Magisterarbeit
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MAGISTERARBEIT Titel der Magisterarbeit A Song of Fans and Piracy How participatory fan-culture challenges media industries, copyrights and notions of authorship The case of A Song of Ice and Fire and HBO’s Game of Thrones Verfasserin Claudia Krug, bakk.phil. angestrebter akademischer Grad Magistra der Philosophie (Mag.phil.) Wien, 2014 Studienkennzahl lt. A 066 841 Studienblatt: Studienrichtung Publizistik und Kommunikationswissenschaft lt. Studienblatt: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Katharine Sarikakis Betreuerin: 1 Acknowledgments I would like to thank my advisor Univ.-Prof. Dr. Katharine Sarikakis for her support and guidance with this thesis. I would like to thank you for encouraging my research and for allowing me to grow academically and personally. I would also like to thank my partner, Brian, for his love, kindness and support during my studies and especially the time that it has taken me to finalize this thesis. Thank you for always being my bridge over troubled water. Furthermore, I would like to thank my parents for their endless love and support. Without you I would have never been able to achieve all this. Thanks to my brother for introducing me to the world of Westeros many years ago and thus laying the foundation of this thesis. Last but not least, I would like to thank George R.R. Martin for creating this great fantasy series. You are a great source of inspiration. Thanks to the makers and cast of Game of Thrones. You guys did a great job so far. Special thanks to the Westeros.org community and all the fans out there who help to create this modern myth. 2 A Game of Thrones: Who owns Westeros? ........................................................................................... 4 PART ONE .............................................................................................................................................. 12 1.1. A Feast for Lawyers: Intellectual Property and Copyright .......................................................... 12 1.1.1. Justification .......................................................................................................................... 12 1.1.2. Authorship and Copyright: History and International Influences ....................................... 15 1.1.3. Media “Piracy” in the Internet era – a fight for supremacy ................................................ 20 1.2. A Clash of Cultures: Creativity and Authorship in the Internet Era ............................................ 25 1.2.2. Top-Down: Authorship in Commercial Crossmedia Production ......................................... 25 1.2.3. Bottom-up: Participatory Culture and the Vanishing Author ............................................. 27 1.2.4. The Cultural Significance of Amateur Culture ..................................................................... 29 1.2.5. Limits of Free Culture: Creativity and Public Domain.......................................................... 30 1.2.6. Legal implementation of Free Culture................................................................................. 33 PART TWO ............................................................................................................................................. 36 2.1 A Storm of Creativity: Fandom and Fan-Communities ................................................................ 36 2.1.1. Sense of Community ........................................................................................................... 37 2.1.3. The Power of Fandom ......................................................................................................... 39 2.2. A Dance with Pirates: Case Study - A Song of Ice and Fire and HBO’s A Game of Thrones ....... 42 2.2.1. The Material ........................................................................................................................ 42 2.2.2. Research Questions ............................................................................................................. 45 2.2.3. Category System .................................................................................................................. 46 2.3. Findings....................................................................................................................................... 51 A) The Lord and his bannermen: The fan-author-relationship ...................................................... 51 A.1. Who’s a fan? ........................................................................................................................... 51 A.2. The romantic author .............................................................................................................. 54 B: The Brotherhood without Banners (and IP rights) ........................................................................ 56 C: The Others – Commercial recreation outside the community ..................................................... 61 D: Paying the Iron Price – Fans and digital piracy ............................................................................. 63 2.3. Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 64 3. Bibliography ....................................................................................................................................... 67 4. Bibliography of Laws .......................................................................................................................... 71 5. Appendix ............................................................................................................................................ 72 7. Curriculum Vitae .............................................................................................................................. 141 5. Abstract (English) ............................................................................................................................. 142 6. Abstract (German) ........................................................................................................................... 143 3 A Game of Thrones: Who owns Westeros? George R. R. Martin, please write, and write faster You’re not going to get any younger, you know Winter is coming, I’m growing impatient And you’ve still got two more damn books left to go So write, George, write like the wind! I curse the day that my friend ever loaned me An old dog-eared paperback called Game of Thrones How could I know that this seed would grow into An addiction that held me, right down to my bones Now, five books later, I lurk with the masses Indignant, entitled, and waiting for word That the great Bearded Glacier has finally published Nine hundred more pages of crack for the nerds Why does every new verse of your song Keep taking you so goddamn long? Paul and Storm, 2012: Write Like the Wind (George R. R. Martin)1 This fan-song by comedy duo Paul and Storm is addressed to American novelist George R. R. Martin (the great Bearded Glacier), begging him to finish his bestselling, epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire. The series is planned to contain seven books, of which five are already published. The first volume of the series, A Game of Thrones, was published in 1996, followed by A Clash of Kings (1998), A Storm of Swords (2000) and A Feast for Crows (2005). Fans waited six long years for A Dance with Dragons (2011) growing impatient – but 900 pages have not been enough to calm down the lurking masses who are waiting for the forthcoming novels2. The fans are more restless than ever. Because now, with the HBO TV adaption slowly catching up with the books and George not “getting younger” nor in better shape – people are worried that he will not be able to finish his series (Hart, 2012). This would mean that they will never learn who will sit on the Iron Throne of Westeros in the end. After years of dedication and restlessness, fans seem to claim rights, in many different ways, to something they do not own in the sense of Intellectual Property law – by doing so, they break the boundaries between fans, creator and publisher and challenge the legal 1 Paul and Storm, 2012. Write Like the Wind (George R. R. Martin) http://www.paulandstorm.com/lyrics/write- like-the-wind-george-r-r-martin/ [Accessed 14 March 2013]. 2 Titled The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring. 4 concept of authorship and its corresponding rights and cause a great stir around the question about what it means to be an author. But what is the buzz all about, anyway? How did it come to this point? The story of A Song of Ice and Fire takes place on the fictional continents Westeros and Essos. The setting reminds the reader of a feudal society of the European Dark Ages, only that seasons last for years in Westeros and long forgotten magic comes back into the world. The fantasy world of A Song of Ice and Fire is highly appreciated by fans for its particularly detailed history with its own lore, songs, myths and fairytales as well as a vast variety of different religions, guilds and cultures. The world comes to life with over a thousand named characters, most of them with their own detailed stemma and family history. Politics and family feuds, moral ambiguity, violence and sexuality, especially among the big noble houses, threaten to shatter the kingdom of Westeros once more – leaving only a few of the reader’s most favorite characters alive. While the noble houses and other parties fight over the Iron Throne to and with it the claim to rule Westeros, a new