Thursday, April 30, 2015

 

Jacques Coulardeau at Academia.edu (31)

https://www.academia.edu/12170209/THE_PACIFIC_OCEAN_IN_THE_HEART_INDIA_IN_THE_MIND_SRI_LANKA_IN_THE_HEART
Discussion Session up to May 20, 2015
https://www.academia.edu/s/e2f0b3440a

Dalits are the mass victims of a slow cooking Holocaust that has been going on for millennia 

And apart from changing their name, in spite of just trying to assess their number and without even really trying to put an end to the segregation, some glorify some divine models that just perpetuate their fate till death ensues. 

A hot debate on Youtube and some other reviews of very provocative and challenging books on the fate of Dalits and women in a culture that sings the beauty of taking women along the road for your pleasure when you are a man and that makes you divine.
 
Publication Date: Apr 30, 2015
 
Publisher: Editions La Dondaine
 
Location: Olliergues, France
 
Research Interests:

Buddhism, Hinduism, Theravada Buddhism, Indian Diaspora. Jhumpa Lahiri. Margaret Wilson. Post Collonial Literature. Women's Writings., Indian women Fiction,Dhammapada, Dalits, Untouchables, Ambedkar, and Change in Rape Laws in India

 

Jacques Coulartdeau at Academia.edu (28)


GUSTAVE GUILLAUME
DE LA GLOSSOGÉNIE À LA PHYLOGÉNIE DU LANGAGE
DES TROIS AIRES AUX TROIS ARTICULATIONS
Dr Jacques Coulardeau


On ne peut pas reprocher à Guillaume d’ignorer les résultats de la recherche archéologique, anthropologique et historique des dernières vingt années. On peut et on doit cependant clairement montrer les contradictions formelles que ces leçons contiennent. 

Gustave Guillaume pour des raisons qui nous échappent fonctionnait avec deux modèles formels ; un modèle binaire surprenant mais très rhétorique, j’entends digne de la classe de rhétorique du lycée qu’il avait du suivre : « thèse + antithèse = synthèse », formulation largement reprise par Saussure et sa formule « langage = langue + parole » que Guillaume ne fait que transformer en « langage = langue + discours ». 

Cependant dès qu’il entre, à la suite de Meillet fréquemment cité, « chaque langue forme un système où tout se tient et a un plan d’une merveilleuse rigueur. » (256), dans les (sous-)systèmes qui composent le système global d’une langue ou le système encore plus global du langage, il emploie un modèle ternaire très systématique : les trois chronothèses de la chronogenèse, les trois aires de la glossogénie, etc. Il insère cette triade mentale dans le tenseur binaire ce qui donne « langage puissanciel  ||  effection  ||  langage effectif » (285) mais cette effection qui est bien une opération en soi est réduite à un seuil ou centre d’inversion qu’il ne compte alors plus comme une opération ternarisant le tenseur binaire qu’il s’obstine à définir comme binaire.


Cela est étrange mais plus de cinquante ans après le délivrance de ces leçons il est bien sûr impossible de faire l’impasse sur la recherche qui a eu lieu pendant ce demi-siècle et on se doit d’appliquer les trois consignes de Guillaume sans oublier la deuxième de l’exploration de l’effection (« 2. explorer l’effection »). Les linguistes ont du pain sur la planche mais ils se doivent de devenir anthropologues et archéologues s’ils veulent comprendre la langue. 

La question cruciale est : QUELLE EST L’ORIGINE DU LANGAGE ? Cette immense recherche vaut bien un désagréable désagrément avec les créationnistes d’inspiration religieuse ou les innéistes d’inspiration  chomskyenne. Cela permettrait aussi d’ailleurs de comprendre que la Singularité de Ray Kurzweil est, comme son nom l’indique, un peu courte ou singulière.

