I hadn’t encountered Joel’s blog before, so I hope I’m not reading this piece out of the context of his usual commentary. In any event, my response isn’t entirely about this one entry. I’ve only been to two events that were trying to be “unconferences” in some sense, and I’ve never been involved in trying to facilitate one, so there’s nothing about his critique that strikes too close to home, no wound it inflicts on me.

But there is something in the response that frustrates me, and it’s not just about unconferencing. There’s a pattern here that extends across a much vaster terrain. As I said in my Twitter feed, “Do as thou wilt” and “Ur doing it wrong” don’t add up. Joel is hardly the first person to try and say both of them at once.

Let’s take unconferencing. The idea here, as I see it, is to not just systematically question everything that doesn’t work about an existing model of conferencing, collaboration, and meetings but to invent new forms and practices that act on that critique. That alone makes the movement or whatever you want to call it a great thing: there’s nothing worse than endlessly circling around an awareness of how broken or stale existing practices are while feeling condemned to repeat them indefinitely. The one time I sat on a major professional association’s program committee a decade ago, I suggested that it would be a great idea if we just dropped virtually all of the standard paper-presentation sessions in favor of roundtables, workshops and spontaneous discussions, a sort of proto-unconferencing move. But there wasn’t any space in business-as-usual to entertain that idea. It was clear that if I were serious about it, I’d have to make it a crusade. My colleagues weren’t against a change exactly, but they felt there were reasons why we had a lot of small, boring sessions attended by six or seven people who passively listened to papers being read to them and changing that would cause serious problems for many members. Crusading on this subject struck me as a bit lower on my priority list than getting an unnecessary root canal. Smarter by far to just do an end run and invent new practices under new banners, as unconferencers have.

It’s the new practices part that seems to me to be the point: that unconferencing opens up what had been a closed, ritualistic and expensive domain that put very high transaction costs on collaboration, discovery and conversation between people with shared interests and projects.

It sticks in my craw when a move to openness becomes an occasion for a new closure. Which is how I read Joel’s complaint: that the unconference should have a purity test, its own Dogme 95 policed by dour adherents, that it has to be the dialectical opposite of the conference in every respect. In that case, you do not mean UN, you mean ANTI. Which will require the perpetual zombie reification of an ancien regime mode of conferencing as well. Every anti- needs its pro-, every post- needs its unhyphenated Other. To “un” something seems to me not to commit to a perfect opposite but to seek a massive radial evolution of new forms, to open a space, to emancipate.

What I hear in Joel I hear a bit of when #Occupy meetings insist dogmatically on human mics, circles and so on. Or the way that I can remember student activist meetings I participated in the 1980s mandatorily concluding with a sort of offbrand pseudo-Maoist self-crit session. Moves intended to criticize the rigidity and hierarchy of some other form of group or collaboration sometimes harden quickly into their own form of exclusionary orthodoxy, their own fetishized manners. To me a perfect unconference or rally or online collaboration or what have you would be a jam session, a moveable feast. Improvisation has signal, it has pattern, it has structure, it has plans, but it also has the freedom to say or play what it seems right to say or play at that moment. Whatever works is what I want to be free to do, what the work of the “un” ought to accomplish, to make working an always-provisional, always-scrutinized, always-open value. Let a thousand models bloom, and then cross-pollinate.

This isn’t just about one mode or tradition of collaborative practice. Ultimately this distinction, this different sense of what it means to “UN-” something, strikes right to the heart of the most extravagant and exciting promises that congregants gathered in the house of Shirky try to uphold. I really believe you cannot set yourself against attempts to protect worn-out traditions through enclosure and monopoly with your own enclosures, your own moves to exclusive ownership. Otherwise it just comes off like an attempt to evict the old sheep farmers so that you can breed goats on the same fenced-in pastures, a casting of one brand name against another, a strategy of transfer-seeking.

Openness is a sensibility long before it is found expressed in anything more concrete, and it requires a delight in the mutations and adaptations that follow from an intervention into a closed space. It rests on a gentleness of regard towards the practical and imaginary moves made by others, an encouragement of remixing and reinvention.

