Goat stories and globalised IP

Because I've been writing and thinking a lot about historical fiction in medieval Bohemia, YouTube recommended to me the “Old Goat Stories”, animated movies based on central-European fairy tales. At a point in the second one, I imagined myself as a writer inserting the line: “I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you meddling kids, and your talking goat!”

That got me thinking: can you copyright a catch phrase? At what point should intellectual property which becomes successfully pervasive enough to become memes or tropes, stop being protected?

The hair to split in this is that short phrases and brand identifiers are protected by trademarks, not simply copyright. That's a surprisingly important difference, because copyright is automatic with publication, but trademarks have to effectively be bought from regulators. It's similar to buying a radio frequency, or a licence to sell alcohol.

Furthermore, they are only valid for specific purposes. Returning to the original research question, I looked up the U.S. Trademarks & Patents Office and wrote some in. That's how I learned anyone can say “yabba dabba doo” on the radio or internet – because the original source material is no longer in production, so its trademark has lapsed – but not print it on a T-shirt, because the trademark on the apparel is ongoing. Similarly, ripping off “what's up doc” or “wassally wabbit” without attribution will still cause trouble for you.

Secondly, copyright and trademarks operate for different purposes. Copyright is meant to spread original ideas around, as long as others recognise whose original idea it was. [Academia has this at its foundation.] The only time you're allowed to get aggressive is when your work is copied instead of being reproduced. Technically speaking then, Warner Music can demand payment from any children's party who sings “happy birthday” without acknowledging that they legally own the song. Similarly, anyone who writes a series of books about Harry the Halfling travelling with a wizard across a war-torn hellscape populated by orcs to destroy an ancient artefact will probably find themselves in trouble with the Tolkien estate [at least until 2043, when the rights will expire, and the content will enter the “public domain”].

However, we're still free to write about “halflings” and “orcs”, and spell “dwarves” instead of “dwarfs”, even though these are all things which Tolkien invented. This is because he didn't apply them as trademarks, which would give a legal monopoly not only on copying but any reproductions. Any easily recognisable symbol or slogan you're aware of from the 20^th century is likely a trademark.

Demonstrating the relationship of intellectual property and legal protections leads to an investigation of some of the biggest brands commonly around. Robin Hood has been around for so long that, even if we could determine the original author, it is definitely public domain. Exactly because it is a story and character so widely recognisable, D.C.'s Green Arrow and Marvel's Hawkeye used it as the base for their own, newer products, which are now protected by commercial law. The same goes for the various animated and cinematic portrayals of Robin Hood and the merry men, have paradoxically become products protected by commercial law. Especially, anyone who tries to reimagine the story, viewing it from a different angle, could argue that it is an innovation of the author, and therefore protected.

Another successful example demonstrates how it can't be assumed that that original author wants people to add to work they've already done, to preserve their money-making rights. Tolkien's “swords and sorcery” genre of “fantasy adventure” led to Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). (Which seriously, even if you've never played before, I bet you've heard of it, right?) Since their content isn't original, all they have left are the rules systems and game mechanics, and they've been open sourced for 20 years. In the year 2000, the owners of the brand released an open game licence (OGL), allowing others – A. K. A. Third-party providers; 3PPs – to write and distribute material to be used for their game. Without this licence, the owners had monopoly distribution rights, which they could enforce under penalty of law. Instead, recognising the wide variety of “home-brewed” material that was already being used by their customers – including tweaks to their core rule systems – the publishers allowed that content to be distributed widely, provided that the new authors “clearly indicate which portions of the work that you are distributing are open game content”, according to OGL s8. Some of this experimentation they later adopted into new, official rules and mechanics.

Another consequence of throwing open the rights to their rules system was allowing more competition. Some of their staff left and started a rival game publishing company (Paizo), utilising the content covered in OGL, and taking it in a different direction. Normally that is exactly what you don't want from your IP regime.

Doing another assignment, I was also impressed to find that Microsoft's online pictures included coins and banknotes from Australia, and Ethiopia. Putting them in a document includes a text box with the licencing information. Specifically, "This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA". This is a creative commons protocol, meaning that anyone can use the image freely, anywhere, including for commercial purposes. 

