy-atthe-crossroads/, pp. 6–18 (p. 12).

23 Nicole Martinez, 'How Does Relaxing the Cuba Trade Embargo Affect Artists?', *Art Law Journal* (online), 11 May 2015 (the article is no longer available on their website).

24 In 1967 Fidel proclaimed the abolition of copyright. In October of the same year, at a preparatory seminar for the Cultural Congress of Havana, artists and writers willingly renounced the commercial rights to their work in return for social recognition and the value inherent in the creative act. Paraphrased from Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt, 'The Emancipatory Potential of Culture under Socialism', in her *To Defend the Revolution Is to Defend Culture*: *The Cultural Policy of the Cuban Revolution*  (Oakland: PM Press, 2015), pp. 103–04. Cuba has been a member of the World Trade Organisation since 20 April 1995, https://www.wto.org/english/thewto\_e/ countries\_e/cuba\_e.htm and acceded to the Berne Convention soon after (with some exceptions in November 1996, http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/notifications/ berne/treaty\_berne\_176.html).

and films, and seem to complain about the visibility of pirated DVDs for sale in Cuba. I start to imagine the badly printed covers of American blockbusters lined up on a wall, and realise I am actually recalling a scene from central London, not Centro Havana.

#### *June 2017, London*

I guess I will be back writing this when I know the result. After polling closes on Thursday we are gathering in the 1Love pop-up community centre in Canary Wharf and watching the results together. We need a place we can be all night, with a prayer room for those observing Ramadan, and so this venue will be perfect. We are going to bring the baby and are hoping she sleeps in the pram, amongst other cautious, bigger hopes. We plan to be out all day, knocking on doors in Thurrock, our nearest marginal, doing the work of 'getting the vote out' — leaving reminders and encouraging those who said they would vote for us to actually go and cast it. I didn't know this was what happened on polling day until a few weeks ago, but apparently it's crucial.

I keep fantasising about it. I see us crying in red t-shirts like we are watching the final of a big game. Are we happy or sad? I remember last year, waking at 3am and watching the results of the EU referendum coming through from the light of our phones. The baby asleep, the BBC website, checking in on Facebook to see comments of dismay as the Leave vote got clearer.

It will be strange to be physically with our Tower Hamlets Momentum friends, reacting in the moment. When other important news reports have arrived we've been apart, but sending messages in our WhatsApp group. The 'chat' has got more and more frequent these weeks since the snap election was called. Two hundred or so messages a day: witty responses, declarations of support and love, secret irritations and theories shared. The chat gives a focus, something to engage with when confronted with the helpless inevitability of watching the news unfold, out of your hands but there in your bed. I write a wry comment, Gavin smiles at it sitting across the room from me. I worry that we won't all be as witty in person, but I can't imagine not being there in the flesh, I can't imagine missing it: missing watching it collectively, in solidarity, whatever it is.

#### *May 2015, Havana*

Catherine has gathered a group of artists and writers and we've been meeting every few days, in each other's flats, perched with laptops in lounges, sitting at kitchen tables. Today we are discussing what is already available in terms of arts magazines — Reynier has brought along *Upsalón*, which is stapled and monotone, focused on contemporary literature and published by the Faculty of Arts at the University of Havana. As well as university-run publications that cover art criticism there are two official arts magazines: *Artecubano*, which focuses on fine art in a fairly academic art historical way, and *Revolución y Cultura*  which is multidisciplinary. Both are perfect-bound with coated covers and colour illustrations, but the design feels dated and they appear drab and heavy. Yanelys Nuñez Leyva describes her frustration that there is no print publication that has regular listings of upcoming shows, or reviews of current exhibitions. She writes on art for the *Havana Times*, an online magazine founded in 2008 that was initially approved by the Cuban Journalists' Association (UPEC) before its permission was withdrawn, apparently because some of its writers were publishing blogs critical of the government (it is now run out of Nicaragua).25

25 *Havana Times* (*HT*) features both 'journalist and non-journalist writing' in Spanish and English, and was set up in 2008 by Circles Robinson while he was working in Cuba (for 'a Cuban government agency that assisted the Cuban media with translations'). Robinson says it set out to 'distance our publication from the polarized and conservative Cuban government media as well as from the mostly foreignbased anti-Castro media', and describes the funding of the site as 'self-financed', 'an after-work "labor of love" […] with a little help from my friends', declaring that '*HT* has refused to apply for any grants from direct or indirect US government funding sources.' The website was initially supported by the Cuban Journalists' Association (UPEC), but six months later this support was withdrawn: 'The sharp criticism of government policies by several of our bloggers was too much for an organization [UPEC] that is totally dependent economically and ideologically on the government/party line.' Circles Robinson, 'About Us: Havana Times Reaches 8th Birthday', *Havana Times*, 17 October 2016, https://havanatimes.org/?p=121610 In an interview with the *Weekly Worker* (The Communist Party of Great Britain's online/print publication) Robinson describes his aim 'to promote a combination of conventional and new-style reporting, as well as commentary that reflects critical support for the Cuban revolution, which is not necessarily synonymous with its leaders.' He also explains that he is a US citizen and had been living in Nicaragua before he came to work in Cuba, having returned there with his family after his contract working for the Cuban government came to an end. 'I had a major conflict at work resulting from some of my co-workers and myself openly questioning the unethical conduct of our immediate boss. To get me to support his behaviour he

