Comedies of Fair U$E

A Search for Comity in the Intellectual Property Wars
Friday, April 28 through Sunday, April 30, 2006
Free and open to the public

Friday April 28, 7:30-9:30 p.m.
Hemmerdinger Hall
100 Washington Sq. East

Saturday 9:30-6:30 p.m. and Sunday 9:30-1:00 p.m.
Hemmerdinger Hall
100 Washington Sq. East

Panelists to include Lawrence Lessig, Art Spiegelman, Susan Meiselas, Jonathan Letham, Errol Morris, Geoff Dyer, and others.

Some of the most contentious issues bedeviling cultural life today are increasingly coming to revolve around the question of what proper deference ought to be paid to the notion of intellectual property. Just what is copyright, what is its point, who is it designed to protect (individual creators and their legatees, be they individual or corporate, and necessarily to the same extent?) and what is it designed to foster (the most thrivingly fertile intellectual community and intercourse possible?)? How might such objectives, thus stated, be internally at odds, and how might such tensions in turn be resolved? What sorts of product ought to be copyrightable and for how long? To what (increasing?) extent is the cultural/intellectual commons being divied up, fenced off into ever more diminutive swaths of barbed and monetarized terrain? And what exceptions ought to be made to this tendency? What is "fair use" and how ought it to be extended (and perhaps expanded)? How do all these issues play out across different media-textual (books and magazines), visual (photos, paintings, films), and aural (musical)? And to what extent are rampaging developments on the cyberfront expanding or constricting all possibilities in this regard?

The last weekend of this coming April (April 28, 29, and 30), the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU will be bringing together practioners and artists (many from among the ranks of its own distinguished fellowship), along with lawyers, judges, historians, theorists and philosophers, in order to explore various aspects of these questions. Robert Boynton of the NYU Journalism faculty, one of the principal chroniclers of developments in this field, and Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University, arguably the fieldÕs most dynamic activist, are collaborating in helping to convene and steer the conference.

The Friday evening session will focus on Google's highly controversial project of digitizing the entire contents of some of the world's greatest libraries, not necessarily with the prior approval of the relevant copyright holders.

Saturday will see separate sessions devoted to the confounding situations swirling around the practices, respectively, of artists, scholars, musicians and documentary filmmakers.

On Sunday, panelists will try to see if there is some way to move past the various impasses involved, and toward a regime of greater comity among creators and users of intellectual property, especially when these are often the same people in different phases of their work.

Panelists, in addition to Mr. Lessig and Mr. Boynton and Institute director Lawrence Weschler will include:

• Photographer Susan Meiselas
• Painter Joy Garnett
• Novelist Jonathan Letham
• Comix artist Art Spiegelman
• Essayist Geoff Dyer (Out of Sheer Rage, The Ongoing Moment)
• Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris
• Joel Wachs, head of the Andy Warhol Foundation
• Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit
• NYU's Siva Vaidhyanathan (Copyrights and Copywrongs)
• Essayist Lewis Hyde (The Gift, Trickster Makes This World)
• NYU's Lawrence Ferrara, expert on musical issues
• Carrie McLaren of Stay Free
• James Boyle, of digital environmentalist movement (Shaman, Software, and Spleens)
• and others

Download the complete schedule.

All events located in: Hemmerdinger Hall, 100 Washinton Square East, New York, NY 10003

Click here to listen to the symposium. Recording provided by www.onthemedia.org.