Yesterday I signed a statement in
support of some principles that I consider central to my work as a writer, my
training as a critic and a journalist, and the work that I do now with an organization
that exposes and tries to address issues concerning rights.
I signed it at great personal risk: isolating people I hold most dear to me; upsetting relationships that have withstood time and distance, and ideological differences; and having to share space with people whose mode of engaging with issues I am strongly opposed to.
I signed it because, in situations
involving disagreements and disputes over literary production and criticism, I
strongly disagree with the act of pursuing legal action as a primary course of
action, over other modes of discourse which are far less adversarial and far
more productive.
In signing, I expressed my agreement
only to the specific declarations in the statement. This agreement does not
extend to opinions or declarations made by the other signatories after the
release of that statement.
I am reposting here in my blog the
statement I signed because, while I cannot do anything, for now, about the
other risks that seemed inherent to my signing of the statement, I can at least
physically remove my views from those vapid and crude remarks and manners which,
I feel, hijack the value and intent of the statement, and the very reason why I
signed it: thoughtful, open, intelligent, productive, and sober discussion of
issues.
ORDER IN THE FOOD COURT*
We, concerned writers and supporters of literature, voice our dismay
over the legally-registered demand of Noelle Q. de Jesus, Mookie
Katigbak-Lacuesta, and Anvil Publishing—editors and publisher of Fast
Food Fiction Delivery—for Adam David to take down his online
reappropriations of the contents of the anthology. David selected excerpts from
various pieces in the collection, retyped them, and plugged them into a website
coded to generate random combinations of these passages. David’s work,
accessible through Mediafire and Blogspot, is consistent with the trajectory of
his writing, which—from The El Bimbo Variations to Than
Then Than—has questioned notions of originality and displayed an
impertinent stance to literary tradition and an aggressive repurposing of
source texts, often to humorous yet critical effect.
De Jesus, Katigbak-Lacuesta, and Anvil, through their lawyers, have
accused David of four grounds of copyright infringement and have threatened him
with a fine of PhP150,000 and imprisonment of one to three years for each count.
Hence, David stands to be fined as much as PhP600,000 and be imprisoned for as
long as 12 years. The grounds for infringement are: (1) reproduction right, (2)
other communication to the public of the work, (3) publisher’s right, and (4)
moral rights. In other words, the editors and publisher have accused David of:
not securing permission from the copyright owners, disfiguring the original
form of the anthology material, failing to acknowledge the anthology’s
contributors, and giving the public access to the anthology outside the
conditions set by the publisher.
We are distressed by these accusations because we feel that the demand:
1. implies an unwillingness to participate in the kind of discourse that
is necessary to the development of literary practice, even if and specially
when such engagements are informed by negative critique;
2. exhibits a disregard for literary practices that have persisted over
the past 500 years, specially in the light of copyist tendencies and the
aesthetics of collage as evident in Cervantes’s Don Quixote, T.S.
Eliot’s The Waste Land, to the Conceptualists of the late 20th
century;
3. with its emphasis on how David’s violation of copyright allegedly
“erod[es] the integrity of every short story in the book,” is based on an
outdated notion of author as singular, original, and propertied, hence reducing
the work solely into a commodity and diminishing the agency of the reader by
turning her into a mere consumer;
4. rather than encouraging discussion, demonstrates instead censorship
through intimidation and harassment; in effect, by taking the legal (read:
costly) route, the conflict between various aesthetic and creative viewpoints
deteriorates into a battle of financial resources.
To conclude, the demand of de Jesus, Katigbak-Lacuesta, and Anvil
signifies an aversion to practices that seek to advance the many ways in which
authors produce materials, readers engage with texts, and literature responds
to its changing social, technological, and cultural contexts. We denounce this
attitude of conservative literary gatekeeping, we resist the policing of the
literary community, and we oppose the forces that coerce our writers into
silence.
(500 WORDS)
