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Backward C inside a Circle: Free Culture in Zines

Alycia Sellie Graduate Center, City University of New York

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BACKWARD C INSIDE A CIRCLE: FREE CULTURE IN ZINES

ALYCIA SELLIE

A master’s thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Liberal Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, The City University of New York

2014

This work is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

ALYCIA SELLIE

This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Liberal Studies in satisfaction of the thesis requirement for the degree of Master of Arts.

Joseph Entin

Date Thesis Advisor

Matthew K. Gold

Date Executive Officer

THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

iii

Abstract

BACKWARD C INSIDE A CIRCLE: FREE CULTURE IN ZINES

Alycia Sellie

Adviser: Professor Joseph Entin

Although zines made today utilize many forms of antiquated technologies such as the typewriter and the photocopier in their construction, they are a part of contemporary tinkering with intellectual property. This thesis examines free culture as it has been expressed in self-published zines made in the last thirty-five years. It looks at the licenses found in zines as conversations between a zine maker and a zine reader. Beyond just the legal implications, the cultural and ethical effects of licensing a zine are explored.

The internet is not the only place where people have played with intellectual property and toyed with alternatives to copyright. Outside thinking about digital copying, this thesis highlights ways that the use and remixing of the others’ work in print is a part of the free culture movement. It looks beyond the technological to uncover other forms of anti-copyright activism.

Dedication

This thesis is dedicated to the memories of Marlin J. Brown and Danalee J. Brown, who could make and repair all kinds of things, as well as scale obstacles through thinking, and who shared these skills with me.

Acknowledgements

My heartfelt thanks goes to Jill Cirasella, Molly Fair, Matthew J. Goins, and Shifra Sharlin, who all helped me in their own ways as I wrote this thesis.

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction …………………………………………………………………….… 1

2. Copying Makes a Zine ……...……………………………………………….…… 7

3. Zine Studies ……...……………………………………………….……...... 12

4. License Studies ……...……………………………………………….…...... … 16

5. What is a License? / Copyright as Conversation ……...………………………….. 18

6. Free Culture ……...……………………………………………….……...... 21

7. Methodology ……...……………………………………………….……...... 23

8. Zine Licenses ……...……………………………………………….……...... 28

8a. Free Culture Licenses

i. Copyleft ...... 29

ii. Creative Commons ...... 33

iii. Anti-© ...... 37

iv. DIY Licenses ...... 40

8b. Licenses Over Time ...... 42

8c. Restricted Licenses

i. Zines without a License ...... 46

ii. No-Derivatives and Non-Commercial ...... 48

iii. More than Copyrighted(ed) ...... 50

9. Control and Trust ...... 52

10. The Photocopier ...... 56

Bibliography ...... 67

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure Page

1. Your Secretary (zine), no.3 nd, np. Queer Zine Archive Project. 14

2. Davida Gypsy Brier. MetaZine: It’s About Zines (zine), July 2013, 2. 18 Personal Collection.

3. Bob McGlynn, Mayhem Comix, nd, np. New York State Library Mike 25 Gunderloy Collection.

4. Tiny Basic image in the public domain, as found at: 29 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tiny_BASIC&oldid=574820961

5. Grrrl Zines A Go-Go, Zine Capsule: Zine Collecting for the Future (zine), 30 2008, np. Barnard Library Zine Collection.

6. Gendercide (zine), no.1, 2006, np. Queer Zine Archive Project. 34

7. Alana Kumbier, ed., Because the Boss Belongs to Us: Queer Femmes on 34 Bruce Springsteen (zine), March 2011, np. Queer Zine Archive Project.

8. Sassyfrass Circus (zine), no. 7, nd, np. Queer Zine Archive Project. 35

9. Rachel and Sari, eds. Hoax: feminisms and communication (zine), no.6, 39 November 2011, np. Personal Collection.

10. Schism (zine), nd, np. New York State Library Mike Gunderloy Collection. 40

11. Cassie J. Sneider, Scrappy J: A Story About Fighting (zine), 2008, np. 50 Brooklyn College Library Zine Collection.

12. Robyn Chapman, Hey 4 Eyes! (zine), no. 1, Summer 2004, np. Personal 50 Collection.

13. Image used by Jenna Braeger, “The Punk and the Curator: On Fanzines,” 53 Sassyfrass Circus, http://sassyfrasscircus.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/the- punk-and-the-curator-on-fanzines/.

vii

I use language the way a painter would use paint. I use other texts—that’s how I write.1 —Kathy Acker

Techniques of collage and detournement occur quite naturally to anyone armed with scissors, glue stick, a pen and a sense of humor.2 –V.Vale

1. INTRODUCTION

Using the photocopier in place of a publisher, zines are created through idiosyncratic practices. The process of making a zine is not easily summarized. Rather than one process, zinesters use many techniques. Because zines are primarily self-driven and invented, methods are unique to each title; there are no standards. The fact that most zines are created in very small print runs3 and that often their creators don’t make a profit from their publications4 might be two of the only elements of zine publishing that could be said to unite them across all definitions.5

Motivations for making a zine vary. However, many people begin because they are dissatisfied about discourses happening around them. They start looking for alternatives—for places to vent, to be heard, or to be understood:

I created Media Whore because of my inability (and growing frustration) to find an existing periodical that met my desires. I wanted something hip, but informative, I wanted something feminist, but not about general pop culture or the news. I wanted something sexy, but not product-oriented or promoting consumerism. I wanted something that acknowledged that women think about things other than men, sex, and fashion. I wanted something that was well-designed and easy to read, but still retained an underground edge.6

1 Frustrations can be fixed onto the printed pages of a zine and transformed from a feeling into an action by way of the photocopier. They can be made into a tangible object that contains (and shares) those initial thoughts or furies:

It was actually the idea of several women incarcerated in Oregon who were reading zines and magazines written by men in prison, and were seeing that their experiences were not being reflected in men prisoner writings. They said they weren’t seeing things about dealing with their kids, or child custody issues, or maintaining contact with family, or pervasive sexual harassment they get from staff members inside prisons, so they wanted a publication that spoke about their issues and also spoke to other women so they knew they weren’t suffering these things by themselves.7

Publishing becomes a way to address fractures in a community, to seek camaraderie when one has felt cast out, and is a safe way to say things that one isn’t given a chance to express in the moment:

Shotgun Seamstress is a zine by & for black punks, queers, misfits, feminists, artists & musicians, weirdos and the people who support us. This zine is meant to support Black People who exist within predominantly white subcultures, and to encourage the creation of our own.8

This tactic that zinesters use—when they step outside of what already exists, in other media, to form a new publication (and also simultaneously a new nexus of discourse)—displays an approach that is central to the art of zine making.

Refusing to stay within the bounds of what is already established is a large part of the zine maker’s philosophy of DIY (Do It Yourself). The way that the DIY ethos takes hold in zine communities is participatory and circular: readers are encouraged to become writers and vice versa. Zinesters validate each other’s interests, and encourage one another to invent and experiment. One doesn’t need to be invited in order to publish a zine, but zinesters help each other to see that self-publishing isn’t something for which you need an invitation.9 Alison

Piepmeier writes that in the zines she studied, those made by girls in particular, are “mechanical,

2 emotional and even theoretical” projects and that they “provide a space, a means, and a process for the voices of girls and women to enter the public world.”10

Working outside of traditional publishing gives zinesters many more options for their work than an author or artist would have if they were working within the confines of standard for-profit models. But because the choices that a zinester must make about their work are not prescribed, making a zine involves a litany of decisions that each zine publisher must make, often on their own.11

Further, since zines are “publicly distributed but homemade texts”12 that are crafted by hand, zinesters not only must decide what content will fill the pages of their publication, but they also must make decisions about every other aspect of its creation—like what kind of paper their pages will be made of (not to mention how the pages will be bound, what size those pages should be, and how many pages will be printed). Like the zine Five O’Clock Charlie, a self-described

“poetry, prose, and undignified little doodles” publication, many zines are “published when

[they] get around to it,” and “compiled, edited and printed” in “sweaty little bedrooms, pubs, and at work.”13

Because zinesters seek alternatives to standard methods of publishing, many of the features one might expect to find in print publications are not found on a consistent basis in zines. Often they do not have a proper title page. Dates of publication could be omitted. A zine might be filled with drawings or photographs instead of text.14 Many zinesters argue that if a publication includes such norms as an International Standard Book Number (ISBN) or

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN), then it isn’t really a zine.15 A zine creator might also intentionally leave out or obfuscate any information about themselves. Anonymous publications or using a zine pseudonym is common.16

3 Given the broad and unconventional spectrum of zine-making traditions, it is surprising that so many zines include a statement within their pages about how their creator wants their publications to be used; a license that prescribes how the intellectual property of a zine should be managed.17 From the many choices that zinesters make about their work, I am focused here on this one decision. This thesis examines the relationship between zines and intellectual property as expressed through licenses.

Within the full range of zines published in the United States in the last thirty-five years are a subset that have been licensed freely, or that use licenses that break away from standard copyright restrictions. As we will see, these licenses are used as a way to subvert, protest or circumvent intellectual property laws. Recent focus on new technologies has led to the assumption that the internet is the only domain for questions intellectual property. Yet during the same period that free culture movements hacked copyright in software and code, zines have experimented with copying and control. As anti-copyright thinking tools, zines have been less celebrated. But zines are equally important as a site of consciousness-raising about alternatives to intellectual property hegemony.

This thesis looks to licenses as primary texts. I follow the ways that ideas about intellectual property travel, move, and transform. I map the movement of ideas about intellectual property in the zine community by a close reading of the copyright statements found on zine publications. Even today, in an age of perpetually developing technologies and constant connectedness, zines are still being created. They are a kind of slow media, allowing creative space away from screens and data overload by the millisecond.

In the same way that zines clear their own path through the publishing process, the licenses I have found in zines do not consistently follow a prescribed model. While many zines

4 use licenses that are ready made, I will also examine the free-form way that some zinesters have created and used vernacular licenses in their own language to describe how their work might be used, instead of following a set formula.

My particular interest in what zinesters have to say about copyright relies on my knowledge of copying as a practice at the heart of zine making. I examine how zine creators use the photocopier as press and publisher, and how the iterative nature of this machine is part of their creative practice. I will show how zinesters incorporate the work of others and how they hope their work can be shared (or, alternately, how they wish to constrain the way their work is shared). This push-pull between copying/sharing/using and privacy/control and personal expression through creative work is central to what I would like to call critical or cultural license studies.

This thesis takes a cultural, not a legal approach. Rather than investigating licenses from the point of view of the law or technology, I am studying how people use and interpret licenses. I am interested in the push/pull between the control and freedoms that licensing represents and also the interactions between what the law is and what people actually do. This study of copyright takes with it the understanding that just because a law prescribes or restricts certain actions, we know that these prescriptions don’t always correspond with what happens on the ground (take home taping of records, mix tapes or other flagrant and common violations of copyright restrictions as evidence of this gap).

This thesis begins with a few core concepts: what is a license, and some basics of copyright. Second, it takes a quick tour of free culture, the idea of ethics and community in licensing. Then it addresses the scholarship of zines and copyright (or lack thereof). Third, I examine licenses that I have found in zines, according to a few categories I have developed.

5 Following that, I discuss issues of openness and control in the zine community. And the final section summarizes how zines in particular prove that intellectual property is a beast to be tamed in every medium—and print’s not dead.