It doesn’t even matter if the end of a right, a freedom, a possibility will ultimately hurt that powerful interest. The contemporary businesses who have registered a powerful stake in exceptionally restrictive monopolies over intellectual property have themselves been enormous beneficiaries of a conception of the public domain as a fundamental and irreversible right of a free society. No matter: they would now see it ended. Better to kill the future than live in a present where you can only have two Ferraris in the driveway.

Hollywood and the music industry have tried repeatedly to kill media technologies and practices which ultimately have returned them enormous profits. I have in my basement industry-produced videotapes that if Jack Valenti had had his way would never have been sold to me. There was money that left my pocket and went to the businesses he represented. And yes, I have videotapes I recorded off of television. Many of those I purchased in another media format later precisely because having videotapes sustained my desire to have those films and shows available for viewing. Videotaping (or making audio tapes) was the precondition of the explosive growth of a market for older visual culture as a consumer commodity. Think back to the early years of television: it never occurred to any of the people producing and owning that intellectual property that it might have value in the future. The more that we have been able to buy and copy, the more that we want. And much of the time, the more that we will pay for.

Enclosures don’t just hurt the commons, they ultimately hurt the new lords of the manor. This is part of the point of rights, of limited government, of checks and balances: that to safeguard the future even of the powerful, you have to restrain everyone from getting everything they think they want right here, right now.

What’s increasingly apparent about law, rights and liberties in the United States is that we have lived in our times in a bubble, an interregnum, a moment where some agencies and operations of the U.S. government, most particularly the Supreme Court of the United States, have moved to align the operations of law and authority with a properly expansive vision of human freedoms and Constitutionally-protected rights. That moment is passing, the pendulum swinging to more Gilded Age norms of brutalist law enforcement, oligarchic license, and an open sanction to the use of military power at the whim of the executive.

Nowhere is this clearer than with intellectual property and the public domain. The Court’s majority in the Golan v. Holder decision are only the stone that seals the tomb, not the murderers who slit its throat. Which means what it has always meant: that those of us who believe in a public domain, whose professions are defined by a sacred commitment to its existence, whose lives were enriched by its existence, will have to fight every day forever to bring it into resurrected glory and then to hold dear its life when we do so. Waiting for the Court, the Congress, the President, the government, the powers-that-be, to live up to the trust they hold, or even to recognize where their own long-term self-interests lie, isn’t good enough. It was comforting for a time to see justice and freedom advance from those precincts, but that led to leaving the door unlocked for burglars.

But two pieces which I read this week have really reverberated with me. The first was Bethany Nowviskie’s “It Starts on Day One”, at the Chronicle of Higher Education‘s ProfHacker column. Nowviskie argues that graduate programs in the humanities should completely wipe out all of their existing methodology courses (she uses the metaphor of a comet hitting the dinosaurs).

I’d agree with her first complaint against such courses, which is that they often teach methods which aren’t really in use any longer, or are inflected with an unthoughtful ethos of wariness or hostility towards digital infrastructure. The second argument she advances I worry about a bit more, which is that many such courses are “a crash course in academic jargon and en-vogue theories”. I’ve previously voiced my own sympathy for the “more hacking, less yacking” vision of some digital humanists, but it’s important not to kill the small mammals along with the dinosaurs, not to let an insurgent energy overwhelm some of the pedagogical wisdom that’s come out of existing practice. In this case, what that might mean is that we shouldn’t forget that making and problematizing are not binary states. Methods classes that are so entirely about doing or practicing that they never stop to be troubled about the purposes and aspirations of doing very quickly become mechanical and arid. “How” should never become the mortal enemy of “why”, “so what” or “who says so?”

Nowviskie rightfully says that a graduate curriculum must include consistent, persistent attention to the “uninterrogated policies and procedures that cover and shape the humanities in the modern college and university”. That’s very much my own feeling, and a driving force behind my continued blogging. But it’s crucially important not to turn many of the critical commitments of digital humanists into the one uninterrogated idea in that process. E.g., if we are going to teach graduate students in a new methodology course how to work with new platforms and publication forms that reconfigure intellectual property or create open access, we can’t step over the question of whether they should. Whenever you’re dealing with a whether kind of discussion, it’s important not to close all the escape hatches. That’s where methods classes have to come back to theory, to problematizing, and without any stopwatch ticking that says, “Hey, we only have five minutes for gnawing on our own entrails, then we have to get back to learning PHP.” This isn’t just an important pedagogical and ethical obligation: it’s also the currency of the humanities. Methods which are cut-and-dried, just about making, just about doing, just about following the recipe, are by their nature somewhat orthogonal to the spirit of humanistic inquiry.

