Articles de revues sur le sujet « Copy-move attack »

One of the easiest manipulation methods is a copy-move forgery, which adds or hides objects in the images with copies of certain parts at the same pictures. The combination of SIFT and Zernike Moments is one of many methods that helping to detect textured and smooth regions. However, this combination is slowest than SIFT individually. On the other hand, Gaussian Pyramid Decomposition helps to reduce computation time. Because of this finding, we examine the impact of Gaussian Pyramid Decomposition in copy-move detection with SIFT and Zernike Moments combinations. We conducted detection test in plain copy-move, copy-move with rotation transformation, copy-move with JPEG compression, multiple copy-move, copy-move with reflection attack, and copy-move with image inpainting. We also examine the detections result with different values of gaussian pyramid limit and different area separation ratios. In detection with plain copy-move images, it generates low level of accuracy, precision and recall of 58.46%, 18.21% and 69.39%, respectively. The results are getting worse in for copy-move detection with reflection attack and copy-move with image inpainting. This weakness happened because this method has not been able to detect the position of the part of the image that is considered symmetrical and check whether the forged part uses samples from other parts of the image.

As the great development of digital photography and relevant post-processing technology, digital image forgery becomes easily in terms of operating thus may be improperly utilized in news photography in which any forgery is strictly prohibited or the other scenario, for instance, as an evidence in the court. Therefore, digital image forgery detection technique is needed. In this paper, attention has been focused on copy-move forgery that one region is copied and then pasted onto other zones to create duplication or cover something in an image. A novel method based on HSV color space feature is proposed and experimental result will be given and it shows the effectiveness and accurateness of proposed methodology.

The most important barrier in the image forensic is to ensue a forgery detection method such can detect the copied region which sustains rotation, scaling reflection, compressing or all. Traditional SIFT method is not good enough to yield good result. Matching accuracy is not good. In order to improve the accuracy in copy move forgery detection, this paper suggests a forgery detection method especially for copy move attack using Key Point Localized Super Pixel (KLSP). The proposed approach harmonizes both Super Pixel Segmentation using Lazy Random Walk (LRW) and Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) based key point extraction. The experimental result indicates the proposed KLSP approach achieves better performance than the previous well known approaches.

Due to the powerful image editing tools images are open to several manipulations; therefore, their authenticity is becoming questionable especially when images have influential power, for example, in a court of law, news reports, and insurance claims. Image forensic techniques determine the integrity of images by applying various high-tech mechanisms developed in the literature. In this paper, the images are analyzed for a particular type of forgery where a region of an image is copied and pasted onto the same image to create a duplication or to conceal some existing objects. To detect the copy-move forgery attack, images are first divided into overlapping square blocks and DCT components are adopted as the block representations. Due to the high dimensional nature of the feature space, Gaussian RBF kernel PCA is applied to achieve the reduced dimensional feature vector representation that also improved the efficiency during the feature matching. Extensive experiments are performed to evaluate the proposed method in comparison to state of the art. The experimental results reveal that the proposed technique precisely determines the copy-move forgery even when the images are contaminated with blurring, noise, and compression and can effectively detect multiple copy-move forgeries. Hence, the proposed technique provides a computationally efficient and reliable way of copy-move forgery detection that increases the credibility of images in evidence centered applications.

Studies towards image forensics are about a decade old and various forms of research techniques have been presented till date towards image forgery detection. Majority of the existing techniques deals with identification of tampered regions using different forms of research methodologies. However, it is still an open-end question about the effectiveness of existing image forgery detection techniques as there is no reported benchmarked outcome till date about it. Therefore, the present manuscript discusses about the most frequently addressed image attacks e.g. image splicing and copy-move attack and elaborates the existing techniques presented by research community to resist it. The paper also contributes to explore the direction of present research trend with respect to tool adoption, database adoption, and technique adoption, and frequently used attack scenario. Finally, significant open research gap are explored after reviewing effectiveness of existing techniques.

To protect their digital assets from malware attacks, most users and companies rely on antivirus (AV) software. AVs’ protection is a full-time task against malware: This is similar to a game where malware, e.g., through obfuscation and polymorphism, denial of service attacks, and malformed packets and parameters, tries to circumvent AV defences or make them crash. However, AVs react by complementing signature-based detection with anomaly or behavioral analysis, and by using OS protection, standard code, and binary protection techniques. Further, malware counter-acts, for instance, by using adversarial inputs to avoid detection, and so on. In this cat-and-mouse game, a winning strategy is trying to anticipate the move of the adversary by looking into one’s own weaknesses, seeing how the adversary can penetrate them, and building up appropriate defences or attacks. In this article, we play the role of malware developers and anticipate two novel moves for the malware side to demonstrate the weakness in the AVs and to improve the defences in AVs’ side. The first one consists in simulating mouse events to control AVs, namely, to send them mouse “clicks” to deactivate their protection. We prove that many AVs can be disabled in this way, and we call this class of attacks Ghost Control . The second one consists in controlling whitelisted applications, such as Notepad, by sending them keyboard events (such as “copy-and-paste”) to perform malicious operations on behalf of the malware. We prove that the anti-ransomware protection feature of AVs can be bypassed if we use Notepad as a “puppet” to rewrite the content of protected files as a ransomware would do. Playing with the words, and recalling the cat-and-mouse game, we call this class of attacks Cut-and-Mouse . We tested these two attacks on 29 AVs, and the results show that 14 AVs are vulnerable to Ghost Control attack while all 29 AV programs tested are found vulnerable to Cut-and-Mouse . Furthermore, we also show some weaknesses in additional protection mechanisms of AVs, such as sandboxing and CAPTCHA verification. We have engaged with the affected AV companies, and we reported the disclosure communication with them and their responses.

Forgeries have recently become more prevalent in the society as a result of recent improvements in media generation technologies. In real-time, modern technology allows for the creation of a forged version of a single image obtained from a social network. Forgery detection algorithms have been created for a variety of areas; however they quickly become obsolete as new attack types exist. This paper presents a unique image forgery detection strategy based on deep learning algorithms. The proposed approach employs a convolutional neural network (CNN) to produce histogram representations from input RGB color images, which are then utilized to detect image forgeries. With the image separation method and copy-move detection applications in mind, the proposed CNN is combined with an intelligent approach and histogram mapping. It is used to detect fake or true images at the initial stage of our proposed work. Besides, it is specially designed for performing feature extraction in image layer separation with the help of CNN model. To capture both geographical and histogram information and the likelihood of presence at the same time, we use vectors in our dynamic capsule networks to detect the forgery kernels from reference images. The proposed research work integrates the intelligence with a feature engineering approach in an efficient manner. They are well-known and efficient in the identification of forged images. The performance metrics such as accuracy, recall, precision, and half total error rate (HTER) are computed and tabulated with the graph plot.

A novel image passive forensics method for copy-move forgery detection is proposed. The proposed method combines block matching technology and feature point matching technology, and breaks away from the general framework of the visual feature-based approach that used local visual feature such as SIFT and followed by a clustering procedure to group feature points that are spatially close. In our work, image keypoints are extracted using Harris detector, and the statistical features of keypoint neighborhoods are used to generate forensics features. Then we proposed a new forensics features matching approach, in which, a region growth technology and a mismatch checking approach are developed to reduce mismatched keypoints and improve detected accuracy. We also develop a duplicate region detection method based on the distance frequency of corresponding keypoint pairs. The proposed method can detect duplicate regions for high resolution images. It has higher detection accuracy and computation efficiency. Experimental results show that the proposed method is robust for content-preserving manipulations such as JPEG compression, gamma adjustment, filtering, luminance enhancement, blurring, etc.

Internet of Things (IoT) image sensors, social media, and smartphones generate huge volumes of digital images every day. Easy availability and usability of photo editing tools have made forgery attacks, primarily splicing and copy–move attacks, effortless, causing cybercrimes to be on the rise. While several models have been proposed in the literature for detecting these attacks, the robustness of those models has not been investigated when (i) a low number of tampered images are available for model building or (ii) images from IoT sensors are distorted due to image rotation or scaling caused by unwanted or unexpected changes in sensors’ physical set-up. Moreover, further improvement in detection accuracy is needed for real-word security management systems. To address these limitations, in this paper, an innovative image forgery detection method has been proposed based on Discrete Cosine Transformation (DCT) and Local Binary Pattern (LBP) and a new feature extraction method using the mean operator. First, images are divided into non-overlapping fixed size blocks and 2D block DCT is applied to capture changes due to image forgery. Then LBP is applied to the magnitude of the DCT array to enhance forgery artifacts. Finally, the mean value of a particular cell across all LBP blocks is computed, which yields a fixed number of features and presents a more computationally efficient method. Using Support Vector Machine (SVM), the proposed method has been extensively tested on four well known publicly available gray scale and color image forgery datasets, and additionally on an IoT based image forgery dataset that we built. Experimental results reveal the superiority of our proposed method over recent state-of-the-art methods in terms of widely used performance metrics and computational time and demonstrate robustness against low availability of forged training samples.

Copy-move forgery (CMF) is an established process to copy an image segment and pastes it within the same image to hide or duplicate a portion of the image. Several CMF detection techniques are available; however, better detection accuracy with low feature vector is always substantial. For this, differential excitation component (DEC) of Weber Law descriptor in combination with the gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) approach of texture feature extraction for CMFD is proposed. GLCM Texture features are computed in four directions on DEC and this acts as a feature vector for support vector machine classifier. These texture features are more distinguishable and it is validated through other two proposed methods based on discrete wavelet transform-GLCM (DWT-GLCM) and GLCM. Experimentation is carried out on CoMoFoD and CASIA databases to validate the efficacy of proposed methods. Proposed methods exhibit resilience against many post-processing attacks. Comparative analysis with existing methods shows the superiority of the proposed method (DEC-GLCM) with regard to detection accuracy.

Copying and pasting a patch of an image to hide or exaggerate something in a digital image is known as a copy-move forgery. Copy-move forgery detection (CMFD) is hard to detect because the copied part image from a scene has similar properties with the other parts of the image in terms of texture, light illumination, and objective. The CMFD is still a challenging issue in some attacks such as rotation, scaling, blurring, and noise. In this paper, an approach using the convolutional neural network (CNN) and k-mean clustering is for CMFD. To identify cloned parts candidates, a patch of an image is extracted using corner detection. Next, similar patches are detected using a pre-trained network inspired by the Siamese network. If two similar patches are not evidence of the CMFD, the post-process is performed using k-means clustering. Experimental analyses are done on MICC-F2000, MICC-F600, and MICC-F8 databases. The results showed that using the proposed algorithm we can receive a 94.13% and 96.98% precision and F1 score, respectively, which are the highest among all state-of-the-art algorithms.

Copy-move forgery is the most predominant forgery technique in the field of digital image forgery. Block-based and interest-based are currently the two mainstream categories for copy-move forgery detection methods. However, block-based algorithm lacks the ability to resist affine transformation attacks, and interest point-based algorithm is limited to accurately locate the tampered region. To tackle these challenges, a coarse-to-fine model (CFM) is proposed. By extracting features, affine transformation matrix and detecting forgery regions, the localization of tampered areas from sparse to precise is realized. Specifically, in order to further exactly extract the forged regions and improve performance of the model, a two-level local search algorithm is designed in the refinement stage. In the first level, the image blocks are used as search units for feature matching, and the second level is to refine the edge of the region at pixel level. The method maintains a good balance between the complexity and effectiveness of forgery detection, and the experimental results show that it has a better detection effect than the traditional interest-based copy and move forgery detection method. In addition, CFM method has high robustness on postprocessing operations, such as scaling, rotation, noise, and JPEG compression.

‘With the help of powerful image editing software, various image modifications are possible which are known as image forgeries. Copy-move is the easiest way of image manipulation, wherein an area of the image is copied and replicated in the same image. The major reason for performing this forgery is to conceal undesirable contents of the image. Thus, means are required to unveil the presence of duplicated areas in an image. In this article, an effective and efficient approach for copy-move forgery detection (CMFD) is proposed, which is based on stationary wavelet transform (SWT), speeded-up robust features (SURF), and a novel scaled density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (sDBSCAN) clustering. The SWT allows the SURF descriptor to extract only energy-rich features from the input image. The SURF features can detect the tampered regions even under post-processing attacks like contrast adjustment, scaling, and affine transformation on the images. On the extracted features, a novel scaled density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (sDBSCAN) clustering algorithm is applied to detect forged regions with high accuracy as it can easily identify the clusters of arbitrary shapes and sizes and can filter the outliers. For performance evaluation, three publicly available datasets namely MICC-F220, MICC-F2000, and image manipulation dataset (IMD) are employed. The qualitative and quantitative analysis demonstrates that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art CMFD approaches in the presence of different post-processing attacks.

Image manipulation can cause many ethical, economical, and political issues for everyone. It can be used to create fake information, fake ids, fake online profiles, fake news. A proper technique for image detection and verification is thus, a hot research area, which helps the affected people to overcome the forgery attacks. Due to the increased interaction among people through social networking sites, image forgery is prevalent and it is an essential activity to detect any forged image. This paper’s main objective is to identify fraud or tampered images effectively. By using the methods of copy move forgery detection, the obtained results are more accurate in a minimum time as compared to previous algorithms.

Region duplication forgery detection is a special type of forgery detection approach and widely used research topic under digital image forensics. In copy move forgery, a specific area is copied and then pasted into any other region of the image. Due to the availability of sophisticated image processing tools, it becomes very hard to detect forgery with naked eyes. From the forged region of an image no visual clues are often detected. For making the tampering more robust, various transformations like scaling, rotation, illumination changes, JPEG compression, noise addition, gamma correction, and blurring are applied. So there is a need for a method which performs efficiently in the presence of all such attacks. This paper presents a detection method based on speeded up robust features (SURF) and hierarchical agglomerative clustering (HAC). SURF detects the keypoints and their corresponding features. From these sets of keypoints, grouping is performed on the matched keypoints by HAC that shows copied and pasted regions.

The extended utilization of picture-enhancing or manipulating tools has led to ease of manipulating multimedia data which includes digital images. These manipulations will disturb the truthfulness and lawfulness of images, resulting in misapprehension, and might disturb social security. The image forensic approach has been employed for detecting whether or not an image has been manipulated with the usage of positive attacks which includes splicing, and copy-move. This paper provides a competent tampering detection technique using resampling features and convolution neural network (CNN). In this model range spatial filtering (RSF)-CNN, throughout preprocessing the image is divided into consistent patches. Then, within every patch, the resampling features are extracted by utilizing affine transformation and the Laplacian operator. Then, the extracted features are accumulated for creating descriptors by using CNN. A wide-ranging analysis is performed for assessing tampering detection and tampered region segmentation accuracies of proposed RSF-CNN based tampering detection procedures considering various falsifications and post-processing attacks which include joint photographic expert group (JPEG) compression, scaling, rotations, noise additions, and more than one manipulation. From the achieved results, it can be visible the RSF-CNN primarily based tampering detection with adequately higher accurateness than existing tampering detection methodologies.