6 2. COPYING MAKES A ZINE

Copying texts was a central component of the act of writing for Kathy Acker. When she described her experiences writing Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream, she said that she decided to copy Cervantes’ work because Don Quixote was the book that she brought with her to the waiting room to read before an abortion. At first, she couldn’t think, so she started copying the text:

It was my version of a Sherrie Levine painting, where you copy something with no theoretical justification behind what you’re doing… After I got into the middle of it, I began to see that the book was, in a way, about appropriating male texts and about trying to find your voice as a woman (I deal with that a lot in the second part of the book). But it really started out with my fascination with Levine's notion of seeing what happens when you copy something for no reason.18

Acker argued that her use of other texts was not an action that pointed outward, but one that functioned as autobiography, or as an exploration of identity and persona as public commentary on her interior world. Instead of plagiarizing as an act of theft, Acker appropriated texts in order to reference the inner workings of her characters and herself, while simultaneously pointing to layers of surrounding culture.

Kathy Acker’s work is not a forgery, nor is it an exact replica. She did not re-use anyone else’s text in total, only in part. In Great Expectations, she used large pieces of the Dickens work, but she then altered the story and re-created the narrative, which she folded into her own.

She did not use a Duchampian approach in which she may have signed a copy of another’s book as a found object. Rather, Acker incorporated others’ texts into her own writing practice. Unlike

Levine, Acker used the texts of others within her work, weaving between her writing and the work of others. She also oscillated between narratives—inserting autobiography while removing narrative elements and creating an uneasy collage. Although Acker denied originality, she

7 created totally new pieces of work from the work of others. There would be no confusing an original text and an Acker text, and to see both together would prove that the Acker version is no true “copy.”

Of course the trope of an artist who uses or manipulates the work of others is an old one.

Nina Paley, filmmaker and free culture activist, addresses this concept in her video, “All

Creative Work is Derivative.”19 In the video, Nina animates the human form as sculpted throughout art history, beginning as far back as possible. Each sculpture is juxtaposed on top of another chronologically, showing not an evolution of originality, but the similarities of these depictions over time. In his book, In Praise of Copying, Marcus Boon writes:

There is a long history of appropriation in the arts. To take a few lines of an author’s composition, to copy an image or a melody and use it in your own work: such acts of citation or outright theft formed the basis of art before romanticism— Shakespeare’s extensive use of other playwrights’ plots and texts, for example. The valorization of the expressive power of the individual artist emerged around the same time as copyright laws, during the Romantic period. But the integration of the original artist into the marketplace was also accompanied by the rise of an avant-garde whose work has constantly been built around a critique of notions of originality, identity and property. Such avant-garde work includes collage and montage by Picasso and the Dadaists; direct acts of appropriation such as Duchamp’s LHOOQ, a retitled and retouched print of the Mona Lisa; Andy Warhol’s soup cans and silkscreens.20

Boon also discusses the overlap of gender and copying. He asks whether those creative practices that are considered more feminine are also more associated with derivative works, or craft.

Practices like quilting or cooking are rarely seen as art, and are often overlooked. Boon also discusses the perception that copying is always looked down upon, even though it is at the core of human reproduction (also a female practice). Additionally, he presents the “great montage artists,” the majority were women: collagists like Hanna Hoch, Barbara Kruger, and Kathy

Acker.21

8 Acker has been a significant artistic influence upon musician Kathleen Hanna. In an interview in the Village Voice in 2002, Hanna credited Acker for her decision to front the band

Bikini Kill. Acker gave Hanna some advice: “If you want to be heard,” she asked, “why are you doing spoken word? You should be in a band.”22

But Kathleen Hanna is not just a musician. Well-known as a leader of the riot grrrl movement, Hanna was also a zinester.23 As a zinester, Hanna’s work used the same approach that Acker brought to writing. Both women used methods of appropriation, assemblage, montage, detournement, bricoleur, or whatever other French words one might use to describe the layering of one’s thoughts, feelings and world through text and imagery. Print culture scholar

Janice Radway summarizes this practice as part of the core of zine traditions:

Zines gesture insistently toward the rich densities of the social world not simply through indexical reference and representation but, literally, by incorporating bits and pieces of that world within their pages. This is done through practices of collage, bricolage, citation and cultural recycling. Indeed zines almost always incorporate the words and images of multiple others into their miscellaneous mix. Zine artists constitute themselves, then, in and through constant conversation with others. Virtually every utterance and every representation is staged as a response. Nothing appears sui generis as if originating in a single writer. Rather, every speech act is called forth as part of a dialogue, at least, and more often as part of an extended conversation.24

In an earlier piece, “Girls, Reading, and Narrative Gleaning: Crafting Repertoires for Self-

Fashioning Within Everyday Life,” Radway talked about her own uses of texts: “Reading was sometimes more a form of itinerant poaching for me—to use Michel de Certeau’s (1984) terminology—a way of raiding texts for what I could use to project a future.”25

Zine scholar Anna Poletti describes the same use in zines on the other side of the globe.

She writes: “The recycling of pre-existing media material and found-text in collage, the use of the photocopier as a means of production, and the personalization of the photocopied text are common features of Australian zines.”26 In her book, Intimate Ephemera: Reading of Young

9 Lives in Australian Zine Culture, she describes how a zinester used a well-known text from

Roland Barthes much in the same way that Acker would have—by placing it in the middle of her own work, without credit. 27

Johanna Fateman, an artist and bandmate of Hanna’s, discussed issues of artistic use and appropriation in her zine, Artaud-Mania: The Diary of a Fan:

I once wrote a novel called "Black Beauty" based on the movie "Black Beauty." I was unconcerned about my sister's critique of the project based on a false notion of originality and undeterred by the already existing novel of the same name upon which the movie had been based because I had found (plagiarized) a text which perfectly fulfilled my criteria for art in its description of a situation in which 1) total autonomy from parental control had been achieved, and 2) telepathy with animals was possible. I felt no need to assume a posture of invention, only ownership. This was childhood.

Under this piece, a section is crossed out, but still readable:

Growing up in an academic community I learned that stealing ideas was as morally bad as stealing money in fact it was exactly the same thing. But on the other hand this message was delivered with ambivalence because, you know, guilt about being complicit with capitalism and, after all, it always depends on who is stealing money from who, etc.28

Today if you want a copy of Hanna or Fateman’s zines, you have to scrounge. Long out of print, the way that many riot grrrl fans obtain these zines is to find someone selling a copy of a copy of a copy—or a faded, greyish ghost of a once crisp black and white zine, like a flashback to a time when someone sharing their music collection with you meant receiving a tape made from their records, or when you had to watch a grainy tape of a copy of a copy in order to see any underground films, as I had to strain to see through the noise and fuzz in order to try to see

Eraserhead.

Kate Eichhorn argues in her piece, “Archiving the Movement: The Riot Grrrl Collection at Fales Library and Special Collections,” that riot grrrl is far more connected to the avant garde and to artistic movements than is commonly acknowledged: “it is important to emphasize that

10 many early riot grrrl writers (and notably, I am choosing to refer to them as writers rather than zinesters here) were, like Acker and her contemporaries in the avant-garde writing scenes in New

York City and San Francisco, committed to creating a textual space where competing tendencies, narratives, truths, styles and aesthetics could co-exist…”29 Further, Eichhorn criticizes others who study zines for not considering content over form, and “pushing aesthetic questions to the margins,” or not including “extended discussion of zine writing in relation to pastiche, detournement, appropriation or questions of authorship.”30 I agree with Eichhorn’s call for further study of zine practices as creative artistic practices and experiments with intellectual property theory.

11 3. ZINE STUDIES

Most scholarly studies of zines discuss the way that these publications copy and collage.

Not many of them devote much attention to discussing these practices in relation to the study of intellectual property or copyright culture. Zines, or as Radway categorizes them, “not books,” display some of the most experimental approaches to licensing that happen in print, and yet these experiments have been very infrequently studied.31

Since the 1990s, popular press articles relating to zines have been plentiful. But these stories don’t tend to break through to any meaningful discourse about zine publishing. They reduce zines with their tone, which is almost side-show-esque, as can be read through their titles:

“Wacky Magazines Know No Limits,”32 “Desktop Publishing has Lead to Zineomania,”33

“Comix-A-Go-Go and the 'Zine Scene: They're Black and White—and Read All Over.”34

Many anthologies have been published in the last thirty years that re-print selections of zines, celebrate the zine scene, and thinly describe some of the histories of the medium.35 A number of books have been published that fall into the category of handbooks, or how-to texts that describe what zines are, contextualize them, and enumerate tips and tricks for making your own zine.36

Slowly a more in-depth and critical approach to zine studies is developing. Already pockets of intense scholarship have arisen within the larger field, among them girl zines studies,37 particularly within the third wave feminist movement of riot grrrl,38 and the study of zines as important materials for libraries and archives.39

Stephen Duncombe’s Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative

Culture was the first monograph devoted to zines and is the text most broadly cited both by scholars and zinesters. Duncombe summarizes the early nineties experience of zines from the

12 perspective of a “former punk band member, political activist, zinester and academic.”40

Duncombe uses what scholars like Poletti have criticized as a “resistance approach” to zines.41

Even though he frames zine-making from a political perspective, others, like Radway, who agree with the concept that zines have political power, have criticized Duncombe’s inability to see how zines are effective as “ideological instruments.”42 Duncombe’s final chapter even questions whether making a zine is an effective political action, or tactic. Yet I agree with Piepmeier’s skepticism of “the kinds of intellectual binaries that would have us divide cultural productions in terms of complicity or resistance.”43

Duncombe considers intellectual property in one small section of his book. He initially argues that the participatory traditions of DIY within the zine community make zinesters open to the use and re-use of their work by others. Likening the practices of re-use within zines to “the early days of newspapers and magazines in the United States,” Duncombe argues for a connection between zine appropriation and the culture of reprinting as described by Meredith

McGill, where taking texts from one source to publish in another was legal and rampant, most notably in the newspaper industry.44

What Duncombe does not specify is that today, unlike in the early nineteenth century, copyright gives zinesters two ways to use the work of others: legally or illegally. Both kinds of use happen throughout zine publications. Sometimes through legal means—if a zinester would use work that was published under a license that allows use, or work that is published under standard copyright restrictions where use is granted via permission from the rights holder. And sometimes the illegal use of another’s work happens totally unwittingly.

Figure 1.Statement from the inside pages of Your Secretary #3.Queer Zine Archive Project.45

The example above is just one of many where a use/appropriation is ambiguous, even as it is pointed to, or discussed by the zinester.

Duncombe writes: “While a number of zines—and increasingly more—are explicitly copyrighted, an almost equal number are explicitly anticopyrighted.”46 And for some zines,

“violating copyrights becomes their raison d’etre.” In his footnotes, Duncombe cites the earliest zine that experimented with intellectual property that I have been able to identify: Copyright

Violation, from 1981, which consisted almost entirely of advertisements taken from the mass press, doctored by the zinesters, and then, in turn, copyrighted. Duncombe assumes that this is some kind of joke.47

By describing just a few zines that have addressed copyright, Duncombe has performed some of the most in-depth study about zines and intellectual property issues to date. But the sum of his writing on this subject is less than three pages. This trend is repeated in other academic studies of zines, where mention of copyright or intellectual property issues float through a piece peripherally.

