The contributors to this book focus on collage and appropriation art, exploring the legal ramifications of such practices in an age when private companies can own culture using copyright and trademark law.

Minds Alive explores the enduring role and intrinsic value of libraries, archives, and public institutions in the digital age. Featuring international contributors, this volume delves into libraries and archives as institutions and institutional partners, the professional responsibilities of librarians and archivists, and the ways in which librarians and archivists continue to respond to the networked age, digital culture, and digitization. The endless possibilities and robust importance of libraries and archives are at the heart of this optimistic collection. Topics include transformations in the networked digital age; Indigenous issues and challenges in custodianship, ownership, and access; the importance of the harmonization of memory institutions today; and the overarching significance of libraries and archives in the public sphere. Libraries and archives – at once public institutions providing both communal and private havens of discovery – are being repurposed and transformed in intercultural contexts. Only by keeping pace with users’ changing needs can they continue to provide the richest resources for an informed citizenry.

The act of creation requires us to remix existing cultural content and yet recent sweeping changes to copyright laws have criminalized the creative act as a violation of corporate rights in a commodified world. Copyright was originally designed to protect publishers, not authors, and has now gained a stranglehold on our ability to transport, read, write, teach and publish digital materials. Contrasting Western models with issues of piracy as practiced in Asia, Digital Prohibition explores the concept of authorship as a capitalist institution and posits the Marxist idea of the multitude (à la Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, and Paulo Virno) as a new collaborative model for creation in the digital age. Looking at how digital culture has transformed unitary authorship from its book-bound parameters into a collective and dispersed endeavor, Dr. Guertin examines process-based forms as diverse as blogs, Facebook, Twitter, performance art, immersive environments, smart mobs, hacktivism, tactical media, machinima, generative computer games (like Spore and The Sims) and augmented reality.

Video cuts in Shakespeare productions by companies like the Wooster Group and Toneelgroep Amsterdam, cut-and-paste searches of Shakespeare's texts in online databases, cut-scenes from Shakespeare in video games, mp3 files of famous Shakespeare speeches by famous actors, mash-ups using Shakespeare clips on YouTube, not to mention customary cuts to Shakespeare's scripts in stage productions and films: all are examples of how Shakespeare is being consumed today through cuts. In distracted times Shakespeare has, in more ways than one, been driven to distraction. Shakespeare | Cut considers these contemporary practices, but it also takes the long view of how Shakespeare's texts have been cut apart in creative ways beginning in Shakespeare's own time. The book's five chapters consider cuts, cutting, and cutwork from a variety of angles: (1) as bodily experiences, (2) as essential parts of the process whereby Shakespeare and his contemporaries crafted scripts, (3) as units in perception, (4) as technologies situated at the interface between "figure" and "life," and (5) as a fetish in western culture since 1900. Printed here for the first time are examples of the cut-ups that William S. Burroughs and Brion Guysin carried out with Shakespeare texts in the 1950s. The illustrations range from seventeenth-century promptbooks to the earliest photographs of Shakespeare performers in the 1840s and '50s to cards from "The Shakespeare Game" published in 1900 to Wyndham Lewis's lithograph of "Timon of Athens" for the first issue of BLAST in 1914 to stills from contemporary multimedia productions like Toneelgroep's Kings of War -- publisher website.

Any and all songs are capable of being remixed. But not all remixes are treated equally. Rock This Way examines transformative musical works—cover songs, remixes, mash-ups, parodies, and soundalike songs—to discover what contemporary American culture sees as legitimate when it comes to making music that builds upon other songs. Through examples of how popular discussion talked about such songs between 2009 and 2018, Mel Stanfill uses a combination of discourse analysis and digital humanities methods to interrogate our broader understanding of transformative works and where they converge at the legal, economic, and cultural ownership levels. Rock This Way provides a new way of thinking about what it means to re-create and borrow music, how the racial identity of both the reusing artist and the reused artist matters, and the ways in which the law polices artists and their works. Ultimately, Stanfill demonstrates that the extent to which a work is seen as having new expression or meaning is contingent upon notions of creativity, legitimacy, and law, all of which are shaped by white supremacy.

Since the 1930s, the Walt Disney Company has produced characters, images, and stories that have captivated audiences around the world. How can we understand the appeal of Disney products? What is it about the Disney phenomenon that attracts so many children, as well as adults? In this updated second edition, with new examples provided throughout, Janet Wasko examines the processes by which the Disney company – one of the largest media and entertainment corporations in the world – continues to manufacture the fantasies that enthrall millions. She analyses the historical expansion of the Disney empire into the twenty-first century, examines the content of Disney’s classic and more recent films, cartoons and TV programs and discusses how they are produced, considering how some of the same techniques have been applied to the Disney theme parks. She also discusses the reception (and sometimes, reinterpretation) of Disney products by different kinds of audiences. By looking at the Disney phenomenon from a variety of perspectives, she provides an updated and comprehensive overview of one of the most significant media and cultural institutions of our time. This important book by a leading scholar of the entertainment industries will be of great interest to students in media and cultural studies, as well as a broader readership of Disney fans.