A friend of mine wrote an article titled "Organizing Rights at the 'Global University,'" which chronicles the experiences of organizing international (mostly Chinese) students, researchers, and teachers as part of a struggle for an academic labor union at Yale. Her article is published in WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society, but to read it online, you have to pay a fee. You can either subscribe to the journal or buy rights to access the article for a limited time. I logged on to Yale's off-campus network, but I still couldn't access the journal (though logging on through Yale's server gets me on to jstor and Project Muse sites). I emailed my friend to ask if she got royalties from the payments her article earned, and she told me--predictably--that she does not. She also sent me a .pdf of her article, which I look forward to reading.

The zeitgeist seems to be pressing in on the question of public access to scholarship. Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman have both mentioned it, along with links to the New Yorker article about James Joyce's grandson, the Franco of his estate. Then there's the congressional debate written up by Inside Higher Ed, and of course the comments at Silliman's blog, which have grown exponentially since I read them a few days ago, and various links from those comments, such as this one.

At the same time, I've got friends who are going to law school, and say they are interested in Intellectual Property law. I don't know what that really means--you could say you're interested in labor law and then end up union-busting for a firm like Jackson Lewis--so perhpaps my friends interested in intellectual property law want to fight the good fight, and perhaps they want to fight the bad fight.

Both my parents were art dealers, and so I understand the infrastructural need for companies that represent and work for artists, musicians, poets, and scholars. I wouldn't expect any novelist to take home 100% of the sales from her book, assuming she didn't publish it herself, and so if a journal such as WorkingUSA needs to charge individuals so that it can stay in business, then I could be convinced to pay the price. But when my friend doesn't get anything in return after I've entered my credit card number and hit return, then The Journal of Labor and Society is disrespecting its workforce, and I'm going to ask my friend for a free copy of the article instead.

Likewise, if I see a pirated CD for sale on the streets of Beijing, I figure that the profit I'm cutting into is not the artist's, but rather the record company's. And I have no compunction about buying music or movies when it's Sony who has to suffer. For while I said that I understand the necessity of an infrastructure in which a company works for the artist, what I do not support is how we have "progressed" to a point where the artist works for the infrastructure. And inasmuch as my upbringing is in the art world, I'd say that the gauge for deciding who is working for whom would be the art dealer's fifty percent. If more than fifty percent of sales is going to the company, then I think that means that the artist is working for the company, and not the other way around.

I think I've mentioned before that I view scholars and artists equally as workers--cultural workers--whose work deserves respect and proper economic treatment as work. Many figures, such as Stephen James Joyce but also anti-academic artists or poets of all kinds, have an outdated view of scholars as a bourgeoisie elite, and want to leave the creative arts uncontaminated by their ilk. This kind of infighting is, it's obvious to me, counterproductive, and keeps the publishing industries--whether Sony or Blackwell Synergy--in control of the discussion, and of the policy.