Wednesday, April 29, 2015

 

Jacques Coulardeau at Academia.edu (27)

 

OUT OF THE FRINGE
CONTEMPORARY LATINA/LATINO
THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE
Carida SVICH & Maria Teresa MARRERO, Editors
NEW YORK, NY, 2000

READING NOTES AND REVIEWS
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

This collection of ten plays is one of the strangest collections I know. Most authors are women. The theme of Chicana women is central and lesbianism is shown as some kind of escape from the Post Colonial Traumatic Stress Syndrome of Chicano men and Chicana women.
Among these plays there is a rewriting of Medea’s myth from this lesbian point of view that is phenomenal in many ways and particularly in the fact that Medea is making herself a lesbian to protect and save her motherhood that leads her to killing her own son not to lose him to his father and hence lose her motherhood, not seeing that she kills her motherhood at the same time, which becomes final in the end when the dead son brings poison to his own institutionalized mother and thus terminates her like some kind of vermin. Out of love . . . for sure!
At the same time the consciousness of that Post Colonial Traumatic Stress Syndrome is not clearly captured which leads to mourning the dead Chicano soldiers in the American imperialistic wars without denouncing these wars per se.


I just wonder if these authors have not integrated themselves too much into American society and particularly American universities that are dealing with Indian or Chicano or Lesbian studies as some kind of attractive gimmicks to have more students. Note the gay theme is nearly totally absent from this collection and yet when mentioned like in the first play of the collection it does not concern Chicanos per se, even if the main part of this first play happens in Las Vegas which is not exactly Chicano or Indian.
Enjoy the reading of the reviews as some kind of introduction to that Chicano and Chicana drama which is anyway essential in American culture today, and not only, far from it, the United States.

1-        LUIS ALFARO – STRAIGHT AS A LINE - 2000
2-        COCO FUSCO & NAO BUSTAMANTE – STUFF – 1996
3-        MIGDALIA CRUZ – FUR, A PLAY IN NINETEEN SCENES – 1995
4-        NILO CRUZ – NIGHT TRAIN TO BOLINA – 1994
5-        NAOMI IIZUKA – SKIN, AN ADAPTATION OF BÜCHNER’S WOYZECK – 1995
6-        OLIVER MAYER – RAGGED TIME – 1994
7-        PEDRO R. MONGE-RAFULS – TRASH, A MONOLOGUE – 1995
8-        CHERRIE MORAGA – THE HUNGRY WOMAN, A MEXICAN MEDEA – 1995
9-        MONICA PALACIOS – GREETINGS FROM A QUEER SENORITA – 1995

10-            CARIDAD SVICH – ALCHEMY OF DESIRE:DEAD-MAN4S BLUES, A PLAY WITH SONGS – 1994

Monday, April 27, 2015

 

Jacques Coulardeau at Amazon (26)


AN UNTELLABLE STORY
A dramatic Confession
THE NINETEEN STATIONS OF SARAPHIC LOVE

James Crittle, a famous pilot of the French Air Force, later turned university professor, on February 18, 2015, was found dead in full uniform Rue Montmartre in Paris. He had used some cyanide to put an end to his life. The French Air Force took over his funeral in Bordeaux, but Joseph and Magdalena Seth, two young people who had been his friends up to three years before when James Crittle stepped out of their life without any explanation, hearing the news on the radio decided to claim his body since he had no known direct relatives.
They are entrusted then with an important envelope addressed to them and that contains the manuscript of this “Untellable Story” and my name and contact. I had been James Crittle’s friend some fifty years earlier when I was going to the university and met him then. He had obviously kept track of me over these years.
I here try to give you his confession, since he calls it a confession, about his first twenty years in this life and I just try to put, as far as I can, this text into perspective with an introduction. Joseph and Magdalena Seth added a short conclusion. Most of the pictures and illustrations were in the initial envelope. We decided to use them, with some prudence though because some of the people on these pictures are totally unknown to us and they were not identified.
We also retained some documents from East Germany and the USA and his military papers, considering they had nothing to do with this “Untellable Story.”