It is easy make fake images by making use of editing software. It has become an effortless job to put together or detach some attributes from an image. Validation of digital images is very essential. Identifying the fake image is the crucial topic. In order to identify tampered image active and passive detection methods are used. An image can be tampered by using image splicing, copy-move, and retouching. In particular, copy-move attack is considered in this paper. It is essential to find out whether the image is tampered or not. An effective method for detecting forged image is proposed which uses adhoc algorithm. In this algorithm there is no need of original image as it compares the similar pixels in the given image. Clusters which are larger than block size are pulled out. Similar clusters are extracted using some similarity function. The method successfully detects the forged parts in the image and saves the forged image in JPEG format. The performance is measured on various images.

Digital images are foremost source for information transfer. Due to advancement of the technology, images are now not treated as reliable source of information. Digital images can be edited according to the need. Adding and deleting content from an image is most easiest and popular way of creating image forgery, which is known as copy-move forgery. Digital Image Forensics is the field that deals with the authenticity of the images. Digital image forensics checks the integrity of the images by detecting various forgeries. In order to hide the traces of copy-move forgery there are editing operations like rotation, scaling, JPEG compression, Gaussian noise called as attacks, which are performed on the copied part of the image before pasting. Till now these attacks are not detected by the single method. The novel approach is proposed to detect image forgery by copy-move under above attacks by combining block-based and keypoint-based method.Keywords: Digital image forensics, copy-move forgery, passive blind approach, keypoint-based, block-based methods

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to improve the accuracy of copy-move forgery detection (CMFD) in image forensics by proposing a novel scheme and the main contribution is evolving circular domains coverage (ECDC) algorithm. The proposed scheme integrates both block-based and keypoint-based forgery detection methods. Firstly, the speed-up robust feature (SURF) in log-polar space and the scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) are extracted from an entire image. Secondly, generalized 2 nearest neighbor (g2NN) is employed to get massive matched pairs. Then, random sample consensus (RANSAC) algorithm is employed to filter out mismatched pairs, thus allowing rough localization of counterfeit areas. To present these forgery areas more accurately, we propose the efficient and accurate ECDC algorithm to present them. This algorithm can find satisfactory threshold areas by extracting block features from jointly evolving circular domains, which are centered on matched pairs. Finally, morphological operation is applied to refine the detected forgery areas. Experimental results indicate that the proposed CMFD scheme can achieve better detection performance under various attacks compared with other state-of-the-art CMFD schemes.

Copy-move imitation is a widespread and generally utilized operation to corrupt digital image. It is considered as the most effective research areas in the domain of blind digital image forensics area. Keypoint based totally identification techniques have been regarded to be very environment-friendly in exposing copy-move proof because of their steadiness against a number of attacks, as like large-scale geometric movements. Conversely, these techniques don’t have the capabilities to cope with the instances if copy-move forgeries only engage in minor or clean areas, the place the quantity of keypoints is more restricted. To affirm the originality of image, detection of digital image tempering is required. To manage this difficulty, a quick and efficient copy-move imitation detection process is promoted by using the skill of hierarchical function point matching. It is viable to produce an adequate quantity of key points that are present in small or easy areas with the aid of reducing the brightness threshold and resizing the enter digital image. After that, construct a novel hierarchical equivalent technique to remedy the key point equivalent issues over a huge quantity of the key points. To decrease the false alarm charge and exactly localize the affected areas, we similarly advise an innovative iterative localization approach by way of using the steady elements (which comprises of the overriding orientation and the scale data) and the color data of all key point. The proposed technique validates the highest quality overall functioning of the suggested approach in terms of efficiency and precision.

This paper presents a secure image authentication scheme for tamper localization and recovery at pixel level. The proposed scheme encrypts the watermark comprising tamper localization code and self-recovery code using chaotic sequence to ensure security. This scheme uses pixel to block conversion technique for ensuring lossless recovery of the original image from an untampered watermarked image. For enhancing the localization accuracy, a multilevel tamper localization strategy is used. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme generates watermarked images with minimal information loss and can withstand copy-move, image splicing, content removal, vector quantization, collage and content only attacks. This scheme has better security, better tamper localization accuracy and better recovered image quality under extensive tampering and takes less computation time in comparison to the state-of-the-art schemes.

AbstractIn micro- and nano-scale systems, particles can be moved by using an external force like gravity or a magnetic field. In the presence of adhesive particles that can attach to each other, the challenge is to decide whether a shape is constructible. Previous work provides a class of shapes for which constructibility can be decided efficiently when particles move maximally into the same direction induced by a global signal. In this paper we consider the single step model, i.e., a model in which each particle moves one unit step into the given direction. We restrict the assembly process such that at each single time step actually one particle is added to and moved within the workspace. We prove that deciding constructibility is NP-complete for three-dimensional shapes, and that a maximum constructible shape can be approximated. The same approximation algorithm applies for 2D. We further present linear-time algorithms to decide whether or not a tree-shape in 2D or 3D is constructible. Scaling a shape yields constructibility; in particular we show that the 2-scaled copy of every non-degenerate polyomino is constructible. In the three-dimensional setting we show that the 3-scaled copy of every non-degenerate polycube is constructible.

AbstractIn the last years, due to the availability and easy of use of image editing tools, a large amount of fake and altered images have been produced and spread through the media and the Web. A lot of different approaches have been proposed in order to assess the authenticity of an image and in some cases to localize the altered (forged) areas. In this paper, we conduct a survey of some of the most recent image forgery detection methods that are specifically designed upon Deep Learning (DL) techniques, focusing on commonly found copy-move and splicing attacks. DeepFake generated content is also addressed insofar as its application is aimed at images, achieving the same effect as splicing. This survey is especially timely because deep learning powered techniques appear to be the most relevant right now, since they give the best overall performances on the available benchmark datasets. We discuss the key-aspects of these methods, while also describing the datasets on which they are trained and validated. We also discuss and compare (where possible) their performance. Building upon this analysis, we conclude by addressing possible future research trends and directions, in both deep learning architectural and evaluation approaches, and dataset building for easy methods comparison.

This issue of M/C Journal reclaims the language of “freedom”. The selected articles demonstrate that today freedom is frequently overruled in the name of a permanent state of emergency. Present-day politics shows countless instances in which information, knowledge and culture are not seen as an inalienable right but are rather oppressed and distorted. Freedom is the freedom to say “no”, to withdraw your collaboration, to refuse friendly cooperation! To be “free” means to be able to enact your identity without having to capitulate to the ruling forces that dictate which discourses are and are not permissible in the public sphere(s). Citizens worldwide are armchair passengers on the nightly TV news train; they dream of their lives as being “free”. After all, to be free is a guaranteed human right, enshrined by the United Nations. Are freedom, independence and autonomy merely illusions, or are sociable media succeeding in empowering citizens for a participatory democracy as Yochai Benkler argues? If information “wants to be free”, the battle between intellectual “property” and creativity must be resolved. Technology does not make freedom inevitable: the on-the-ground-realities of network and hardware access make what seems to be “open” and “free”, closed and expensive for most people on this planet. The feature article for this issue of M/C Journal is a statement on the state of free speech in a free country: in “Depiction of Muslims in Selected Australian Media: Free Speech or Taking Sides”, Dr Nahid Kabir examines the publication of 12 cartoons depicting images of the Prophet Mohammad in 2005. In exploring the response of two Australian newspapers to the Danish controversy, the article considers whether the debate in the name of “free speech” has ended in a “form of attack” on Australian Muslims. In “Freedom, Hate, Fronts”, Patrick Lynn Rivers reflects on the use of the Internet by the predominantly Afrikaner “Vryheidsfront Plus” political party to construct whiteness in post-apartheid South Africa. The creation of a politics centred on racial “cyborgs” points to the facilitation of freedom of an “oppressed minority”, continuing the Afrikaners’ historical struggle for self-determination and independence. Problematising this approach, Rivers concludes that, like freedom, whiteness after apartheid is far from defined. Authors Amita Nijhawan and Sukhmani Khorana both address Deepa Mehta’s highly-acclaimed film trilogy Fire, Earth, and Water. As a female Hindu director, Mehta engages controversial issues for Indian society: the life of widows who are forced into prostitution, for example. As observed, the trilogy has been subject to critiques of too much freedom from inside the country, counterbalanced by those outside the country condemning the Indian body-politic for its lack of freedom. In exploring post-colonial discourses in India’s construction of nation and gender, Nijhawan and Khorana present complementary accounts of the director’s struggle to resist government censorship. Hegemonic power is played out in the definition of freedom in relation to contested questions of self-representation in Indian society. Freedom of use and the notion of “property talk” are discussed by Australian lawyer and academic Steve Collins, commenting on the revival of values from Blackstonian copyright, in which ownership is seen to preclude the rights of others. Collins observes that talk of “property” risks making transformative works an elitist form of creativity, available only to those with the financial resources necessary to meet the demands for license fees. The notion of “property” thus challenges the freedom to create and to transform. Collins notes that this is no longer a philosophical question, but a practical one, as he entreats courts to move beyond the propertarian paradigm. A further angle on the issue of freedom is put forward by Nadine Henley in “Free to be Obese?” Here, Henley tackles the boundaries of state governance in controlling the bodies of its citizens: Is it ethical for a government to enforce the health of its citizens, or should obesity, for example, be a rightful choice? Two emotive Freedom Poems by Kathryn Waddell Takara conclude this issue. The editors have selected “Angela Davis” and “Mumia Abu Jamal: Knight for Justice” from the larger body of Takara’s work, Root Tapping, as representing the desire to celebrate freedom. The expectation of Angela Davis’ arrival and the transcendent revenge for the imprisonment of political activist Mumia Abu Jamal speak of the power of radical opposition in the face of oppression. The cover image of this issue, “Free” by John Fairley (“Bostich”), has been derived from the photo-sharing Flickr.com, which supports the Creative Commons licensing scheme. Acknowledgments: The editors thank all contributors and reviewers involved in this issue for their continuing dialogue and critical reflection on the notion of “freedom”. We wish to kindly acknowledge the adept assistance of copy editors Laura Marshall and Donna Paichl, and the continuing guidance of M/C General Editor Dr Axel Bruns. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Scholz, Trebor, and Rachel Cobcroft. "Free." M/C Journal 9.4 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0609/0-editorial.php>. APA Style Scholz, T., and R. Cobcroft. (Sep. 2006) "Free," M/C Journal, 9(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0609/0-editorial.php>.

