Adventures in Academic Advertising

I recently had the pleasure of providing a short promotional blurb for a colleague’s new book: Tanner Mirrlees’ Global Entertainment Media: Between Cultural Imperialism and Cultural Globalization (Routledge, 2013). It was interesting to observe the difference between what I supplied, and what they ended up using.

Here’s what I sent:

Comprehensive and tactically plain-spoken, Dr. Mirrlees’ cultural-economic study maps out the complex networks of production, consumption, and regulation that structure today’s culture industry, and offers a key for unlocking its meanings and functions in a neoliberal age dominated by neo-imperial corporations. In the process, this teachable text provides a primer – ideal for undergraduates – on key “macro” concepts in media and cultural studies, like discourse, globalization, intellectual property, and postcolonialism.

Here’s what they ran:

This teachable text provides a primer—ideal for undergraduates—on key ‘macro’ concepts in media and cultural studies, like discourse, globalization, intellectual property, and postcolonialism.

I’m not criticizing anybody, I just think the difference is interesting. (Also – note to self: you’re wordy!) And they ran the extended original on the book’s webpage. Publishers’ advertising and promotion people need a pretty free hand to work with what’s given: advertising is their expertise, it is so not mine. I just like contemplating the specific editorial moves involved here, and how they work to shift units, in this case an academic book.

And of course, Mirrlees’ book is very good, especially for its demystifying treatment of intellectual property, and its elaboration of theories of cultural imperialism.

#congress11

Historic, pretty campus. (Pretty vertical, too: everything's a hike up or down the mountain.)

This year’s Congress has been a long story (which you don’t get) and a short trip (which you do): just yesterday afternoon and today, but nevertheless full of good things.
For starters, there’s clearly a lot more online back-channel activity than there was even just a year ago, especially on Twitter. Following #congress11 updates has helpfully pointed me to some recordings of events that I missed: the ESC round table on social networking and the humanities, for example; or National Chief Shawn Atleo’s lecture on First Nations education.
In a quick debriefing, what I did reach included:
an ACCUTE joint panel with the International Gothic Association, with talks about Mary Shelley’s Last Man, True Blood, and a Peter Pan adaptation;
the traditional President’s Reception (the real cornerstone social event of any Congress, the attraction being free food and drink), where, for a change, I actually worked the room and caught up with some good people: former professors, mentors, peers, and other colleagues from the different places I’ve studied and worked — even Prof Dr Kuester from Marburg, for whose McLuhan centenary conference I’d given a virtual (webinar) talk barely two weeks ago (“the ambassador liked it,” he said…oh good);
the first plenary talk for the Society for Digital Humanities (which I’ve been meaning to check out), which Jon Saklofske delivered, on what Disney theme parks can teach the designers of virtual worlds (both of which I haven’t been meaning to check out, actually);
then the ACCUTE-NASSR session on genre, in which my talk on the cento and copyright joined talks on Ann Radcliffe and Frankenstein, with a good audience and a great discussion on subjects common to our talks (like the power of the claims of the dead over those of the living, and the implications of stitching together things from diverse sources);
followed by lunch with a delegate at that session, an erstwhile colleague at Guelph who’s also studying copyright history, making said lunch a bit of a brainstorm (the kind of serious keener conversation I’ve often seen others at Congress getting into informally, but never thought I had neither the knack or attention span for, outside formal proceedings);
a “Career Corner” panel on publishing scholarly books, with reps from academic presses and the ASPP … amidst the Athabasca UP rep’s pitch for open access, another editor’s discussion of permissions, and my questions about quotation length and fair dealing (which can be used to defend a published book — a point I hadn’t been sure about), copyright (including the death and expected re-animation of Bill C-32) surfaced here as a bigger topic than many in the room had likely expected;
the ACCUTE annual general meeting, which I had to leave as it went overtime;
and, to wrap up the day, a couple of drinks in the beer tent with a former student of mine from UNBSJ, now at UNBF and holding down a resident DJ gig in Fredericton. Amazing to learn what your students get up to — another social serendipity that a big production like Congress can often yield. Before he took off to join the performers in this week’s Macbeth production, I asked him where I could find an ABM.
–I don’t know, I go to UNB. This is STU.
–STU is like twenty feet from UNB.
–Twenty feet up the mountain.