Jacques COULARDEAU
Olliergues, France
March 14, 2015


Format : Format Kindle
Nombre de pages de l'édition imprimée : 201 pages
Utilisation simultanée de l'appareil : Illimité
Editeur : Editions La Dondaine; Édition : 1 (13 mars 2015)
Vendu par : Amazon Media EU S.à r.l.
Langue : Anglais
ASIN: B00UP4CX88
Synthèse vocale : Activée 


$ 8.51 - EUR 7,84

Sunday, April 26, 2015

 

Jacques Coulardeau at Academia.edu (25)

 

Mythical Mythological Tristan and Iseult

Tristan et Iseut, un récit mythologique

https://www.academia.edu/10056513/Mythical_Mythological_Tristan_and_Iseult_Tristan_et_Iseut_un_r%C3%A9cit_mythologique  

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

 

Notes de recherche / Research notes

25 Reviews / Critiques – 153 pages

For an article to be published in July 2015

Théâtres du Monde

Université d’Avignon

Olliergues, January 5, 2015


Si vous aimez le cochon, vous serez gâté et vous apprendrez que l'amour n'est que cochon et truie, mais on vous apprendra aussi que le cochon est un animal divin, de l'autre côté de la barrière du réel. Ne parlons pas de la truie puisqu'elle est l'entremetteuse entre l'homme et la salvation suprême. Ah ! le péché originel ! Revu et corrigé à la graisse de saindoux, de sein-doux, de Saint Doux.

mè misié la
poko dacor
kite bonm
saint doux y soti
y ka soukoué tèt li
o souè pa ni bonm
saint doux
osouè la sé bon gaz ki ni
y décidé sé pou y chapé éé
http://www.greatsong.net/PAROLES-EDITH-LEFEL,BONM-SAINT-DOUX,105210573.html

If you like old legends and how they change through centuries, if you consider these old stories have roots in older civilizations, often disappeared or completely transmuted by time, you will find this Tristan and Iseult story particularly inspiring. People have written so much about it that we have a forest of visions (hiding the simplest trees of common sense) brought by a relatively reduced methodological approaches and methods.


1.         Béroul – Le Roman de Tristan – 1165 – Ernest Muret, éd. Paris – 1982
2.         Béroul – Le Roman de Tristan – 1165 – Philippe Walter, tr. – Corina Stanesco, éd. Paris - 2000
3.         Eilhart von Oberg – Tristrant – 1170-1180 – Tübingen – 1969
4.         Eilhart von Oberg – Tristan et Iseut – 1170-1180 – Danielle Buschinger & Wolfgang Spiewok, tr. – Juliette Dor, éd. Amiens – 1997
5.         Thomas – Le Roman de Tristan – 1173-1176 http://www.jpsnorton.com/books/publisher/ulan-press/
6.         Les deux poèmes de La Folie Tristan – Félix Lecoy, éd. Paris – 1994
7.         Gottfried von Strassburg – Tristan – 1210 – Unspecified, tr. – A.T. Hatto, éd. London – 2004
8.         Gottfried von Strassburg – Tristan und Isolde – 1210 – Karl Simrock, tr. http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/tristan-und-isolde-3160/1
9.         Frère Robert – Tristrams Saga – 1226 – Daniel Lacroix & Philippe Walter, tr. & éd. Paris - 1989
10.     Matthew Arnold – Tristram and Iseult – 1852 http://d.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/text/Arnold-Tristram-and-Iseult
11.     Richard Wagner – Tristan und Isolde – 1865 – Daniel Barenboïm, ed. – Patrice Chéreau, dir. – Teatro Alla Scala – 2007
12.     Richard Wagner – Tristan und Isolde – Alfred Ernst, tr. – André Segond, éd. Arles – 1992
13.     Joseph Bédier – Le Roman de Tristan et Iseut http://www.gutenberg.org/files/42256/42256-h/42256-h.htm
14.     Thomas Hardy – The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall at Tintahel in Lyonnesse New York – 1923
15.     Jean Cocteau – Jean Delannoy, dir. – Jean Marais, act. – L’Eternel Retour – 1943  
16.     Jean Cocteau, aut. & dir. – le testament d’Orphée –1960
17.     Frank Martin – Le Vin Herbé – Oratorio Profane – Livret de Frank Martin – 1938
18.     Paul Claudel – Partage de Midi Paris – 1948
19.     Frank Martin – Der Zaubertrank (Le Vin Herbé) – Salzburger Festspielen Landestheater – 24. August 1948 – Libretto Wien – © 1947.
20.     Jean Cocteau – Jean Pierre Melville, dir. – Les Enfants Terribles – 1950
21.     Pierre Champion – Le Roman de Tristan et Iseut – Paris – 1958
22.     Philippe Walter – Tristan et Yseut, le Porcher et la truie – Paris – 2006
23.     Ridley Scott, dir. – Tristan and Isolde – Twentieth Century Fox – 2006
24.     Jean Hautepierre – Tristan et Yseult – Grez sur Loing – 2013
25.     Rachel Bromwich – Trioedd Ynys Prydein, The Triads of the island of BritainUniversity of Wales Press (1961-1978-2006-)2014