All we hear is radio gaga, radio googoo, radio blahblah Radio, what’s new? Radio, someone still loves you Queen, “Radio Gaga” Someone still loves radio—and more people are beginning to discover its online form, Webcasting, as an alternative to terrestrial radio stations. Online radio allows listeners to swap local radio fare for more exotic programming, turning everyday PCs into world receivers, and offers a large variety of special-interest Webcasts catering to very genre-specific tastes. (Spinner.com, one of the largest commercial Webcasters, offers some 175 channels from Abstract Beats to Zydeco, for example.) For independent music labels whose content would never be played on mainstream terrestrial radio, Webcasting has become a major source of exposure. Unlike filesharing, however, Webcasts remain largely ephemeral: no permanent copy of radio content can be created on the user’s computer unless authorised by the Webcaster, or unless users specifically seek out software like Streambox VCR which circumvents such restrictions. Yet in the U.S. the year 2002 saw a protracted battle for the future of webcasting, waged between the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and its royalty collection agency SoundExchange on one side, and a loose coalition of Webcasters on the other. Mirroring the sustained attack on filesharing services, the battle over Webcasting demonstrates once again the hardline position the RIAA has adopted in its dealings with new media music services. In the filesharing arena, we have seen the demise of early services such as Napster and their replacement with deliberately crippled, recording industry-run alternatives or more powerful underground services. In its approach to Webcasting, the RIAA similarly attempted to push through a solution that would have made Internet radio unaffordable to any but the major players in the industry. Its involvement in this fight provides a useful illustration of the shortcomings of the music industry’s strategy for dealing with new, Internet-based media. Casus Belli Prior to 2002, the battlelines had been drawn already. When the grandly named Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) became law in the U.S. in late October 1998, it introduced a requirement for royalties to be paid by online stations. Rates for such fees were to be determined according to a ‘willing buyer/willing seller’ model—in other words, they were expected to reflect what would be ‘standard’ fees in an established digital media market, as determined by an independent Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP). Once set, royalties dating back to the date of passage of the DMCA were then to be paid retroactively by Webcasters. While agreements over performing rights (royalties due to the authors of copyrighted material) resulted in a requirement for Webcasters to pay an average rate of around 3% of their annual revenue, no decision had yet been made about royalties for sound recordings (due to the actual performers of a specific piece) as late as 2001, raising fears of a significant backlog of accumulated fees for at least three years suddenly burdening an industry which had yet to prove its profitability. Some Webcasters even pre-emptively began pulling the plug on their channels (see e.g. Borland). The Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP) on Webcasting held its deliberations on a royalty fee structure during the second half of 2001, with submissions by the key parties. The RIAA demanded a payment of around 0.4¢ per song/ per listener. By contrast the Digital Media Association, on behalf of Webcasters, offered 0.14¢ per song/per hour (regardless of the number of listeners). The CARP recommendation markedly reduced the RIAA’s proposed fees, but retained the suggested per song/per listener royalty structure. Librarian of Congress James H. Billington rejected this recommendation but replaced it with a virtually identical model of 0.07¢ per song/per listener for commercial Webcasters, or about 18% of the original RIAA rate (Copyright Office). This still meant significant royalty fees for Webcasters: assuming an average of 10 songs per hour and 100 listeners per channel at any one time, Webcasters broadcasting only one channel, 24 hours a day, would have to pay around $6,100 per year (and this retroactively back to 1998), even though this small audience would be unlikely to generate any income. This fee punished stations for becoming moderately popular, as increasing average audience to 1000 would increase payable royalties to $61,000, while profit might still prove elusive. This was prohibitively expensive for smaller, start-up players, and contributed to a growing list of Webcasters switching off their streams in the belief that they had lost their fight for survival. By contrast U.S. terrestrial radio stations are exempt altogether from paying any royalties to the RIAA because their work is seen as providing a ‘promotional service’ to the music industry. Examining the RIAA Strategy and Its Motives Any negotiator worth their salt will make an opening offer aimed at maximising the eventual outcome of the negotiation, so the initial RIAA demand of 0.4¢ per song/per listener should perhaps be seen as ambitious. Nonetheless, the RIAA’s entire strategy in this conflict seemed geared more towards the terminal frustration of hopeful Webcaster aspirations. The strongest evidence to suggest that the RIAA never negotiated in good faith stems from June 2002 comments by erstwhile Broadcast.com founder Mark Cuban, who in 1999 was involved in negotiating a deal between his company (then newly acquired by Yahoo!) and the RIAA to set royalty rates for Broadcast.com streams. Cuban revealed that buyer and seller in this case were willing first and foremost to price out of the market any potential competition to Broadcast.com from smaller, start-up Webcast operators—this was the reason for choosing the per-song/per-listener fee structure over a percentage-of-revenue approach: I hated the [per-song/listener] price points and explained why they were too high. HOWEVER, … I, as Broadcast.com, didn’t want percent-of-revenue pricing. Why? Because it meant every “Tom, Dick, and Harry” webcaster could come in and undercut our pricing because we had revenue and they didn’t. … The Yahoo! deal I worked on, if it resembles the deal the CARP ruling was built on, was designed so that there would be less competition, and so that small webcasters who needed to live off of a “percentage-of-revenue” to survive, couldn’t. (qtd. in Maloney & Hanson) Therefore, the RIAA consciously presented to the CARP a pricing structure which was not representative of an agreement between willing buyer and seller, but rather an agreement designed to achieve specific objectives: to punish very small operators for becoming more popular, hence discouraging hobbyists from turning professional; make Webcasting unaffordable for independent, small to medium operations; open the market only to major players with significant revenue streams; encourage amalgamation of independent stations into larger networks, and incorporate networks into the bigger media organisations. Indeed, Levy cites the “testimony of an RIAA-backed economist who told the government fee panel [CARP] that a dramatic shakeout in Webcasting is ‘inevitable and desirable because it will bring about market consolidation’”—and ‘consolidation’ (thus excluding small business from the Webcasting market) was clearly the underlying motive of RIAA strategy during the fights of 2002. Reasons for such anti-competitive policies are speculative but the conduct suggests that it represents the interests of an oligopoly of major entertainment producers, defending their interests from independent and alternative upstarts emerging with the information age, whilst claiming to protect the entire music community from exploitation by digital media operators. For three years running music industry sales have been in decline, and “forecasts see sales sliding another six percent in 2003—a fall felt most by the big five music giants—Universal, Sony, Warner, EMI and BMG—which account for 70 percent of sales” (Warner & Marr). The transnationals have consistently attributed this decline to the impact of CD burning, filesharing and other Internet technologies for music transmission. Yet the RIAA was successful in shutting down Napster, and there are a host of other reasons for the downturn: There have been no major musical trends to emerge as major drivers of music sales since the advent of grunge in the early 1990s--“while record sales are dropping, they are also spreading into diverse genres” (Childress), Western economies have continued to skirt recession with a marked decrease in consumer spending, 15 years after the introduction of the CD medium, the initial waves of listeners replacing their vinyl records with CD re-releases and remasters (once a major source of income for labels) have subsided, CD prices remain high, even compared to DVD movie releases, and There is a growing backlash against the practices of an “industry founded on exploitation, oiled by deceit, riven with theft and fuelled by greed” (Fripp 9) and there are calls to boycott major labels altogether, and increased political scrutiny. Hence some observers have read the RIAA’s attacks on filesharing and Webcasts as the actions of an industry fighting for its own survival. Wired quotes former Billboard editor Timothy White as saying that 2003 “could determine whether the music business as we know it survives” (reported in Maloney, “Wired”), and this sentiment is echoed in other reports on the state of the music industry. Alternatively, analysts have noted “the industry released around 27,000 titles in 2001, down from a peak of 38,900 in 1999. Since year-on-year unit sales have dropped a mere 10.3 per cent, it’s clear that demand has held up extremely well: despite higher prices, consumers retain the CD buying habit” (Orlowski). Whether signs of an industry in decline or not, the RIAA’s uncompromising policies in its fight against unpoliced Internet music technologies have caused headaches amongst its own supporters. (A recent Wired article speaks of “civil war inside Sony” over such issues—see Rose.) The Time-Warner-Netscape-AOL conglomerate might find the benefits from its support of the RIAA will be negated by the new royalty fees required of Spinner.com in its new incarnation as ‘Radio@Netscape Plus’, or by the downturn in AOL Broadband’s ability to sign up customers as incentives such as access to filesharing and Web radio dry up. Postscript: Conflict Resolution in the Webcast Wars (?) Without significant policy shifts by the RIAA it has fallen to U.S. politicians to force an uneasy truce in the Webcast conflict. This intervention was prompted by dissatisfaction with the industry’s disregard for the stated aim of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to cultivate not hinder business in new Internet technologies and the view that CARP had been tricked into accepting a flawed Yahoo!/RIAA deal as the basis for its fee structure recommendations. Following several attempts at legislation and emergency negotiations small Webcasters won a reprieve from the per song/per listener royalty structure which they had been threatened with, and will now pay a percentage of their revenue. This agreement is built on the “Small Webcaster Settlement Act,” which acknowledges that small Webcasters “have expressed their desire for a fee based on a percentage of revenue,” it rejects the CARP recommendations and the Librarian’s rulings as unsuitable for small operators, and instead requires the RIAA and small commercial Webcasters to develop their own structures in the spirit of this bill. While this solution generates division of the Webcast market into smaller and larger operators (and possibly makes the move from the first to the second group, who do pay per song/per listener royalties, all the more daunting), the new structure should be able to ensure its aim of protecting content diversity in Webcasting. That is until the industry finds a new battleground on which to engage Internet-based music technologies. Works Cited Borland, John. “Ad Disputes Tune Web Radio Out.” CNET News.com 11 April 2001. 9 Jan. 2003 <http://news.com.com/2100-1023-255673.htm...>. Childress, Donna J. “Boomers Key to Record Sales.” AARP: The Magazine Mar.-Apr. 2003. 12 Feb. 2003 <http://www.aarpmagazine.org/lifestyle/Ar...>. Copyright Office, Library of Congress, USA. “Summary of the Determination of the Librarian of Congress on Rates and Terms for Webcasting and Ephemeral Recordings.” 8 July. 2002. 9 Jan. 2003 <http://www.copyright.gov/carp/webcasting...>. Fripp, Robert. “Discipline Global Mobile: A Small, Mobile and Independent Record Company.” CD booklet. Space Groove. ProjeKct Two. Discipline Global Mobile, 1998. 9-10. Levy, Steven. “Labels to Net Radio: Die Now.” Newsweek 15 July 2002: 51. 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Maloney, Paul, and Kurt Hanson. “Cuban Says Yahoo!’s RIAA Deal Was Designed to Stifle Competition!” RAIN: Radio and Internet Newsletter, 24 June 2002. 9 Jan. 2003 <http://www.kurthanson.com/archive/news/0...>. Orlowski, Andrew. “Missing RIAA Figures Shoot Down ‘Piracy’ Canard.” The Register 16 Dec. 2002. 12 Feb. 2003 <http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/2...>. Rose, Frank. “The Civil War inside Sony.” Wired 11.02 (Feb. 2003). 12 Feb. 2003 <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.02...>. Sidelsky, Barry. “Internet Radio Basics: Copyright Primer and Update.” RAIN: Radio and Internet Newsletter, 28/29 Oct. 2002. 9 Jan. 2003 <http://www.kurthanson.com/archive/news/1...> and <http://www.kurthanson.com/archive/news/1...>. “Small Webcaster Settlement Act.” U.S. Congress, 14 Nov. 2002. 9 Jan. 2003 <http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/...>. Warner, Bernhard, and Merissa Marr. “Battered Record Execs Set to Face the Music.” Reuters 17 Jan. 2003. 18 Jan. 2003 <http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml...> Links http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=musicNews&amp;amp;storyID=2065414 http://www.spinner.com/ http://www.boycott-riaa.com/ http://www.kurthanson.com/archive/news/010603/index.asp http://www.kurthanson.com/archive/news/010803/index.asp http://www.soundexchange.com/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/28588.html http://www.kurthanson.com/archive/news/062402/index.asp#story1 http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi- in/getdoc.cgi?dbname=107_cong_bills&amp;amp;docid=f:h5469eas.txt.pdf http://www.kurthanson.com/archive/news/011303/index.asp#story2 http://www.kurthanson.com/archive/news/102802/index.asp http://www.aarpmagazine.org/lifestyle/Articles/a2003-01-08-recordsales http://www.broadcast.com/ http://www.kurthanson.com/archive/news/010703/index.asp http://www.kurthanson.com/silenced.asp http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2002-09-30-cd-settlement_x.htm http://www.riaa.org/ http://www.digmedia.org/ http://www.yahoo.com/ http://www.google.com/search?q=streambox+vcr&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;amp;oe=UTF-8&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;meta= http://radio.netscape.com/ http://www.kurthanson.com/archive/news/102902/index.asp http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.02/sony.html http://www.napster.com/ http://news.com.com/2100-1023-255673.html?legacy=cnet http://www.wired.com/ http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/ http://www.copyright.gov/carp/webcasting_rates_final.html Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Bruns, Axel. "Fight for Survival" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 6.1 (2003). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/07-fightforsurvival.php>. APA Style Bruns, A., (2003, Feb 26). Fight for Survival. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,(1). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/07-fightforsurvival.html