This leads me to the second piece I really liked in this past week, at Ian Bogost’s blog. Now, look, to some extent this essay is just Bogost being Bogost: whether in tweets, blogs or books, you get the clear sense that he exemplifies the quip about not wanting to be part of any club that would have him as a member. The voice that I’ve built up on this blog over the years is so sedately reasonable that I can’t really write in this space any longer in a more expressive way, as I once think I could, but if I could, I’d probably write very nearly what Bogost says in this entry. Bogost says to humanists that if there’s a crisis in the humanities, they’ve got no one to blame but themselves.

To quote at length, he writes:

“We are insufferable. We do not want change. We do not want centrality. We do not want to speak to nor interact with the world. We mistake the tiny pastures of private ideals with the megalopolis of real lives. We spin from our mouths retrograde dreams of the second coming of the nineteenth century whilst simultaneously dismissing out of our sphincters the far more earnest ambitions of the public at large—religion, economy, family, craft, science.”

Digital culture, he adds, is good for the humanities for the simple reason that “computing has revealed a world full of things: hairdressers, recipes, pornographers, typefaces, Bible studies, scandals, magnetic disks, rugby players, dereferenced pointers, cardboard void fill, pro-lifers, snowstorms”.

Where the evenhanded compulsion of my public voice kicks in the wake of his complaint is simply to say that the things scholarly humanists care about, they care about earnestly, passionately, sincerely, and much of how they care about what they care about would be easier to appreciate if those passions were sized to their subject better. Bogost is complaining in part about something that Bruce Robbins observed some time ago about the political posture of many cultural studies scholars: that they simultaneously assume that the stakes of scholarly work are so very high that the least form of error (political, interpretative or empirical) is devastating in its possible impact and that scholars and intellectuals are peripheral, unimportant and marginalized (and must somehow figure out how not to be). The consequence of that dual construction is that the simple pleasures of humanistic writing and teaching get washed out and so too the simple possibilities of talking with publics about culture and ideas in a conversation that could satisfy everyone involved.

Scholarly humanists, taken as an abstract whole, are now so anxious about so many things: their prestige, their authority, their exclusivity, the stability of their subject, that they strain the patience of anyone or any group more serene in its sense of place within the university or the culture. And that anxiety often leads to lashing-out in all directions: at enemies both powerful and weak, at baffled witnesses and sympathetic friends, even to purification rituals within the ranks. I don’t think it has to be that way at all. Bogost thinks the answer is a purge. I think the answer is both as difficult and as simple as a more relaxed, humble and curious approach to being humanists, to scale down the claims we make and the stakes we impose.

I’ve experimented with classes that are annotating primary documents, something that other faculty at Swarthmore have taken to a whole new level. Similarly interesting discussions arise out that kind of “applied knowlege”.

Another concept that I haven’t tried yet but which seems like a natural possibility is guiding students through the preparatory work that an author or producer might do if they were adapting a body of knowledge, a setting or a story for some kind of media besides scholarly publication. Say, what kinds of researched knowledge you might need if you were going to write a script, make costumes, find locations, fine-tune dialogue, craft audio, and so on for a film working with a particular historical setting.

Or, in another case, if you were going to debate and discuss what you’d have to do to successfully adapt a science-fiction novel to a film. Not actually create the adaptation, just figure out what the issues involved in an adaptation might be, what rules of preference for ‘adaptable’ works a group of students could generate and discuss and so on. This is probably yet another example of an exercise or a direction for a class that would define me as the advance guard of a barbarian horde dedicated to despoiling the noble traditions of disciplinary inquiry and serious scholarship. But honestly, you can study texts which exist and use them to raise the same questions: how does intertextuality operate? How do visuality and textuality interrelate? Are there cultural works which are so strongly native to one mode or form of representation that they have no plasticity, no room for reinterpretation or translation into other forms? Are specific technologies of representation necessary preconditions of some kinds of cultural work? It’s just that starting from the question, “Which books on this list do you think could plausibly be adapted into films, and what kinds of translating and interpreting would you employ in your favored cases” gives those discussions an interesting mix of open-ended contingency and practical concreteness.