 

If raping women is a fair game then I withdraw in some totally closed up monastery

JAYADEVA’S GITAGOVINDA – BARBARA STOLER MILLER, Ed. & Tr. – 1977

The long introduction and the numerous notes are necessary for us to estimate the value of this long poem. In English it sounds wordy. Is it really?


The translation, from the excerpts in Sanskrit given in the notes, misses one essential point of this poetry: its Sanskrit musicality. A bilingual edition would have been a lot fairer. The Sanskrit language in the various songs has two characteristics: the musicality of the vowels that are repetitive in many ways and the rhythm of the consonants that are repetitive too. Sanskrit poetry is based on the syllable whereas the English language is based on the tonal stressed and unstressed syllables. The consonances and assonances of Sanskrit cannot be kept in English, and what’s more the syllabic rhythm cannot either. We miss this dimension enormously.


In fact the poem is a serties of short poems that tell the story in-between the songs themselves that are incantations which means these songs have to be repetitive since they are both a homage to the loved one or ones and a sort of prayer to some kind of god of love. They thus use the tantric form of that type of ritualistic poetry  of the mantra and each stanza has a repeated burden of one or two lines turning the songs into prayer mills. This repetitive character founds the love rite that is behind this poem.


And that’s the most surprising element. It is no love. It is only desire and sex. The images (and in English that’s all that is left) are nothing but some nice wrapping added to that purely animal, physiological sexual intercourse. Krishna takes any woman he can find and pretends he only loves one. In fact we can think he is a perverse rapist who tries to make the one he wants jealous by taking others till she yields to his advances. Krishna is pitiful and pathetic and we seem to miss that dimension because the repetitive form of the songs without the musicality and the rhythm makes it in a way humdrum if not boring. In fact we just jump this repeated lines that bring nothing at all once we have read them one time.


In fact since Krishna is a god of his own he is a model literally imposed onto the psyche of any man in that ritualistic cultural field: you have to take women because you are a man and you have to use these women as some kind of bait for the one you pretend you love in order to conquer her and submit to her own desire to satisfy yours and eventually submit her to your own domination. Where is love in all that? That’s nothing but rape and possession (two meanings intended). It is such a deeply ingrained religious vision that explains the narrow minded heterosexuality in this cultural field and the ritual cult dedicated to raping women that is finally coming to the attention of the world in India.


That kind of tyrannical attachment of males to the satisfaction of their physiological drives and impulses is nothing but “tanha” and that is the fundamental behavior rejected by Buddhism. The Buddhist tradition is the total flushing down of such attitudes, actions, and even mental visions that are nothing but blind flesh and blood thirst and hunger. There is no love there because there is no compassion, no empathy, no respect of the other, no mental dimension except if we consider being haunted by sexual impulses is a mental activity. For me it requires a long sojourn in a mental hospital or clinic more than any respect at all.


It is difficult to say anything about this poem since we miss the original music and rhythm and we only have some ranting of a pubescent teenager who is sowing his own wild and irresponsible oats everywhere. Such an attitude deserves the firmest rejection and condemnation that Buddha himself leveled at such people unworthy of any attention. But imagine a society where their gods are like that. Shakespeare and his sonnets are blushing with shame at this total lack of love and the reduction of man’s and woman’s most beautiful passion to nothing but an animal drive. And animal metaphors are galore everywhere, though the poet seems to love bees drunk on their own over-sweet honey.


Dr Jacques COULARDEAU



 

Fair Use is a perfect concept in the USA but it is hijacked in Europe by anti-copyright lunatics

PATRICIA AUFDERHEIDE & PETER JASZI – RECLAIMING FAIR USE – 2011

This is a real bible for fair use right now in the USA. It is inescapable, unavoidable, indispensable. But at the same time it assumes we know our basics and I think it is necessary to start with a quotation they do not give, the section of the US Code that defines fair use (17 US Code Section 107)


“Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include—
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.”