IP and OA: price and access in academic publishing

Having just signed a copyright agreement with Taylor & Francis (one of the Anglophone world’s biggest academic publishers), I was pleased to see some provisions for noncommercial and educational sharing. I wouldn’t call them optimal provisions, but better than some — so they’re good to see in such a big publishing conglomerate.

It’s always critically important to read an academic publishing copyright agreement, even in cases where there’s zero remuneration (which is, for articles, quite a lot of them, in my experience). What’s especially important to scrutinize is the agreement’s provision for open access. Fugitive philosopher Tobias van Veen found out the hard way that one publisher’s failure to hold up its end of a contractual agreement to perpetual accessibility didn’t prevent it from sending a cease & desist on discovering he’d taken it upon himself to ensure access, afer the journal in which his work was published had been unaccountably disappeared. (Undaunted, he has since counter-filed against the publisher.)

If the agreement doesn’t seem clear enough, refer to the publisher’s listing in the SHERPA/RoMEO database, which describes the open access (OA) policies of most academic publishers today, big or small. This is a very useful database: it uses a colour-coding system to clearly indicate how free an academic author may or may not be to make one’s research publicly accessible in an institutional repository like AU Space. The open access to research that such repositories afford is, itself, important as academic culture increasingly prioritizes public outreach, accountability, and “knowledge mobilization.” For individual researchers, open access represents an opportunity to reach a potentially much wider audience than individual or institutional subscribers. It occurs to me that greater awareness of OA and IP among academic authors could eventually affect how journals are ranked — not just according to a traditional ideal of specialist prestige, but perhaps also according to an emerging ideal of public service.

Open access is far from being evenly or widely adopted among publishers, to be sure. Many academic publishers not only charge subscription fees for institutions to catalogue journals, but also charge purchase fees for individual articles. And now, as open access gains momentum, some publishers are now “offering” to provide open access for an article — if the author pays them a premium to do so.

What’s with scholarly journal economics: most pay $0 to publish article; charge $30 to buy it; & now, with Open Access, want authors to pay?

To take stock of my own publication record in the context of IP and OA. Counting the article for which I’ve just assigned copyright, I’m looking at thirteen refereed articles. Three are in OA journals (of otherwise uncertain rank): Socialist Studies, Borrowers & Lenders, and Post-Identity. Two for Canadian Theatre Review paid actual money — and both are publicly accessible (one via an individual arrangement; the other, as I’ve just discovered, via the publisher, as promotional content).

As for the accessibility of publishers I’ve printed works with: Cambridge UP and Rodopi rank with SHERPA/RoMEO as “green” publishers (most accommodating of OA); U of Toronto P and Taylor & Francis as “yellow” (somewhat accommodating); and Liverpool UP as “white” (less accommodating). Of the publishers not listed in SHERPA/RoMEO: two (U of Texas P and West Chester U) offer institutionally subscribed electronic full-text access and print article purchase ($15 USD for a single article from Texas; $20 for a journal issue from West Chester); and, lastly, one independent publisher (at the U of San Diego) offers only institutionally or individually subscribed print access, which seems positively medieval (I should write to them to request OA release for that essay).

Some of the bigger publishers also offer purchase “options” for non-subscribers or readers without access to university libraries: my U of Toronto Quarterly article sells for $13 USD from U of Toronto P; my Popular Music article, for $30 USD from Cambridge; and my Science Fiction Film & TV article, for $35 USD from Liverpool.