Having to explore your reasoning for those kind of preferences is a really interesting exercise. For example, on the Register‘s current list:

John Scalzi, Agent to the Stars. This seems like an easy adaptation to me, and a highly viable one. But why? Some of it is Scalzi’s prose and dialogue: it already feels like a screen treatment in places. The pacing of the story fits the likely pacing of a standard commercial film. The premise isn’t complex, it doesn’t have a huge amount of world-building or backstory. On the other hand, stripped of Scalzi’s wit and the smooth readability of his prose, it could come off as derivative or familiar.

Stephen Donaldson, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Well, maybe I’m inclined to think these books both unadaptable and unwise to adapt because I don’t like them much. But an assignment’s an assignment, so independent of my feelings, this is the classic kind of premise that creates a puzzle about the relationship between diegetic and extra-diegetic elements. In the best case scenario, that’s a goad to the creation of really amazing work that pushes at the boundaries of what cinema can be. In the worst case scenario, well, we’ve all seen epic fails in rising to this challenge. There are some existing films that work brilliantly with the basic construct at the heart of the Thomas Covenant books: The Wizard of Oz for one (the visual and narrative relationship between Oz and Kansas, but also Dorothy has Covenant’s dilemma in the sense that it’s important that she not accept Oz for what it offers, just without so much self-loathing, leprosy and rape).

David Brin, Kiln People. I think I might pick Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon instead for some of the same themes and mood of this Brin novel, but both of them strike me as readily adaptable and as being adaptations that could support a really wide range of visual aesthetics and thematic ambitions. Compare to the Scalzi: anybody who tries to make that a “heavy” text or as an occasion for visual invention is going to break what charm it has. But Kiln People or Altered Carbon have some thematic potency lurking inside the noir-ish mood.

Jack Chalker, the Well World books. Can’t see that these could be adapted as a single feature film, for a zillion reasons, ranging from the irreducible genre geekiness involved in their premise and style to the visual challenges to almost-Rule-34-invoking Chalker fetish about body-swapping to the convoluted plotting of even the relatively simple first book in the series. On the other hand, this strikes me as an insanely appropriate series for adaptation to a digital game, especially a massively-multiplayer persistent-world format.

Robert Heinlein, Time Enough For Love. As my uncle once put it, “Easiest book ever to summarize: an immortal guy has sex with everyone he meets, and then travels through time to have sex with his hot young mother. The End.” Here the premise restricts what it can be: too outre and Mary-Sueish to work as a story played straight, and made as a piece of porn that tries to hold on to a shred of narrative complexity, it would be at best a quaint period piece alongside “Dwarf Threesome Amateurs” and so on in the contemporary market.

Kim Stanley Robinson, The Mars Trilogy. Great text for thinking about how cinematic work handles (or fails to handle) world-building fictions. (Anybody who watched Game of Thrones this last week saw a case of a cinematic work really struggling and sometimes failing to surmount this obstacle.)

Scott Turow, Paul Aiken and James Shapiro last week argued in the New York Times that without copyright, we would have had no Shakespeare. Or at least that’s what the framing of the article was meant to imply. Reading carefully, what they argue instead was that without money, Elizabethean writers would have had no reason to create as much cultural work than they did, that until there was a business model that rewarded performers and writers for their work, the kind of exuberant creativity we seemingly all treasure today would have been impossible. Copyright, as the authors vaguely acknowledge, came later. (You have to know that Shakespeare wrote before 1709 to fully pick up on that acknowledgement.)

This is a pretty classic example of the use of historical analogy as sleight-of-hand, rather than as an investigative tool. Turow, Aiken and Shapiro mean us to understand that copyright was a necessary cause of the possibility of profit that they suggest fueled the work of Shakespeare, and therefore that copyright as we have it today is an equally necessary condition of the continued creation of cultural work. They’re undone by their fatal attraction to the iconic name of Shakespeare, however. If that’s where they want to start the story, the analogy actually undercuts their case.

The dramatic explosion of entrepreneurial cultural creation that they associate with copyright began two hundred years before the first copyright law. Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, made their living without copyright. What came before copyright was the printing press, a new technology that permitted dissemination of printed texts and images on an unprecedented scale, at unprecedented prices.