Llópiz (Julio César Llópiz) is graphic designer and an artist; he shows us some artists' books he's made — digital printed booklets, hand-folded and of limited print run, that are clearly benign from an activist perspective: there's no reason they would be considered publishing in any kind of illegal — counter-revolutionary — way. He then shows us a newsprint project that looks unofficial, but it turns out it isn't — *Noticias Artecubano* — a monthly newspaper edited by the same team as *Artecubano*. He has been running a column for the paper called 'La Fracción por Llópiz' where he invites other artists to make work for the page. Printed cheaply in black and red *Noticias Artecubano* looks like the kind of mass-produced paper you might pick up at a protest — its cheap form immediately suggests wide distribution. I imagine if we were to produce our 'magazine' in a format like this, it would look mass-produced and be likely to raise concerns from the authorities due to its apparent potential reach.

#### *May 2015, Bermuda Triangle*

Looking out the airplane window I imagine I am gazing at the edge of the earth: flying into a curve of bright white glinting light. I feel so far away, so physically distant from home, yet my conversations with Catherine — communicating over three thousand miles — have compounded my idealism about the potentials of the internet for enabling ongoing discourse, and my enthusiasm that we might be able to set up ways of working between Havana and London. The hope is that editors in both localities could feed in remotely, creating a platform for Cuban artists in the UK and vice versa, that would be sustainable on a small scale without the need for massive travel grants.

Yesterday I met with Louisa Bailey and got her go-ahead (in theory) to publish the Havana-London magazine with her branch

threatened to make a case against me using *Havana Times* and the fact that I had started it "without permission", though this was done in my free time. In the end, they simply refused to renew my yearly work contract. While no reason was given, I never felt that *HT* was the main issue in this. Since my residency in Cuba was dependent on the job, I was given a month's notice to leave the country. My family is from Nicaragua and I had lived there for many years before coming to Cuba, so we decided to return there.' Circles Robinson in Zurowski, 'More Glasnost, Less Perestroika'.

of Publication Studio, which she launched in London in February. She's been flat out since then, printing, cutting, gluing and packing copies of her first publication, and all UK orders for books made by similarly tiny 'studios' across the globe.26 Publication Studio (PS) is an interesting model for small-scale publishing — each of its 'nonfranchise franchise'27 of thirteen studios internationally (from Sao Paulo to Malmö) works locally with artists and writers to produce books which are then printed on demand using the same affordable machinery — perfect binder, guillotine and digital printer — that each studio owns (or borrows).28 As with all print-on-demand models this means that by printing and binding books 'one-at-a-time, by hand and on request' they avoid the upfront costs and potential waste of bulk printing.29 But the interesting thing about Publication Studio is the way its network works across territories — because each studio follows similar design formats, shares files online and uses similar equipment, it means publications commissioned and edited by one studio can be easily produced and sold by a studio on the other side of the world. So, if you lived in Malmö, you could order a copy of our magazine from the studio there, and have a copy quickly and easily made — no need for shipping from Havana or London.

The description, 'nonfranchise franchise' pithily acknowledges that new studios benefit from the brand and ability to print and sell a whole back catalogue of PS titles, but it also indicates that PS avoids the homogenisation normally associated with franchises by also being a site for production — creating an international network of local editors, writers, artists… and publics. It's a two-way thing — new studios bring new readerships to existing publications, and PS provides an existing context and readership for new ones. Publication Studio is often described as a really great model for sustainable, small-scale publishing practice,

26 Publication Studio Glasgow was launched in November 2016.

27 'Nonfranchise franchise' was Bridget Kinsella's way of describing Publication Studio in an article for *Publishers Weekly*. Bridget Kinsella, 'Publication Studio: A Nonfranchise Franchise', *Publishers Weekly*, 23 May 2011, http://publishersweekly. com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/47387-publication-studioa-nonfranchise-franchise.html

28 There were thirteen studios during the editing process of this text. For an up-todate list of Publication Studios visit https://publicationstudio.biz/about/

29 Louisa Bailey, 'Sustainable Publishing', in *Plastic Words* (London: Publication Studio, 2015), p. 63.

and the sustainability might be true in environmental terms — there is little wasted paper — every book printed has been ordered, and there is no need to fly books across the globe. However, although 'the retail price of the book covers the cost of materials and labour and a small profit that is split between the studio and the author(s)', its economic viability is flawed: it relies on free labour and risking time on fundraising attempts.30 The small profit is negligible and Louisa, who works two other jobs to pay her London rent, spends the 'spare' time she doesn't spend making the books on applying for grants.