In her study of zines as third space(s), Adela Licona ties the use of open licenses in zines to grassroots movements for literacies and equity.48 She writes that zines collectively “recognize and resist intellectual property control and first-order consumption because these practices limit the circulation of knowledge and practices of difference.”49 Seeing that alternative licenses are akin to “alternative consumption,” Licona brings attention to the ways zines are “advocated and

14 modeled to promote greater access to and for artists and activists as well as to promote equity and social justice in localized contexts,"50 and that they exemplify “how third-space lived practice can subvert normalized and dominant capitalist imperatives.”51

Although Licona understands and celebrates the use of free licenses in zines as an exemplification of her arguments about zines and third space, her discussion of the ways that zinesters can and have used licenses still only takes up a few pages distributed throughout her book.

Perhaps for me to look specifically to the literature of zine studies in order to find instances of explicit conversation about intellectual property is not the correct approach. Maybe a better approach would be to listen to what Radway describes—that we haven’t yet attended to zines “as the critical yet always wholly integral element in complex and socially specific forms of cultural activity,” or that by studying one aspect of zine making at a time, we reify and simplify the activity of zine making and miss “its distinct playfulness and investment in defying familiar categories.” In zine studies, it is always important to remember, as Radway states, that:

Knowledge practices that are too discipline bound hinder our capacity to understand the significance of the fact that zines are actively created by individuals who also circulate them and use them deliberately to trouble all sorts of familiar categorical distinctions to quite powerful effect.52

15 4. LICENSE STUDIES

Connecting the developing fields of zine studies to license studies has at times been the hardest part of writing this thesis. In one sense, the work that I am doing in license studies might seem more appropriate for those who have an interest in studying intellectual property as it relates to copyright law in the United States. But instead of deconstructing and critiquing particular legal cases, I instead focus on the contours or grey areas in how licenses are read, interpreted and used by people, not in courts. Additionally, I acknowledge the constructed and at times otherworldly nature of the U.S. legal system for concepts like intellectual property, which can at times feel wholly unreal because of its intangible nature.53

As zinesters tend to identify with life on the fringes and as a group might be wary of established guidelines like copyright, or even concepts like laws in general, to view their publications merely according to a strict reading of copyright law would not be a very generous light through which to understand zines as works of culture. Thus, I haven’t waded through legal documents heavily here—rather I’m looking to developing thinking about licenses that sometimes lives outside of academic or legal literature.

Late in my research, I found a blog post that I felt captures an approach I have been trying to cultivate in this thesis. The post was by Dan Cohen, Executive Director of the Digital

Public Library of America project. Titled “CC0 (+BY),” Cohen ruminates in his post about what license best suits the project, and how no one license is a precise fit with its goals. Cohen explains that while most would prefer to think of problems like the challenge of licensing a work as a clear, distinct, and remedy-able task and contend with it solely as a technical or legal issue, in reality the social components play a large and complex role, mixing all of the other issues into grey areas. He writes:

16 It’s much easier to think of an issue solely as a technical problem (we just need to figure out how to code that properly), or as a legal problem (we just need to bind everyone under a contractual agreement to achieve the desired outcome), than as a social issue, since the latter requires more attention to the more amorphous aspects such as ethics and politics.

Cohen believes that what is best in contemplating licenses is that we “move the attribution from the legal realm into the social or ethical realm by pairing a permissive license with a strong moral entreaty.” Cohen is arguing against earlier claims that code and the law can resolve all issues of intellectual property.54 He is entering into the brackish waters of ethics and community in order to argue that less restrictive licenses can allow more and better use of materials by people who “consider themselves part of a social contract.”55 By making this decision from an embedded perspective within the community of collaborators, Cohen is telling us much more than if he were to apply the standard copyright restrictions without consideration of the alternatives.

Arguing that becoming “more nuanced about the mix of the social, technical and legal can pay dividends,” Cohen gives us a wonderful framework through which to understand the cultural importance of a license: as a legal contract, a technical tool, and a social conversation happening within a community. My hope is that I have examined all of the licenses here with these multiple lenses.

I view licenses as a conversation between creators and readers. By way of what I call license studies, I have sought out literature that examines the cultural ramifications of licensing creative work, as negotiations between people rather than the methods by which one might restrict the work of another.

17 5. WHAT IS A LICENSE? / COPYRIGHT AS CONVERSATION56

Taking a narrow view, one could argue that a license is solely a legal contract. More broadly, a license could also be seen as the mechanism through which a writer or an artist communicates the ways they would like their work to be used after it leaves their hands. A license can be seen as a way that creators speak to their audience. Licenses map what use of creative work is within bounds and what a creator deems to be unacceptable.

If you were asked to imagine a copyright statement or license, you may picture something along the lines of the following images, taken from the inside cover of MetaZine:

Figure 2. Inside cover of MetaZine. Personal Collection.57

In this issue, the © symbol tells us that Davida is invoking all of her rights to control her work.

This would be a typical example of a license that is employing standard copyright.58 Under standard copyright, an author retains their full legal status as the sole person automatically allowed to use and re-use their work. They are the (copy) rights holder. Others might be able to use the work, but only by contacting the rights holder and obtaining (written) consent for that use.

Copyright scholar and lawyer Lawrence Lessig refers to this situation as “permissions culture,” because so much of this system relies on finding a copyright holder and receiving their

18 OK in order to reprint, remix or otherwise use their work in any way that is more significant than a “reading.” 59

Hypothetically, with any kind of license, works that have been published can be viewed, or “read.”60 A book restricted by the fullest legal copyright protections can still be read—all it takes is to find or purchase a copy of the text. Copyright becomes pertinent only when one tries to take, transform, or use these works in ways beyond reading—i.e. to take a photo of someone’s painting without their consent, reprint an image that has been restricted by copyright, or to distribute and re-use a copyrighted text.61

Lessig sees the logical extension of these restrictions as a transformation into “read-only” culture, wherein a distinct separation occurs between groups of consumers who can only view the work of others, and a class of producers who are not only able to read/view or consume, but also to write and make their own work (and license that work). He worries about the gap between those who are fully media literate and those who are only able to passively view what others have created.

Zinesters intimately understand threats posed by read-only culture, and their work takes a stand against strictly consumerism-based media. On the pages of their zine, often a zinester will explicitly command readers to participate, and to DIY:

The existence of DIY culture is so important for historically marginalized people because it shows you that you don't have to have formal education in something or be an expert to do it well, DIY makes room for everyone to participate, and that means you.62

Zines aim to break down the fourth wall of publishing and to unite readers with writers, or to make them one and the same. Using an open license is one way to allow readers in. Instead of locking up work with copyright restrictions, some zinesters choose to allow their work to be used, re-used and recontextualized by their readers.

19 Although I am interested most in this opening up, this participatory letting in, I want to be clear that not all zines use open, or alternative licenses. As we will see, some zines are very carefully released projects that require intimate tending and control. I still use the word license to refer to any statement written in a zine about how that item might be used by a reader, regardless of whether it might be a standard (all rights reserved) statement or one that is entirely opposed to the idea of intellectual property.

20 6. FREE CULTURE

I have been referring to open, or “free” licenses above. Here I would like to discuss a bit of the history of this term as it relates to alternatives to copyright. Which really means I would like to talk about free culture.

Free culture is the opposite of permissions culture. Lessig writes that “Free cultures are cultures that leave a great deal open for others to build upon; unfree, or permission, cultures leave much less.”63 Question Copyright activist Karl Fogel describes free culture in this way:

“Free culture is a growing understanding among artists and audiences that people shouldn't have to ask permission to copy, share, and use each other's work; it is also a set of practices that make this philosophy work in the real world.”64

There are two branches of the free culture movement. One branch is concerned with licensing in software and computing. Although naming this group can be controversial, I will mostly refer to it here as the free software movement.65 The other branch is dedicated to re- thinking copyright practices surrounding creative works. Groups like Students for Free Culture,

Question Copyright, or Creative Commons are part of this second branch.

Many people today are aware of the restrictions of copyright or intellectual property because of the ease at which we can make perfect copies with computers and share these copies over the internet. Sirens have been set off against piracy and illegal distribution because the technological evolutions of the last thirty years have broken many older media restrictions. What took days to be delivered in the past now arrives in an instant. Fogel writes, “It has become cliché to say that the Internet is as revolutionary a development as the printing press, and it is.”66

While it is undeniable that the internet has given birth to the popularity of resistances to copyright, not all work that promotes free culture is online. Recently Janice Radway wrote, “It is

21 significant, I think, that zinesters seized upon older technologies of book production at the very moment they were being superseded by the explosion of electronic and digital forms of communication.”67

In his book, Free Culture, Lessig responds to claims that if we do not like what happens concerning copyright on the internet, we have the ability to unplug our computers from the internet, or “flip off your modem.” He writes: “Free culture is about the troubles the Internet causes even after the modem is turned off.”68 Here I argue that zines are the projects that show how disconnecting doesn’t solve the problems of creative ownership of intellectual property. The complexities of free culture zines instead prove that the restrictions of copyright hegemonies are now present in all media, and run alongside the progressing battles we see raging over restrictive copying controls on the internet. Free culture, in all of its forms, today asks: “Can there be such a thing as free copying without a profound confrontation with the law?”69

22 7. METHODOLOGY

In the early stages of my research for this thesis, I believed that I was searching for a connection between free culture and zine culture. I imagined that somewhere I would find a bundle of zines that crossed the line into discussions of intellectual property in the zine community that were analogous to conversations that were happening surrounding the rise of free software. As a zine librarian, I had seen many collections of zines that had been created in the last ten years that included zines that used free culture licenses. I assumed that if I made my way to Albany and to the New York State Library where the Mike Gunderloy Factsheet Five

Zine Collection70 resides, that I would find older zines along these same lines. I thought that these older works would help me prove that the tendencies to theorize about the hegemony of copyright had happened in software and print in a related manner.

The Gunderloy collection in Albany is important because it captures the first wave of zine publishing in the united states—from 1982 to 1992—and because Factsheet Five (F5),

Gunderloy’s zine, was such a critical nexus of the zine community. F5 was a zine that published reviews other zines. Before the internet, it was the instrument that one would use to find out what zines were being produced (and then order these materials through the mail using the address published in F5). Any zine that was well known was listed and reviewed on its pages. In order to be featured in F5, a zinester would mail their work to Mike. The NYSL collection is comprised of all of those zines that were sent to F5. Thus, the Gunderloy collection is also significant because of its size—the collection takes up 300 cubic feet. It is one of the largest collections of zines on the East Coast.

What I thought I would find in Albany was a treasure trove of materials: punk and anarchist zines in mountainous piles; gritty political writings that made no apologies and asked

23 no permissions. I assumed that what awaited me would be exactly what I wanted: zines that all bore interesting statements about copyright, from anti-copyright to copyleft, “all wrongs reversed,” or maybe just a backward c inside a circle.

I wanted to see these licenses to see where a movement began—the movement wherein people protested restrictive copyright law by making their own work and sharing it instead of locking it down. I wanted to see if resistance to copyright restrictions came from thinking solely about the internet or if people were thinking about alternatives to intellectual property in print. I thought I had come to Albany to take a look at the source of the river, to find the place from which free culture had first burbled and sprung forth.

I did research for two days in the New York State Library—a little under fourteen hours, really. The most heartbreaking part of the Gunderloy collection is that most of the materials are wholly unprocessed or uncataloged. Most of the materials were in folders in boxes alphabetized by title, but other than that system, I had no way to request what boxes might hold any materials that directly related to my research.