Don’t mistake this post for solicitation or advertisement. I’m not expecting any royalties on these — and actually, I wonder who would spring for them? (I also wonder where the money goes.) I should also say that I’m not especially concerned to get paid by publishers for research articles. It’s a nice bonus when it happens, but writing research is part of my full-time job description already. And the terms on which many publishers provide personal and educational exemptions for contributors and repositories are adequate and fair. I certainly don’t intend to stop publishing with academic presses (if they’ll have me, after this post). I’m mostly concerned, here, about these variable costs and means of public access to refereed research. And the initiative by some publishers to charge authors a premium for rendering their own work openly accessible is a highly questionable practice (it smacks ever so slightly of vanity publishing). So when you read the fine print of a copyright agreement, do so as though it’s under a microscope, or facing a hot bright interrogation lamp.

Cross-blogged from the AU Landing

The stakes of literary criticism

The stakes of literary criticism sometimes turn out to be higher than prevailing preconceptions about it would suggest (you know, the preconceptions involving elbow patches, overpaid obscurantism, and social irrelevance). For instance, earlier this year a New York law professor faced criminal libel charges in France for publishing a critical book review. Around the same time, a Kuwaiti blogger got sued for posting a bad restaurant review.

The counter-discourse about literary criticism as a matter of life or death has roots in the pamphlet and periodical hostilities that marked (and marred) print culture in the Romantic period. The most famous example is the poet Keats, famously sensitive to critical reviews. “Who killed John Keats?” asked Byron in 1821, promptly answering on behalf of one particularly persecuting periodical: “‘I,’ says the Quarterly…”

But Keats’ case is still figurative, not literal, after all: it wasn’t bad reviews that actually killed Keats — it was tuberculosis, whose close reading skills apply only to deconstructing the ambiguities and aporias of the body’s immune system. Rather, the real life-or-death stakes of literary criticism surface in the fact that most negative reviews themselves were published anonymously — as were numerous now-famous novels, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to Walter Scott’s Waverley series, to Austen’s oeuvre. As William St Clair argues in his endlessly absorbing study The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, “anonymity protected publishers and printers from the law of libel” (174).

Perhaps that’s a protection that some of the aforementioned present-day critics wish they had, just as, perhaps, it’s a protection that explains the death of netiquette and the ubiquity of commentating trolls. But anonymity warded against more than just libel in the romantic period:

Anonymity also reduced the risk of being called out to fight in a duel, a form of literary criticism which killed more than one writer of the romantic period. (175)

Such wryly observed literary history puts in perspective “the death of the author,” reminding us of a time when an act of reading represented a kind of re-writing that was radically and literally tantamount to murder (not even murder most foul, but murder socially sanctioned, at that). Let’s hope that, amidst increasingly extremist, neoliberal forms of deregulation, IP law enforcement, and extreme sports (like ultimate fighting or chessboxing), the current spate of libel actions against critics doesn’t augur a return to the good old bad old days when running an unfavourable critique could risk catching a bullet.

Cross-blogged from the AU Landing

Science fiction means business

The US-based Creative Science Foundation is hosting its second annual workshop in the UK this summer. According to the call for papers:

This workshop will explore the use of science fiction as a means to motivate and direct research into new technologies and consumer products. It does this by creating science fiction stories grounded in current science and engineering research that are written for the explicit purpose of acting as prototypes for people to explore a wide variety of futures. [...] In this way fictional prototypes provide a powerful interdisciplinary tool to enhance the traditional practices of research, design and market research.

