Unpacking the gift: negotiating property and custody in archival hardcore blogs

Josh Heuman

doi:10.1017/S026114301300010X

Unpacking the gift: negotiating property and custody in archival hardcore blogs

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 May 2013

Josh Heuman

Show author details

Josh Heuman*: Affiliation:
Department of Communication, Texas A&M University, 4234 TAMU, College Station TX 77843, USA E-mail: [email protected]

Article contents

Abstract
References

Get access

Rights & Permissions

Abstract

How is music appropriated and recirculated on the web, across different claims to authority over its movement? Complicating broad accounts of online ‘piracy’ or ‘sharing’, this paper explores rules of appropriation and recirculation in the field of archival hardcore blogging, in close readings of blogs that try to reconstruct a system of regulating principles and regulated practices. In relations among themselves, bloggers claim (and quarrel over) a non-proprietary ‘custodial’ authority over the music they post, which supports a range of privileges from attribution to exclusivity. Relations between bloggers and property-holders reveal intricate entanglements of different forms of authority (rather than straightforward oppositions between discrete logics of gift and commodity) – in which bands and labels might appeal to subcultural credibility in the same breath as legal copyright. While drawing on concepts of norm and gift that emphasise and valorise the sociality of appropriation, this paper insists on the ambivalence and contestation across different practices of appropriation, and between practices of appropriation and property – recovering an intricate interrelation among the legal, economic and social lives of musical works.

Type: Articles
Information: Popular Music , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , May 2013 , pp. 177 - 195

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S026114301300010X [Opens in a new window]
Copyright: Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Appadurai, A. 1986. ‘Introduction: commodities and the politics of value’, in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Appadurai, A. (New York, Cambridge), pp. 3–63CrossRef Google Scholar

Aufderheide, P., and Jaszi, P. 2011. Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago)CrossRef Google Scholar

Blomley, N. 2005. ‘The borrowed view: privacy, propriety, and the entanglements of property’, Law & Social Inquiry, 30/4, pp. 617–61CrossRef Google Scholar

Borschke, M. 2012. ‘Ad hoc archivists: mp3 blogs and the generation of provenance’, Continuum, 26/1, 1–10CrossRef Google Scholar

Bourdieu, P. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production (New York, Columbia)Google Scholar

Burnett, R. 2011. ‘Internet and music’, in The Handbook of Internet Studies, ed. Consalvo, M. and Ess, C. (Malden, MA, Wiley-Blackwell), pp. 440–50Google Scholar

Caldwell, J. 2009. ‘Hive-sourcing is the new out-sourcing: studying (old) industrial labor habits in new (consumer) labor clothes’, Cinema Journal, 49/1, pp. 160–7CrossRef Google Scholar

Cooper, J., and Harrison, D. 2001. ‘The social organization of audio piracy on the Internet’, Media, Culture & Society, 23/1, pp. 71–89CrossRef Google Scholar

Currah, A. 2007. ‘Managing creativity: the tensions between commodities and gifts in a digital networked environment’, Economy & Society, 36/3, pp. 476–94CrossRef Google Scholar

Fisk, C. 2002. ‘Credit where it's due: the law and norms of attribution’, Georgetown Law Journal, 95/1, pp. 49–117Google Scholar

Foucault, M. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York, Vintage)Google Scholar

Foucault, M. 1977. ‘What is an author’, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca, NY, Cornell), pp. 124–7Google Scholar

Frith, S. 1981. ‘“The magic that can set you free”: the ideology of folk and the myth of the rock community’, Popular Music, 1, pp. 159–68CrossRef Google Scholar

Halbert, D. 2011. ‘Creativity without copyright: anarchist publishers and their approaches to copyright protection’, in Creativity, Law and Entrepreneurship, ed. Ghosh, S. and Molloy, R.P. (Northampton, MA, Edward Elgar), pp. 131–55Google Scholar

Hemmungs, Wirten E. 2006. ‘Out of sight and out of mind: on the cultural hegemony of intellectual property (critique)’, Cultural Studies, 20/2–3, pp. 282–91CrossRef Google Scholar

Hills, M. 2002. Fan Cultures (New York, Routledge)Google Scholar

Jenkins, H., Li, X., Krauskopf, A.D., with Green, J. 2008. ‘If it doesn't spread, it's dead: creating value in a spreadable marketplace’. http://convergenceculture.org/research/Spreadability_doublesidedprint_final_063009.pdf (accessed 15 March 2012)Google Scholar

Jones, S. 2002. ‘Music that moves: popular music, distribution and network technologies’, Cultural Studies, 16/2, pp. 213–32CrossRef Google Scholar

Leyshon, A. 2003. ‘Scary monsters? software formats, peer-to-peer networks, and the spectre of the gift’, Environment & Planning D, 21/5, pp. 533–58CrossRef Google Scholar

Lindvall, H. 2009. ‘Web sheriff is watching you’, The Guardian, 2 October. http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/oct/02/web-sheriff (accessed 15 March 2012)Google Scholar

Marshall, L. 2003. ‘For and against the industry: an introduction to bootleg collectors and tape traders’, Popular Music, 22/1, pp. 57–72CrossRef Google Scholar

Raustiala, K., and Sprigman, C. 2006. ‘The piracy paradox: innovation and intellectual property in fashion design’, Virginia Law Review, 92, pp. 1687–777Google Scholar

Rodman, G., and Vanderdonckt, C. 2006. ‘Music for nothing or, I want my MP3: the regulation and recirculation of affect’, Cultural Studies, 20/2–3, pp. 245–61CrossRef Google Scholar

Rothman, J. 2007. ‘The questionable use of custom in intellectual property’, Virginia Law Review, 93, pp. 1899–982Google Scholar

Rothman, J. 2009. ‘Custom, comedy and the value of dissent’, Virginia Law Review in Brief, 95, pp. 19–26Google Scholar

Schultz, M. 2006. ‘Fear and norms and rock & roll: what jam bands can teach us about persuading people to obey copyright law’, Berkeley Technology Law Journal, 21, pp. 651–728Google Scholar

Schultz, M. 2007. ‘Copynorms: copyright law and social norms’, in Intellectual Property and Information Wealth: Issues and Practices in the Digital Age, ed. Peter, Yu (New York, Praeger), pp. 201–35Google Scholar

Seltzer, W. 2010. ‘Free speech unmoored in copyright's safe harbor: chilling effects of the DMCA on the First Amendment’, Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, 24/1, pp. 171–232Google Scholar

Sigal, J. 2010. ‘reflections on #musicblogocide2k10’. WFMU's Beware of the Blog, 19 February. http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2010/02/reflections-on-musicblogocide2k10.html (accessed 15 March 2012)Google Scholar

Straw, W. 1997. ‘Sizing up record collections. gender and connoisseurship in rock music culture’, in Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender, ed. Whiteley, S. (NewYork, Routledge), pp. 3–16Google Scholar

Styvén, M. 2007. ‘The intangibility of music in the digital age’, Popular Music & Society, 30/1, pp. 53–74CrossRef Google Scholar

Tushnet, R. 2007. ‘Payment in credit: copyright law and subcultural creativity’, Law & Contemporary Problems, 70, pp. 135–74Google Scholar

Vaidhyanathan, S. 2003. Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (New York, New York University Press)Google Scholar

von Hippel, E. 2006. Democratizing Innovation (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press)Google Scholar