In a cut-and-paste society, the way information travels is rapidly changing, but copyright laws are staying the same. Novelist Jonathan Lethem and cartoonist Art Spiegelman debate the evolving role of intellectual property laws.

The New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, in association with the NYU Humanities Council present a weekend long symposium

COMEDIES OF FAIR U$E
A Search for Comity in the Intellectual Property Wars
Friday, April 28 through Sunday, April 30, 2006
Free and open to the public

Friday April 28, 7:30-9:30 p.m.
Hemmerdinger Hall
100 Washington Sq. East

Saturday 9:30-6:30 p.m. and Sunday 9:30-1:00 p.m.
Hemmerdinger Hall
100 Washington Sq. East

Some of the most contentious issues bedeviling cultural life today are increasingly coming to revolve around the question of what proper deference ought to be paid to the notion of intellectual property. Just what is copyright, what is its point, who is it designed to protect (individual creators and their legatees, be they individual or corporate, and necessarily to the same extent?) and what is it designed to foster (the most thrivingly fertile intellectual community and intercourse possible?)? How might such objectives, thus stated, be internally at odds, and how might such tensions in turn be resolved? What sorts of product ought to be copyrightable and for how long? To what (increasing?) extent is the cultural/intellectual commons being divied up, fenced off into ever more diminutive swaths of barbed and monetarized terrain? And what exceptions ought to be made to this tendency? What is "fair use" and how ought it to be extended (and perhaps expanded)? How do all these issues play out across different media-textual (books and magazines), visual (photos, paintings, films), and aural (musical)? And to what extent are rampaging developments on the cyberfront expanding or constricting all possibilities in this regard?