By the end of my second day in the library, I was beginning to reconsider whether my ideas about this thesis were feasible. Each box I opened contained a collection of materials that could inspire many thesis projects, just not the one that I was trying to write.

What I did not easily find were zines. I was looking for materials made on a photocopier and that showed the signs of being made by hand. I found lots of machine printed materials that would be better described as magazines, newsletters, brochures, or artists’ books. There was self- published erotica that held distinctive pre-internet sensibilities. There were newsletters of political organizations and pamphlets that were obviously inside jokes. While the cataloged

24 boxes were quite well organized, there were hairs in most of the unprocessed boxes, leftover from what I assume was Mike Gunderloy’s cat.

When I did find a zine, I did not easily get a sense of what their creators thought about copyright. Because of the unpredictable nature of zines that I describe above—the ways in which their layouts follow no prescribed form—I knew that there was no telling where in a zine a statement about copyright, if there was any, would be found. I worried that I was passing by materials that had pertinent statements simply because I could not scan each zine carefully enough and still get through as much as I could in two days. I worried that the discussions I craved about intellectual property might be on a page that lay unopened, or were right under my nose, but hidden amidst the chaos of the page:

Figure 3. A photo of Mayhem Comix which I took during my visit to the NYSL Gunderloy Collection. There is an alternative license printed on the bottom left of the page depicted here.71

I worried that even with a zine in my hands that contained any statement about copyright that I might overlook the pertinent parts that were relevant to my research. I felt both utterly overwhelmed—like I was trying to find a needle in a haystack—and uncertain about my process.

25 I couldn’t read through all of the zines in that time, so I skimmed through and hoped that anything about intellectual property would somehow jump out at me. From the nineteen boxes that I zipped through in two days, I found just a handful of zines that seemed to talk in any way about copyright or the licensing of intellectual property, some of which are detailed below.

This trend was repeated when I visited other zine collections. Even in libraries where zines are cataloged, information about what kind of license a zine has is hardly, if at all, recorded—unless intellectual property is a main subject of the zine, or what it is about (which is also rarely the case). This means that it would be very unlikely that one could do a search in a catalog for terms along the lines of “zines copyright” or “zines copyleft” and be able to identify those zines that would be pertinent. Thus, doing research to see if copyright statements exist in zines means thumbing through each individual issue in a library collection, as I did in Albany

(even if, unlike the NYSL, that collection has zines included in their catalog).

The difficulties surrounding studying licenses in zines are threefold: first, zines that have been added to library collections are not searchable by whether they have a license, or their license type; second, because it takes careful scrutiny to locate a license within any zine due to their disparate methods of formatting their contents and pages; and last, as we will see, even when a statement about copyright is found in a zine, the zine rarely discusses why that particular license was chosen or how adoption thereof was decided upon. And this is to say nothing of all of the zines that have never made their way into a library collection.

Yet even with these difficulties, my methodology has been to study the licenses that I have been able to find, directly on the page. Instead of doing interviews of zinesters to reach beyond what information is found in a zine, my urge has been to work straight from the zines themselves. I think that this approach is one that is familiar to me because of my history as a zine

26 librarian, and because of my work with a great number of zines through library collections that I have been a part of. My instinct is that too many zines are published anonymously, pseudonymously, or are so random and untraceable that to ask questions of the few zinesters I know or could communicate with would skew my study and remove some of the essential nameless qualities of zines. It would also limit my study to those zinesters still making zines today, or those zinesters who would be reachable and willing to speak to me. Or maybe it is merely the next step beyond this thesis.

The licenses that I describe below have been identified through my visits to the New

York State Library, the Barnard College Zine Collection, through the online collection of the

Queer Zine Archive Project, through my work on the Brooklyn College Library Zine Collection, and from my own personal library of zines.72

27 8. ZINE LICENSES

The zine licenses that I have studied fall into three categories: those that use free culture licenses, those that are restricted by copyright, and a third, ambiguous area of licensing, which is perhaps located in between the first two categories, where a zinester uses free-form, vernacular, or invented form of copyright statement.

The first of the free culture licenses I will examine are those that use the phrase

“copyleft.” Then I turn to ready-made Creative Commons licenses. These are followed by a discussion of zines that label themselves “anti-copyright.” Finally, I consider the few free-form, or DIY licenses, as well as how the licenses changed over time within the issues of two particular zines.

Of the zines that are restricted by copyright, I look to examples that have no statement, and to those that have a license that makes a claim above and beyond copyright’s limitations.

28 8.a.i. COPYLEFT

It may not be possible to locate the first usage of the term “copyleft,” but we can see an early adoption in the computer program Tiny Basic, in 1975-76.73 Instead of the standard copyright notice that usually reads: “Copyright [year], all rights reserved,” the creators of Tiny

Basic displayed an alternative notice: “@COPYLEFT ALL WRONGS RESERVED.”74

75 Figure 4. Image from Tiny Basic

Knowing nothing about Tiny Basic, the environment in which it was created, or the philosophies of its programmers, this statement still gives us a sense of what copyleft might mean. The alteration of just these two words gives us a sense of opposition.

Perhaps a more well-known proponent of the term copyleft in computing is the software activist Richard Stallman. Stallman has written that the concept of copyleft is part of his pragmatic idealism of spreading freedom and cooperation in software, or free software.76 He considers software “free” if it meets a set of criteria regarding rights for software users, and these rights are granted to users via the software’s license.77 Stallman uses the word “free” only in the sense of freedom, not to signify that something is free of charge. These two concepts are commonly described as “free as in speech,” (i.e. freedom) or “free as in beer” (or free of charge).

If we tried to map these two concepts onto the format of zines, we might imagine that zines that are distributed free of charge could be considered free as in beer, and zines that allow

29 unlimited copying, adaptation, re-distribution and derivation of their contents to be free as in speech.

Even though copyleft may have originated in computer cultures, it has been used in many zines, and the use of copyleft in zines makes sense. In software, copyleft encourages use, collaboration and participation, much like DIY demands active participation in the zine community.

In my examination of zines, I found a number of publications that used the word

“copyleft” in their licenses. Femme a Barbe, a compilation zine that discusses gender and hair, has “copyleft/not for profit” hand-written on its title page.78 The transgender zine from cross to trans has a copyleft statement on its front cover: “written between feb and sept 2010 all content copyleft feel free to re-use in non-commercial projects.”79 Barnard Zine Library Zine holds the longest copyleft statement I found—it takes up almost an entire page at the back of this zine, but admits that their statement was taken “practically verbatim” from Charles Johnson’s website

Radgeek.80

Some zines that use copyleft do not publish a statement on their pages at all. They merely include the copyleft symbol—a backwards c inside a circle, or the opposite of the © symbol:

Figure 5. Back cover of Zine Capsule. Barnard Library Zine Collection.81

30 And yet Stallman warns against this very practice:

It is a legal mistake to use a backwards C in a circle instead of a copyright symbol. Copyleft is based legally on copyright, so the work should have a copyright notice. A copyright notice requires either the copyright symbol (a C in a circle) or the word “Copyright.” A backwards C in a circle has no special legal significance, so it doesn't make a copyright notice. It may be amusing in book covers, posters, and such but be careful how you represent it in a web page! 82

Here is where the use of copyleft in zines vs. software divides: while for free software programmers copyleft is an umbrella term that is used to describe a series of licenses that use and hack copyright, zinesters use the word copyleft itself as a license. Today, unlike the Tiny Basic programmers, a programmer would not label their work merely copyleft and assume that another programmer would understand their wishes. Instead, free software is assigned very specific licenses such as the GNU Public License, The Mozilla Public License, or the MIT License, all of which very carefully describe the parameters of use.83

Although “copyleft” as a term sounds like the opposite of copyright, copyleft licenses actually depend upon copyright law. The working of the specific licenses above—MIT, GNU, etc.—are only functional as long as copyright exists. Copyleft uses the same legal mechanisms that protect works under copyright in order to protect the ability to share and re-use works under copyleft licenses. Unlike the public domain, where there is no way to insure that sharing is continual after each use, copyleft licenses attempt to make a program or work that is shared continue to be shared, without being locked up into copyright restrictions.84 In parasitic manner, copyleft licenses depend upon copyright to insure that the goals of copyleft licenses are protected, even as the two systems are radically divergent.

Thus, to a programmer who is well versed in reading free culture licenses, writing copyleft on a zine might not seem significant. For the free software community (who anthropologist E. Gabriella Coleman describes as “the largest single association of amateur

31 intellectual property and free speech legal scholars ever to have existed”), drawing a backward c on a zine might look imprecise, or as though the zinester isn’t comprehending the full pedantic nature of licensing as a practice.85 Because this statement does not bring with it more information about what a creator would like to allow their readers to do with their work, an intellectual property scholar might avoid discussing these statements on zines. A court might reject its meaning entirely.

As a political maneuver, some might reject the effectiveness of using such an open ended and potentially meaningless license. Alison Piepmeier argues in her book, Girl Zines: Making

Media, Doing Feminism, that scholars, with their own expectations of what political work looks like, because of their own experiences studying large-scale social movements such as demonstrations in the 1960s and 1970s, might be missing the smaller or differently positioned activism that (girl) zines do. She questions whether by looking for overarching movements we might be blinding ourselves to the smaller work that zines do accomplish.86

Thus I argue that even though zinesters may have borrowed from movements in software through their use of the word “copyleft,” that their misunderstandings of the pedantic nature of licensing should not make their use of the term irrelevant. Here, instead, as Piepmeier argues, perhaps zines are performing a different practice and moving at a different rate; or are working on a different scale. Even if copyleft licenses in zines don’t conform to the same standards as those used in software, or if they aren’t legally binding in courts, they can still be important. As consciousness-raising tools and exploratory practices, copyleft licenses in zines are manifestations of alternate ways of thinking about intellectual property in print.

32 8.a.ii. CREATIVE COMMONS

Another way that creators can tweak copyright laws in order to have more open and usable statements is to use a Creative Commons (CC) license for their work. Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that was founded in part by Lawrence Lessig. It strives to make free culture easily adoptable, or to reform copyright and create “a more inclusive internet and greater access to knowledge and culture.”87 CC provides a set of licenses that open up copyright to allow more ways for creators to share their work. Like copyleft, these licenses are a form of copyright.

Their licenses are summarized in this way on their website:

The Creative Commons copyright licenses and tools forge a balance inside the traditional “all rights reserved” setting that copyright law creates. Our tools give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work. The combination of our tools and our users is a vast and growing digital commons, a pool of content that can be copied, distributed, edited, remixed, and built upon, all within the boundaries of copyright law.88

Each Creative Commons license has three layers of design: one layer is the “Legal

Code,” which contains the full legal parameters of the license. Another layer adapts each license so that it is “machine readable”—or so that a computer’s software or search engine can find and understand each license and what it allows. The final layer is the “Common Deed,” or the version of the license that is human readable, or a summary of the legalese with a user-friendly interface (and icons) that are simple to understand.

The Creative Commons team has attempted to make one of the most confusing processes involved in sharing or publishing creative works in the United States today into a simple and seamless process of selection. You can visit their website and walk through a Choose Your Own

Adventure game of selecting one of their six licenses. CC has made this decision clear and apparent. Yet as we will see below, choosing a license is never really simple, and the implications of choosing one license over another are hard to predict.