This is the official section of the US Code that states the four factors to which we are going to come back over and over again.

The second document they mention but do not quote is the famous and founding article by Pierre N. Leval, “Toward a Fair Use Standard” published in 1990 in the Harvard Law Review (Issue 103, pp. 1105-1136 plus 128 notes, some extensive). I will not quote it, but I would advise you to get to it.


Let’s follow the fundamental ideas and emphasize what is essential from the point of view of creators and inventors and the protection of their intellectual property, particularly the moral right of that intellectual property. I want to be extremely clear on one point: most authors entrust their own intellectual property rights to some producer, publisher, or any other merchant who wants to make as much money as possible with the copyright they have bought from the creator but they do not represent the real interest of the authors and creators because they only exploit the economic dimension of them. They have imposed a long duration to that copyright (70 years after the death of the creator, more than two generations: the copyright is thus transmitted to the grandchildren, at times the great grandchildren) and no possibility, or very few possibilities to bring a contract of that type to an end in Europe, though it is slightly better in the USA where the copyright can be recuperated by the creator after a few years in some conditions. The producers of any type want a long duration not for the creators but for the copyright they own in full property (they granted authors with a long duration not to seem too greedy but that’s all they are, greedy) and that direct “for hire” copyright is protected for even more as is specified in 17 US Code, section 302c:

“In the case of an anonymous work, a pseudonymous work, or a work made for hire, the copyright endures for a term of 95 years from the year of its first publication, or a term of 120 years from the year of its creation, whichever expires first.    “


Can you imagine? 95 years after first publication or 120 years after creation. Mickey Mouse, is it cinematographic creation or comic strip publication? Which one will end first? It made its first cinematographic appearance in 1928. It will fall into the public domain only in 2048 as a cinematographic creation, and in 2025 as a comic strip character that appeared as such for the first time in 1930. Luckily it is this latter date that should be the good one: still 15 years to run, and you can be sure Walt Disney is going to make these years go as slow as possible. These producers have had the upper hand on the subject in the world and meet with very good listening ears in the European Community, in the US Congress and even in the World Intellectual Property Organization. The interest of the authors is to keep control over their works and what is done with them; to keep control of their moral right over their works; and to get some decent income from the circulation of their works in royalties in proportion to that circulation and at a level that should be a lot better than the miserable 5 to 10% of the sales.


This being said it is important to go back to basics again as for the objective of this copyright when it was instated by Queen Anne in 1710 to the sole profit and under the sole control of the author. Let’s start with the US Constitution and their definition of the powers of Congress. One of these is to instate and manage copyright and patents, that is to say intellectual property, both artistic and industrial:

Article I Section 8 | Clause 8 – Patent and Copyright Clause of the Constitution. [The Congress shall have power] “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”


I will not quote all the successive copyright laws (first ones in 1791). That would be fastidious and useless. The purpose of this copyright is “to promote the progress of . . . useful arts” and the means is to “secur[e] for limited times to authors . . . the exclusive rights to their respective writings . . . “ This being a constitutional provision it can only be changed by an amendment to the constitution that requires a two third majority to be passed and a three fourth majority to be ratified, in other words that is practically impossible on a subject like this one. Remember the 13th amendment abolishing slavery was passed by ONE vote in Congress and ratified thanks to the State of Louisiana that stepped out of the Confederation before the end of the Civil War to rejoin the Union. An amendment to the constitution has become a miraculous enterprise today in the deeply divided political jungle in the USA. Copyright is there to stay both in its purpose and in its duration as set by Congress and the latest duration was endorsed by the Supreme Court when it ruled on it when the case against it was brought to them a few years ago.

What comes up then in Leval’s article and in the common law set by the jurisprudence of courts is rather simple and I am going to enumerate these elements. First what Leval calls the “statutory factors.”