Authors made a living in the post-Gutenberg era not by creating works of intense personal originality, but by cheerfully rummaging through the works of classical, Christian or other earlier authors and stealing plots, characters, passages. Nostradamus was a bestseller partially because he grabbed whatever he could find that sounded interesting or impressive from both obscure and well-known texts. Shakespeare was a master at this kind of remixing, but so were many of his peers, well-known or otherwise. Early modern printing and creating was quite lucrative, and not just because of Bibles and plays. Pornography was another big profit stream, advice and almanacs, political pamphlets, a whole range of familiar kinds of works flourished.

So why copyright? What did copyright (in English law) do? It secured profits for publishers by protecting their investment, and allowed them to regularize their payments to authors as a result. This was an important development and it had many long-term consequences, some of them very positive. But it was not responsible for making writing and creating profitable, nor was it responsible for the early modern explosion in printing, publishing or for that matter inventing or scientific study. The Royal Society was not Edison Labs, and much of what we celebrate about science and technological innovation today owes far more to the former than the latter.

If you want to work by analogy, you’ve got to take the whole thing on board. If you do that in the case of the financial incentives for cultural and technological innovation, the conclusion can’t be a resounding defense of the copyright regime as we know it. The only way you can use history to prove that the immediately pre-Internet copyright regime was the best of all possible worlds is by using the 1980s as an analogy, at the highwater mark of global legal enforcement of its powers and the most elaborate policy framework clarifying its reach combined with some balance of profitability between most cultural industries and cultural creators. Go back to the early 20th Century and not only do you find many cultural industries substantially unfettered by copyright, you also often find publishers and owners utterly in control and many artists impoverished and cheated out of even meager earnings.

In the end, that’s what most writers, artists, and publishers over a certain age are really looking to: the last great business model. It’s hard not to sympathize with them, or to ignore the fruits of that model. In publishing, for example, many writers had just managed through lengthy collective struggle to secure many rights that their predecessors had been cheated out of.

Early modern European print culture does indeed suggest that money had a lot to do with stimulating a huge wave of cultural invention. It also suggests, however, that there is more way than one to skin a cat. Authors and publishers would be better served trying to figure out a new business model than to equip their old one with more weapons and power.

It may well be that in a new business model, less money will be made, or that it will be spread among more people. Rather than a few professional photographers making large salaries, thousands of amateur photographers making small ones. Rather than a few novelists making large salaries, more novelists making a bit of money. This is about the shift from tournament economies to something flatter and more distributed.

This last point is especially important considering Turow, Aiken and Shapiro’s apparent appreciation for the way that early modern print culture widened the range and volume of cultural creation. If there’s one thing that new media have demonstrated, it is that the old culture industries dramatically underestimated the creative capacity of the world around them, and relied far too much on closed-shop networks to determine whether a work was worth publishing or producing.

If the culture of the future has more people producing cultural work for smaller personal payments, then that says less about what has to happen to copyright and more about what has to happen to the world of work in general. It’s possible to imagine a world where a good deal of what we read and watch comes from creators whose main jobs involve something else. For that to be a hopeful vision, we have to imagine that all work will be less about a crazed pursuit of even more extractive productivity, that we will leave space for many people to have several working lives in parallel to one another, to personally diversify our revenue streams. Which would also, by the way, be pretty close to the early modern habitus that Turow, Aiken and Shapiro claim to treasure so very much.

It’s also worth considering what kind of cultural work might be impossible to undertake in a 21st Century distributed business model because of its very high overhead. In those cases, maybe the protection of very aggressive copyright might still be an important incentive to take that kind of financial risk. Note, however, that this is a very different and more focused idea. Not, “Protect copyright at all costs, indiscriminately”, but “What kind of work requires expensive up-front investment, has great social importance, and runs strong risks of not making its money back in the marketplace whether or not it’s protected by copyright?” Viagra doesn’t pass that test, and neither does Avatar. Before we refocus copyright regimes to this class of cultural work, we’ll all want to rethink what actually does belong in this category.

I, on the other hand, have no such inclination. Oh, I’m not uniquely angry at Ithaka’s leadership, mind you. Nor do I think this was a conspiracy to get users to accidentally pay for content that their libraries already own. But if you want a single moment that reveals how flatly insane the entirety of academic publishing actually is, this is that moment. All the fig leaves fell to the ground for a couple of weeks.