33 Many zine creators have adopted Creative Commons licenses because of how easy they are to use and understand—both by the creator and their readers. Some zinesters display a license on their zine by using the icons that CC provides:

Figure 6. Logo from the back cover of Gendercide #1, which is using a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.89

In other cases, a zinester might write out the license, without the icons:

Figure 7. Back cover of Because the Boss Belongs to Us. Queer Zine Archive Project.90

Some zinesters use a form of Creative Commons license on all of their zines.91 I have noticed that many zines made by librarians or for educational purposes use CC. When I began thinking

34 about intellectual property on my own zines, I chose a CC license. I selected the Creative

Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license not just because it reflected the ways in which I wanted my work to be shared, used, and re-circulated, but because I knew that CC licenses were recognizable and have clear documentation to support the licenses. 92 Further, I know that this documentation is written in a understandable manner—so that if someone had never seen a CC license before, it would be simple for them to move from my zine to the CC website and get a sense of the boundaries of what this license allows and forbids. For me, using a CC license, instead of a statement like “copyleft,” helped reassure me that there would be less confusion about what I really wanted and intended in my license.

But even when attempting to use a Creative Commons license, there can be statements that are ambiguous, like in the following case:

Figure 8. Back inside cover of Sassyfrass Circus #7. Queer Zine Archive Project.93

The use of CC here is exactly like the way that we saw “copyleft” invoked in zines above. Since

“Creative Commons” is not in itself a license, but a set of licenses, this statement creates a lot of ambiguity about what rights this creator wants to give to their readers and which are not allowed.

Here we also begin to see parameters of licensing that would be difficult to follow, or honor.

What would happen if you shared this zine with someone who was not “awesome?”

35 This misunderstanding of a system of licensing, just as with copyleft—shows how complicated it can be to license a work, while at the same time how incompatible a strictly legal perspective of licensing can be when applied to zines. While zinesters approach creative work from a place of play and experimentation, licensing can be a very closed, binary and pedantic system of legal interpretations. When watching these two cultures come in proximity to one another we see a strange dance, with awkward steps back and forth between the two.

36 8.a.iii. ANTI-©

Creative Commons preserves Romanticism’s ideas of originality, creativity and property rights, and similarly considers “free culture” to be a separate sphere existing in splendid isolation from the world of material production. Ever since the 18th century, the ideas of “creativity” and “originality” have been inextricably linked to an anti-commons of knowledge. Creative Commons is no exception. There’s no doubt that Creative Commons can shed light on some of the issues in the continuing struggle against intellectual property. But it is insufficient at best, and, at its worst, it’s just another attempt by the apologists of property to confuse the discourse, poison the well, and crowd out any revolutionary analysis.94

The passage by Anna Nimus shows that there are some for whom the promise of copyright reform is not enough. There are critics of copyright that prefer more revolutionary approaches to battling the hegemony of intellectual property. As we have seen, both copyleft and Creative

Commons licenses work within the existing structures of copyright, or depend upon them. This section considers licenses that attempt to work outside the current copyright system, or that advocate for its abolishment.

Nimus mentions the idea of the commons. This concept is discussed often in discourses about access to information.95 Often the idea of the commons is tied to the legal status of the public domain, or works that are outside of the restrictions of copyright—they can be used, re- used, and remixed, with very few restrictions. In the United States, works enter the public domain after a period of time. Over the course of history in the U.S., this length of time has changed—from seven or fourteen years at the start of copyright protections in the U.S., into the lifetime of the creator of a work plus 70 years.96 Like other forms of physical or financial inheritances, many families of creators are now also acquiring and managing their family members’ intellectual property.

During the period of time that I looked for zine licenses for this thesis, I saw no zines that made a claim to be in the public domain. But I did find a large number of zines that claim to be

37 anti-copyright in every zine library that I visited, and over the broadest range of publication dates, from the early 1990s to today.97

Anti-copyright zines use a variety of ways to signify their licenses. Judy!, a fanzine about

Judith Butler, includes a small statement on the inside cover of numbers one and two that state

“all texts anti-©.”98 The zine That’s So Gay has a handwritten statement on its back cover that reads: “our anti-copyright goes like this… you can copy and redistribute by the ZILLIONS, but keep it free! ♥ Free=Good ♥”99 You’ve Always Got a Friend in Philadelphia #1 places “anti- copyright 2009” inside an outline of the state of Pennsylvania on its back cover.100 On each issue of Mayhem Comix I looked at in Albany (see fig. 3) there is a statement which reads: “no copyrite please reproduce by the hundreds of billions,” next to a c inside a circle with a line through the c—which looks a bit like a cent symbol, or ¢.101 Show Me the Money #36 has a short

“@nti-copyright statement” in the middle of a full page of writing about the history and anti- capitalistic philosophies of the publication. Its editor also asserts their right to use others’ texts within their pages without permission, according to fair use.102 Forty Six Instruments of Desire, a zine published by the Plagiarist Press of Iowa City, is one of the oldest anti-copyright zines I found, and its statement simply reads “anti-copyright 1991.103

One consistently anti-copyrighted zine I found is Hoax, a zine described as a “bi-annual queer feminist compilation zine that aims to create a space to analyze the feminisms of our everyday lives.” Each of the issues I have seen has the same statement on the back cover: “anti- copyright [the year published], use & distribute as needed!”104 One of the most striking back covers features a pencil drawing of a woman with a giant bouffant. Her mouth is covered with a large black x, and a swirling cursive writing covering her hair reads, “fuck censorship.”

Figure 9. Back cover of Hoax issue six, Feminisms and Communication, 2011. Personal Collection.105

Ann Bartow, an intellectual property lawyer, understands the parallels that make it appropriate for a feminist publication to reject the bounds of copyright. She writes in her article,

“Fair Use and the Fairer Sex: Gender, Feminism and Copyright Law,” that “Copyright laws are written and enforced to help certain groups of people, largely male, assert and retain control over the resources generated by creative productivity.”106 Because of these injustices, anti-copyright zinesters want to place their works outside of copyright, and outside of a system that prioritizes some and restricts others.

39 8.a.iv. DIY LICENSES

The last kind of copyright statements on zines that I will discuss are those that are self- created. These range from statements that may or may not even be intended to be licenses (such as the one pictured below) to those that may or may not be jokes—like the note in Lower East

Side Librarian Winter Solstice Shout-Out that reads: “Copyright: Don’t be a dick.”107

Figure 10. First page of Schism zine. New York State Library Mike Gunderloy Collection108.

The second part of the Lower East Side Librarian statement also shows a trend in licenses on zines made recently—while use and re-use is ok, digitizing and putting up on the internet is not. In that issue, zinester Jenna Freedman asks that readers “don’t digitize anything but the cover without permission.”109 Similarly, Alex zine has a statement that reads “you can do whatever you want with this zine, but do not put any part of it online.”110 These very specific restrictions signify many things—that some zinesters only want their work to be experienced in print, that they want to move away from online formats entirely, or that they may wish to escape the surveillances of a connected society. Also, these statements are only articulated on zines made in a post-internet world, where zinesters know how easy it would be to digitize a printed work and share it on the web. Zinesters making work in the 1980s or earlier could not have known to request that their publications remain offline, and thus there is a real danger in digitizing older zines: their creators may really not want them to be shared on the web.111 And finally, these particular wishes to remain in print would not be part of any of the licenses I have

40 described above—no Creative Commons or copyleft licenses specifically only restrict reproduction on the internet. Thus the zinesters who wish to remain entirely offline must create their own licenses to accommodate their desires.

If you view free form licenses from the perspective of the law, they don’t seem very useful or even as though they would hold water in court. But if you look at them as a consciousness-raising tool, as a potential meme to be spread from zine to zine to get people to think about intellectual property, then they are very powerful.

41 8b. LICENSES OVER TIME

One of the most intriguing ways that I have found to study decisions regarding intellectual property in zines has been to see changes in the licenses that were chosen for one zine title, over time, through consecutive issues. Here I want to briefly trace the evolution in licenses of two zines that have used mostly free culture licenses before turning to further examination of restrictive zine licenses.

Factsheet Five, as stated above, holds an important place in zine history. Its first few issues had no statements about copyright. The first license I found was on issue 9. That license has the letter K inside a circle next to the words “All rites reversed: reprint ad lib,” which is extremely similar to the license used in the psychedelic humor/cult text, The Principia

FACTSHEET FIVE.” Then others state almost the opposite, but with the same allowances for reprinting: “This magazine is not copyrighted. You may reprint whatever you wish. It would be nice, though not mandatory, if credit were given to FACTSHEET FIVE.”113

Later Gunderloy continues to use this same statement above, with exceptions listed— such as crediting the illustrators of artwork, or allowing contributors to copyright their sections.

Issue #26 then claims copyright again, yet says that reprinting freely with or without permission and with or without credit is ok, then it has a list of seven copyrights that the respective artists retained for images used in the publication. The following issue does the same, but collapses this earlier list into the statement “All artwork is copyright © 1991 by the respective artists and may not be reprinted without permission.”114

42 Jenna Freedman’s zine, Lower East Side Librarian Winter Solstice Shout-Out is another publication that has many licenses. Since 2001, Freedman has produced an annual zine. Of the zines that I own (those published from 2004-2012), there aren’t any two that share the same license. Some have no statements at all. As we saw above, many of Jenna’s licenses are self- invented. The oldest that I have with a statement reads: “Copyleft—ask first, unless it’s a just a little quote.”115 That is followed by the “Don’t be a Dick” statement that asks for that issue not to be put on the internet.116 2008 uses a “Creative Commons type copyright Attribution-

NonCommercial-NoDerivative Works,” then states that two contributors own their own works.117 The following year, Freedman includes this statement: “I’m pretty much anti-©, but I don’t want you stealing my stuff wholesale or digitizing anything. That’s more or less a CC

Derivative, ShareAlike with Non-Commercial implied but not overtly stated or guaranteed.”118

In 2012, she wrote a “Fair use statement” instead of a copyright statement: “it’s not fair to use something of mine and claim it as yours, or to quote extensively from it without permission.”119

Within both of these publications—Factsheet Five and Lower East Side Librarian—the transformations in licensing from issue to issue has been central to my own curiosity about intellectual property in zines. The small and low stakes attitude of zines make them the perfect platform through which to perform new concepts of property and play with ideas about copyright. But if one cares about their zine (and most zinesters adamantly do), you would want your license to be respected. Therefore, these changes in license bring up managerial issues for a zine publisher: how could one possibly track all these decisions over time—i.e. which license was given to what issue? Or if there are concerns about violations, how can you track which content is allowed or disallowed, if every issue’s license varies?

43 The fact that in both cases the statements do not retain their exact shape over time is telling of the changes in thinking both zinesters undoubtedly must have been undergoing. One has to assume that when publishing a perzine (or a diary-like zine about a zinester’s daily life), as

Freedman does, that from year to year one may feel differently about how they would like their zine to be used, depending on the content that they share. A zinester’s decision to use a license might also fluctuate as their opinions about copyright change. As a librarian, Freedman’s licenses may also have been a reaction to trends in the worlds of scholarly communication or book publishing.

Being able to see not only Gunderloy’s influences—by way of the Principia Discordia, for example—is extremely important because we see a zinester, who, even while being positioned at the core of the zine community struggled to find his license(s). Observing how he fluctuates: in one issue as he asserts his copyright, while in another he rejects it, back and forth; is telling of the whole project of DIY intellectual property. Thus, we can see through the tweaking and re-stating that occurs in just these two zines a tiny peek behind the curtain of the zine licensing process. It’s a complex experiment.