“1. Factor one – The Purpose and Character of the Secondary Use.” It is clear that the Secondary use has to have a different purpose from that of the primary use. If a piece of entertaining music is used to be mashed up into another piece of entertaining music, it is obvious the purpose and even character are the same. Aufderheide and Jaszi specify this point as follows:

“. . . a wide range of reasons for people to repurpose copyrighted material: satire and parody, commentary both negative and positive, as a trigger to discussion, as illustration or example, incidental use, diaries, preservation, and pastiche/collage – or as many now called it, remix.” (page 119)

The fundamental word in that approach is “repurpose.” And we are talking common law here: the repurposing element will have to be assessed by a court if need be. It is not defined by the law itself in any detail. That’s what a common law judicial system is: the code law only defines a general frame tnat has to be in conformity with the constitutional law which is basic. And then it is the jurisprudence of courts, hence common law, that defines all the fine print of the interpretation of this code law. The Supreme Court is the final stop and can only deal with the constitutionality of a legal provision in the US Code, what’s more the federal constitutionality of such and of any state law in any State Code, and of any court decision. But remember the Supreme Court has to be asked to rule on a case that has run all levels in the judiciary system, and the Supreme Court will first decide if they want to rule on the case. They are not obliged to rule on any case presented to them.


“2. Factor Two – The Nature of the Copyrighted Work.” This factor is difficult to understand. It concerns the genre with a strict opposition between documentary or factual reportage on one hand and fictional works on the other hand. In fact these two are the extremes of a continuous shift from one to the other and then the court considering a case that comes to them will have to assess the position between these two extremes, hence the degrees of factuality and fictional creativity. We also have to consider that what is protected is the form of the work itself not the ideas, hence the words themselves in a poem or a novel and not the ideas. Things become more complicated when we are dealing with visual or auditory arts or media. It is easy to see that the word “the” is not protected at all and if “to be or not to be” would be protected if these words were modern, the individual words themselves could not be and phrases like “be or be not” in the context “be or be not! See how I care!” could not even be thought as being protected. But the note “C” played by a trumpet is a lot more complex. The note itself is not protected, but the sound of the trumpet produced by a trumpet player who has his own style and his own trumpet is going to be protected. And you have the same thing, though even more complex with images. We come here to the concept of plagiarism which is extremely difficult to pinpoint and identify. How many identical notes can be considered as plagiarism? One particular performance of these notes is protected against sampling and yet what is fair use if someone did sample them and used them? Then we go back to the first factor.


“3. Factor Three – Amount and Substantiality.” The amount can be extensive but it has to be the exact necessary amount to reach the purpose of the secondary use: in other words you must not quote for the pleasure of quoting but to make your point and nothing but your point. Too short might not hit the target but too much would be over killing and then you will step out of fair use.


“4. Factor Four – Effect on the Market.” This factor is also difficult to evaluate. Essentially it would not be fair use if the secondary use completely dried out the primary commercial use and hence income of the copyright holder. But there are other elements to be taken into account. A secondary use can even enable the primary use to get a new or renewed life. This has to do too with the image of the author of the primary use, hence with moral right. We all know that an author can disclaim his own paternity of an adaptation of a work of his and win, even a lot, in damages. We all know the case of “The Lawnmower Man” by Stephen King who denied his paternity of the film on the basis that the film was far too far away from his original short story.


Aufderheide and Jaszi add four more elements to be taken into account. The first one is just the recording and emphasis on the RE-purposing of the secondary use. And this new purpose has to be different from the original one, clearly different. Then they insist on the appropriateness of the amount of copyrighted material used in the derived work. The third one is a reference to a concept that is rather fuzzy: “Was it reasonable within the field or discipline it was made in? . . . What normally acceptable practice is.” (page 25) That means there is no universal rule, but there are many practices that change from one field to another: it is not the same in graphic arts and in music, and it cannot be the same. It is not the same in archiving and in musical creation, in teaching and in satirical drama. Only the professionals of each field are able to define what is “normal” in their domain. And even so. If you want to show the rhyming and rhythmic patterns of a poem, you have to quote the whole poem. If on the other hand you want to show the special use of one metaphor in that same poem, you will probably not have to quote the whole poem but only the relevant elements. The last element they add is “good faith and this is immediately asserted as requiring full attribution and credit to the works and authors quoted in the secondary use. This is, without the authors of the book ever calling it by its own name, the moral right of any author, composer or artist of any sort.