To sum it up, as I have before at this blog: academic institutions (and grant-giving agencies outside of academia) subsidize scholarly research through sabbaticals, through supporting laboratories and libraries, through travel funds and so on. When scholars report and disseminate their research in short-form articles or papers, they traditionally have done so by giving away the written report to outside publishers. (Or worse yet, the researchers have had to pay someone to disseminate or publish their findings, a cost which is also borne by the universities or by granting agencies.) Then scholars gave away something else to the publishers: the work of peer review, done on an entirely voluntary basis, which was the primary value-added that made the publications desirable in the first place. These publishers then sold back the published results to universities, often at very high profit-seeking mark-ups.

What do scholars get out of disseminating or publishing their research? Primarily they gain reputation, which may indirectly produce financial rewards. Only very rarely does an academic receive direct financial gain from the act of publication itself. How do you gain reputation? Through the widest possible circulation of the research publication.

So: in the system as it existed from about 1970 to the present, universities had to pay twice (or more, if you count supporting peer review as a form of academic labor) for research, and because publishers held the rights to the work that was donated to them, work did not circulate as widely as it could. Quite the contrary: conventional publication sharply limited its circulation.

That was one thing when the publishers were bearing the costs of the physical production of print. Digital publishing is not cost-free (UI design, storage, interoperability and preservation all cost something), but neither does it have any of the burdensome overhead of print.

So why do we tolerate the rank insanity of this system now that we can completely obliterate it? Peer review is completely mobile to digital publication: it was already done remotely anyway. Editorial boards are completely mobile to digital publication. There’s still a place for book publication that is handled by presses, books which potentially have slightly wider audiences than one hundred fifty research libraries. There’s still a role for a few wider-circulation print journals that also reach wider audiences. But the vast majority of academic publication can avoid the middlemen entirely, which would simultaneously save money and serve the purpose of scholarly publication far better.

Now, JSTOR’s interface design didn’t actually change anything about who owns what material. All it did was briefly showcase the nudity of the emperor, reveal more nakedly how much of our academic patrimony we gave away for decades and decades, made us rattle our beggar’s cups a bit more. At least in the fairy tale, when the town sees the emperor is naked, they don’t close their eyes until they can get back to imagining him as regally clothed again. No, they run the salesmen out of town and laugh the emperor back into his palace.

The comments thread ended up touching on some broader perennial issues on copyright, fair use and academic publishing which I’ve frequently discussed at this blog, and probably will discuss again. Let me focus here on the particular question of the classroom use of video material and a simple but powerful response that I think academics in general could and should offer to AIME and its clients.

Once upon a time, if you asked your library to acquire audio-visual material, you generally assumed that you would need to schedule a time for all members of the class to watch that video. That was what the technology afforded. This was far from ideal compared to assigned reading. You didn’t have to manage the schedule of all members of a class to ensure that reading took place before a class session. You assigned it, students did it at their convenience. Coordinating a film showing in contrast was a serious pain in the ass. This tended to cap the numbers of faculty willing to make heavy use of such materials in their courses.

Coupled to that, the relative price of films and the technology necessary to show them was up until relatively recently was very high compared to most print materials.

This began to shift somewhat as viewing technology became cheaper and more ubiquitious. Now you could reasonably assign students to view a film at their own convenience. On the other hand, there was still a bottleneck compared to a reading assignment. If asked 35 students to view a film within a two-day interval and made no further efforts to coordinate showings, I almost guaranteed that some would not be able to do the assignment. This was equally true, however, when assigned readings were based on a limited number of copies kept in binders on library reserve.

Being able to make short fair-use selections of larger texts available digitally changes the game for reading, and the same would be true for film which is streamed to a course member’s individual computer at their convenience. (I should add that we don’t do that here at Swarthmore at the moment.) This is, in short, a simple case of technological progress, of a new technology responsively solving a long-standing problem and improving the basic infrastructure of teaching. It lets us teach from a wider range of material in a more effective way, to accommodate the real schedules and needs of our students.

So along comes AIME, acting on behalf of its clients, and says, “If you want to do things that way, you need to pay us more, and pay us in a format where we may at some later date unilaterally revoke or change the terms of end-user licenses whose terms have never really been legally tested.”