44 8c. RESTRICTED LICENSES

So far this thesis has been an examination of free culture zine licenses. Certainly there are also many zines that use standard copyright restrictions. But zines with standard copyright licenses are not my focus here. I would, rather, like to discuss zines that have been interestingly restricted by copyright in the next few sections.

45 8.c.i. ZINES WITHOUT A LICENSE

Most zines, however, ignore the issue of ‘intellectual property’ entirely. With neither a copyright nor anticopyright on their zine, they challenge the dominant trend toward proprietary informational rights, borrowing freely, rarely crediting mainstream sources, and usually crediting underground ones.120

By far the largest category of zines that I have seen in all of my studies has been zines that have no copyright statement at all. There could be many reasons why a zinester neglects to put a license on their publication. It may be that they forgot—a slip I am personally guilty of, and as we saw above with Lower East Side Librarian happens even with zinesters who have made copyright statements in the past. Aside from forgetfulness, a zinester might forego a statement out of indifference or ignorance about licensing. Or it may be that a zinester so thoroughly objects to the concept of intellectual property that they would choose not to mention copyright in any way on their pages.

The problem with the last option, however, is that in the United States, if a creative work has no license or statement to dictate otherwise, these works are given an automatic copyright protection, and the author of the item is made the rights holder.121 Thus if a zinester actually objects vehemently to the concept that ideas could be restricted by copyright, or if they think even mentioning those concept further their hold on hearts and minds, then they might not mention copyright on their work. One could think of this position as even further afar from copyright than an anti-copyright statement. Yet the irony of the practice would be that by foregoing a statement, they would be locking down their work in the most standard way.

Thus, unlike other forms of opting out, to neglect to put a copyright statement on a work means that work receives the fullest restrictions, and places it directly inside of the copyright system.

46 There are many zines whose political goals seem to align with free licenses, and yet they have no statements that describe that they allow use and adaptation on their pages. There are educational, or consciousness-raising zines that try to address serious social ills and spread information about health and well-being that do not use free licenses, thus limiting the scope of their usefulness. One of the most surprising things I found in my research is that most zines that identify as anarchist have no copyright statements. My assumption, before my research, was that anarchist zines would be my biggest source of alternative licenses, following Proudhon. What I found instead was a consistent absence, which instead implies to me that those who theorize about anarchism or who live within anarchist communities may be deciding to remove themselves from conversations about property norms entirely. Or they forgot. Or they don’t care—without a license, it’s hard to know why and how these decisions are made.

And for many of these zines, even though they don’t have a free culture license, groups might re-print and re-distribute them anyway. And yet copyright law makes this action a crime— perhaps not one for which anyone would be prosecuted—but a crime nonetheless.

47 8.c.ii. NO-DERIVATIVES AND NON-COMMERCIAL

Another way that zinesters control their work is through Non-Commercial and No-

Derivatives licenses. Even though we saw examples of these licenses in the sections about free culture above, free culture activists do not believe that these versions of licenses fall into the realm of free culture. Thus, Creative Commons licenses that use these attributes are more open than standard copyright, but they still place too many restrictions to be considered fully free.

No-Derivatives licenses restrict anyone’s ability to make a work based on an original, and that means that many uses are restricted, including the basic practices of using materials on the photocopier to make zines. Using a No-Derivatives license on a work that has been woven from the surrounding world and collaged into a publication is a fairly awkward practice from an intellectual property standpoint.

Many people often believe that using a Non-Commercial license means that their work will be restricted financially so that only they can make a profit off of it. Zinesters, with their distrust of capitalism and corporations seem to appreciate the sentiment that their work would not be associated with commercialism (sometimes by themselves as well as by anyone else). It would make sense, then, to restrict their work using a NonCommercial license.

But it would be wrong to make the leap into believing that a Non-Commercial license is inherently anti-capitalist, or aligned with the non-profit ideals of zine making. Commercial use is still possible with Non-Commercial licenses—just as with regular copyright, for the copyright holder or for others with permission. Further, these licenses still retain the same ideas about property and ownership as standard copyright. Also, even activities as far from for-profit culture as trading zines at a zine fest might be considered commercial activities according to the law, and would not be permitted according to a strict reading of these licenses. Thus, restricting

48 commercial activity isn’t as certain a restriction as it may seem on the surface, and is definitely not one that a zinester should use if they are attempting to expand the domains of free information about what can be used and adopted by others.

49 8.c.iii. MORE THAN COPYRIGHT(ED)

Finally, the most perplexing category for me in all of zinedom has been licenses I discovered in zines that ask for more restraint of their work than standard copyright restrictions provide, or attitudes that expect that a creator can have full control over every object they produce, even after they have released their work.

Among examples of these licenses and attitudes have been statements like this one, from the zine Scrappy J: A Story About Fighting:

Figure 11. Scrappy J. Brooklyn College Library Zine Collection122

Other examples are usually a kind of riff on standard copyright restrictions, and many mention the concept of “stealing:”

123 Figure 12. Hey, 4-eyes! first page of issue One. Personal Collection.

50 The license above brings up an important part of copyright—the doctrine of fair use. Fair use permits the use of copyrighted works for commentary, teaching, criticism, in parodies and for the purpose of reviews (as well as other uses).124 So for Chapman of Hey 4-eyes! to state that

“reviews are ok” is redundant. Thus, even though these more restrictive licenses may make claims about what their creators can or cannot control about what one does with their work, these claims might be untested in courts. A license that claims to control a zine more than standard copyright restrictions may not be honored, especially if it uses ambiguous concepts like

“awesome people,” or “don’t be a dick.”

The interesting aspect of these restrictive or vernacular licenses is the way that zinesters imagine they might control their work, beyond what is allowed by law. Although zines are published, and therefore public, some zinesters still attempt to control who has access to their work and how their zines are (or are not) used.

51 9. CONTROL AND TRUST

Ann Bartow writes that for some authors, copyright law affects them most by making them “vulnerable to the allegations of infringement by others.”125 We can think of this by way of thinking about zinesters who have used and appropriated images and text into their work—they could be vulnerable to accusations of theft by the original copyright owner of any of those materials. Yet there is a larger vulnerability that has recently come to the forefront—the worry that although zinesters have taken and used, that someone else will do the same to them, and that that person will not understand, or be of the zine community.

These feelings hinge on a narrative that describes zines as underground, outside, and separate. Some think they are safe from infringement or appropriation from outside because zines are somewhat hidden, whether that may mean from the mainstream, some conception of

“above,” a corporation, or merely by “the man.”

In 2010, Teal Triggs published the book Fanzines. The publication of this book unleashed a wave of outcry and controversy among zinesters. What had happened, in short, was that Triggs, a design professor at the Royal College of Art in London, published a large color monograph that mostly consisted of color reproductions of the covers of zines. The criticisms surrounding the book vary. Some object to the fact that this book is sold at the cover price of forty dollars, a price that they interpret to mean that someone—Triggs or her publisher—are making a profit from the work.126 Others objected to the fact that the book is being sold at Urban

Outfitters, a retailer often accused of appropriating from independent designers without permission.127 Finally, some object to the idea of writing about zines and zine culture at all, or allowing the zine community to be studied and incorporated into scholarship in any way.128

52 The zinesters whose work was included in the book had many concerns about the communication they received (or didn’t receive) about the book. Triggs emailed some of the zinesters whose work she reproduced, but not all of them. For the majority of creators who

Triggs contacted, she did so on the very eve of publication, more as a notification than to ask permission of the zinester to use their work. She was largely unresponsive to the messages zinesters sent back, even when the zinesters had questions or concerns about what she was printing.129 She never replied at all to numerous emails wherein zine creators asked for incorrect information to be updated, or that asked for more information about the book.130

Amidst many subsequent discussions of the fact that Triggs is an outsider to the zine community, zinester Jenna Braeger wrote on her blog:

What Teal Triggs has accomplished is the creation of an incomplete archive–images of zines without the voices of their creators, a flattening of a vivid subculture into style–I mean, she is a historian of graphic design–in my pessimism, I can imagine Fanzines being read in advertising classes as a text on how to get that “cool underground look” for your edgy girl power product line. But then, I am admittedly operating from a base level of mistrust. Triggs is not a zinester, she is for all intents and purposes an outsider to what is admittedly a very insular, though evangelical, subculture. I am operating under the assumption that outsiders, especially “experts” will (because they do) misrepresent, appropriate and commodify.”131

Followed with this image:

Figure 13. From http://sassyfrasscircus.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/the-punk-and-the-curator-on-fanzines/.

53 Triggs’ actions played upon fears that are shared within the zine community—that corporations, publishers or otherwise entitled people in the mainstream whose intentions are for- profit will “steal” the creations of the underground. And that if their work was “stolen,” they would have no legal recourse outside of hiring a lawyer, which many could not afford.132

What this controversy has unveiled to me is that not all zinesters choose self-publishing because it is a practice that is free or open; they choose to publish a zine because of the way that the localized nature of this practice allows control and certainty surrounding their work. Small distribution means knowing who owns a copy of your zine, or knowledge of the people who own your publication.133 Instead of the way that work is shared on the internet (instantly and broadly), physical objects can be traced via controlled circulation of a limited number of copies. Highly personal topics can be shared, but carefully.

This idea of a controlled release of a zine parallels what Kate Eichhorn writes about the riot grrrl movement—that it had a commitment to “open access within limits.” Kathleen Hanna has described her decision to donate her personal papers to New York University’s Fales Library and Special Collections rather than to a more accessible public archive as akin to the decision to publish a zine instead of a blog. She calls this an artistic decision and an intentional choice to reach a smaller audience.134

Perhaps permissions culture is what is right for certain communities or discourses. In cases where people have been timid to speak out, where they feel that others speak for them too often, or where there is trauma (all areas where zines have been used as an outlet), it might be better to share your work with a more trusted group. Regardless of whether Teal Triggs was inside or outside the zine community when she published Fanzines, she moved herself outside the circle of trust when she remained unresponsive to the concerns about her work.

54 As Dan Cohen addressed with his discussion of ethical licenses, there is more to licensing than just the law or technical issues. Social elements like trust and feeling safe or secure can far outweigh a desire to open up and share. Thus licensing in zines can’t be a simple binary between open and closed, free or controlled. And as we saw with many licenses in zines, sometimes the controls you would prefer just don’t exist; you have to DIY.

55 10. THE PHOTOCOPIER

On a cold December evening in Brooklyn, Sherry Millner described her life in filmmaking to an audience assembled at Interference Archive. “Copying a film in the seventies was not like it is today, with digital films—when I wanted to copy a film, I had to pay for a ticket and take my super 8 camera into the theater with me, or project it myself onto a wall and then shoot it with my own camera.” 135

Watching Millner’s film that night, I thought to myself that this analog and imperfect manner of copying is exactly the same kind of procedure that I had long seen happening in the world of zines: where copies of copies of copies wore down the page. Or where “stealing” is a kind of ad-hoc cultural criticism. This transformative kind of copying—where the copies are blatant, easily identifiable as such, and flaunt their copied-ness—had been very intriguing to me, and continued to become even more so the more I learn about the poles of “permissions” and

“free” culture.