#### *May 2015, Havana*

We are at 'Sometimes Art Space', the living room of Solveig Font, in Vedado where she and her partner Llópiz (Julio César Llópiz) intermittently organise art exhibitions, inviting an extended network of friends and colleagues. The space is not official but also not illegal — it's listed as part of the biennial satellite programme. Our conversation is again circling around how the magazine might be tolerated. We talk about the term *permissive* / *permisivo*, its vernacular association with tolerance of sexuality, and in relation to the testing of other freedoms — the careful dance around what is allowed and what is pushing too far — and despite our reluctance to give her any more airtime we find ourselves talking again about Tania Bruguera.

Solveig describes the meeting between Raul and Obama as an important delicate moment — most Cubans have family in America; fragile international policy is not an abstraction. However she does have some sympathy with the first iteration of *El Susurro de Tatlin #6* (*Tatlin's Whisper #6*) for the way it negotiated the system, and used the art context to create a 'state of exception.'31 *El Susurro de Tatlin #6* was part of a

30 Bailey, 'Sustainable Publishing', p. 63.

31 'Estado de Excepción' ('State of Exception') was the title of a series of group exhibitions curated by Tania Bruguera and Marilyn Machado as part of the Havana Biennial 2009, and to commemorate the end of her project *Cátedra Arte de Conducta* (*Behaviour Art School*, 2002–2009).

On *El Susurro de Tatlin #6* (2009), Coco Fusco, in a letter she wrote in response to the article by Claire Bishop, 'Tania Bruguera at the 10th Havana Biennial', *Artforum*, Summer 2009, noted that 'An important question about the usefulness of the piece is whether this performative spectacle effectively diverted attention away from ongoing activism on behalf of civil rights in Cuba, focusing the Western gaze

number of exhibitions and events that took place at the 2009 biennial to commemorate the end of Bruguera's project *Cátedra Arte de Conducta* (*Behaviour Art School*, 2002–2009), and we discuss how she refused to let this art school become official, a situation Solveig finds questionable: why not test its potential?32

Reynier is the most critical of the artist: if the work was an intentional provocation, the duration of the performance 'expanded' by the responses it received from the Cuban police and the international press, then the provocation encompasses the way an American press utilised her critique for their ends, any delay to the end of the embargo, and the negative impact on the freedoms that Cuban artists have and the steps being made towards enlarging these.33 Bruguera has suggested

Although we are talking about a magazine, we don't discuss Bruguera's first 'alternative institution', the newspaper *Memoria de la Postguerra* (*Postwar Memory*, 1993–1994), perhaps because we are specifically talking about a magazine as exhibition space, not as a vehicle for news or activism. *Memoria* has been called 'positive institutional critique' and Bruguera has noted that, as with the *Cátedra Arte de Conducta* (Behavior Art School, 2002–2009, http://www.taniabruguera.com/ cms/492-0-Ctedra+Arte+de+Conducta+Behavior+Art+School.htm), she was creating an 'alternative institution' — challenging the government-controlled press, and the official national newspaper (*Granma*), by producing her own. W. J. T. Mitchell, 'How to Make Art with a Jackhammer: A Conversation with Tania Bruguera', *Afterall* 42, Autumn/Winter 2016, p. 55, https://doi.org/10.1086/689803

The first issue of *Memoria* featured a list of 'Internacionales' — artists who had left Cuba — printed like a list of war dead, and her website describes the paper as for 'debate of non-authorized topics, criticism generally silenced by the state.' The paper seems to have been as much about a Cuban-American voice, as a Cuban one, and was eventually censored. See http://www.taniabruguera.com/cms/564-0- Postwar+Memory+II.htm

33 In this phrasing I have adapted 'duration is expanded' from a description by Daniel R. Quiles. 'The work's duration was followed — and effectively expanded — by the appearance of state power, effectively transforming the privileged moment (the "you had to be there" school of performance) into a narrative of provocation or resistance whose importance supersedes that of the original.' D. R. Quiles, 'The Vicissitudes of Conduct,' *Third Text*, September 2016, http://thirdtext.org/ vicissitudes-of-conduct

instead on the theatrical props that frame official Revolutionary discourse and the emotive charge that those props impart.' See 'Public Address', *Artforum*, October 2009, pp. 38–40, http://www.taniabruguera.com/cms/260-0-Public+Address.htm

32 Contrary to my understanding presented here of what happened, Claire Bishop has said that *Cátedra Arte de Conducta* closed due to government pressure: 'In a similar fashion, her art school, the Catedra Arte de Conducta, proceeded on the premise that more can be achieved by negotiating with the Instituto Superior de Arte, which enabled international teachers to be invited legally to Cuba, than by remaining militantly outside it. (When the state cannot recognize Arte de Conducta as desirable and expedient, Bruguera closed it down.)' 'Public Address', 'Claire Bishop responds', in ibid.

she works alone to stop other artists getting into trouble,34 but Reynier suggests that her lone authorship, far from being sacrificial, only serves herself, pointing out that *Tatlin's Whisper #6* (2009) was bought *by the Guggenheim* — the emphasis upon the name of the American millionaire dynasty.