Other specific terms of the licence say, "indicate any changes made. Any sharing of transformed material must be distributed under the same licence as the original". After all, the point of creative commons is to encourage widespread use of their content by removing any barriers. For the images of currency, its purpose is similarly to be distributed for indiscriminate use, which raises the question that if everyone should have it, should it have any IP protection?

Yes, in fact. When Australia changed from pounds to dollars in 1966, we originally had $1 notes. With the best of intentions at the time, they had aboriginal art printed on one side. The artist, David Malangi, recognised the work was his, and successfully sued the Reserve Bank, which admitted they had not asked for permission to use his designs.

When it comes to digital publications, IP protections are intertwined with other concepts and technological capabilities. Metadata is a big one, since it can effectively determine who gets credit, and who gets paid. Digital rights management software [DRM] is another emergent battleground, since it combines questions of ownership and distribution with access. It can therefore be seen that copyright and other considerations of disseminating intellectual property on the internet are a rabbit hole that requires professional understanding to navigate.

Quickly on wikis

This is one of the #23things which links today's internet with its historical origins. It is based on:

"collaborative websites which can be directly edited merely by using a web browser…by anyone with access to it". 

That quote comes from Wiktionary, "the free online dictionary", whose entries are built, and later built upon, by its users. It's related to the famous Wikipedia, a collaborative encyclopedia.

Attitudes to Wikimedia projects have tended to be derisive and elitist, exactly because it's common people contributing their knowledge freely, bit by bit, in their own language, relying on other volunteers to check its authenticity. Anecdotal evidence supports this; we all must have heard a story of someone logging into Wikipedia to change an article, just to win an argument at the time.

That argument broke down for me after realising two things:

1. Wikimedia material is updated faster than professional academia, and
2. The information in it is surprisingly detailed, and surprisingly high quality, since it's not aimed at any particular audience.

At this point, I remember a time in primary school where we had to look up the meanings behind days of the week and months of the year. I had the Oxford dictionary, which was different to everyone else's, and told me this much:

" The day of the week after Tuesday and before Thursday".

By contrast, Wiktionary tells us this much:

" The fourth day of the week in many religious traditions, and the third day of the week in systems using the ISO 8601 norm; it follows Tuesday and precedes Thursday".

Its page goes on to discuss the etymology (word origin), audio clips for pronunciation, as well as writing guide in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The online entry also lists informal and derived terminology, translations, and how its use and spelling has changed over time [in English]. As said on the homepage:

" Wiktionary has grown beyond a standard dictionary and now includes a thesaurus, a rhyme guide, phrase books, language statistics and extensive appendices. We aim to include not only the definition of a word, but also enough information to really understand it".

Just like Wikipedia, the homepage for Wiktionary has an introduction, and some content to help people begin: a featured word of the day in English, and the "foreign word of the day". They also include links to the standards they use, and an experimental space for new users.

Extensive use of hyperlinks is a distinguishing feature of Wikimedia, making them more interactive than standard articles or other pages of text. For this reason, I kept the links in both previous definitions. In this way, it took only four clicks/links to go from the homepage to the Wikipedia article about "play as therapy" for small children. Linking so many unrelated articles this way has led to Wikimedia being recognised as a massive, though useful, time sink, both for users and contributors. The way that different Wikimedia entries link to each other also forms a very well-connected data empire of its own.

Because of their simple design and construction, and the intensity of engagement by the target user community, wikis are popular on other social media. The urban dictionary should get a special mention, since it helps anyone with a net connection to keep up to date with slang, both in a contemporary and historical sense. In the same vein, fandom.com gives as much detail as you can handle about any particular game, movie, TV series, or other pop culture obsession.

In short: Wikimedia are a great resource for anyone generally, but especially those of the information professions. They're free, easy to use and understand, and as thorough as we allow them to be.

The Reverse-museum and interactive archaeology.

Like most students, I'm sure, I spend a lot of time in procrastination instead of the research and writing that I'm meant to. I prefer not to say, "wasting time", since it can be put to unexpected use, such as the inspiration for this article. As part of this, I subscribe to the British Museum on YouTube, and blundering through computer games based in middle-age and colonial age settings.

