April 2004 Information Outlook - Part I
This will be my first time in three years that I won't be attending the SLA Annual conference. That's really a shame, because I'm going to miss the closing plenary speech by Bill Ivey. I didn't recognize his name when I first heard about his status as guest speaker. But Mr. Ivey is "Director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts," according to the conference materials. And that's the short version.
As I learned from this month's Information Outlook, Mr. Ivey has many thoughts on the issues of cultural artifacts, access and control. (Note: full-text access at SLA's website is restricted to members). Some excerpts from "Artifacts from the 20th Century," an interview with Ivey by Charlene Cunniffee ...
BI: Those [audio and video] technologies, combined with performances and spoken word, have created a vast, vast set -- just a vast quantity of heritage material that for the most part is held by, owned by, controlled by the corporations that originally created these products as works for hire.
And these collaborative art forms -- movies, radio and television programs, sound recordings, which bring many kinds of talents into the process of creating a single final product -- this kind of art, this collaborative art, ends up being owned and controlled not by the individual creative players but by the corporation that in a sense brought them all together.
We do have a unique preservation challenge when it comes to these materials that were only made possible by the technologies that came along early in the 20th century ... it's my opinion that the 20th century presented us with a unique set of challenges, both in terms of the character of the material itself and the fact that it was simultaneously cultural heritage and some company's assets.
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If we can find good public policy partnerships that link up the public interest with copyright owners, with those entities that actually control these historical collections... It wasn't that long ago, I mean, the early 1960s, RCA Records actually disposed to significant parts of its historical master disks simply because it was determined that they would never have any present or further commercial value.
And while I think it's great that the contemporary value of historical music and moving images makes some parts of our heritage a part of the marketplace today and gives a certain vitality to old material, it also is a kind of cruel triage mechanism that takes some parts of cultural heritage and kind of consigns them to perpetual obscurity.
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CC: ... The current legal and copyright environment does not sound very friendly to this effort. As the copyright gets extended and the RIAA and others assert their rights in a very strong manner, how do you see this evolving -- since the trend seems to be tighter ownership rather than looser ownership?
BI: Copyright has been extended and ... ownership rights in historical cultural material have been aggressively protected and pursued by copyright owners. I think it's an indication of how little progress we've made in developing a serious conversation about citizens rights, needs of society, in relation to the rights of owners.
In other parts of society, like the natural environment and historical monuments, we've had that conversation. Absent any real public concern, it does seem that copyright owners in recent years have been able to expand the reach of copyright without any serious power center kind of standing up and saying, well, this is too much.
And I think it's going to take some time before our society gets to the point that we see the public interest modifying the interest of copyright owners. But the time to start the conversation is now, because with media consolidation, with offshore ownership of cultural assets, if we don't find a way to assert the public interest around some of these questions, we will see significant pieces of cultural heritage either lost entirely or locked away so that for practical purposes they are lost.
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In the U.S., there is no U.S. cultural artifact that can't be purchased and taken away. And so I think there are terrific opportunities for a two-way conversation in which the U.S. can bring its very sophisticated thinking about attaching and protecting revenue streams that can be connected to cultural work -- but at the same time learn something from countries that understand that cultural heritage has to do with national identity, with national pride, with the integrity of your own society, and that those commercial interests and those commercial systems need to be modified and cannot simply dominate the entire cultural conversation.