The relationship between fiction and fact here is familiar enough to science fiction. In popular and fan discourses, this relationship tends to be mystified in terms of “uncanny prediction”: recent popular magazine articles detail “6 eerily specific inventions predicted by science fiction” and “11 astounding sci-fi predictions that came true.” In criticism and research, we find demystifications that investigate the material conditions linking science fiction to fact, extrapolation to production. Mark Fisher has helpfully coined the term “SF capital” to describe how science fiction works as a literary laboratory for real-world R&D, a resource for what Henry Jenkins calls “the military-entertainment complex” (75). A generation before Fisher, Marshall McLuhan — who was ambivalent about science fiction, and sometimes criticized for writing it -– had a firm, proleptic grasp on the idea of SF capital, which he well understood in his dual capacities as maverick scholar and corporate consultant:

Big Business has learned to tap the s-f writer. (124)

What’s striking in the CSF is perhaps the boldness of business’ courtship of SF: how frankly SF capital is being recognized and instituted, in a peculiarly Utilitarian program to enlist SF production specifically for “consumer products” and “market research.” The CSF is, in a way, simply spelling out the terms of a long-standing if somewhat asymmetrical partnership. SF’s command of both a popular market and a certain counter-cultural cachet has positioned it, since its inception (in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), as more commodity than culture, hence its exile to the peripheries of legitimate “Literature,” according to a cultural-economic history provocatively explained by Samuel R. Delany (195). But is its future to be increasingly channeled into and defined by the speculations and futures we associate more with high finance and global capital than with cultural commentary and social progress?

Putting the question this way, of course, oversimplifies the numerous trajectories, formations, allegiances, and even definitions of science fiction; this is perhaps more an issue of science fiction studies, of the genre’s role in and relation to research: will a program like that of the CSF represent a route for delivering SF out of its encampment on the fringes of literary studies, towards more interdisciplinary and more broad-based social engagements, or will it merely transport it from one camp to another?

Works Cited
Creative Science Foundation. Intel Labs, Hillsboro, 2011.
Delany, Samuel R. and Carl Freedman. “A Conversation with Samuel R. Delany about Sex, Gender, Race, Writing — and Science Fiction.” Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction’s Newest New-Wave Trajectory. Ed. Marleen S. Barr. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008. 191-235.
Fisher, Mark. “SF Capital.” Transmat: Resources in Transcendent Materialism (2001).
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006.
Kessler, Sarah. “11 Astounding Sci-Fi Predictions That Came True.” Mashable 25 Sept. 2011.
McLuhan, Marshall. The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. New York: Bantam, 1967.
Murdock, Colin. “6 eerily specific inventions predicted by science fiction.” Cracked 19 Nov. 2010.

The rhetoric of drugs. I mean blogs.

The title of AU CIO Dr Brian Stewart’s recent blog post (“Addicted to blog,” 13 Feb. 2011) frames a discussion of the desire to blog as a question of addiction. This detail (whose explication here is not totally tangential to the substance of Brian’s post about another post by GMU prof Bryan Caplan) points to an interesting symptom of new media culture generally, and, more specifically, of the continuing, uphill battle for blogging to gain academic legitimacy of the kind that has been conventionally accorded peer-reviewed work.

The rhetoric of addiction informs (or infects) much popular discourse about new media in general (not just about clinically recognized forms of dependency like IAD, which is not my subject here). I’ve always found it fascinating that the characteristically modern subjectivity of the user is most closely and consistently connected not only with drugs but also with computing (as in the terminology of “graphic user interface”). “The notion of drug addiction as a disease,” Jacques Derrida remarked in a 1989 interview, “is contemporaneous with modernity and with modern science. Electronic circuitry got hooked up in the argot of drugs and the addict got wired” (¶8).

So the various reasons often given for denying to blogging the legitimacy of peer-reviewed research trade in no small part on modern Western culture’s deep association of new media usage with substance dependency (a variation on its associations of techne with death). Note how well the following quotation from that Derrida interview holds up, if you substitute “drug addict” with “academic blogger”:

What do we hold against the drug addict? Something we never, at least never to the same degree, hold against the alcoholic or the smoker: that he cuts himself off from the world, in exile from reality, far from objective reality and the real life of the city and the community; that he escapes into a world of simulacrum and fiction. (¶21)

Work Cited
Derrida, Jacques. “The Rhetoric of Drugs: An Interview” [1989]. differences 5.1 (1993): 1-25.