(My obsession for the past year has been Kingdom Come: Deliverance, which aspired to be as realistic in detail as possible. It has generated its own niche of internet fandom/nerdiness, which is concerned with questions from "how to construct an ideal suit of armour?" to "how could you accurately transcribe a illustrated Bible found in a monastery library?".)

By interactive museum work, I was inspired by the Queensland State Archives, which found a creative use for their collection of architectural drawings: converting them into stages of an arcade game, based on the classic Pac Man. For the cost of getting there, you can chase a mate and a few unfriendly sprites around the Thursday Island watch house!

The British museum videos are especially engaging in how they use their exhibits to tell a story. these are variously about the technology in use, or how useful the exhibit itself would have been originally, the political and economic context where from which it originally derived, or even how people used to pass the time in a given time and place.

This led me to stumble upon the channel for Tod's Workshop, where I finally learned points of trivia like the difference between a knife/sword, or spear/Lance. Then there's this wonderful piece, which starts with the question: "could arrows actually get through metal plate armour?".

(If the rest of this article doesn't make much sense, I promise it will after be watching through that video.)

This video has thousands of fans and has taken the internet by storm, with good reason. Structurally, it is as well assembled as the best academic articles where likely to find open (and perhaps, the best metalwork). It starts with a research question and analyses the sources available to give insight into the answer. Todd then outlines the design of a test for existing assumptions and knowledge, then finds people with skills and materials appropriate to putting a field test or experiment together. They execute the plan, discuss the results, and then tweak their experiment further before arriving at a solid and convincing conclusion. this would make it a great piece for teachers to show their students (especially the little boys).

More fascinating I think we can agree was how they managed to design and faithfully recreate solid steel armour appropriate to the time period, including with the tools and techniques of that time, especially considering most mediaeval tradespeople were illiterate!

This got me thinking about what a new field for the GLAMR industries might be, for which my working label is “reverse curation”, or “interactive archaeology” (© Douglas 2019). Not everyone could or would go to a physical museum and view original or recreated exhibits, regardless of the subject. Video series by archaeologists, curators, archivists etc. on their exhibits could be great for communicating their value to a bigger audience, particularly in combination with skilled enthusiasts to answer questions about things we know must have happened, but we're unsure how or why. Perhaps include a professional conservator or re-constructionist/restorer or dramaturg to make the direct link that this is a real and serious thing people are paid to do.

Another example is just as impressive, but more terrifying and more topical. Since the mid-1980s, a group of sailors calling themselves the First Mariners has been recreating epic sea voyages in what I can only really think of as reverse curation, but also describes itself as “archaeological re-enactment”. They started with a migration from Indonesia to Madagascar, which is theorized to have been achieved dozens of thousands of years ago. That's easy enough, until you question how people from that place and time would have crossed the whole Indian Ocean or especially why. Similarly, a Viking dragon boat was built to specification, to test a voyage from Denmark to Ireland by way of Scotland. In early 2020 (summertime for us), this epic voyages team will build an ocean going raft to sail between Timor and northern Australia, again to see whether and how it can be done. They're combining stone axes and reed-grass rope with G. P. S. Personally, I'm excited for this! I’m even tempted to go and be part of it!

In the near future, I foresee a collection of historical resources hosted on dedicated cloud servers, which people can interact with virtually, to a degree that no decent archivists/curator would allow physically. Returning to the example of Tod's Workshop, I was fascinated by the discussion of how the breastplate is a different thickness in different places. Imagine a digital tool which allowed you to take a virtual replica and analyse it in as much detail as you wanted; far more than you'd read on the attending label in a physical museum. You could track the thickness of the metal, its chemical composition, variations in design over time, place of manufacture, owner, and so on. This could be especially useful for exhibits which an audience couldn't physically interact in the first place: massive historical buildings for analysing their architecture and construction; any famous art museum; any maritime museum; a war memorial which allowed visualisation and interaction with the battlefields, down to the weather conditions. From there, it would be easy to make themed virtual exhibitions. An alternative or even transition state could have exhibit labels with Q. R. Codes, readable by the audience members' tablet or smartphone. This would allow them to take time to absorb the details of the resources, including with their own accessibility settings, and in their preferred language. Interface functionality could even allow exploring the pieces without the metric system (for those who insist on using 1:16^th inches).