and the community’s claims to the material: the Anglo-American model and the French-European model. The former is utilitarian, prioritizing social instruments that ensure the greatest good for the greatest number of people. In this model, copyright incentivizes authors to create texts with economic rewards. As a result of these incentivized creations, the community as a whole advances. And when the specified copyright term runs out, the community advances by having access to the text directly. The second model relies on the ideal of individuals’ natural and moral rights (droit moral), which are thought to exceed the community’s right to text and culture, even as text and culture are generated in a shared environment of inspiration and influence.29 A person has the right to benefit financially from her or his labor. Moreover, a person who writes words on paper imprints the writing with a sort of indelible essence; that connection between author and text cannot be violated by the assignment or denial of legal rights. To the utilitarian model, and the laws that codify it, this belief that texts are imbued with their artist’s personality, and that the connection renders certain rights onto the artist, is dismissible as “intuitive, unanalyzed feeling.”30 The natural rights model and the utilitarian model, in short, reflect two different ways of thinking about authorship.
In scholarly exchanges about authorship, particularly those that center on the relationship between authors and texts, two disputes in twentieth-century intellectual history are rehearsed repeatedly. They demand inclusion here because their implications are especially pertinent to scholars of digital culture and technology, who are invested in both critical theory and the emergence of collaborative networks and fragmented artifacts. The first is the publication of Michel Foucault’s 1969 essay “What Is an Author?”31 In this essay Foucault argues that even though literary criticism and cultural theory generally may have accepted the “death of the author,” individual authors’ names still mark off “the edges of the text, revealing, or at least characterizing, its mode of being.”32 There is no understanding or theory of the text, what Foucault calls a “work,” that is free from “the millions of traces left by [the author] after his [sic] death.”33 The “author function,” Foucault explains, saves readers and scholars from the intolerable condition of literary anonymity. Far more dispersed than the real writer himself or herself, the author function “operates in the scission” generated by the deconstruction of singular authorship.34 Beyond literary and cultural assumptions, Foucault’s essay interrogates how power is appropriated and wielded discursively with or without the individual author(ity) of a name.35 His writings on these processes of power became especially influential among poststructuralist scholars in the United States in the late 1970s, when authorship and ownership were emerging as at once political and technical matters.36
The second momentous dispute is between Jacques Derrida and John Searle, debating the legitimacy of authorship as a convention of textual ownership. To Searle, authorship is an extension of the kind of intentional communication that a speaker effects when putting thoughts into words.37 Words belong to their utterer insofar as they represent his or her intentions. Derrida insists, simply put, that no such alignment of words and intentions is possible, and that ownership marked by copyright is a fantasy. Searle and Derrida’s legendary kerfuffle is sometimes characterized as a historical engagement between French-German and American-English philosophical traditions.38 It began in 1977 when Derrida’s essay “Signature, Event, Context” was first published in English in a volume of Glyph.39 The second volume of the year featured an article by John Searle, in which he critiques what he considers to be Derrida’s misreadings of J. L. Austin’s linguistics. In his published reply, “Limited Inc abc.,” Derrida deconstructs his own as well as Searle’s status as owners of their words and texts. He notes, “the difficulty I encounter in naming the definite origin, the true person responsible for the Reply: not only because of the debts acknowledged by John R. Searle before even beginning to reply, but because of the entire, more or less anonymous tradition of a code, a heritage, a reservoir of arguments to which he and I are indebted.”40 To illustrate that all writing exists in reference to other writing—that is, in quotation marks, or as a copyright violation—Derrida puts “copyright © 1977 by John R. Searle” first in quotation marks, then in another set of quotation marks, and then another.41 Copyright laws and theories notwithstanding, the text is always “separated at birth from the assistance of its father.”42 No use of language, no authorship, no relationship between a text and its author, Derrida insists, is free from the complications of contagion.
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