Back home I check and confirm: *Tatlin's Whisper #6* (*Havana Version*) was purchased via the UBS MAP Purchase Fund and it acceded to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum collection in November 2014, a month before Bruguera's attempted restaging.35 Further searching shows me that Bruguera's place in American academia was pretty much secured on her return to the US — she received a Yale Greenberg Fellowship, a six-month residency at the university starting in August 2015.36 According to Wikipedia, Maurice Raymond 'Hank' Greenberg is a Republican and an American business executive, former chairman and CEO of American International Group (AIG), which was the world's eighteenth largest public company and the largest insurance and financial services corporation in history.

#### *April 2015, London*

'Please join us at 10am, Rolls Building, Royal Courts of Justice, London.' We send an email to all our subscribers calling for support for the students who have been taken to court by University of the Arts London. Since March around 80 graduate students (who I figure will each be paying around £9,000 a year in fees) have been sleeping in the reception area of Central Saint Martins to oppose the cuts to foundation degree courses across UAL.

Foundation courses are one of the last free courses the university runs, and help bring more diverse groups into the arts, but it seems that, with ongoing government cuts to further and higher education, they have stopped being cost-effective for the university.

34 Tania comments that the experience of collectively making the newspaper *Memoria de la Postguerra* and inadvertently getting others into trouble had caused her to want to work alone and in performance, although she later 'regretted having answered to political pressure in such a way, using my own body instead of pursuing the social body'. Mitchell, 'How to Make Art with a Jackhammer', p. 53.

35 See Guggenheim collection online: https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/33083.

36 The title of the work is listed in English (without any Spanish version) on the Guggenheim website. See https://worldfellows.yale.edu/tania-bruguera

Having failed to shift the students from their occupation, UAL has decided to get them out by cherry-picking a few students, some of them student union reps, and taking them individually to court over costs.

#### *January 2016, London*

I tweet, post and share a crowdfunder for the legal defence of 'Sean Dockray (the initiator of the online library aaarg.org) and Marcell Mars (who registered the latest domain, aaaaarg.fail).'37 The fundraiser reaches \$10,000 over its initial \$5,000 goal in a matter of days, but they are being sued for \$500,000 by a publisher in Quebec, and the site explains they have no idea what the eventual legal costs will be.

I don't know how their lawyers are running the case, but perhaps they will argue, as Dockray has in the past, that digital property — ebook ownership — contradicts the First Sale Doctrine, which was established in America in 1908 and gave the owner the right the sell, lease or rent their copy of a book — making it possible that second-hand bookshops and public libraries could be legal.38

Dockray has also written eloquently about the care behind the act of scanning, and the feeling of intimacy when reading someone's scanned PDF, seeing the marks of previous readings, pencilled notes and spillages. The use of scans on the site also indicates that the papers are from printed books in people's possession — property they have the right to share with those they choose. Perhaps by emphasising that this is *someone's* book, dwelling on a smudged fingerprinted scan serves to indicate that aaarg is not a place designed for illegal file-sharing but rather a semi-private digital library.39

The current network of thousands of aaarg users grew from just one email Dockray sent to a list of friends, collaborators and colleagues, inviting them to share and make use of what he had built.40 It feels depressingly

37 See https://uk.gofundme.com/aaaaarg

38 Ebooks actually only provide a license for use and access and this contradicts the First Sale Doctrine. See Sean Dockray, 'Interface, Access, Loss', in Marysia Lewandowska and Laurel Ptak (eds.), *Undoing Property*? (Stockholm and Berlin: Sternberg Press & Tensta konsthall, 2013), p. 189.

39 When aaarg first started it only contained scanned documents because the PDF files of the time were too big to share in this way (it now also holds PDFs).

40 The site is semi private: in order to access aaarg.org you need to be invited or to be told the website address (which migrates, changing its number of 'a's to avoid legal

apt that Dockray might be saved by an online crowdfunder — one of an industry of businesses that position themselves as benevolent communitybuilders in order to collect their cut, and that first emerged around the same time Dockray was coding away, making his 'scaffold'. 'Scaffold' is Dockray's word for what aaarg.org is, which I understand to mean that it is not the architecture — it is not part of the academic institution — but it is attached to it and supports it.

#### *January 2015, London*