IntroductionFor both consumers and creators, Web series have been viewed for some time as an appealing alternative to television series. As Alice explains, creating content for the Web was once seen as “a last resort” for projects that were unable to secure funding for television production (59). However, the Web has, in recent years, become a “legitimized” space, allowing Web series to be considered a media platform capable of presenting narratives of various genres (Alice 59). Moreover, due to the lack of restrictions and overheads placed on Web producers, it is argued that there is more capacity to take risks in Web series and thus depict “a broader array of stories” (Christian, “The Web” 352). Nevertheless, television still remains the traditional mode of storytelling, and for many producers, it is still an “object of desire” (Christian, “The Web” 352). Emerging producers still see television as the ultimate “end goal”, leaving the Web as a sufficient platform that will allow them to create something. Alternatively, for many established creators, the Web is understood to be a stage upon which they can tell stories television would perhaps never consider. Regardless of why creators are attracted to the Web, the platform has indeed cemented its place as an alternative in the television media landscape. For Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, the Web, or more specifically, YouTube, provided an unbridled space for their creativity when nowhere else would. The two comediennes co-wrote and starred in their Web series, Broad City, back in 2009, and it has since been picked up by Comedy Central and successfully turned into a television series. The fourth season is set to air in August 2017. Both versions of the series follow two twenty-something women, Abbi Abrams and Ilana Wexler (played by Jacobson and Glazer respectively), as they explore themselves, and New York City. Broad City is one of the few Web series to be picked up as a television series and maintain its success; an impressive accomplishment, no matter how legitimate Web series have become. However, the unwavering devotion maintained by the television series to continue depicting millennial women in the same fashion as the Web series is, arguably, more impressive. With a focus on Broad City’s depiction of its two eccentric protagonists, this article explores how the transitions from Web to television are negotiated. In the case of Broad City, I contend that its unconventional start as a web series is what allows the television series to continue depicting contemporary womanhood honestly. Taking the Alternate Path: YouTubeDefined as “scripted, episodic and experimental videos made for the internet”, Web episodes (or Webisodes) hold many advantages to the traditional television medium (Kornblum; Peirce 317). Aware of these advantages and struggling to be noticed naturally for their work in the sketch comedy group, Upright Citizens Brigade (UCB), Glazer and Jacobson took to the Internet to write and create their own series, Broad City. This trend arose in 2007 during the difficult phase American television when the Writers Guild of America began its fifteen-month strike (De Moraes). During this time, Peirce states that producing a new program for television proved “almost impossible” (315). There was a level of uncertainty plaguing the future of prime-time television, and with budgets being refashioned, reality programs were filling television line-ups more than any other genre of show (Peirce 315). Within this climate, it is unsurprising that the Google-owned video-sharing website, YouTube, quickly became the frontrunner in online video (Christian, “The Web” 351). YouTube is argued to be responsible for opening the doors to the next wave of entertainment media, after pledging to give users their own personal video network. Suddenly, amateurs, independents and corporations alike were, for the first time, able to compete against each other in shaping this post-network era of television (Christian, “The Web” 351). Moreover, the premise of “anyone can upload” meant that this era allowed for a new variety of television, in a range of genres and storytelling modes that were once considered untouchable to television networks (Christian, “The Web” 351). Evidently, such freedom is appealing to all kinds of online content creators, no matter their status. Established actor, comedian, and writer Louis C.K. most recently joined the Web series movement with his creation Horace and Pete (2016-). The dark comedy is written, directed, and produced entirely by C.K. and he plays the main protagonist, Horace. However, the appeal was not so much the control he would potentially have over the product, but more how the viewers could access it. Upon the release of the pilot episode, C.K. released a statement clarifying why he made a series outside of the television studio system. He explains that he was intrigued by the idea of providing viewers with the newly made show “directly and immediately”, with each episode being posted onto his Website as soon as it is shot. Additionally, C.K. also sought to create a show “without the usual promotion” that, he states, tells the viewer “what the show feels and looks like before you get to see it yourself” (C.K.). It is clear that the unique nature of the modern medium provides benefits to creators at all levels. For the Broad City duo, who unlike C.K., had yet to be noticed, YouTube was appealing because it provided them with an outlet through which they could control the product themselves. Jacobson states, “After a while, we thought, ‘why are we trying to be on something that someone else controls?’” (Paumgarten). The Web series commenced in late 2009 and ran until 2011, with each episode ranging anywhere between one and eight minutes. In the thirty-three episodes created, Abbi and Ilana consistently find themselves in awkward and comedic situations while they try to navigate their lives in New York City. These awkward situations vary in their complexity. One episode simply looks at the two protagonists trying to survive riding the subway, while another looks at the issue of being catcalled and objectified by strangers. There is no narrative arc in either season, the storylines are simply extracted from the lives of the creators. Glazer and Jacobson have discussed this in various interviews, explaining that these characters are essentially exaggerations of themselves and the show is a “heightened version” of their dynamic (Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls, 2014; Justin; Matthews). As such, Broad City contributes to a well-established trend of comedians impersonating younger, lazier, and poorer versions of themselves. However, since the Web series’ thematic relies so heavily on the experiences and personality traits of the writers, Glazer and Jacobson are more like the characters they portray than the likes of Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon (30 Rock, 2007-2013) or Lena Dunham’s Hannah Horvath (Girls, 2012-), for example. A result is that the Web series does not seek to provide its viewers with neat conclusions, or have the protagonists grow and evolve over the span of a season. This freedom is only designated to the Web series format, as television viewers – despite not always getting it – yearn for a heartier resolution (DeFino 99). Another attribute of video-sharing sites like YouTube is that they allow anyone to share anything they create, regardless of the budget. The two seasons of Broad City, the Web series, are written, created, and produced by Glazer and Jacobson primarily. As they were still undiscovered, both women were working on the series with very limited funds, and were therefore only able to have friends or family assist them in the production. This results in a series which feels authentically home-made in its aesthetic; features which eventually become characteristics essential to the transferral from Web to television. Glazer and Jacobson resolved to make the Web series from a more professional standpoint by the second season by following a production schedule and choosing to treat the vignettes as if they were real television shorts. As Glazer states, the pair “just had a new attitude”, and suddenly the aim shifted from producing webisodes as a creative outlet, to pitching the show in Los Angeles (Kameir). By the time the final episode was set to go into production, the two creators believed that the chances of having the series picked up by a network would increase if the episode featured a guest star. Because of their involvement in the UCB, Glazer and Jacobson approached one of the founders of the sketch group, Amy Poehler, to make a brief cameo. The Web series as a whole had garnered half a million hits, but the finale in which Poehler plays herself, received almost seventy-five thousand (Paumgarten). Poehler agreed to work with the Broad City duo following her appearance in the finale, and signed on to be Executive Producer should the show ever be made into a television series. The star power held by Poehler is undoubtedly a lead contributor to the success in Broad City’s transfer between the media. Poehler states that she felt a kinship towards the project because of her work in translating UCB sketches to television. In a roundtable interview, she says “Feeling very protective about the material, but wanting to bring it to a bigger audience…I related to that and understood it” (The Paley Centre for Media). On the difficult business of bringing Web series to television, Poehler compares it to that of an organ transplant, explaining “You have to move fast. You have to keep it on ice and be careful not to harm it in any way. A lot of things can go wrong. Sometimes the best way to get a heart or a kidney to a recipient is to get people to move out of the way” (Paumgarten). With Poehler’s assistance, the concept of Broad City as a television series was introduced to various networks before being successfully picked up by Comedy Central. From January of 2014, the network aired Broad City’s first season, comprised of ten, twenty-two-minute-long episodes. Averaging 1.2 million viewers per episode, season one of Broad City became one of Comedy Central’s highest rated shows since 2012 (Ng). From Web to TV: Alternative Ideas of Millennial Women in Broad CityThe factors behind why certain texts effectively transfer from Web to television and others fail continues to be debated within academic and popular culture circles. Series such as Quarterlife (2007), The CollegeHumor Show (2009), and the more recent Haters Back Off (2016-) - all texts which were originally made for online consumption only - were each met with criticism when translated for television (Peirce 317; Lowry; Christian, “How” ). This does not necessarily mean that a Web series is undeserving of a place in commercial or network television. Obviously, it comes down to multiple factors, but often it is because the television series comes across as out of touch, compared to its online version. As Alice points out, with the speed of online release, and the “virality” that accompanies this kind of media, writers have the ability to be “guided by and to capitalise on what and how the viewer public feels” (60). Television series are often seen commenting on outside criticism within episodes, but there is extensive lagging due to the time it takes to produce a season. Broad City was set to have an easier time on television, what with its impressive following, and “Celebrity Shepherd”, Amy Poehler - Poehler presented as a necessity when making the jump from Web to TV, according to Christian (“The Web”). But there appears to be a fine line when shifting between the platforms: in staying too close to the original, a series could come off as unoriginal and therefore unnecessary. Or, alternatively, a series could add too many other storylines in order to fill the time slot, and ruin the simplicity of the premise. Adaptation theorist, Linda Hutcheon, contends that a successful translation occurs when a text remains loyal to the original, but brings creativity to the reimagining (21). If investigating the transferral within the realm of adaptation theory, Broad City’s success as a television series is arguably due to it following this formula. Hutcheon writes that to adapt is not to slavishly copy, but rather, is the process of reclaiming the adapted material. “What one does with the text” is where the novelty is found (21). In looking at what Broad City, the television series, has done with Broad City, the Web series, there is clear loyalty shown to the original. This is seen most significantly in the treatment of the same two protagonists, and the dynamic of their friendship. In both versions of Broad City, Abbi is the older of the two and the more responsible one, to a degree. While she still enjoys smoking marijuana with Ilana, Abbi is also constantly striving to reach traditional goals in her life such as having a career she enjoys, or maintaining a healthy relationship. Ilana, on the other hand, is a proud marijuana enthusiast who occasionally shows up for her job, but cares more for smoking weed, enjoying casual sex, and being with her friends (primarily Abbi). Neither the Web series nor the television series explicitly states how the two characters met, but it is implied that they have built a strong, sister-like relationship with one another. Often Ilana comments on her sexual attraction to Abbi, but it is always seen as comedic rather than as a hint towards a possible coupling in future episodes. In the Web series’ second season, the episode Valentine’s Day, introduces this satirical take on female friendships for the first time. The three-minute episode shows brief cuts of Abbi and Ilana doing various activities in the city, all of which are stereotypically featured in films of the romantic comedy genre. As they play in the snow, ride a ferry, and watch couples ice-skate at the Rockefeller Centre, the clarinet music playing over the sequence builds momentum. However, the scene is suddenly halted as Ilana goes in to kiss Abbi and, unlike in said romantic film montages, Abbi quickly jolts back and cries “Ilana, what the fuck? How many times do I have to fucking tell you?” This is the first line of audible dialogue in the scene thus far, to which a frustrated Ilana responds, “I’m trying to seal the night with a kiss.” Following this is a heated debate regarding how each character viewed the intention of the day, with Ilana thinking it was a really “romantic day”, despite knowing that Abbi is decidedly heterosexual. This kind of satirical angle taken towards the trope of female friendship is carried over to the television series and made just as prominent, with almost every single episode making a joke at Ilana’s romantic desire for Abbi. Alongside the sexual attraction, the closeness of the two female leads remains unchanged between the two media. In the television series, for example, jokes about Ilana’s love for Abbi are scattered throughout, and as in the original series, they remain brief and inconsequential. In the television pilot, What a Wonderful World, the episode opens to a typical scene of the two characters having a V-chat (a nod to a favoured motif in the Web series). While chatting to Abbi, it initially appears as though Ilana is bopping up and down to the music of Lil Wayne. However, it is quickly revealed when Ilana shifts her laptop screen down, that she is actually having sex with her casual partner, Lincoln (Hannibal Buress). The sequence cuts to Abbi looking outraged at her laptop, asking “Oh my god, is that Lincoln?”. Lincoln then replies, “Yep”, just before the camera cuts to him lying on the bed, with Ilana’s laptop on his stomach. When Abbi asks if they are having sex, Ilana casually replies “I’m just keeping it warm”, forcing Abbi to once again have a discussion about boundaries. Once they close the V-chat, the scene stays on a low angle shot of Ilana as she says to Lincoln, “That was like a threesome”, reassuring the audience that she has learned nothing. This is a strong opening scene as it reinforces the understanding that the relationship between the two characters is unchanged. Furthermore, it proves to audiences that although Broad City has moved into a television landscape, it will not be tamed. The result of refusing to be tamed in its new environment is that Broad City can continue representing female friendship in more honest ways, as well as offer new ideas of what it is to be a millennial woman today.Conclusion In an interview, Glazer explains how television has a history of never being honest in its representation of women, arguing, “Nothing’s real on TV” (Miller). Jacobson follows on from this, stating “When we write for these characters… I think the thing we talk about the most is like, well, what would we really do? It’s just real” (Miller). In abiding by this sentiment throughout the web series and the television series, Broad City effectively offers the idea that depicting diversity is possible on both platforms. With various Web series still unable to successfully make the jump to television today, it becomes more obvious that Broad City’s decision to continue showcasing bold female narratives is what allows it to maintain its popularity. Starting in such an uninhibited environment has proven a burden for other texts when it comes to transferring creativity to the more traditional medium of television. For Broad City, however, the alternative storytelling platform allowed the show to create its strong foundation and dedicated fan base. One that has willingly followed Broad City across the platforms, but will only stay tuned if it stays true to representing millennial women honestly, regardless of whether mainstream television is ready.ReferencesAlice, Jessica. “Clicking with Audiences: Web Series and Diverse Representations.” Metro Magazine: Media and Education 187 (2016): 58-63.Angelo, Megan. “The Sneak Attack Feminism of Broad City.” Wall Street Journal, 2011. 17 Dec. 2016 <http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2011/02/14/the-sneak-attack-feminism-of-broad-city/>. 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Halfway through the 2006 memoir comic Fun Home, the reader encounters a photograph that the book’s author, Alison Bechdel, found in a box of family snapshots shortly after her father’s death. The picture—“literally the core of the book, the centrefold” (Bechdel qtd. in Chute “Interview” 1006)—of Alison’s teenaged babysitter, Roy, erotically reclining on a bed in only his underwear, is the most tangible and direct evidence of her father’s sexual affairs with teenage boys, more confronting than his own earlier confession. Through this image, and a rich archive of familial texts, Bechdel chronicles her father’s thwarted desires and ambitions, probable suicide, and her own sexual and artistic coming of age.Bruce Bechdel, a married school teacher and part-time funeral director, was also an avid amateur historical restorer and connoisseur of modernist literature. Shortly after Alison came out to her parents at nineteen, Bruce was hit by a truck in what his daughter believes was an act of suicide. In Fun Home, Bechdel reads her family history suspiciously, plumbing family snapshots, letters, and favoured novels, interpreting against the grain, to trace her queer genealogy. Ultimately, she inverts this suspicious and interrogative reading, using the evidence she has gathered in order to read her father’s sexuality positively and embrace her queer and artistic inheritance from him. In The New York Times Magazine, in 2004, Charles McGrath made the suggestion that comics were “the new literary form” (24). Although comics have not yet reached widespread mainstream acceptance as a medium of merit, the burgeoning field of comics scholarship over the last fifteen years, the 2007 adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis into a feature film, and the addition of comics to the Best American series all testify to the widening popularity and status of the form. Memoir comics have established themselves, as Hillary Chute notes, as “the dominant mode of contemporary work” (Graphic 17). Many of these autobiographical works, including Fun Home, recount traumatic histories, employing the medium’s unique capacity to evoke the fractured and repetitive experience of the traumatised through panel structure and use of images. Comics articulate “what wasn’t permitted to be said or imagined, defying the ordinary processes of thought” (Said qtd. in Whitlock 967). The hand-drawn nature of comics emphasises the subjectivity of perception and memory, making it a particularly powerful medium for personal histories. The clear mediation of a history by the artist’s hand complicates truth claims. Comics open up avenues for both suspicious and restorative readings because their form suggests that history is always constructed and therefore not able to be confirmed as “ultimately truthful,” but also that there is no ultimate truth to be unveiled. No narrative is unmediated; a timeline is not more “pure” than a fleshed out narrative text. All narratives exclude information in order to craft a comprehensible series of events. Bechdel’s role as a suspicious reader of her father and of her own history resonates through her role as a historian and her interrogation of the ethical concerns of referential writing.Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity critiques the hermeneutics of suspicion from a queer theory perspective, instead advocating reparative reading as a critical strategy. The hermeneutics of suspicion describes “the well-oiled machine of ideology critique” that has become the primary mode of critical reading over the last thirty or so years, suspiciously interpreting texts to uncover their hidden ideological biases (Felski, Uses 1). Reparative reading, on the other hand, moves away from this paranoid mode, instead valuing pleasure and “positive affects like joy and excitement” (Vincent). Sedgwick does not wholly reject suspicious reading, suggesting that it “represent[s] a way, among other ways, of seeking, finding, and organizing knowledge. Paranoia knows some things well and others poorly” (Touching 129). Felski, paraphrasing Ricoeur, notes that the hermeneutics of suspicion “adopts an adversarial sensibility to probe for concealed, repressed, or disavowed meanings” (“Suspicious” 216). In this fashion, Bechdel employs suspicious strategies to reveal her father’s hidden desires and transgressions that were obscured in the standard version of her family narrative, but ultimately moves away from such techniques to joyfully embrace her inheritance from him. Sedgwick notes that paranoid readings may only reveal that which is already known:While there is plenty of hidden violence that requires exposure there is also, and increasingly, an ethos where forms of violence that are hypervisible from the start may be offered as an exemplary spectacle rather than remain to be unveiled as a scandalous secret. (Touching 139)This is contrary to suspicious reading’s assumption that violence is culturally shunned, hidden, and in need of “unveiling” in contemporary Western culture. It would be too obvious for Bechdel to condemn her father: gay men have been unfairly misrepresented in the American popular imagination for decades, if not longer. Through her reparative reading of him, she rejects this single-minded reduction of people to one negative type. She accepts both her father’s weaknesses and her debts to him. A reading which only sought to publicise Bruce’s homosexual affairs would lack the great depth that Bechdel finds in the slippage between her father’s identity and her own.Bechdel’s embrace of Bruce’s failings as a father, a husband, and an artist, her revisioning of his death as a positive, creative act full of agency, and her characterisation of him as a supportive forerunner, “there to catch [Alison] as [she] leapt,” (Bechdel 232) moves his story away from archetypal narratives of homosexual tragedy. Bechdel’s memoir ends with (and enacts through its virtuoso execution) her own success, and the support of those who came before her. This move mirrors Joseph Litvak’s suggestion that “the importance of ‘mistakes’ in queer reading and writing […] has a lot to do with loosening the traumatic, inevitable-seeming connection between mistakes and humiliation […] Doesn’t reading queer mean learning, among other things, that mistakes can be good rather than bad surprises?” (Sedgwick Touching 146–7).Fun Home is saturated with intertextual references and archival materials that attempt to piece together the memoir’s fractured and hidden histories. The construction of this personal history works by including familial and historical records to register the trauma of the Bechdels’ personal tragedy. The archival texts are meticulously hand-drawn, their time-worn and ragged physicality maintained to emphasise the referentiality of these documents. Bechdel’s use of realistically drawn family photographs, complete with photo corners, suggests a family photograph album, although rather than establishing a censored and idealistic narrative, as most family albums do, the photographs are read and reproduced for their suppressed and destabilising content. Bechdel describes them as “particularly mythic” (Chute “Interview” 1009), and she plunders this symbolic richness to rewrite her family history. The archival documents function as primary texts, which stand in opposition to the deadly secrecy of her childhood home: they are concrete and evidentiary. Bechdel reads her father’s letters and photographs (and their gothic revival house) for sexual and artistic evidence, “read[ing] the text against the grain in order to draw out what it refuses to own up to” (Felski “Suspicious” 23). She interprets his letters’ baroque lyrical flourishes as indications both of his semi-repressed homosexuality and of the artistic sensibility that she would inherit and refine.Suspicion of the entire historical project marks the memoir. Philippe Lejeune describes the “Autobiographical Pact” as “a contract of identity that is sealed by the proper name” of the author (19). Bechdel does not challenge this pact fundamentally—the authoritative narrative voice of her book structures it to be read as historically truthful—but she does challenge and complicate the apparent simplicity of this referential model. Bechdel’s discussion of the referential failings of her childhood diary making—“the troubled gap between word and meaning”—casts a suspicious eye over the rest of the memoir’s historical project (Bechdel 143). She asks how language can adequately articulate experience or refer to the external world in an environment defined by secrets and silence. At the time of her childhood, it cannot—the claim to full disclosure that the memoir ultimately makes is predicated on distance and time. Bechdel simultaneously makes a claim for the historical veracity of her narrative and destabilises our assumptions around the idea of factual and retrospective truth:When I was ten, I was obsessed with making sure my diary entries bore no false witness. But as I aged, hard facts gave way to vagaries of emotion and opinion. False humility, overwrought penmanship, and self-disgust began to cloud my testimony […] until […] the truth is barely perceptible behind a hedge of qualifiers, encryption, and stray punctuation. (Bechdel 169)That which is “unrepresentable” is simultaneously represented and denied. The comics medium itself, with its simultaneous graphic and textual representation, suggests the unreliability of any one means of representation. Of Bechdel’s diaries, Jared Gardner notes, “what develops over the course of her diary […] is an increasing sense that text and image are each alone inadequate to the task, and that some merger of the two is required to tell the story of the truth, and the truth of the story” (“Archives” 3).As the boyishly dressed Alison urges her father, applying scare-quoted “bronzer,” to hurry up, Bechdel narrates, “my father began to seem morally suspect to me long before I knew that he actually had a dark secret” (16). Alison is presented as her father’s binary opposite, “butch to his nelly. Utilitarian to his aesthete,” (15) and, as a teenager, frames his love of art and extravagance as debauched. This clear distinction soon becomes blurred, as Alison and Bruce’s similarities begin to overwhelm their differences. The huge drawn hand shown holding the photograph of Roy, in the memoir’s “centrefold,” more than twice life-size, reproduces the reader’s hand holding the book. We are placed in Bechdel’s, and by extension her father’s, role, as the illicit and transgressive voyeurs of the erotic spectacle of Roy’s body, and as the possessors and consumers of hidden, troubling texts. At this point, Bechdel begins to take her queer reading of this family archive and use it to establish a strong connection between her initially unsympathetic father and herself. Despite his neglect of his children, and his self-involvement, Bechdel claims him as her spiritual and creative father, as well as her biological one. This reparative embrace moves Bruce from the role of criticised outsider in Alison’s world to one of queer predecessor. Bechdel figures herself and her father as doubled aesthetic and erotic observers and appreciators. Ann Cvetkovich suggests that “mimicking her father as witness to the image, Alison is brought closer to him only at the risk of replicating his illicit sexual desires” (118). For Alison, consuming her father’s texts connects her with him in a positive yet troubling way: “My father’s end was my beginning. Or more precisely, […] the end of his lie coincided with the beginning of my truth” (Bechdel 116–17). The final panel of the same chapter depicts Alison’s hands holding drawn photos of herself at twenty-one and Bruce at twenty-two. The snapshots overlap, and Bechdel lists the similarities between the photographs, concluding, “it’s about as close as a translation can get” (120). Through the “vast network of transversals” (102) that is their life together, Alison and Bruce are, paradoxically, twinned “inversions of one another” (98). Sedgwick suggests that “inversion models […] locate gay people—whether biologically or culturally—at the threshold between genders” (Epistemology 88). Bechdel’s focus on Proust’s “antiquated clinical term” both neatly fits her thematic expression of Alison and Bruce’s relationship as doubles (“Not only were we inverts. We were inversions of one another”) and situates them in a space of possibility and liminality (97-98).Bechdel rejects a wholly suspicious approach by maintaining and embracing the aporia in her and her father’s story, an essential element of memory. According to Chute, Fun Home shows “that the form of comics crucially retains the insolvable gaps of family history” (Graphic 175). Rejecting suspicion involves embracing ambiguity and unresolvability. It concedes that there is no one authentic truth to be neatly revealed and resolved. Fun Home’s “spatial and semantic gaps […] express a critical unknowability or undecidability” (Chute Graphic 182). Bechdel allows the gaps in her narrative to remain, refusing to “pretend to know” Bruce’s “erotic truth” (230), an act to which suspicious reading is diametrically opposed. Suspicious reading wishes to close all gaps, to articulate silences and literalise mysteries, and Bechdel’s narrative progressively moves away from this mode. The medium of comics uses words and images together, simultaneously separate and united. Similarly, Alison and Bruce are presented as opposites: butch/sissy, artist/dilettante. Yet the memoir’s conclusion presents Alison and Bruce in a loving, reciprocal relationship. The final page of the book has two frames: one of Bruce’s perspective in the moment before his death, and one showing him contentedly playing with a young Alison in a swimming pool—death contrasted with life. The gaps in the narrative are not closed but embraced. Bechdel’s “tricky reverse narration” (232) suggests a complex mode of reading that allows both Bechdel and the reader to perceive Bruce as a positive forebear. Comics as a medium pay particular visual attention to absence and silence. The gutter, the space between panels, functions in a way that is not quite paralleled by silence in speech and music, and spaces and line breaks in text—after all, there are still blank spaces between words and elements of the image within the comics panel. The gutter is the space where closure occurs, allowing readers to infer causality and often the passing of time (McCloud 5). The gutters in this book echo the many gaps in knowledge and presence that mark the narrative. Fun Home is impelled by absence on a practical level: the absence of the dead parent, the absence of a past that was unspoken of and yet informed every element of Alison’s childhood.Bechdel’s hyper-literate narration steers the reader through the memoir and acknowledges its own aporia. Fun Home “does not seek to preserve the past as it was, as its archival obsession might suggest, but rather to circulate ideas about the past with gaps fully intact” (Chute Graphic 180). Bechdel, while making her own interpretation of her father’s death clear, does not insist on her reading. While Bruce attempted to restore his home into a perfect, hermetically sealed simulacrum of nineteenth-century domestic glamour, Bechdel creates a postmodern text that slips easily between a multiplicity of time periods, opening up the absences, failures, and humiliations of her story. Chute argues:Bruce Bechdel wants the past to be whole; Alison Bechdel makes it free-floating […] She animates the past in a book that is […] a counterarchitecture to the stifling, shame-filled house in which she grew up: she animates and releases its histories, circulating them and giving them life even when they devolve on death. (Graphic 216)Bechdel employs a literary process of detection in the revelation of both of their sexualities. Her archive is constructed like an evidence file; through layered tableaux of letters, novels and photographs, we see how Bruce’s obsessive love of avant-garde literature functions as an emblem of his hidden desire; Alison discovers her sexuality through the memoirs of Colette and the seminal gay pride manifestos of the late 1970s. Watson suggests that the “panels, gutters, and page, as bounded and delimited visual space, allow texturing of the two-dimensional image through collage, counterpoint, the superimposition of multiple media, and self-referential gestures […] Bechdel's rich exploitation of visual possibilities places Fun Home at an autobiographical interface where disparate modes of self-inscription intersect and comment upon one another” (32).Alison’s role as a literary and literal detective of concealed sexualities and of texts is particularly evident in the scene when she realises that she is gay. Wearing a plaid trench coat with the collar turned up like a private eye, she stands in the campus bookshop reading a copy of Word is Out, with a shadowy figure in the background (one whose silhouette resembles her father’s teenaged lover, Roy), and a speech bubble with a single exclamation mark articulating her realisation. While “the classic detective novel […] depends on […] a double plot, telling the story of a crime via the story of its investigation” (Felski “Suspicious” 225), Fun Home tells the story of Alison’s coming out and genesis as an artist through the story of her father’s brief life and thwarted desires. On the memoir’s final page, revisioning the artifactual photograph that begins her final chapter, Bechdel reclaims her father from what a cool reading of the historical record (adultery with adolescents, verbally abusive, emotionally distant) might encourage readers to superficially assume. Cvetkovich articulates the way Fun Home uses:Ordinary experience as an opening onto revisionist histories that avoid the emotional simplifications that can sometimes accompany representations of even the most unassimilable historical traumas […] Bechdel refuses easy distinctions between heroes and perpetrators, but doing so via a figure who represents a highly stigmatised sexuality is a bold move. (125)Rejecting paranoid strategies, Bechdel is less interested in classification and condemnation of her father than she is in her own tangled relation to him. She adopts a reparative strategy by focusing on the strands of joy and identification in her history with her father, rather than simply making a paranoid attack on his character.She occludes the negative possibilities and connotations of her father’s story to end on a largely positive note: “But in the tricky reverse narration that impels our entwined stories, he was there to catch me when I leapt” (232). In the final moment of her text Bechdel moves away from the memoir’s earlier destabilising actions, which forced the reader to regard Bruce with suspicion, as the keeper of destructive secrets and as a menacing presence in the Bechdels’ family life. The final image is of complete trust and support. His death is rendered not as chaotic and violent as it historically was, but calm, controlled, beneficent. Bechdel has commented, “I think it’s part of my father’s brilliance, the fact that his death was so ambiguous […] The idea that he could pull that off. That it was his last great wheeze. I want to believe that he went out triumphantly” (qtd. in Burkeman). The revisioning of Bruce’s death as a suicide and the reverse narration which establishes the accomplished artist and writer Bechdel’s creative and literary debt to him function as a redemption.Bechdel queers her suspicious reading of her family history in order to reparatively reclaim her father’s historical and personal connection with herself. The narrative testifies to Bruce’s failings as a father and husband, and confesses to Alison’s own complicity in her father’s transgressive desires and artistic interest, and to her inability to represent the past authoritatively and with complete accuracy. Bechdel both engages in and ultimately rejects a suspicious interpretation of her family and personal history. As Gardner notes, “only by allowing the past to bleed into history, fact to bleed into fiction, image into text, might we begin to allow our own pain to bleed into the other, and more urgently, the pain of the other to bleed into ourselves” (“Autobiography’s” 23). Suspicion itself is queered in the reparative revisioning of Bruce’s life and death, and in the “tricky reverse narration” (232) of the künstlerroman’s joyful conclusion.ReferencesBechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. New York: Mariner Books, 2007. Burkeman, Oliver. “A life stripped bare.” The Guardian 16 Oct. 2006: G2 16.Cvetkovich, Ann. “Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 36.1/2 (2008): 111–29. Chute, Hillary L. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia UP, 2010. ---. “Interview with Alison Bechdel.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 1004–13. Felski, Rita. Uses of Literature. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2008.---. “Suspicious Minds.” Poetics Today 32:3 (2011): 215–34. Gardner, Jared. “Archives, Collectors, and the New Media Work of Comics.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 787–806. ---. “Autobiography’s Biography 1972-2007.” Biography 31.1 (2008): 1–26. Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994. McGrath, Charles. “Not Funnies.” New York Times Magazine 11 Jul. 2004: 24–56. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. ---. Touching Feeling. Durham : Duke University Press, 2003. Vincent, J. Keith. “Affect and Reparative Reading.” Honoring Eve. Ed. J. Keith Vincent. Affect and Reparative Reading. Boston University College of Arts and Sciences. October 31 2009. 25 May 2011. ‹http://www.bu.edu/honoringeve/panels/affect-and-reparative-reading/?›.Watson, Julia. “Autographic disclosures and genealogies of desire in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Biography 31.1 (2008): 27–59. Whitlock, Gillian. “Autographics: The Seeing “I” of the Comics.” Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 965–79.

