Salon Wazzup, Elián!
" The Associated Press photo was splayed across newspapers and magazine covers across the nation -- little Elián, screaming with fear, as an FBI trooper points a gun in the direction of his head. Once the picture became a sensation, it was merely a matter of time before someone online turned it into a parody; and sure enough, someone did, animating the Elián photo to the soundtrack of the popular Budweiser "Wazzup!" commercial.

Within hours, the smart alecks behind the parody were engaged in a legal tiff with officials from the Associated Press, who forced them to take the site down. Now, however, the satirists appear to be winning concessions from a "chastened" AP."

""We do care about free expression, and being in the position of seeming to suppress it is something that has given me some second thoughts about how we responded," Tomlin says. "I read my note on the Web now, it certainly looks every bit as heavy-handed as some of my critics have said it was. I don't think that's the right way to start a thoughtful debate about what's appropriate and what's not.""

peterme.com Late-ish night memetics thoughts. Excuse any logical leaps.

""We had 5000 hits by the time I came in Wednesday, and by 10 a.m. it was 20,000. Before noon it was almost 100,000, and by Wednesday night we had 600,000 hits."

"So, you know, there's gotta be something of sociological import in the development, publication, and reception of the Elian Wazzup video. It's such a remarkable crystallization point of the Now of pop culture. The development points to how almost natural satire is becoming in modern discourse as a method of communicating ideas. The publication demonstrates the ease and speed with which fairly normal Joes can create and distribute their ideas. The reception illuminates the awesome capability of the internet to foment a literal overnight phenomenon (I must have received at least 4 links to the page... ). The cease-and-desist letter provides a classic example of how The Old Ways just wont work any more. Most delightfully, this is a story of how two schmucks were able to turn the government (Janet Reno's minions), the press (AP photo), and Big Corporations (Anheuser-Busch) on their heads with a bit of creative splicing. And don't forget, there are dot coms filled with venture capital and dozens of employees that would kill for those hit numbers. "

redux [02.05.00]
Reason Magazine Copy Catfight
"There is an inherent conflict between intellectual property rights and freedom of speech, a tension between your right to control a story you've written and my right to use it as raw material for my own work. Thanks to two trends, that tension is turning rapidly into a collision... On one hand, as information has grown more valuable, copyright and trademark law has become increasingly restrictive. At the same time, there has been, in the words of MIT media studies professor Henry Jenkins, an "explosion of grassroots, participatory culture," a new high-tech folkway that not only draws on pop culture but appropriates from it more easily than ever before, and disseminates itself on a wider scale."

redux [04.15.00]
MIT Technology Review Freedom—Or Copyright?
"Once upon a time, in the age of the printing press, an industrial regulation was established for the business of writing and publishing. It was called copyright. Copyright’s purpose was to encourage the publication of a diversity of written works. Copyright’s method was to make publishers get permission from authors to reprint recent writings.

Ordinary readers had little reason to disapprove, since copyright restricted only publication, not the things a reader could do. If it raised the price of a book a small amount, that was only money. Copyright provided a public benefit, as intended, with little burden on the public. It did its job well—back then.

Then a new way of distributing information came about: computers and networks. The advantage of digital information technology is that it facilitates copying and manipulating information, including software, musical recordings and books. Networks offered the possibility of unlimited access to all sorts of data—an information utopia.

But one obstacle stood in the way: copyright. Readers who made use of their computers to share copyright infringers. The world had changed, and what was once an industrial regulation on publishers had become a restriction on the public it was meant to serve."