Cross-posted from my Athabasca U Landing blog

Trash the slash

Note: this is a post about writing style only. I have nothing but love for slash fiction, I could take or leave slasher films, and I’m enough of a Nash the Slash fan to own some vintage vinyl.

A while ago, a colleague and I were discussing an invitation she’d received to write an article for the Popular Culture and Philosophy book series, whose titles tend to crowd the likes of Gramsci off the shelves of your local book monopoly’s “Cultural Studies” shelf. We discussed their submission guidelines, some of which left me wondering who exactly the market for these books is. The guidelines show a barely veiled hostility to academicalism throughout: they advise a contributor to “explain philosophical ideas” but avoid “jargon” — unless it’s “‘in-group’ phrases” that will be “familiar to fans of the [pop culture] topic”; they advise you not to spend pages discussing philosophy, but to mention the topic “regularly and frequently.” Okay. So these books are for fans, not philosophers.

Anyway. One imperative in the guidelines for Good Writing and Presentation caught my attention, under a header called “Avoid the monstrously ugly!”:

Avoid all use of slashes to indicate alternatives (“in a modern/progressive vein”; “theocratic/patriarchal”); this habit betrays slovenly thinking as well as a tin ear for verbal expression. (If a polarity is intended, employ a hyphen: “left brain-right brain,” “freewill-determinism.”)

And this is where the guidelines started to make sense. I share these editors’ loathing of the punctuational slash — / — in academic writing, specifically in the literary criticism and Humanities research that tend to dominate my reading, and that definitely tend to overuse the slash. I read the slash as a symptom of the stylistic malaise of scholarly writing, which has prompted not only the admonitions of editors but also the lamentations of scholars. In literary criticism, this malaise was the subject of a recent Readers’ Forum of English Studies in Canada (ESC), edited by Stephen Slemon, called “Why do I have to write like that?” Dr. Slemon calls literary criticism a “baleful genre,” but holds out hope that professional reflection on it signals “a genuine capacity for [said profession's] self-rescue and that the diacritic of that capacity might be another way of writing” (2).

My modest contribution to building this capacity here is to make a case for scholarly writing, especially literary criticism, to trash the pernicious slash. I realize it’s not my place to dictate on points of style, but I can at least explain why I never use it.¹ The slash is to me a bit like what Comic Sans is to designers: amateurish, inappropriate, and inexplicably overused.

First, in which cases is using the slash authorized?

• To mark the ends of quoted poetic lines
• In citing URLs
• In writing dates, e.g. “9/11″

(An increasingly common construction in everyday writing, “and/or” would be a provisional, supplementary entry on this list. There are clearer constructions to indicate alternates, and this “verbal monstrosity” has its own controversy, but I’m hunting bigger punctuation game here.) So having summarized approved slash uses, let’s look at its misuses.

The slash disguises imprecision and indecision as ambiguity and indeterminacy. Now don’t get me wrong: as a writer of literary criticism, I depend and thrive on textual ambiguity and indeterminacy. But in scholarly writing, using slash punctuation to signal a point of ambiguity or disjunction tends rather to suggest that a statement needs both further critical reflection and closer editing. Take this example:

a prominent endeavour among colonised writers/artists has been to rework the European ‘classics’ in order to invest them with more local relevance and to divest them of their assumed authority/authenticity. (Gilbert and Tomkins 16)

Here the slash simply seems to replace “and,” which would read more smoothly and retain the sense of pairs that are intimately articulated. In another passage, though (in this text which uses the slash rather compulsively in this way), the slash interferes with clarity of meaning: “Since its history/practice is extremely complex, it is impossible to do justice to Indian drama in a broadly comparative study” (7). Here, history and practice are two very different terms, presumptuously identified and singularized as a noun that still clashes grammatically with the singular verb “is” which follows. Here, then, is a case for reflecting further on which term better fits the statement, or whether “and” could more clearly conjoin both terms.