The book then gives a procedure to establish a code of best practices in a given field. It has to come from the users and creators of this field, not necessarily the copyright holders when these are the producers. It is easy in some domains, but it is still very difficult in the fictional audio-visual field and in music. A consensus has to be found among creators and users and then this code of best practices of fair use in one particular domain after strict examination of it by lawyers and organizations engaged in that kind of legal action and reflection has to be publicized and progressively promoted to a general consensus with the producers as copyright holders. The main argument with them is that they can become fair users in their own productive work in some clear cut situations, which will enable them to simplify their managerial work and even reduce their costs provided they allow other producers and professionals in their field to do the same with their own productions. It is give and receive, it is loss on one side and gain on the other side, and in the end they have to become convinced that the simplification of their work is worth some loss especially since it will also correspond to some economies that might even be of scale.


Can this procedure which is typically American be transported into Europe? My answer is yes but with a tremendous amount of difficulty because of the strictly different methods used in Europe which is essentially a legal system based on legal codes hence on code law and on parliamentary acts. Right now a reform of authors’ rights legislation is being discussed in Brussels and Strasbourg but their aim is not to bring everyone in every field to a consensual agreement on what fair use could be, but to set up an ever growing lists of exemptions (that’s the word used in American legal language on the subject, and not exceptions) that are for many of them unrealistic. We may understand that hearing-impaired people may have access to some visual description of what they can’t hear, but to provide all handicapped people with the same privilege is in fact making it free for everyone because it is no longer ethical.


In the same way the false debate around what Europeans call “transformative works” in which they include mash-ups and that they define as a work in which the original fragments are no longer recognizable by the wide public (without asking the question whether this wide public knows or is able to identify the works from which these fragments are taken), hence inciting the secondary use “creators” to forget attributing or crediting their “works” to the original artists, hence to negate the moral rights of these original artists, this false debate is trying to make us believe that the inventor of mashed potato can be credited with the invention  of the potato itself. In other words for them Parmentier is the one who invented the potato in the world if not universe, of course my dear Dr. Watson. It is then purely the negation of any fair use and its replacement by some kind of long list of exemptions that then become full exceptions since it is not fields of practices where authors’ rights are suspended under very concrete and clear conditions, but fields of activities where authors’ rights are purely and simply gotten rid of, fields in which there exists no protection any more, and consequently no incentive to create any more. It thus becomes a dangerous situation against creativity itself.


My conclusion is clear. Copyright was invented “to promote the progress . . . of useful arts” by providing the authors with an incentive in the form of a possible commercial income. But if that copyright is negated or limited in some fields in the name of enabling a wider public to have access (meaning unpaid for access) to more works then the incentive to creators will be dropped and creators will have to move to other parts of the world or to other practices that will lock up their works in some air-proof profitable closets with extremely limited access. The best works will then remain unknown for long periods of time of the public, general, wide or whatever. Europeans are producing today with their legal limited mind a generation of creating similar to Arthur Rimbaud whose main poetical work (“A Season in Hell”) remained unknown for a full century and was rediscovered by pure accident and luck. And all that is only motivated by political considerations.


This book is thus very important for Northern America but fair use is systematically perverted into a completely different perspective and for a completely different project by some anti-copyright and anti-authors’ rights lobby in Europe. But that is not the only field where Europe is misguided since they want to make open-access publication compulsory for any piece of research that has benefitted from “some” public money without any specification of the amount nor of the nature of that public money. A primary school teacher who is living thanks to the public money paid by the state for his teaching and who writes in the middle of the night some articles on the genitive in the Sanskrit Vedas could not do it if he did not have his public salary. So his research is benefitting from public money and would have to be published under open access, hence without any incoming financial proceeds for the researcher who not even considered as a researcher deserving some “salary” for his work, and anyone could quote it without any obligation in return, financial or moral. Europe is standing on its head, its feet up in the air “pedaling in the sauerkraut” as the French would say, though some don’t want to appear anti-German so they “pedal in the mashed potato” of our friend Parmentier. That will produce mashed sauerkraut and sooner or later mash-up sauerkraut. Bon appétit!


Dr Jacques COULARDEAU




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