The monthly salon discussion for the DC metro area on issues of copyright meets for the month of October tonight. The gathering starts at 6:20PM at Teaism at Penn Quarter, 400 8th Street. This is within easy walking distance of the Chinatown and Archives metro stations.
I will be there. If you are in the area and interested, come and check it out.
Shannon Simmons will lead a conversation on negative spaces in intellectual property. Shannon is a doctoral student at UMD’s College of Information Studies. I met her, along with some of her peers, at the last CopyNight, this promises to be a good discussion. Since I read pieces on the fashion industry and stage magic within the last few years, I have been fascinated by this idea of negative spaces.
Over the past couple of years scholarly interest in negative spaces in intellectual property such as fashion, cuisine, comedy and magic has been growing. Each of these groups do fairly well despite the fact that they receive little to no copyright protection, having established their own community enforced protection mechanisms. While copyright is intended to help promote the progress of creative works, it has been argued that in some low ip-regimes such as the fashion industry copying actually helps to promote the swift cycle of innovation. What lessons, if any, can be taken from these negative spaces and applied to areas currently receiving copyright protection?
Some links for the discussion:
- From the Boston Globe: Creative Vigilantes, Daniel Smith
- University of Chicago Moblog on Negative Spaces
- From Boing Boing: Magicians Innovate Without IP Law, David Pescovitz
I heard it was a great turn out last night. Sorry to have missed it.
It was indeed a great turn out, including Wendy Seltzer who is apparently now in DC, teaching at American. Many of the usual suspects and many new faces. The discussion was very lively and I have quite a few notes. I’ll write up a post tomorrow based on them.