With the way that work is created and shared on computers and through the internet today, are we really allowed to copy, and to “steal” without surveillance? Today, can we perform the digital equivalent of raising our camera at a screen or putting a photo on the copy machine?

The zines that I study in this thesis are copies. Photocopies, specifically. They are items that consist of toner heated and pressed onto acidic paper. Paper that was intended for reports, forms, physical inboxes and outboxes. Zines are made from materials that have been appropriated from office cultures and morphed into something much more intellectually and emotionally enticing. They take sterile office materials and bricolage them into reports of one’s mental state, personal triumphs, and anguishes. They catalog obsessions rather than budget

56 expenditures. The papers stolen from the photocopier feed trays end up listing worries and secrets, instead of overtime or performance evaluations.136

I am interested in the use of the photocopier as press and publisher here because of the manner that the copy machine facilitates the construction of a certain kind of imperfect copy (as opposed to a perfect digital reproduction). I’m fascinated with the way that the photocopier allows for two-dimensional photographs, or collages of all kinds of materials. Like a flower press with a lens, a photocopier allows a zine maker to collect bits of trash and cloth and scrap from the world around them and transform them into a pressed, united publication of their own. As

Janice Radway has written:

Texts do not dictate their meanings to us. Stories do not control what readers remember of them or take away from them to be adapted to the particulars of their own lives. Nor do objects determine what we will do with them. Think of the simple safety pin in the hands of punk rockers in the 1970s or the American flag that graced the backside of so many pairs of jeans in the 1960s. Neither do musical compositions fully dictate which passages will be hummed over and over again in the shower or on the way to school. Cultural materials function rather more like incitements than stamps, imprints, or molds.”137

Zines are reflections and interpretations—of the world around us, and of intellectual property.

Zines interpret systems of copyright and copyleft, anti-copyright and the commons into formations that suit creative needs. As all creators must now consider intellectual property, licenses become political statements about the creative and iterative practices of art making.

The internet is not the only place where people have played with intellectual property and toyed with alternatives to copyright. Taking a step outside well-worn thinking about digital copying, this thesis has highlighted ways that the free use and remixing of the others’ work in print is a part of the free culture movement. Instead of re-telling the dominant narrative about the free culture and open source communities battling alone in digital landscapes against copyright

57 restrictions, I have looked beyond the technological to uncover other forms of anti-copyright activism in print.

Here I have examined contemporary American zines—items made within the last thirty- five years—to show ways that people have been experimenting with and pushing against intellectual property via self-publishing and print culture. I examined the ways that zinesters license their print works not as a protean hacker tactic of the past, but to show that experimentation with controlling creative work in zines has been a simultaneous counterhegemonic practice that continues today alongside and in compliment to other free culture activism.

Today, zines are the slow movement of publishing. While some turn to the internet for constant connectedness, zines can take months or years to be constructed. They travel through the mail, and are still ordered by sending well-concealed cash to someone’s address or post office box and trusting they will have their publication delivered in turn. Even though zines take their time and embrace slowness, they are not stuck in the past. Zines hold within them some of the most experimental uses of copyright licenses, and thus some of the most intriguing manifestations of thinking about intellectual property in print. In a rapidly changing media landscape, zines are still constructed, traded, and loved:

In an age of electronic media, when the future of the book itself is often called into question, and when the visual and textual landscape is further dominated by an increasingly voracious culture industry, zines endure.138

1 Susan E. Hawkins, “All in the Family: Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School,” Contemporary Literature 45 no.4 (2004): 637-658. Project Muse. DOI: 10.1353/cli.2005.0005 2 V. Vale, Zines! Vol. 1. (San Francisco, CA: V/Search, 1996),4. 3 Perhaps only a few hundred copies of each issue might be produced of each title. Conversation on the social media website We Make Zines showed that some zinesters only make as few as 20 or 30 at a time. See: “How Many Copies of a Zine Make Up a Decent First Publication?” We Make Zines (Social Networking Ning), http://wemakezines.ning.com/forum/topics/how-many-copies-of-a-zine-make. 4 Each zine is usually sold for just a few dollars each, or is traded for other zines. On the thread “Pricing Zines” on We Make Zines, zinesters agree that even $5 for a zine is too high a price. See: “Pricing Zines.” We Make Zines (Social Networking Ning), http://wemakezines.ning.com/forum/topics/pricing-zines. 5 No one definition of what makes a zine has ever been made certifiable—people just keep creating more definitions. Although some overlap occurs, the definitions of what constitutes a zine can contradict one another. There is a continuously evolving discourse within zine communities about what constitutes a zine, a conversation that changes depending on who is having the conversation. 6 Randie Farmalant, Media Whore (zine), no.1, np. Personal Collection. 7 “ZINE SPOTLIGHT: Tenacious: Art and Writing from Women in Prison (Issue #27),” POC Zine Project (blog), http://poczineproject.tumblr.com/tagged/Tenacious 8 Shotgun Seamstress (zine), no.2, December 2007, np. 9 Print Culture scholar Janice Radway believes that zines are inherently social publications, and that “Clearly, zinesters desired more than the typical, anonymous reader who might pick up a mass- market paperback at the supermarket. Their textual and extra-textual activities suggest that what they really desired was direct communication with identifiable others who shared their interests, attitudes, and views.” From Janice Radway, “Zines Then and Now: What Are They? What Do You Do With Them? How Do They Work?,” in From Codex to Hypertext, ed. Anouk Lang, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 37. 10 Alison Piepmeier, Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism (New York: New York University Press, 2009),170-171. 11 Some zines act as a compilation, or a “comp zine,” or are edited, like an anthology. However, the majority of zines are a solo practice, created just by one person. 12 Anna Poletti, Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008), 34. 13 Douglas Duncan, Kyle Loftus, and Erik D. Honeycutt, eds., Five O Clock Charlie (zine), 1989, np. New York State Library Mike Gunderloy Collection. The “at work” component here is a common one among zinesters as well—scamming copies or supplies from work for zines is a common practice. 14 Although I have seen examples of zines without any text written in them at all, they are extremely hard to cite, or to locate—even in library collections! 15 As zinester Davida Gypsy Breier writes in Xerography Debt #29, “We published zines because we wanted to communicate and because what we had to say and how we wanted to say it was of no interest to commercial publishers. That was fine, they had their world and we had ours. Zines that got big enough to carry ISSNs or barcodes of any kind were scorned. And anything with an ISBN might as well have carried the mark of the beast. We were in a culture war of sorts, defying the commodification of art and ideas.”

16 When I was the organizer of the Madison Zine Fest, I once had a check made out to a zinester as an honorarium, only to find out after they tried to go to the bank and cash it (unsuccessfully) that the name I knew them by was a pseudonym. There is often, additionally, a separation or the sense of an alter ego for zinesters—their zine occupies a separate conception of themselves than they may otherwise express in their daily lives. Or a zine might be written by an anonymous collective to create a sense of union, like in the zine Queers Read This, which is attributed to “Anonymous Queers” 17 Intellectual property is a term used to describe intangible rights that protect creative products through restrictions like copyright. Here I will only be discussing copyright, but intellectual property also includes the licensing of patents and trademarks. 18 Larry McCaffery and Kathy Acker. “An Interview with Kathy Acker.” Mississippi Review 20, no. 1/2 (1991): 91. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20134512. 19 The video can be viewed at: http://blog.ninapaley.com/2010/02/09/all-creative-work-is- derivative/ 20 Marcus Boon, In Praise of Copying (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 205-206. 21 Ibid, 138-166. 22 C. Carr, “Theoretical Girl: The Legacy of Kathy Acker,” Village Voice, November 5 2002. http://www.villagevoice.com/2002-11-05/news/theoretical-grrrl/full/. 23 Hanna’s zines include: April Fool’s day, Bikini Kill, My Life with Evan Dando Popstar, Revolution Girl Style Now, and she was a contributor to: Girl Germs, Jigsaw, riot grrrl. 24 Radway, “Zines Then and Now,” 17. 25 Janice Radway, “Girls, Reading, and Narrative Gleaning: Crafting Repertoires for Self- Fashioning Within Everyday Life,” In Narrative Impact: Social and Cognitive Foundations, ed. Melanie C. Green, Jeffrey J. Strange, and Timothy C. Brock (New York: Psychology Press, 2002), 197. 26 Poletti, Intimate Ephemera, 7. 27 Ibid., 101. 28 Excerpted in Lisa Darms, ed., The Riot Grrrl Collection (New York: Feminist Press, 2013), 334. 29 Kate Eichhorn, “Archiving the Movement: The Riot Grrrl Collection at Fales Library and Special Collections,” in Make Your Own History: Documenting Feminist and Queer Activism in the 21st Century, edited by Kelly Wooten and Liz Bly (Los Angeles: Litwin Books, 2012), 36. 30 Ibid., 37 31 Radway, “Zines Then and Now,” 34. 32 Pat Guy, “Wacky Magazines Know No Limits,” USA Today, August 3, 1992. LexisNexis. 33 Jean-Luc Plat, “Desktop Publishing has led to Zineomania,” The Gazette (Montreal, Quebec), May 1, 1993. LexisNexis Academic. 34 Peter Wilson, “Comix-A-Go-Go and the 'Zine Scene: They're Black and White--and Read All Over,” The Vancouver Sun (British Columbia), April 28, 1994. LexisNexis Academic. 35 See: The Book of Zines; The Factsheet Five Zine Reader; A Girl's Guide to Taking Over the World; The Riot Grrrl Collection; The World of Zines and The Zine Yearbook vols. 1-9.

36 See: Make a Zine!, Stolen Sharpie Revolution, and Whatcha Mean What’s a Zine? for just a few examples of handbooks. 37 See the work of Green and Taormino, Harris, Kearney, Licona, Piepmeier, and Radway for studies of girl zines. 38 For riot grrrl zines, see the scholarship of Eichhorn, Darms, Nguyen, Schilt, and Zobl. 39 For two bibliographies about zines in libraries, see: Jeremy Gardner’s “Zines in the Academic Library: A Literature Review,” Library Student Journal. 4, (2009), http://www.librarystudentjournal.org/index.php/lsj/article/view/101, and Barnard Zine Library’s Zines and Librarianship bibliography, http://zines.barnard.edu/zines_bibliography. 40 Janice Radway, “Zines, Half-Lives, and their Afterlives: On the Temporalities of Social and Political Change,” PMLA 126, no. 1 (2011), 142. In Notes from Underground, Duncombe describes connecting with zines while on tour as a roadie, and he also mentions not being able to really fully describe what his own zine is in portions of his book. 41 Poletti, Intimate Ephemera, 24-25 42 Radway, “Zines, Half Lives,” 145-146 43 Piepmeier, Girl Zines, 11. 44 Meredith McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting 1834-1853, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 45 Your Secretary (zine), no.3 nd, np. Queer Zine Archive Project. 46 Stephen Duncombe, Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture (New York: Verso, 1997), 123. 47 Ibid., 217. 48 Adela Licona, Zines in Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands Rhetoric (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012), 45. 49 Ibid., 127. 50 Ibid., 127. 51 Ibid., 45. 52 Radway, “Zines Then and Now,” 7-8. 53 It is important to acknowledge the awkward and confusing nature of intellectual property as a construct, as Lessig does: “Indeed, the very idea of property in any idea or any expression is very odd. I understand what I am taking when I take the picnic table you put in your backyard. I am taking a thing, the picnic table, and after I take it, you don’t have it. But what am I taking when I take the good idea you had to put a picnic table in the backyard—by, for example, going to Sears, buying a table, and putting it in my backyard? What is the thing I am taking then?” from Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 83. 54 See Lessig, Code 2.0. 55 Cohen even addresses the fact that not everyone will abide by an ethical request, and he has come to terms with this reality. 56 Just a proper warning here: I am not a lawyer!