Let’s leave aside all the endless quarrelling over what fair use is or is not under current law, or even what it should be. Let’s also leave aside mainstream commercial film and video distributors, who aren’t especially dependent upon the educational marketplace. (Though with DVD sales declining rapidly, maybe even they can’t afford to scorn any significant customer base.) Let’s just talk about most of the companies who are AIME’s clients. Bullfrog. PBS Video. California Newsreel. Various other educational video producers.

Educational institutions are their customer base. Period. So here’s a simple response that is easily within the collective reach of educators: don’t buy the products of media companies that will not affordably accommodate a major technological innovation which substantially enhances our classrooms. No, we won’t pay a crazy-high institutional use fee that doesn’t even permanently resolve the question of future uses of that material on future technological platforms. Sell us material at the reasonable price you sell to individual users and allow us to use it to teach with.

If that puts you out of business, too bad for you, media producers. Because here’s what I think faculty need to remember. In most courses and most subjects, you don’t need film. Yes, you ought to have it, it’s important to have it, it’s useful to have it, but you can do without. So if the producers won’t accommodate the financial situation of our institutions and won’t accommodate the enabling technologies of our classrooms, bid them farewell. Someone else will eventually figure out how to make and distribute visual work which does make those accommodations.

Don’t leave this to the lawyers and the administrators. These are issues where faculty and librarians can decisively resolve matters the simple way any customer can. Where the product is sold to you under highly unfavorable terms, don’t buy.

I might add that there’s an additional step that would help even more: at least some producers of educational video also depend on academics as unpaid or low-compensated creators of content. Don’t participate in that fashion in making materials which will not be made available to other educators on favorable terms.

Manufacture there if it makes sense. But don’t bother trying to sell products and services.

Microsoft, out. Yahoo, out. Blizzard, out. Everybody. You’re all being played for chumps. Now, if that move coincidentally happened to help a push for political liberalization, that’s a silver lining.

Working on a couple of new projects, I’ve been diving back deeply into catalogs and search spaces and portals. It’s mostly been a depressing experience. Here and there, I have a satisfying feeling that something I’ve used for years has steadily improved. Our own local catalog Tripod is so vastly better in basic design and navigation than a decade ago that it’s almost startling. Another old stalwart, JSTOR, feels more intuitive in its design than it once did.

Travel across various search spaces and databases, though, and several basic frustrations arise.

1. Databases which default to an advanced rather than simple interface upon first access. Sometimes that’s because a portal points to the advanced interface, sometimes it’s because the basic interface is a hidden or obscured option.

2. Basic interfaces which are cluttered or require toggling four or more separate drop-down menus or other settings even to carry out a basic search.

3. Advanced interfaces which are really cluttered, with constraining menus, toggles or radio buttons scattered across multiple columns. Sometimes a search page looks like someone vomited up every kind of interactable object that’s ever been used in a form or UI. (Or as in the case of ISI Web of Science, with a marketing slogan at the top that’s made to look like interactable text.)

4. Diversity of interface designs. By now, we really should be converging on a common design. Instead, every vendor seems to feel an obligation to maintain a different design as a branding tool, not to aid users.

5. Constant shuffling and pointless tinkering with the UI for databases. It’s one thing to make a really big shift (say, towards an inviting basic entry-point interface away from a cluttered entry-point advanced interface) and another thing to constantly move menus around in a page layout. But the latter is very common behavior.

6. Really low standards for the quality of digitization and for searching within digitized text. JSTOR is a happy exception, but some other digitization projects are just hair-tearingly poor once you get into the nitty-gritty and start to make serious use of the resources they hold. There’s at least one company doing archival digitization where I find the type of material they’re digitizing appealing but I’m prepared to argue against ever buying anything they’re doing because the design and usability standards of their work are so slapdash.

7. Fragmentation of material. Rather than moving towards amalgamation and interoperability across databases, you really get the sense that everybody’s been busy grabbing at whatever piles of text they can lay their hands on, building the biggest little mudhill they can manage to put up, and then building walls around it. There are interstitial services that help a user “jump” from one little fragmented collection to another and portals that aim to be a “top level” to return to, sure, but we should be doing better by now.