It is the same spectacle all over the Western world: whenever delegates gather to discuss the development and consequences of new media technologies, a handful of people among them will stand out from the crowd, and somehow seem not quite to fit in with the remaining assortment of techno-evangelists, Internet ethnographers, multimedia project leaders, and online culture critics. At some point in the proceedings, they'll get to the podium and hold a talk on their ideas for the future of copyright protection and intellectual property (IP) rights in the information age; when they are finished, the reactions of the audience typically range from mild "what was that all about?" amusement to sheer "they haven't got a clue" disbelief. Spare a thought for copyright lawyers; they're valiantly fighting a losing battle. Ever since the digitalisation and networking of our interpersonal and mass media made information transmission and duplication effortless and instantaneous, they've been trying to come up with ways to uphold and enforce concepts of copyright which are fundamentally linked to information as bound to physical objects (artifacts, books, CDs, etc.), as Barlow has demonstrated so clearly in "Selling Wine without Bottles". He writes that "copyright worked well because, Gutenberg notwithstanding, it was hard to make a book. ... Books had material surfaces to which one could attach copyright notices, publisher's marques, and price tags". If you could control the physical media which were used to transmit information (paper, books, audio and video tapes, as well as radio and TV sets, or access to cable systems), you could control who made copies when and where, and at what price. This only worked as long as the technology to make copies was similarly scarce, though: as soon as most people learnt to write, or as faxes and photocopiers became cheaper, the only real copyright protection books had was the effort that would have to be spent to copy them. With technology continuously advancing (perhaps even at accellerating pace), copyright is soon becoming a legal fiction that is losing its link to reality. Indeed, we are now at a point where we have the opportunity -- the necessity, even -- to shift the fictional paradigm, to replace the industrial-age fiction of protective individual copyright with an information-age fiction of widespread intellectual cooperation. As it becomes ever easier to bypass and ignore copyright rules, and as copyright thus becomes ever more illusionary, this new fiction will correspondingly come ever closer to being realised. To Protect and to ... Lose Today, the lawyers' (and their corporate employers') favourite weapon in their fight against electronic copyright piracy are increasingly elaborate protection mechanisms -- hidden electronic signatures to mark intellectual property, electronic keys to unlock copyrighted products only for legitimate users (and sometimes only for a fixed amount of time or after certain licence payments), encryption of sensitive information, or of entire products to prevent electronic duplication. While the encryption of information exchanges between individuals has been proven to be a useful deterrent against all but the most determined of hackers, it's interesting to note that practically no electronic copyright protection mechanism of mass market products has ever been seen to work. However good and elaborate the protection efforts, it seems that as long as there is a sufficient number of interested consumers unwilling to pay for legitimate access, copy protections will be cracked eventually: the rampant software piracy is the best example. On the other hand, where copy protections become too elaborate and cumbersome, they end up killing the product they are meant to protect: this is currently happening in the case of some of the pay-per-view or limited-plays protection schemes forced upon the U.S. market for Digital Versatile Discs (DVDs). The eventual failure of such mechanisms isn't a particularly recent observation, even. When broadcast radio was first introduced in Australia in 1923, it was proposed that programme content should be protected (and stations financed) by fixing radio receivers to a particular station's frequency -- by buying such a 'sealed set' receiver you would in effect subscribe to a station and acquire the right to receive the content it provided. Never known as uninventive, those Australians who this overprotectiveness didn't completely put off buying a receiver (radio was far from being a proven mass medium at the time, after all) did of course soon break the seal, and learnt to adjust the frequency to try out different stations -- or they built their own radios from scratch. The 'sealed set' scheme was abandoned after only nine months. Even with the development of copy protection schemes since the 1920s, a full (or at least sufficiently comprehensive) protection of intellectual property seems as unattainable a fiction as it was then. Protection and copying technology are never far apart in development anyway, but even more fundamentally, the protected products are eventually meant to be used, after all. No matter how elaborately protected a CD, a video, or a computer programme is, it will still have to be converted into sound waves, image information, or executable code, and at that level copying will still remain possible. In the absence of workable copy protection, however, copies will be made in large amounts -- even more so since information is now being spread and multiplied around the globe virtually at the speed of light. Against this tide of copies, any attempts to use legislation to at least force the payment of royalties from illegitimate users are also becoming increasingly futile. While there may be a few highly publicised court cases, the multitude of small transgressions will remain unanswered. This in turn undermines the equality before the law that is a basic human right: increasingly, the few that are punished will be able to argue that, if "everybody does it", to single them out is highly unfair. At the same time, corporate efforts to uphold the law may be counterproductive: as Barlow writes, "against the swift tide of custom, the Software Publishers' current practice of hanging a few visible scapegoats is so obviously capricious as to only further diminish respect for the law". Quite simply, their legal costs may not be justified by the results anymore. Abandoning Copyright Law If copyright has become a fiction, however -- one that is still, despite all evidence, posited as reality by the legal system --, and if the makeup of today's electronic media, particularly the Internet, allow that fiction to be widely ignored and circumvented in daily practice -- despite all corporate legal efforts --, how is this disparity between law and reality to be solved? Barlow offers a clear answer: "whenever there is such profound divergence between the law and social practice, it is not society that adapts". He goes on to state that it may well be that when the current system of intellectual property law has collapsed, as seems inevitable, that no new legal structure will arise in its place. But something will happen. After all, people do business. When a currency becomes meaningless, business is done in barter. When societies develop outside the law, they develop their own unwritten codes, practices, and ethical systems. While technology may undo law, technology offers methods for restoring creative rights. When William Gibson invented the term 'cyberspace', he described it as a "consensual hallucination" (67). As the removal of copyright to the realm of the fictional has been driven largely by the Internet and its 'freedom of information' ethics, perhaps it is apt to speak of a new approach to intellectual property (or, with Barlow, to 'creative rights') as one of consensual, collaborative use of such property. This approach is far from being fully realised yet, and must so for now remain fiction, too, but it is no mere utopian vision -- in various places, attempts are made to put into place consensual schemes of dealing with intellectual property. They also represent a move from IP hoarding to IP use. Raymond speaks of the schemes competing here as the 'cathedral' and the 'bazaar' system. In the cathedral system, knowledge is tightly controlled, and only the finished product, "carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation" (1), is ever released. This corresponds to traditional copyright approaches, where company secrets are hoarded and locked away (sometimes only in order to keep competitors from using them), and breaches punished severely. The bazaar system, on the other hand, includes the entire community of producers and users early on in the creative process, up to the point of removing the producer/user dichotomy altogether: "no quiet, reverent cathedral-building here -- rather, ... a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches ... out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles", as Raymond admits (1). The Linux 'Miracle' Raymond writes about one such bazaar-system project which provides impressive proof that the approach can work, however: the highly acclaimed Unix-based operating system Linux. Instigated and organised by Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds, this enthusiast-driven, Internet-based development project has achieved more in less than a decade than what many corporate developers (Microsoft being the obvious example) can do in thrice that time, and with little financial incentive or institutional support at that. As Raymond describes, "the Linux world behaves in many respects like a free market or an ecology, a collection of selfish agents attempting to maximise utility which in the process produces a self-correcting spontaneous order more elaborate and efficient than any amount of central planning could achieve" (10). Thus, while there is no doubt that individual participants will eventually always also be driven by selfish reasons, there is collaboration towards the achievement of communal goals, and a consensus about what those goals are: "while coding remains an essentially solitary activity, the really great hacks come from harnessing the attention and brainpower of entire communities. The developer who uses only his or her own brain in a closed project is going to fall behind the developer who knows how to create an open, evolutionary context in which bug-spotting and improvements get done by hundreds of people" (Raymond 10). It is obvious that such collaborative projects need a structure that allows for the immediate participation of a large community, and so in the same way that the Internet has been instrumental in dismantling traditional copyright systems, it is also a driving factor in making these new approaches possible: "Linux was the first project to make a conscious and successful effort to use the entire world as its talent pool. I don't think it's a coincidence that the gestation period of Linux coincided with the birth of the World Wide Web, and that Linux left its infancy during the same period in 1993-1994 that saw the takeoff of the ISP industry and the explosion of mainstream interest in the Internet. Linus was the first person who learned how to play by the new rules that pervasive Internet made possible" (Raymond 10). While some previous collaborative efforts exist (such as shareware schemes, which have existed ever since the advent of programmable home computers), their comparatively limited successes underline the importance of a suitable communication medium. The success of Linux has now begun to affect corporate structures, too: informational material for the Mozilla project, in fact, makes direct reference to the Linux experience. On the Net, Mozilla is as big as it gets -- instituted to continue development of Netscape Communicator-based Web browsers following Netscape's publication of the Communicator source code, it poses a serious threat to Microsoft's push (the legality of which is currently under investigation in the U.S.) to increase marketshare for its Internet Explorer browser. Much like Linux, Mozilla will be a collaborative effort: "we intend to delegate authority over the various modules to the people most qualified to make decisions about them. We intend to operate as a meritocracy: the more good code you contribute, the more responsibility you will be given. We believe that to be the only way to continue to remain relevant, and to do the greatest good for the greatest number" ("Who Is Mozilla.org?"), with the Netscape corporation only one among that number, and a contributor amongst many. Netscape itself intends to release browsers based on the Mozilla source code, with some individual proprietary additions and the benefits corporate structures allow (printed manuals, helplines, and the like), but -- so it seems -- it is giving up its unlimited hold over the course of development of the browser. Such actions afford an almost prophetic quality to Barlow's observation that "familiarity is an important asset in the world of information. It may often be the case that the best thing you can do to raise the demand for your product is to give it away". The use of examples from the computer world should not be seen to mean that the consensual, collaborative use of intellectual property suggested here is limited only to software -- it is, however, no surprise that a computer-based medium would first be put to use to support computer-based development projects. Producers and artists from other fields can profit from networking with their peers and clients just as much: artists can stay in touch with their audience and one another, working on collaborative projects such as the brilliant Djam Karet CD Collaborator (see Taylor's review in Gibraltar), professional interest groups can exchange information about the latest developments in their field as well as link with the users of their products to find out about their needs or problems, and the use of the Net as a medium of communication for academic researchers was one of its first applications, of course. In many such cases, consensual collaboration would even speed up the development process and help iron out remaining glitches, beating the efforts of traditional institutions with their severely guarded intellectual property rights. As Raymond sees it, for example, "no commercial developer can match the pool of talent the Linux community can bring to bear on a problem", and so "perhaps in the end the free-software culture will triumph not because cooperation is morally right or software 'hoarding' is morally wrong ... , but simply because the commercial world cannot win an evolutionary arms race with free-software communities that can put orders of magnitude more skilled time into a problem" (10). Realising the Fiction There remains the problem that even the members of such development communities must make a living somehow -- a need to which their efforts in the community not only don't contribute, but the pursuit of which even limits the time available for the community efforts. The apparent impossibility of reconciling these two goals has made the consensual collaborative approach appear little more than a utopian fiction so far, individual successes like Linux or (potentially) Mozilla notwithstanding. However, there are ways of making money from the communal work even if due to the abolition of copyright laws mere royalty payments are impossible -- as the example of Netscape's relation to the Mozilla project shows, the added benefits that corporate support can bring will still seem worth paying for, for many users. Similarly, while music and artwork may be freely available on the Net, many music fans will still prefer to get the entire CD package from a store rather than having to burn the CD and print the booklet themselves. The changes to producer/user relations suggested here do have severe implications for corporate and legal structures, however, and that is the central reason why particularly the major corporate intellectual property holders (or, hoarders) and their armies of lawyers are engaged in such a fierce defensive battle. Needless to say, the changeover from the still-powerful fiction of enforcible intellectual property copyrights to the new vision of open, consensual collaboration that gives credit for individual contributions, but has no concept of an exclusive ownership of ideas, will not take place overnight. Intellectual property will continue to be guarded, trade secrets will keep being kept, for some time yet, but -- just as is the case with the established practice of patenting particular ideas just so competitors can't use them, but without ever putting them to use in one's own work -- eventually such efforts will prove to be self-defeating. Shutting one's creative talents off in a quiet cathedral will come to be seen as less productive than engaging in the creative cooperation occuring in the global bazaar, and solitary directives of central executives will be replaced by consensual decisions of the community of producers and users. As Raymond points out, "this is not to say that individual vision and brilliance will no longer matter; rather, ... the cutting edge ... will belong to people who start from individual vision and brilliance, then amplify it through the effective construction of voluntary communities of interest" (10). Such communal approaches may to some seem much like communism, but this, too, is a misconception. In fact, in this new system there is much more exchange, much more give and take going on than in the traditional process of an exchange of money for product between user and producer -- only the currency has changed. "This explains much of the collective 'volunteer' work which fills the archives, newsgroups, and databases of the Internet. Its denizens are not working for 'nothing,' as is widely believed. Rather they are getting paid in something besides money. It is an economy which consists almost entirely of information" (Barlow). And with the removal of the many barriers to the free flow of information and obstacles to scientific and artistic development that traditional copyright has created, the progress of human endeavour itself is likely to be sped up. In the end, then, it all comes down to what fictions we choose to believe or reject. In the light of recent developments, and considering the evidence that suggests the viability, even superiority of alternative approaches, it is becoming increasingly hard to believe that traditional copyright can, and much less, should be sustained. Other than the few major copyright holders, few stand to gain from upholding these rights. On the other hand, were we to lift copyright restrictions and use the ideas and information thus made available freely in a cooperative, consensual, and most of all productive way, we all might profit. As various projects have shown, that fiction is already in the process of being realised. References Barlow, John Perry. "Selling Wine without Bottles: The Economy of Mind on the Global Net." 1993. 26 Jan. 1999 <www.eff.org/pub/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/idea_economy_article.php>. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. London: HarperCollins, 1984. Raymond, Eric S. "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." 1998. 26 Jan. 1999 <http://www.redhat.com/redhat/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar.php>. Taylor, Mike. "Djam Karet, Jeff Greinke, Tim Song Jones, Nick Peck, Kit Watkins." Gibraltar 5.12 (22 Apr. 1995). 10 Feb. 1999 <http://www.progrock.net/gibraltar/issues/Vol5.Iss12.htm>. "Who Is Mozilla.org?" Mozilla.org Website. 1998. 26 Jan. 1999 <http://www.mozilla.org/about.php>. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Axel Bruns. "The Fiction of Copyright: Towards a Consensual Use of Intellectual Property." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.1 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/copy.php>. Chicago style: Axel Bruns, "The Fiction of Copyright: Towards a Consensual Use of Intellectual Property," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 1 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/copy.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Axel Bruns. (1999) The fiction of copyright: towards a consensual use of intellectual property. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/copy.php> ([your date of access]).