57 Davida Gypsy Brier. MetaZine: It’s About Zines (zine), July 2013, 2. Personal Collection. 58 Copyright in the United States applies to “original works of authorship,” both published and unpublished, that have been “fixed in tangible form.” Thus, an idea can not be owned by an author or artist unless or until it has been represented in some way, and only that particular representation or expression of the idea would be able to be copyrighted. Books, zines, software, blog posts, ebooks, comics and many other physical and digital items all fall under the category of “tangible forms” that could be copyrighted by their creators or sometimes their publishers. For more information, see: United States Copyright Office. Copyright Basics. Washington, D.C. http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf 59 Lessig, Free Culture. 60 Which is why Lessig writes: “A permission culture means a lawyer’s culture—a culture in which the ability to create requires a call to your lawyer.” Lessig, Free Culture, 192. 61 And even here it is difficult to generalize, because of the rights to fair use and also because of the ways that copyright varies by format. For more information, see: United States Copyright Office, “Fair Use,” Washington D.C. June 2012. FL-102. http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html 62 Shotgun Seamstress (zine), no.5. August 2010, np. Personal Collection. 63 Lessig, Free Culture, 30. 64 Karl Fogel, “What is Free Culture?” Question Copyright, Last modified July 22, 2011, http://questioncopyright.org/what_is_free_culture. 65 Free software is also sometimes known as: open source software, free, libre and open source software, FLOSS, or F/OSS. There is controversy in the community over which of these names is most appropriate. 66 Karl Fogel, “The Surprising History of Copyright and The Promise of a Post-Copyright World,” Question Copyright, Undated, http://questioncopyright.org/promise. 67 Radway, “Zines Then and Now,” 24. 68 Lessig, Free Culture, xiii. 69 Boon, In Praise of Copying, 242. 70 For more information about this collection, see: http://www.nysl.nysed.gov/msscfa/sc20329.htm 71 Bob McGlynn, Mayhem Comix, nd, np. New York State Library Mike Gunderloy Collection. 72 I have labeled all zines referenced here with the collection they are housed within. 73 “Copyleft,” Wikipedia, last modified January 4, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Copyleft&oldid=589156056. 74 “Tiny Basic,” Wikipedia, last modified September 28, 2013, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tiny_BASIC&oldid=574820961. 75 Tiny Basic image in the public domain, as found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tiny_BASIC&oldid=574820961 76 Richard Stallman, “Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism,” GNU Operating System, last modified October 14, 2013, http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html. 77 “A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms: The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0). The freedom to study how the program works,

62 and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2). The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.” as found in “What is Free Software?” GNU Operating System, last modified January 3, 2014, https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html. 78 Jenna Braeger, ed., Femme a Barbe (zine), vol.1, 2010. Barnard Zine Library Collection. 79 from cross to trans (zine), 2010, np. Queer Zine Archive Project. 80 Alexa B. Antopol, Barnard Zine Library Zine (zine), ed. Jenna Freedman and Torie Quinonez, Spring/Fall 2005, 13. Personal Collection. 81 Grrrl Zines A Go-Go, Zine Capsule: Zine Collecting for the Future (zine), 2008, np. Barnard Library Zine Collection. 82 “What is Copyleft?” GNU Operating System, last modified October 8, 2013, http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/. 83 “Categories of Free and Nonfree Software,” GNU Operating System, Last modified March 19, 2013, http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html#PublicDomainSoftware. 84 In addition, I have found no zines during my research that place their contents is in the public domain. 85 E. Gabriella Coleman, Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 433. 86 Piepmeier, Girl Zines, 160. 87 “About,” Creative Commons, undated, http://creativecommons.org/about. 88 “About the Licenses,” Creative Commons, undated, http://creativecommons.org/licenses. 89 Gendercide (zine), no.1, 2006, np. Queer Zine Archive Project. Additionally, there have been changes in these licenses over time, so sometimes a user will specifically name which version of the CC license they are using—Attribution-NonCommercial-Noderivs 2.5 Generic vs. Attribution- NonCommercial-Noderivatives 4.0 International, etc. 90 Alana Kumbier, ed., Because the Boss Belongs to Us: Queer Femmes on Bruce Springsteen (zine), March 2011, np. Queer Zine Archive Project. 91 Take zinesters Milo Miller and Chris Wilde of QZAP, who, for many of their zines, use the Attribution-NonCommercial-Noderivatives license seen above. 92 See: The Borough is My Library: A Metropolitan Library Workers Zine (zine) numbers 2-4. 93 Sassyfrass Circus (zine), no. 7, nd, np. Queer Zine Archive Project. 94 Anna Nimus. “Copyright, Copyleft, and the Creative Anti-Commons,” Subsol (Blog), http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/nimustext.html. 95 For more scholarship on the commons, see Boyle, The Public Domain; Hyde, Common as Air; and Suber, Open Access. 96 United States Copyright Office, “How Long Does Copyright Protection Last?” Last modified March 10, 2010, http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-duration.html.

97 See also Atton, Alternative Media, (London: Sage, 2001), 44-45, for a discussion of open distribution, in which zinesters are encouraged to freely re-distribute zines for other zinesters. 98 Ingrid Sischy, ed. Judy! (zine), 1 no.1, Spring Fever 1993, np., and Judy! (zine) 1, no. 2, 1994, np. Queer Zine Archive Project. 99 Tuck ‘n’ Muffins, That’s So Gay (zine), nd, np. Queer Zine Archive Project. 100 Sari, You’ve Got a Friend in Pennsylvania (zine), no.1, 2009, np. Queer Zine Archive Project. 101 McGlynn, Mayhem Comix. 102 Tony Hunnicutt, Show me the Money! Against Corpse Machine America since 1999 (zine), no. 36, Winter/Spring 2012. Personal Collection. 103 Forty Six Instruments of Desire (zine), Iowa City: Plagiarist Press, 1991. New York State Library Mike Gunderloy Collection. This is one of the only zines labeled anti-copyright in the NYSL catalog. 104 Hoax zine, issues no. 4-9. Personal Collection. 105 Rachel and Sari, eds. Hoax: feminisms and communication (zine), no.6, November 2011, np. Personal Collection. 106 Ann Bartow, "Fair Use and the Fairer Sex: Gender, Feminism, and Copyright Law," American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law 14, no. 3 (2006): 551. 107 Jenna Freedman, Lower East Side Librarian Winter Solstice Shout Out (zine), 2007, np. Personal Collection. 108 Schism (zine), nd, np. New York State Library Mike Gunderloy Collection. 109 Freedman, Lower East Side, 2007. 110 Anne, Alex (zine), no. 4, June 2012, np. Personal Collection. 111 The issue of digitization is also carefully approached by zine libraries. See: Jill Katte Vermillion, “Why We’re Not Digitizing Zines,” Duke University Libraries Digital Collections (Blog), http://blogs.library.duke.edu/digital-collections/2009/09/21/why-were-not-digitizing-zines. 112 Mike Gunderloy, Factsheet Five (zine), no.9, nd, np. New York State Library Mike Gunderloy Collection. 113 Mike Gunderloy, Factsheet Five (zine), no.23, 1987, np. New York State Library Mike Gunderloy Collection. 114 Mike Gunderloy, Factsheet Five (zine), no.44, 1991, 2. New York State Library Mike Gunderloy Collection. 115 Jenna Freedman, Lower East Side Librarian Winter Solstice Shout Out (zine), 2005, np. Personal Collection. 116 Freedman, Lower East Side, 2007, np. 117 Jenna Freedman, Lower East Side Librarian Winter Solstice Shout Out (zine), 2008, np. Personal Collection. 118 Jenna Freedman, Lower East Side Librarian Winter Solstice Shout Out (zine), 2009, np. Personal Collection.

119 Jenna Freedman, Lower East Side Librarian Winter Solstice Shout Out (zine), 2012, np. Personal Collection. 120 Duncombe, Notes from Underground, 124. 121 Lessig writes: “Under current copyright law, you automatically get a copyright, regardless of whether you comply with any formality. You don’t have to register. You don’t even have to mark your content. The default is control, and ‘formalities’ are banished.” Lessig, Free Culture, 288. 122 Cassie J. Sneider, Scrappy J: A Story About Fighting (zine), 2008, np. Brooklyn College Library Zine Collection. 123 Robyn Chapman, Hey 4 Eyes! (zine), no. 1, Summer 2004, np. Personal Collection. 124 United States Copyright Office, “Fair Use,” Washington D.C. June 2012. FL-102, http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html 125 Bartow, “Fair Use and the Fairer Sex,” 559. 126 This steep cover price is also awkward in relation to the fact that most zines are sold at a very low prince, usually anywhere from $1-3, or traded for free. 127 See: http://supersonicelectronic.com/post/58798461913/mallory-rose-vs-ashkahn, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/26/urban-outfitters-steal_n_867604.html, http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2013/11/urban_outfitters_stealing_designs_glam-trash.php 128 See the 14 pages of discussion of Triggs on the social networking zine site We Make Zines: http://wemakezines.ning.com/forum/topics/how-do-yall-feel-about-this. 129 Lindsay Gibb, “Fanzines Book Irks Zinesters,” Broken Pencil, http://www.brokenpencilarchive.tuesdayafternoon.net/view.php?id=5508. When pressed, Triggs attributed these shortcomings in communication to the difficult nature of finding contact information for out-of-print publications, and that the work she used ranged as far back as the 1930s. These were not excuses that many zinesters had sympathy for, and perhaps not one that courts would uphold as well— just because respecting copyright would be difficult is not an excuse in cases of violation. 130 Jerianne Thompson, “Why I’m Mad About the New Fanzines Book,” Zine World, http://web.archive.org/web/20120321214612/http://www.undergroundpress.org/zine-news/why-im-mad- about-the-new-fanzines-book/. 131 Jenna Braeger, “The Punk and the Curator: On Fanzines,” Sassyfrass Circus, http://sassyfrasscircus.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/the-punk-and-the-curator-on-fanzines/. 132 All of this becomes even more complicated when we consider that Triggs was not publishing in the United States, but in England—entering at least the copyright components of the debate into international waters. Yet perhaps all of the covers that she included in her book might also be legally allowed under the doctrine of fair use—she wasn’t digitizing whole texts, or taking away from anyone’s sales. Many of the zines she printed were also out of print or rare, meaning the cover reproductions in her book might be the only way to access these materials for many zines for many zinesters, readers, and scholars. 133 I know one zinester who keeps a detailed spreadsheet and tracks all copies of their work— which issues they have shared and who they gave them to. 134 Eichhorn, “Archiving the Movement,” 32. 135 Sherry Millner, Screening: Make Sure You’re Not Being Watched, Interference Archive, Brooklyn, NY, December 12, 2013.

136 As Lisa Gitleman asserts about the PDF, we can think of photocopiers as particularly office- related machines, or part of corporations, paperwork, secretarial and administrative work. Lisa Gitelman, Lecture at Inke Conference, New York University, New York, September 26, 2013. 137 Radway, “Girls, Reading,” 197. 138 Piepmeier, Girl Zines, 58.

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