No Country for Old Media
No Country for Old Media Chris Hubbles A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2018 Reading Committee: Jin Ha Lee, Chair Adam D. Moore Nicholas M. Weber Program Authorized to Offer Degree: The Information School Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC-BY-4.0) 2018 Chris Hubbles University of Washington Abstract No Country for Old Media Chris Hubbles Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Jin Ha Lee, Associate Professor The Information School The philosophical defense of intellectual property theory has become a significant, and growing, area of inquiry over the past several decades. Copyright, the legal mechanism protecting creative works, is one major class of intellectual property rights. Modern intellectual property thought draws primarily from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paradigms, which relied upon reasonable but implicit assumptions about durability of material substrates. Subsequent changes in how intellectual works are fixed physically, as well as practical experience with copyright implementation, challenge these assumptions about durability, and indicate the need for more circumscribed grants of intellectual rights. Yet copyright duration and scope increased substantially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the changes in media durability have gone largely unconsidered by recent theorists. As a result, modern adaptations of intellectual property theory extrapolated from Enlightenment-era models fail to afford sufficient value to preservation of creative works. Many nineteenth- and twentieth-century media are inherently fragile or unstable, illustrating problems with the archetype of the long-term information carrier – for instance, newspaper and paperback books in print, daguerreotypes in photography, phonograph cylinders and shellac discs in audio, nitrate film and VHS tapes in visual media, and floppy disks in software-based media.
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