Decide! I am provoked to think, on reading sentences like these. You’re writing an argument, not a Choose Your own Adventure.

The slash reduces theoretical insight to crude shorthand. One of the contributors to Slemon’s ESC forum makes a case for “adjusting what we understand as good critical writing,” arguing that it should not need “to conform to academic formulas” (12). On this I quite agree: what’s blogging, after all, if not critical writing that doesn’t conform to academic formulas? However, among the standards outlined and reflected on in this article, that concerning spelling and punctuation makes a symptomatic, parenthetical exemption: “Nothing is misspelled (unless self-consciously so, in which case the misspelled word is coded as linguistic intervention through the assiduous placement of dashes, hyphens, quotation marks, and/or parentheses)” (10). The exemption usefully outlines a standard theoretical rationale for the kind of creative punctuation epitomized by the slash: it represents a “linguistic intervention.” It also makes such an intervention by using “and/or.” But too often this kind of linguistic intervention occurs cursorily, without the extensive elaboration that would articulate and account for the specific intervention purported to be made. (Commitment to such articulation is arguably a significant part of what makes Derrida’s writings so lengthy; he doesn’t make linguistic interventions lightly, or without explicating in detail their implications.)

And we read an instance of the more naturalized than problematized “linguistic intervention” later in this same ESC article, amidst reflections on the author’s grading process and its politics, as a process “designed to discipline/convert students to the conventions of good academic critical writing” (11).

In the context of an argument for rethinking the criteria of good writing, the slash here may well represent an ironic linguistic intervention against “writing that is ideologically coded as upper middle class and white” (11) — a point well taken, in its own right. But the further irony is how this intervention also interferes with basic grammatical clarity. In the context of the sentence, both “discipline” and “convert” are transitive verbs, but “discipline” doesn’t use the same transitive construction: one may discipline students in the conventions, but not to them. Alternately, it would be grammatically correct to discipline students to do something — that is, to follow the slashed verb with another verb. However, discipline can also be read intransitively, which would grammatically end the sentence much sooner, right after discipline. In short, the grammatical and semiotic interference posed by the slash as used in this sentence outweigh its coded theoretical insight (which presumably alludes to the Foucauldian theory of discipline and its academic exploitation).

It’s symptomatic that this article is written by the ESC forum’s most junior contributor, a doctoral candidate. I don’t say this to belittle or unfairly criticize the contributor at all — I quite agree with the article’s argument — but its conspicuous slash use contrasts to the absence of the slash (with one exception [4]) among the forum’s seven other contributions, all by more senior scholars. The slash in this article, then, is a symptom of a particular moment in literary critical pedagogy, a moment shaped and informed by the linguistic, theoretical, and cultural turns of the Humanities in the last decades of the twentieth century.

I realize that reading the slash as a product of that moment, and that moment as a product of those paradigm-shifting turns, could be misconstrued as an attack on theory; so let me be clear that nothing could be further from my intent. (I intensively study, extensively use, and tentatively develop theory in my own writing.) As I said at the outset, my concern here is strictly stylistic, and just as style has its politics, so does resistance to stylistic excess, in the name not of simplicity or “common sense,” but of clarity and confidence of voice in critical composition, as a surer means to persuade a larger readership of the soundness of one’s argument — and, of course, of its validity too. As another of Slemon’s contributors affirms, “we must teach the tools of the well-wrought sentence even as we teach the tools for dismantling it [...] as a daring return to the idea that the best prose and the best writers flow across genres” (27). Or to put it another way, by paraphrasing Flaubert: be regular and orderly in your punctuation, that you may be wild and original in your ideas.

To my reading eye (and I know I’m not alone on this), the slash does to the flow of reading a scholarly text what a skipping needle does to the flow of listening to a record. What is presumably intended as semiotic richness reads like punctuational noise. In my research writing and in how I teach writing, I will continue to work towards that happy day when the academical slash may be regarded as a quaint oddity, the way we now regard the presumptuous use of the masculine pronoun to speak on anyone’s behalf.

