Browsing by Author "Vaidhyanathan, Siva"

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The Anarchist in the Coffee House: A Brief Consideration of Local Culture, the Free Culture Movement, and Prospects for a Global Public Sphere
(2007) Vaidhyanathan, Siva
"This article examines one particular Public Sphere experiment - the rise of a global 'Free Culture Movement' that aims to limit the spread of strong intellectual property regimes. It also considers the complications encountered by the Free Culture Movement when it crosses a very different value set at work in global cultural policy debates - the protection of native or local culture exemplified by the Native Culture Movement. Through this case study, I suggest that perhaps the Public Sphere is not the best model to idealize when we think globally and dream democratically. Habermas's Public Sphere is as temporally and geographically specific as Benedict Anderson's notion of 'imagined communities' and similarly has been inflated to cover disparate experiences that do not precisely map to the specific historical experience the original work covers."
The State of Copyright Activism
(2004) Vaidhyanathan, Siva
"One of the great hopes I had while I researched and wrote Copyrights and Copywrongs (New York: New York University Press, 2001), a cultural history of American copyright, during the late 1990s was that copyright debates might puncture the bubble of public consciousness and become important global policy questions. My wish has come true. Since 1998 questions about whether the United States has constructed an equitable or effective copyright system frequently appear on the pages of daily newspapers. Activist movements for both stronger and looser copyright systems have grown in volume and furor. And the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in early 2003 that the foundations of American copyright, as expressed in the Constitution, are barely relevant in an age in which both media companies and clever consumers enjoy unprecedented power over the use of works."