Introduction It appears that graffiti has begun to clean up its act. Escalating numbers of mature graffiti writers feel the removal of their graffiti has robbed them of a history, and are turning to legal projects in an effort to restore it. Phibs has declared the graffiti underground “limited” and Kano claims its illegal aspect no longer inspires him (Hamilton, 73). A sign of the times was the exhibition Sake of Name: Australian Graffiti Now which opened at the Wharf 2 Theatre in January 2001. The exhibition was commissioned by the Sydney Theatre Company and comprised twenty-two pieces painted by graffiti writers from around Australia. Keen to present a respectable image, writers rejected the original title of Bomb the Wharf, as they felt it focused on the negative aspects of the culture (Andrews, 2). Premier Bob Carr opened the exhibition with the declaration that there is a difference between “graffiti art” and “graffiti vandalism”. The Premier’s stance struck a discordant note with Tony Stevens, a twenty-three-year veteran graffiti cleaner. Described by the Sydney Morning Herald as an “urban art critic by default,” Stevens could see no distinction between graffiti art and vandalism (Leys, 1). Furthermore, he expressed his disappointment that the pieces had “no sense of individuality … it could be graffiti from any American city” (Stevens, 1). As far as Stevens could see, Australian graffiti expressed nothing of its Australian context; it simply mimicked that of America. Sydney Theatre Company director Benedict Andrews responded with a venomous attack on Stevens. Andrews accused the cleaner of being blinded by prejudice (1), and felt that years of cleaning texta tags from railway corridors could not have possibly qualified Stevens as an art critic (3). “The artists in this exhibition are not misfits,” Andrews wrote (2). “They are serious artists in dialogue with their culture and the landscapes in which they live” (2). He went on to hail the strength and diversity of the Australian graffiti scene: “it is a vital and agile international culture and in Australia has evolved in specific ways” (1). The altercation between Stevens and Andrews pointed to one of the debates concerning Australian graffiti: whether it is unique or simply imitative of the American form. Hinged on the assessment of graffiti as vandalism is the view that graffiti is dirty, a disease. Proponents of this view consider graffiti to be an undifferentiated global phenomenon. Others conceive of graffiti as art, and as such argue that it is expressive of local experiences. Graffiti writers maintain that graffiti is expressive of local experiences and they describe it in terms of regional styles and aesthetics. This article maps the transformation of hip hop graffiti as it has been disseminated throughout the world. It registers the distinctiveness of graffiti in Australia and argues that graffiti is not a globally homogenous form, but one which develops in a locally specific manner. Writing and Replicating: Hip Hop Graffiti and Cultural Imperialism Contemporary graffiti subcultures are strongly identified with large American cities. Originating in the black neighbourhood cultures of Philadelphia and New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s, hip hop graffiti emerged as part of a larger, homegrown, alternative youth culture (“Urban Graffiti”, 77). Before the end of the 1970s, the aesthetic codes and stylised images of hip hop graffiti began to disseminate to major cities across America and throughout the globe. Its transmission was facilitated by: the production and export of films such as Style Wars (Silver and Chalfant, 1983) and Wild Style (Ahearn, 1983); the covers of rap albums; graffiti magazines; art dealers; and style manuals such as Subway Art (Cooper and Chalfant) and Spraycan Art (Chalfant and Prigroff). Graffiti migrated to Australian shores during the early 1980s, gaining influence through the appearance of these seminal works, which are credited by many as having inspired them to pick up a can of spraypaint. During its larval stages, the subcultural codes of graffiti invented by American writers were reiterated in an Australian context. Australian graffiti writers poached the vocabulary and rhetoric invented by their American counterparts. Writers spoke of “getting up”, “getting fame” and their “crew”, classifying their work as “tags”, “pieces”, or “throw ups”. They utilised the same bubble letters, and later, the incomprehensible “wildstyle” originally devised by American writers. It was not long, however, before Australian writers were making their own innovations and developing a unique style. Despite this, there is still widespread conviction in the view that Australian graffiti is a replica of an American cultural form. This view is supported at a theoretical level by the concept of cultural imperialism. It is generally understood, at a basic level, to be the diffusion of a foreign culture at the expense of a local culture. The concept has been usefully clarified by John Tomlinson. Since there are various orders of power involved in allegations of cultural imperialism, Tomlinson attempts to resist some implicit “master narrative” of the term, accounting for cultural imperialism in a multidimensional fashion (20). He outlines five possible versions, which inflect cultural imperialism to mean cultural domination; a discourse of nationality; media imperialism; global capital; and modernity (19-28). The idea that Australian graffiti replicates American graffiti draws particularly on the first two versions—that of cultural imperialism as cultural domination, and the discourse of nationality. Both these approaches focus on the processes involved in cultural imperialism—“the invasion of an indigenous culture by a foreign one” (Tomlinson, 23). Many people I spoke to about graffiti saw it as evidence of foreign, particularly American, domination and influence over Australian culture. They expressed concern that the appearance of graffiti would signal an influx of “American” problems: gang activity, escalating violence and social disorder. Cultural imperialism as a discourse of nationality hinges on the concepts of “belonging” and “indigenous culture”. In a conference organised by the Graffiti Program of the Government of Western Australia, Senator Ian Campbell argued that graffiti had no place in Australia. He felt that, “there should be little need for social comment through the vandalism of other’s property. Perhaps in nations where … freedoms are not recognised … but not in Australia” (6). Tomlinson argues that the conceptions of cultural imperialism as both cultural domination and as a discourse of nationality are popular because of their highly ambiguous (and thus accommodating) nature (19, 23). However, both notions are problematic. Tomlinson immediately dismisses the notion of cultural imperialism as cultural domination, arguing that one should aim for specificity. “Imperialism” and “domination” are rather general notions, and as such both have sufficient conceptual breadth and ambiguity to accommodate most uses to which they might be put (19). Cultural imperialism as a discourse of nationality is similarly problematic, relying on the precise definitions of a series of terms—such as belonging, and indigenous culture—which have multiple inflections (24). Cultural imperialism has often been tracked as a process of homogenisation. Conceiving of cultural imperialism as homogenisation is particularly pertinent to the argument for the global homogeneity of graffiti. Cultural homogenisation makes “everywhere seem more or less the same,” assuming a global uniformity which is inherently Western, and in extreme cases, American (6). The implications of “Americanisation” are relevant to the attitudes of Australian graffiti writers. On the Blitzkrieg Bulletin Board—an internet board for Australian graffiti writers—I found evidence of a range of responses to “Americanisation” in Australian graffiti. One of the writers had posted: “you shouldn’t even be doing graff if you are a toy little kid, buying export paint and painting legal walls during the day … f*** all y’all niggaz!” s3 replied, “I do know that modern graffiti originated in America but … token are you American? Why do you want to talk like an American gangsta rapper?” The global currency of graffiti is one in which local originality and distinctiveness are highly prized. It is a source of shame for a writer to “bite”. Many of the writers I spoke to became irate when I suggested that Australian styles “bit” those of America. It seems inconsistent that Australian graffiti writers would reproduce American graffiti, if they do not even tolerate Australian writers using the word “nigga”. Like the argument that Australian graffiti replicates that of America, the concept of cultural imperialism is problematic. By the 1970s the concept was beginning to come apart at the seams, its “artificial coherence” exposed when subjected to a range of applications (Tomlinson, 8). Although the idea of cultural imperialism has been discredited and somewhat abandoned at the level of theory, the concept nonetheless continues to guide attitudes towards graffiti. Jeff Ferrell has argued that the interplay of cultural resources involved in worldwide graffiti directly locates it inside issues of cultural imperialism (“Review of Moscow Graffiti”, paragraph 5). Stylistic and subcultural consistencies are mobilised to substantiate assertions of the operation of cultural imperialism in the global form of graffiti. This serves to render it globally homogeneous. While many graffiti writers would concede that graffiti maintains certain global elements, few would agree that this is indicative of a global homogeneity of form. As part of the hip hop component of their website, Triple J conducted an investigation into graffiti. It found that “the graffiti aesthetic developed in New York has been modified with individual characteristics … and has transformed into a unique Australian style” (“Old Skool”, paragraph 6). Veteran writers Umph, Exit, Phibs and Dmote agree. Perth writer Zenith claims, “we came up with styles from the US back in the day and it has grown into something quite unique” (personal communication). Exit declares, “every city has its own particular style. Graffiti from Australia can easily be distinguished by graffiti artists. Australia has its own particular style” (1). Umph agrees: “to us writers, the differences are obvious” (2). Although some continue to perceive Australian graffiti as replicating that of America, it appears that this is no longer the case. Evidence has emerged that Australian graffiti has evolved into a unique and localised form, which no longer imitates that of America. “Going Over” Cultural Imperialism: Hip Hop Graffiti and Processes of Globalisation The argument that graffiti has developed local inflections has lately garnered increasing support due to new theories of global cultural interaction and exchange. The modern era has been characterised by the increasing circulation of goods, capital, knowledge, information, people, images, ideologies, technologies and practices across national borders and territorial boundaries (Appadurai, 230; Scholte, 10). Academic discussion of these developments has converged in recent years around the concept of “globalisation”. While cultural imperialism describes these movements as the diffusion of a foreign culture at the expense of a local one, globalisation interprets these profound changes as evidence of “a global ecumene of persistent cultural interaction and exchange” (Hannerz, 107). In such a view, the globe is not characterised by domination and homogenisation (as with cultural imperialism), but more in terms of exchange and heterogeneity. Recent studies acknowledge that globalisation is complex and multidimensional (Giddens, 30; Kalb, 1), even a process of paradoxes (Findlay, 30). Globalisation is frequently described in terms of contradictory processes—universalisation vs. particularisation, homogenisation vs. differentiation, integration vs. fragmentation. Another of these dialectical tendencies is that of localisation. Kloos defines localisation as representing “the rise of localised, culturally defined identities … localisation stresses sociocultural specificity, in a limited space” (281). While localisation initially appears to stand in opposition to globalisation, the concepts are actually involved in a dialectical process (Giddens, 64). The relationship between localisation and globalisation has been formulated as follows: “Processes of globalisation trigger identity movements leading to the creation of localised, cultural-specific, identities” (Kloos, 282). The development of localisation is particularly pertinent to this study of graffiti. The concept allows for local diversity and has led to the understanding that global cultural phenomena are involved in a process of exchange. Work around globalisation lends credence to the argument that, as graffiti has disseminated throughout the globe, it has mutated to the specific locale within which it exists. Graffiti has always been locally specific: from the early stages which witnessed writers such as Julio 204, Fran 207 and Joe 136 (the numbers referred to their street), to the more recent practice of suffixing tag names with the name of a writers’ crew and their area code. The tendency to include area codes has been largely abandoned in Australia as the law has responded to graffiti with increasing vigilance, but evolutions in graffiti have pointed towards the development of regionally specific styles which writers have come to recognise. Thus, graffiti cannot be thought of as a globally homogenous form, nor can it be said that Australian graffiti replicates that of America. As hip hop has circulated throughout the globe it has appeared to adopt local inflections, having adapted into something quite locally distinctive. In a sense hip hop has been “translated” to particular circumstances. It is now appropriate to consider Australian hip hop and graffiti as a translation of a global cultural phenomenon. A useful reference in this regard is Yuri Lotman, who designates dialogue as the elementary mechanism of translation (143). He suggests that participants involved in a dialogue alternate between a position of “transmission” and “reception” (144). Hence cultural developments are cyclical, and relationships between units—which may range from genres to national cultures—pass through periods of “transmission” and “reception” (144). Lotman proposes that the relationship between structures follows a pattern: at first, a structure will appear in decline, static, unoriginal. He records these “intermissions” as “pauses in dialogue”, during which the structure absorbs influences from the outside (144). When saturation reaches a certain limit, the structure begins producing its own texts as its “passive state changes to a state of alertness” (145). This is a useful way of comprehending Australian hip hop culture. It appears that the Australian hip hop scene has left behind its period of “reception” and is now witnessing one of “transmission” in which it is producing uniquely Australian flavours and styles. Of the contemporary graffiti I have observed, it appears that Australian writing is truly distinctive. Australian writers may have initially poached the subcultural codes developed by their American counterparts, however Australia has evolved to be truly unique where it counts—in graffiti styles. Distinctive graffiti styles can be witnessed, not only between different continents, but also within geographic locations. American graffiti registers a variety of locally specific forms. New York remains devoted to the letter, while graffiti on the west coast of America is renowned for its gang writing. American lettering styles tend to develop existing styles. New York wildstyle is easily recognised, and differs from letters in the Bay Area and San Francisco, which feature arrows inside the letters. While American graffiti is by and large concerned with letters, Australia has gained some repute for its exploration of characters. Like American writers, Australians employ characters poached from popular culture, but for the most part Australian writers employ characters and figures that they have invented themselves, often poaching elements from a wide variety of sources and utilising a wide variety of styles. Marine imagery, not usually employed in American graffiti, recurs in Australian pieces. Kikinit in the Park, a youth festival held in Fremantle in March 2001, featured a live urban art display by Bugszy Snaps, who combined oceanic and graffiti iconography, fusing sea creatures with spraypaint cans. Phibs also “uses images from the sea a lot” (Hamilton, 73), having grown up at the beach. In spite of this focus on the development of characters and images, Australia has not neglected the letter. While initially Australian graffiti artists imitated the styles developed in America, Australian lettering has evolved into something exceptional. Some writers have continued to employ bubble letters and wildstyle, and Australia has kept up with modifications in wildstyle that has seen it move towards 3D. Australia has cultivated this form of traditional wildstyle, elevating it to new heights. Sometimes it is combined with other styles; other times it appears as controlled wildstyle—set around a framework of some sort. In other instances, Australia has charted new territory with the letter, developing styles that are completely individual. Australian writing also blends a variety of lettering and graphic styles, combining letters and figures in new and exciting ways. Australian graffiti often fuses letters with images. This is relatively rare in American graffiti, which tends to focus on lettering and, on the whole, utilises characters to less effect than Australian graffiti. Conclusion Graffiti is not a globally homogeneous form, but one which has developed in locally specific and distinctive ways. As hip hop graffiti has circulated throughout the globe it has been translated between various sites and developed local inflections. In order to visualise graffiti in this manner, it is necessary to recognise theories of cultural imperialism as guiding the widespread belief that graffiti is a globally homogeneous form. I have refuted this view and the worth of cultural imperialism in directing attitudes towards graffiti, as there is a valid foundation for considering the local distinctiveness of Australian graffiti. By engaging critically with literature around globalisation, I have established a theoretical base for the argument that graffiti is locally specific. Envisaging the global form of hip hop graffiti as translated between various sites and having developed in locally specific ways has exposed the study of graffiti outside of the United States. Current writings on cultural studies and graffiti are dominated by the American academy, taking the United States as its centre. In rectifying this imbalance, I stress the need to recognise the distinctiveness of other cultures and geographic locations, even if they appear to be similar. While writers across Australia argue that their locations produce original styles, few have been willing to expound on how their scene is “fresh”. One writer I spoke with was an exception. Zenith explained that: “the way we are original is that our style has developed for so long, fermented if you will, because of Perth being so damned isolated” (personal communication). He went on to say: “I also happen to feel that we’re losing the originality every second of every day, for a number of reasons … with web sites, videos, magazines, and all this type of graffito affiliated stuff” (personal communication). Hip hop graffiti culture is one in which communication and exchange is of central concern. The circulation of this “graffito affiliated stuff”—websites, graffiti magazines, videos, books—as well as the fact that aerosol artists frequently travel to other cities and countries to write, demonstrates that this is a culture which, although largely identified with America, is also global in reach. This global interaction and exchange is increasingly characterised by a complex relationship which involves imitation and adaptation. Glossary Bite To copy another graffiti writer’s style Crew Organised group of graffiti writers Getting up Successful graffiti endeavour; to graffiti Going over To graffiti over another’s graffiti Piece The most sophisticated kind of graffiti, which includes characters, words and phrases Tag A stylised version of a signature; the most basic form of graffiti Throw up Two-dimensional version of a tag Wildstyle Style of graffiti characterised by interlocking letters and arrows Writer Graffiti artist; one who does graffiti References Andrews, Benedict. “If a Cleaner Can Review Graffiti Art, Then …” Sydney Morning Herald 15 Jan. 2001. 15 August 2001 http://www.smh.com.au/news/0101/15/features/features8.html>. Appadurai, Arjun. “Globalization and the Research Imagination.” International Social Science Journal 51.2 (1999): 229-38. Campbell, Ian. “The National Perspective.” Dealing with Graffiti. Ed. Graffiti Program, Government of Western Australia: Perth, 1997: 6-7. Chalfant, Henry, and James Prigroff. Spraycan Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 1987. Cooper, Martha, and Henry Chalfant. Subway Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 1984. “Exit”. n.d. [1998]. 18 Jul. 2001 http://loud.net.au/projects/digit/garry/exit.htm>. Ferrell, Jeff. “Review of Moscow Graffiti: Language and Subculture.” Social Justice 20.3-4 (1993): 188 (15). ———. “Urban Graffiti: Crime, Control, and Resistance.” Youth and Society 27 (1995-6): 73-87. Findlay, Mark. The Globalization of Crime: Understanding Transitional Relationships in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Giddens, Anthony. Runaway World: How Globalization Is Reshaping our Lives. New York: Routledge, 2000. Hamilton, Kate. “Can in Hand.” Rolling Stone 590 (2001): 72-5. Hannerz, Ulf. “Scenarios for Peripheral Cultures.” Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity. Ed. Anthony D. King. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1991. 107-28. Kalb, Don. “Localizing Flows: Power, Paths, Institutions, and Networks.” The Ends of Globalization: Bringing Society Back In. Ed. Don Kalb. Boston: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000. 1-29. Kloos, Peter. “The Dialectics of Globalization and Localization.” The Ends of Globalization: Bringing Society Back In. Ed. Don Kalb. Boston: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. 281-97. Leys, Nick. “Graffiti Removalist Gives Art Installation a Spray.” Sydney Morning Herald 9 January 2001. 9 Jan. 2001. http://www.smh.com.au/news/0101/09/national/national15.html>. Lotman, Yuri. The Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1990. “Old Skool.” Triple J. 2001. 18 Jul. 2001 http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/arts/graff/oldskool/default.htm>. s3. “Name & Email Supplied.” Online posting. 9 May 2004. Blitzkrieg Bulletin Board. 20 July 2001 http://network54.com/Forum>. Scholte, Jan Aarte. “Globalisation: Prospects For a Paradigm Shift.” Politics and Globalisation: Knowledge, Ethics and Agency. Ed. Martin Shaw. London: Routledge, 1999. 9-22. Stevens, Tony. “It’s Vandalism, It’s Illegal and It Causes Anguish and Frustration.” Sydney Morning Herald 5 Feb. 2001. 4 Mar. 2001 http://www.smh.com.au/news/0102/05/features/features10.html>. Style Wars. Dir. Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant. 1983. DVD. Passion River, 2005. Token. “F*** You Little Kids!” Online posting. 5 May 2000. Blitzkrieg Bulletin Board. 20 Jul. 2001 http://network54.com/Forum>. Tomlinson, John. Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction. London: Pinter Publishers, 1991. Umph. n.d. [1998]. 18 Jul. 2001. http://loud.net.au/projects/digit/garry/umph.htm>. Wild Style. Dir. Charlie Ahearn. 1983. DVD. Rhino Theatrical, 2002. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Lombard, Kara-Jane. "“To Us Writers, the Differences Are Obvious”: The Adaptation of Hip Hop Graffiti to an Australian Context." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/05-lombard.php>. APA Style Lombard, K. (May 2007) "“To Us Writers, the Differences Are Obvious”: The Adaptation of Hip Hop Graffiti to an Australian Context," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/05-lombard.php>.