I’m not so set in my ways that I wouldn’t like to hear the counter-argument, and there may well be more than one theoretically informed and incisive problematization of the critical deployed slash. But I haven’t yet seen such a problematization, only its further, naturalizing proliferation. As in the latest ESC arrived in the mail. This issue’s Readers’ Forum? “Pro/Con/fessionals: (Re)defining Ourselves and the Profession.” And the needle slips clean off the record.

Note
1. I’ve been publishing research since 2002, and the only slashes in any of it (excepting the above authorized uses) appear in two phrases — quoted from other scholars. (An article I co-wrote uses some slashes — but not the part I wrote.) I’m well aware my writing has lots of its own stylistic excesses and deficiencies, but slash misuse is something I’ve always studiously avoided.

Works Cited
Dobson, Kit and Jason Haslam. “Readers’ Forum Introduction: Pro/Con/fessionals: (Re)defining Ourselves and the Profession.” English Studies in Canada 35.4 (2009). 1-2.
Gilbert, Helen and Joanne Tomkins. Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics. London: Routledge: 1996.
Slemon, Stephen, ed. “Reader’s Forum: Why do I have to write like that?” English Studies in Canada 32.2-3 (2006): 1-37.

Congress 2010, day four

Author Lawrence Hill talks about _The Book of Negroes_. Photo courtesy of Boundry.

First thing (and I mean first thing, like before 8 am), Lawrence Hill read from and talked about his bestselling novel The Book of Negroes. (No spoilers, thankfully, as I’m not too far into it.) You can watch an archived video of the proceedings here.

I had to lurch out of there during the Q&A to get to my 9 am session with Socialist Studies on time. After our papers, AU colleague Jay Smith and I fielded great questions and comments about the copyfight from an audience modest in numbers but diverse and engaging in interest and questions: critical communication scholars, a rep from AU Press, a just-graduated English PhD…
A post-session coffee break introduced me to another AU prof, Ingo Schmidt, and then morphed into lunch as a reunion with my UNBSJ colleagues.

This is a placeholder for the better shot the waiter took with Madeley's camera.

The last Congress proceeding I took in was a two-hour panel on Open Access research and publishing, archived on video here.

The four speakers including law professor and copyright activist Michael Geist. Geist took a detour to brief the room on the new Bill C-32, the Copyright Modernization Act, being tabled this week. It was a briefing and a call to action, as Geist clearly explained the problem with DRM or “digital locks”: protecting them under copyright legislation ends up trumping other possible gains for fair dealing, education, criticism, private study, and other non-commercial personal uses of media content. As a call to action, Geist’s talk stressed that the bill might hold some good news (i.e. for fair dealing and education), so Canadians should demand the new bill be fixed, not killed. And fixing it mostly means permitting the circumvention of digital locks when that’s done for lawful reasons.

Geist explains what's wrong with protecting digital locks in copyright law. Photo courtesy of Boundry.

I managed to sneak in the session’s last question, really just to mention the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which hadn’t yet come up in the session, but which seemed well worth mentioning, given the session’s Twitter activity showing a good deal of shock over just the new national bill itself.

Q: Is there any good news in ACTA? A: No.

I described ACTA as one of several industry pressures facing the OA movement, and asked if there was any “good news” with ACTA and how to mobilize against it. He said he didn’t see any good news with ACTA, but he did brief the audience about it: “The thing about this ‘Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement’ is that it’s not about counterfeiting or trade — it’s an intellectual property agreement.” One, as he summarized it, that would be like a DMCA for the whole world.

After which I retreated, under already smoggy skies freshly smeared with the smoke of nearby forest fires: to catch up on Congress blogging, to meet my UNBSJ colleague for a splendid Caribbean dinner at Mango Bay … and to go buy two dozen St Viateur bagels to fly home with.