Case titles
Reuse Case: Conceptual Poetry – simply reading a publicly available document
A conceptual poet decides to recite official documents in a performance at a
poetry festival. These documents describe in detail the autopsy of a teenager
who was recently shot by the police. The performance of the autopsy of a
Black teenager by a White established poet, presented as a piece of
conceptual poetry, creates an outrage. The poet does not apologize and insists
that he 'took a publicly available document from an American tragedy that was
witnessed first-hand (in this case by the doctor performing the autopsy) and
simply read it'. The autopsy documents are available in the public domain.
Reuse Case: Cultural Appropriation – who decides
A EU-funded project on critical pedagogies in the arts is named after Teaching
to transgress - education as the practice of freedom , a well known book by Afro-
American feminist activist teacher and author bell hooks. Participants in the
project question whether choosing this title is a form of unethical cultural
appropriation. They wonder whether it counts as appropriate to use it for a
project organised by white folks in three European art schools. The bell hooks
foundation is asked for their opinion, who support the reuse of the book title
for the educational project. This opinion appeases the nervousness in the
group. The process leaves others to wonder why the bell hooks foundation has
been readily accepted as THE authority in solving the question (whether the
use of the title was an appropriative act) or whether there would have been
other ways to address the question.
Reuse Case: Entangled Authorship – academic boundaries
A collective of artists experiences friction when one of its members re-uses
parts of a text they had written collaboratively. Some group members work
within academia, others independently. Assuming the text is collectively
owned, and with a deadline looming, the freelance practitioner includes the
fragment in a workshop announcement, published online, without double checking
with the others. One member who is working in academia is about to
publish their book with a renowned academic publishing house. In an
automated plagiarism test, passages of their book turn up as plagiarized from
the online workshop announcement. They need to explain the publisher that
they had written this particular fragment of the text, but that it was re-used
and circulated without credits.
Reuse Case: Blue Tags – 'Not to be shared promiscuously'
The Labriola National American Indian Data Center describes itself as an
'Indigenous library center led by an all-Indigenous staff'. On their website,
under the header 'Information is Sacred…' they mention how as part of their
work, the center develops protocols for cultural and Tribal sovereignty,
aiming for Indigenous ownership of knowledge. The conditions for reuse of
the library's material are being articulated by librarians or custodians, rather
than by their authors. To signal these conditions, librarians put orange tags in
books which they consider containing misrepresentations of Indigenous
peoples, and blue tags in those which include knowledge that shouldn’t be
shared 'promiscuously'. There is no information on the website about what
'non-promiscuous sharing' would entail.
Reuse Case: Refusing responsibility for derivatives
A group of artists explicitly refuses to copyright their materials. They are
happy for anyone to reuse, copy and transform their works in any context,
for any purpose. But they insist that if only a detail would be changed, they
want their name to be removed. The group does not want to be associated
with reused work in any way, as they feel they cannot take responsibility for
such derivatives.