Introduction 2021 was the year that NFTs got big—not just in value but also in terms of the cultural consciousness. When digital artist Beeple sold the portfolio of his 5,000 daily images at Christie’s for US$69 million, the art world was left intrigued, confused, and outraged in equal measure. Depending on who you asked, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) seemed to be either a quick cash-grab or the future of the art market (Bowden and Jones; Smee). Following the Beeple sale, articles started to appear indicating that the film industry was abuzz for NFTs. Independent filmmaker Kevin Smith was quick to announce that he planned to release his horror film Killroy Was Here as an NFT (Alexander); in September 2021 the James Bond film No Time to Die also unveiled a series of collectibles to coincide with the film’s much-delayed theatrical release (Natalee); the distribution and collectible platforms Vuele, NFT Studios, and Mogul Productions all emerged, and the industry rumour mill suggests more start-ups are en route (CurrencyWorks; NFT Studios; NewsBTC). Blockchain disciples say that the technology will solve all the problems of the Internet (Tewari; Norton; European Business Review); critics say it will only perpetuate existing accessibility and equality issues (Davis and Flatow; Klein). Those more circumspect will doubtless sit back until the dust settles, waiting to see what parts of so-called web3 will be genuinely integrated into the architecture of the Internet. Pamela Hutchinson puts it neatly in terms of the arts sector: “the NFT may revolutionise the art market, film funding and distribution. Or it might be an ecological disaster and a financial bubble, in which few actual movies change hands, and fraudsters get rich from other people’s intellectual property” (Hutchinson). There is an uptick in the literature around NFTs and blockchain (see Quiniou; Gayvoronskaya & Meinel); however, the technology remains unregulated and unstandardised (Yeung 212-14; Dimitropoulos 112-13). Similarly, the sheer amount of funding being put into fundamental technical, data, and security-related issues speaks volumes to the nascency of the space (Ossinger; Livni; Gayvoronskaya & Meinel 52-6). Put very briefly, NFTs are part of a given blockchain system; think of them, like cryptocurrency coins, as “units of value” within that system (Roose). NFTs were initially rolled out on Ethereum, though several other blockchains have now implemented their own NFT frameworks. NFTs are usually not the artwork itself, but rather a unique, un-copyable (hence, non-fungible) piece of code that is attached, linked, or connected to another digital file, be that an image, video, text, or something else entirely. NFTs are often referred to as a digital artwork’s “certificate of authenticity” (Roose). At the time of writing, it remains to be seen how widely blockchain and NFT technology will be implemented across the entertainment industries. However, this article aims to outline the current state of implementation in the film trade specifically, and to attempt to sort true potential from the hype. Beginning with an overview of the core issues around blockchain and NFTs as they apply to film properties and adjacent products, current implementations of the technology are outlined, before finishing with a hesitant glimpse into the potential future applications. The Issues and Conversation At the core of current conversations around blockchain are three topics: intellectual property and ownership, concentrations of power and control, and environmental impact. To this I would like to add a consideration of social capital, which I begin with briefly here. Both the film industry and “crypto” — if we take the latter to encompass the various facets of so-called ‘web3’ — are engines of social capital. In the case of cinema, its products are commodified and passed through a model that begins with exclusivity (theatrical release) before progressing to mass availability (home media, streaming). The cinematic object, i.e., an individual copy of a film, is, by virtue of its origins as a mass product of the twentieth century, fungible. The film is captured, copied, stored, distributed, and shared. The film-industrial model has always relied on social phenomena, word of mouth, critical discourse, and latterly on buzz across digital social media platforms. This is perhaps as distinct from fine art, where — at least for dealers — the content of the piece does not necessarily matter so much as verification of ownership and provenance. Similarly, web3, with its decentralised and often-anonymised processes, relies on a kind of social activity, or at least a recorded interaction wherein the chain is stamped and each iteration is updated across the system. Even without the current hype, web3 still relies a great deal on discourse, sharing, and community, particularly as it flattens the existing hierarchies of the Internet that linger from Web 2.0. In terms of NFTs, blockchain systems attach scarcity and uniqueness to digital objects. For now, that scarcity and uniqueness is resulting in financial value, though as Jonathan Beller argues the notion of value could — or perhaps should — be reconsidered as blockchain technology, and especially cryptocurrencies, evolve (Beller 217). Regardless, NFT advocates maintain that this is the future of all online activity. To questions of copyright, the structures of blockchain do permit some level of certainty around where a given piece of intellectual property emerged. This is particularly useful where there are transnational differences in recognition of copyright law, such as in France, for instance (Quiniou 112-13). The Berne Convention stipulates that “the subsistence of copyright does not rest on the compliance with formal requirements: rights will exist if the work meets the requirements for protection set out by national law and treaties” (Guadamuz 1373). However, there are still no legal structures underpinning even the most transparent of transactions, when an originator goes out of their way to transfer rights to the buyer of the accompanying NFT. The minimum requirement — even courtesy — for the assignment of rights is the identification of the work itself; as Guadamuz notes, this is tricky for NFTs as they are written in code (1374). The blockchain’s openness and transparency are its key benefits, but until the code can explicitly include (or concretely and permanently reference) the ‘content’ of an NFT, its utility as a system of ownership is questionable. Decentralisation, too, is raised consistently as a key positive characteristic of blockchain technology. Despite the energy required for this decentralisation (addressed shortly), it is true that, at least in its base code, blockchain is a technology with no centralised source of truth or verification. Instead, such verification is performed by every node on the chain. On the surface, for the film industry, this might mean modes of financing, rights management, and distribution chains that are not beholden to multinational media conglomerates, streamers like Netflix, niche intermediaries, or legacy studios. The result here would be a flattening of the terrain: breaking down studio and corporate gatekeeping in favour of a more democratised creative landscape. Creators and creative teams would work peer-to-peer, paying, contracting, servicing, and distribution via the blockchain, with iron-clad, publicly accessible tracking of transactions and ownership. The alternative, though, is that the same imbalances persist, just in a different form: this is outlined in the next section. As Hunter Vaughan writes, the film industry’s environmental impact has long been under-examined. Its practices are diverse, distributed, and hard to quantify. Cinematic images, Vaughan writes, “do not come from nothing, and they do not vanish into the air: they have always been generated by the earth and sun, by fossil fuels and chemical reactions, and our enjoyment of them has material consequences” (3). We believe that by watching a “green” film like Avatar we are doing good, but it implicates us in the dirty secret, an issue of “ignorance and of voluntary psychosis” where “we do not see who we are harming or how these practices are affecting the environment, and we routinely agree to accept the virtual as real” (5). Beyond questions of implication and eco-material conceptualisation, however, there are stark facts. In the 1920s, the Kodak Park Plant in New York drew 12 million gallons of water from Lake Ontario each day to produce film stock. As the twentieth century came to a close, this amount — for a single film plant — had grown to 35-53 million gallons per day. The waste water was perfunctorily “cleaned” and then dumped into surrounding rivers (72-3). This was just one plant, and one part of the filmmaking process. With the shift to digital, this cost might now be calculated in the extraction of precious metals used to make contemporary cameras, computers, or storage devices. Regardless, extrapolate outwards to a global film industry and one quickly realises the impact is almost beyond comprehension. Considering — let alone calculating — the carbon footprint of blockchain requires outlining some fundamentals of the technology. The two primary architectures of blockchain are Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS), both of which denote methods of adding and verifying new blocks to a chain. PoW was the first model, employed by Bitcoin and the first iteration of Ethereum. In a PoW model, each new block has a specific cryptographic hash. To confirm the new block, crypto miners use their systems to generate a target hash that is less than or equal to that of the block. The systems process these calculations quickly, as the goal is to be “the first miner with the target hash because that miner is the one who can update the blockchain and receive crypto rewards” (Daly). The race for block confirmation necessitates huge amounts of processing power to make these quick calculations. The PoS model differs in that miners are replaced by validators (or staking services where participants pool validation power). Rather than investing in computer power, validators invest in the blockchain’s coins, staking those coins (tokens) in a smart contract (think of this contract like a bank account or vault). When a new block is proposed, an algorithm chooses a validator based on the size of their stake; if the block is verified, the validator receives further cryptocurrency as a reward (Castor). Given the ubiquity and exponential growth of blockchain technology and its users, an accurate quantification of its carbon footprint is difficult. For some precedent, though, one might consider the impact of the Bitcoin blockchain, which runs on a PoW model. As the New York Times so succinctly puts it: “the process of creating Bitcoin to spend or trade consumes around 91 terawatt-hours of electricity annually, more than is used by Finland, a nation of about 5.5 million” (Huang, O’Neill and Tabuchi). The current Ethereum system (at time of writing), where the majority of NFT transactions take place, also runs on PoW, and it is estimated that a single Ethereum transaction is equivalent to nearly nine days of power consumption by an average US household (Digiconomist). Ethereum always intended to operate on a PoS system, and the transition to this new model is currently underway (Castor). Proof of Stake transactions use significantly less energy — the new Ethereum will supposedly be approximately 2,000 times more energy efficient (Beekhuizen). However, newer systems such as Solana have been explicit about their efficiency goals, stating that a single Solana transaction uses less energy (1,837 Joules, to be precise) than keeping an LED light on for one hour (36,000 J); one Ethereum transaction, for comparison, uses over 692 million J (Solana). In addition to energy usage, however, there is also the question of e-waste as a result of mining and general blockchain operations which, at the time of writing, for Bitcoin sits at around 32 kilotons per year, around the same as the consumer IT wastage of the Netherlands (de Vries and Stoll). How the growth in NFT awareness and adoption amplifies this impact remains to be seen, but depending on which blockchain they use, they may be wasting energy and resources by design. If using a PoW model, the more valuable the cryptocurrency used to make the purchase, the more energy (“gas”) required to authenticate the purchase across the chain. Images abound online of jerry-rigged crypto data centres of varying quality (see also efficiency and safety). With each NFT minted, sold, or traded, these centres draw — and thus waste, for gas — more and more energy. With increased public attention and scrutiny, cryptocurrencies are slowly realising that things could be better. As sustainable alternatives become more desirable and mainstream, it is safe to predict that many NFT marketplaces may migrate to Cardano, Solana, or other more efficient blockchain bases. For now, though, this article considers the existing implementations of NFTs and blockchain technology within the film industry. Current Implementations The current applications of NFTs in film centre around financing and distribution. In terms of the former, NFTs are saleable items that can raise capital for production, distribution, or marketing. As previously mentioned, director Kevin Smith launched Jay & Silent Bob’s Crypto Studio in order to finish and release Killroy Was Here. Smith released over 600 limited edition tokens, including one of the film itself (Moore). In October 2021, renowned Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai sold an NFT with unreleased footage from his film In the Mood for Love at Sotheby’s for US$550,000 (Raybaud). Quentin Tarantino entered the arena in January 2022, auctioning uncut scenes from his 1994 film Pulp Fiction, despite the threat of legal action from the film’s original distributor Miramax (Dailey). In Australia, an early adopter of the technology is director Michael Beets, who works in virtual production and immersive experiences. His immersive 14-minute VR film Nezunoban (2020) was split into seven different chapters, and each chapter was sold as an NFT. Beets also works with artists to develop entry tickets that are their own piece of generative art; with these tickets and the chapters selling for hundreds of dollars at a time, Beets seems to have achieved the impossible: turning a profit on a short film (Fletcher). Another Australian writer-producer, Samuel Wilson, now based in Canada, suggests that the technology does encourage filmmakers to think differently about what they create: At the moment, I’m making NFTs from extra footage of my feature film Miles Away, which will be released early next year. In one way, it’s like a new age of behind-the-scenes/bonus features. I have 14 hours of DV tapes that I’m cutting into a short film which I will then sell in chapters over the coming months. One chapter will feature the dashing KJ Apa (Songbird, Riverdale) without his shirt on. So, hopefully that can turn some heads. (Wilson, in Fletcher) In addition to individual directors, a number of startup companies are also seeking to get in on the action. One of these is Vuele, which is best understood as a blockchain-based streaming service: an NFT Netflix, if you like. In addition to films themselves, the service will offer extra content as NFTs, including “behind the scenes content, bonus features, exclusive Q&As, and memorabilia” (CurrencyWorks). Vuele’s launch title is Zero Contact, directed by Rick Dugdale and starring Anthony Hopkins. The film is marketed as “the World’s First NFT Feature Film” (as at the time of writing, though, both Vuele and its flagship film have yet to launch). Also launching is NFT Studios, a blockchain-based production company that distributes the executive producer role to those buying into the project. NFT Studios is a decentralised administrative organisation (DAO), guided by tech experts, producers, and film industry intermediaries. NFT Studios is launching with A Wing and a Prayer, a biopic of aeronaut Brian Milton (NFT Studios), and will announce their full slate across festivals in 2022. In Australia, Culture Vault states that its aim is to demystify crypto and champion Australian artists’ rights and access to the space. Co-founder and CEO Michelle Grey is well aware of the aforementioned current social capital of NFTs, but is also acutely aware of the space’s opacity and the ubiquity of often machine-generated tat. “The early NFT space was in its infancy, there was a lot of crap around, but don’t forget there’s a lot of garbage in the traditional art world too,” she says (cited in Miller). Grey and her company effectively act like art dealers; intermediaries between the tech and art worlds. These new companies claim to be adhering to the principles of web3, often selling themselves as collectives, DAOs, or distributed administrative systems. But the entrenched tendencies of the film industry — particularly the persistent Hollywood system — are not so easily broken down. Vuele is a joint venture between CurrencyWorks and Enderby Entertainment. The former is a financial technology company setting up blockchain systems for businesses, including the establishment of branded digital currencies such as the controversial FreedomCoin (Memoria); the latter, Enderby, is a production company founded by Canadian film producer (and former investor relations expert in the oil and uranium sectors) Rick Dugdale (Wiesner). Similarly, NFT Studios is partnered with consulting and marketing agencies and blockchain venture capitalists (NFT Investments PLC). Depending on how charitable or cynical one is feeling, these start-ups are either helpful intermediaries to facilitate legacy media moving into NFT technology, or the first bricks in the capitalist wall to bar access for entry to other players. The Future Is… Buffering Marketplaces like Mintable, OpenSea, and Rarible do indeed make the minting and selling of NFTs fairly straightforward — if you’ve ever listed an item for sale on eBay or Facebook, you can probably mint an NFT. Despite this, the current major barrier for average punters to the NFT space remains technical knowledge. The principles of blockchain remain fairly opaque — even this author, who has been on a deep dive for this article, remains sceptical that widespread adoption across multiple applications and industries is feasible. Even so, as Rennie notes, “the unknown is not what blockchain technology is, or even what it is for (there are countless ‘use cases’), but how it structures the actions of those who use it” (235). At the time of writing, a great many commentators and a small handful of scholars are speculating about the role of the metaverse in the creative space. If the endgame of the metaverse is realised, i.e., a virtual, interactive space where users can interact, trade, and consume entertainment, the role of creators, dealers, distributors, and other brokers and players will be up-ended, and have to re-settle once again. Film industry practitioners might look to the games space to see what the road might look like, but then again, in an industry that is — at its best — somewhat resistant to change, this may simply be a fad that blows over. Blockchain’s current employment as a get-rich-quick mechanism for the algorithmic literati and as a computational extension of existing power structures suggests nothing more than another techno-bubble primed to burst (Patrickson 591-2; Klein). Despite the aspirational commentary surrounding distributed administrative systems and organisations, the current implementations are restricted, for now, to startups like NFT Studios. In terms of cinema, it does remain to be seen whether the deployment of NFTs will move beyond a kind of “Netflix with tchotchkes” model, or a variant of crowdfunding with perks. Once Vuele and NFT Studios launch properly, we may have a sense of how this all will play out, particularly alongside less corporate-driven, more artistically-minded initiatives like that of Michael Beets and Culture Vault. It is possible, too, that blockchain technology may streamline the mechanics of the industry in terms of automating or simplifying parts of the production process, particularly around contracts, financing, licensing. This would obviously remove some of the associated labour and fees, but would also de-couple long-established parts and personnel of the industry — would Hollywood and similar industrial-entertainment complexes let this happen? 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